Polo’s book and the praise heaped on William of Rubruck’s one must set the uncomfortable fact that few people in medieval Europe read Rubruck’s book (although it was drawn upon by Roger Bacon, as previously discussed), while Marco Polo’s was a sensation—widely copied, translated, and influential. As noted in the previous chapter, there are five surviving manuscripts of Rubruck’s book, four of them in England and all in Latin, and around 150 manuscripts of the Divisament in Latin and many vernaculars, scattered across European collections.31 Much has been lost between the medieval period and the present, including the aesthetic sense and brand of curiosity that made Marco Polo’s book of greater appeal than Rubruck’s. Medieval travel books will generally disappoint readers hoping to be taken on a quasi-biographical journey of conscious engagement with the world, composed with a linear narrative and literary flair; we need to appreciate them for their contemporary appeal.
However, by the early sixteenth century a taste for the modern mode in travel writing was already emerging. Lincoln Davis Hammond contrasts the relatively impersonal style of Poggio’s book of Niccolò’s experiences with Ludovico de Varthema’s Itinerario of 1510 and argues that Ludovico represents a new kind of traveler.32 Where medieval travelers had particular purposes—usually mercantile, missionary, or ambassadorial—and produced works shaped by their motivations and overwhelmingly influenced by later scribes and readers, Ludovico enjoys travel for its own sake.33 Where Poggio’s humanistic desire was to provide a body of useful knowledge, Ludovico added an acknowledgment of the reader’s desire for vicarious experience of the dangers of the journey: “whereas I procured the pleasure of seeing new manners and customs by very great dangers and insupportable fatigue, they will enjoy the same advantage and pleasure, without discomfort or danger, by merely reading.”34 He tells of how he left Alexandria “longing for novelty (as a thirsty man longs for water).”35 The passive reader is invited to project himself onto the figure of the adventurer, and the armchair traveler is born.
Marco Polo’s book may not have been a “machine for othering,” but concepts of Otherness underlie rather a lot of recent scholarship on travel writing. These draw on insights regarding modern colonialism in which the West is seen as needing to emphasize the strangeness of the non-West in order to buttress its own sense of identity and to justify claims to superiority.36 In colonial discourse the Other may be demonized, stereotyped, caricatured, stigmatized, denigrated, and even dehumanized in the political effort to claim superiority for colonizer and justify acts of conquest and dominion. Homi K. Bhabha states, “The object of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction.”37 Modern travel writing is one among many genres in which textual representation of other peoples and cultures is implicated in colonial domination: “Travel and its cultural practices have been located within larger formations in which the inscriptions of power and privilege are made clearly visible. … There is a sense in which all travel writing, as a process of inscription and appropriation, spins webs of colonizing power.”38 The Orientalizing, possessing, imperial eye, in this view, can rarely be absent.39 Peter Rietbergen, in his 1998 cultural history of Europe, states, “Everything, including Europe, exists only by virtue of its contrast or its opposite. Moreover, everyone has an ‘unknown side,’ some characteristics of fears and desires, which define that person. Man, European man as he defines himself, has made and known himself only through a confrontation with the ‘other.’”40
Mary B. Campbell, Michael Uebel, and Michèle Guéret-Laferté are among those who have argued for medieval texts’ construction of a strange eastern Other to aid in the formation of European identity.41 Matters of the alienation or at least discomfiture experienced by particular travelers in eastern locations should of course not be ignored. William of Rubruck’s statement that upon entering Mongolian territory “it seemed indeed to me as if I were stepping into some other world [aliud saeculum]” has often been quoted.42 Yet my own view coincides closely with Albrecht Classen’s assessment that “intolerance might well have been the birthmark of the early modern age, whereas in the Middle Ages the relationship between ‘self’ and ‘other’ was still a matter of complex and open-ended negotiation,” and with Paul Freedman’s persuasive dismissal of any easy application of anxieties about “Otherness” to medieval perceptions.43 Furthermore, it is worth pointing out that definitional boundaries are not only drawn by appeal to binaries and opposites. They are also made by recourse to synonyms—by drawing attention to similarity and sameness as much as to difference. This is, after all, the principle on which modern dictionaries work. The development of a European identity was aided by its reading public’s interest in places and peoples akin to them as well as alien.
Moreover, the relationship between medieval European and Asian regions was by no means one of a submissive, feminine East to the masterful, masculine West, as in Said’s construction of Orientalism. Europeans were conscious of the much greater military might, economic force, and social organization found in various eastern contexts. Even when writing of places with simpler and poorer societies, such as parts of southeast Asia, it was not with a colonial or imperial eye. When travel writers offered negative views on eastern peoples this was due to the threat the latter posed as actual or potential enemies to Christian Europe (especially in depictions of Mongols up to the late thirteenth century) or due to ancient European bias against unsettled peoples. With regard to the latter, W. R. Jones has demonstrated how medieval authors inherited ancient Greek and Roman views of “Barbarian,” “sylvan,” or nomadic peoples as belligerent, cruel, lawless, deceitful, and senseless.44 To Cicero, for example, sylvestres homines were truly “brutes” barely distinguishable from wild animals, lacking in all reason, law, discipline, or civility and likely to eat raw human flesh and drink blood from skulls. Early medieval authors added “pagan” to this list of defects. Barbarian imagery was successively applied to Cimmerians, Scythians, Celts, and Germans, and by the thirteenth century the Mongols had become the obvious target; later it would be the turn of the Turks. In subsequent chapters we will see that not only nomadic Mongols but also some southeast Asian villagers were more often constructed through images of barbarism such as anthropophagic habits and monstrous morphology than were the dwellers of the great cities of China and south India. Yet even while we pay heed to such ancient influences, we must be wary of assuming that medieval travel writers imposed a simple template on the peoples observed. This will be particularly apparent in the complex perspectives on Mongolians supplied by such intelligent observers as Carpini and Rubruck.
“Europe”
What, then, was “Europe"? Denys Hay’s 1957 work on the medieval formation of European identity insists on a distinction between Europe and Christendom. He argues that the latter, which had already existed from late antiquity to refer to a more abstract body of the Christian faithful without territorial limits, began to emerge as a geographical entity and political identity with the Muslim expansion of the sixth to ninth centuries and became stronger during the period of Gregorian reform and the production of crusading propaganda from the late eleventh century.45 In Hay’s exercise in “historical semantics,” however, “Europe” is found to have been employed very sparingly by writers before the later thirteenth century, most often in geographic texts or cartography.46 The scriptural tradition of the partition of the world between the three sons of Noah—Asia to Shem, Africa to Ham, and Europe to Japheth—was elaborated in Latin and vernacular writings across the medieval centuries and this, too, helped keep the idea of Europe culturally current. Yet before the later thirteenth century, Europe “is a word devoid of sentiment, Christendom a word with profound emotional overtones.”47 This began to change, Hay argues, with the late medieval crisis of confidence concerning papal authority arising out of the “Babylonian captivity,” Great Schism, and Conciliar movement, which were damaging to Christian unity. The situation was compounded by the Reformation movements of the sixteenth century. In the meantime Humanists were turning to the word “Europe,” which had appeal for its classical resonances, and the development of portolani (maps charting shorelines) gave the geographic outline
