or other subdivisions where available, followed in parenthesis to page references to the edition of the original language used and (in most cases) to an English translation. Where I have modified a translation or provided my own, this is made clear.
Introduction
I speak and speak, but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. The description of the world to which you lend a benevolent ear is one thing; the description that will go the rounds of the groups of stevedores and gondoliers on the street outside my house the day of my return is another; and yet another, that which I might dictate late in life, if I were taken prisoner by Genoese pirates and put in irons in the same cell with a writer of adventure stories. It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.1
To write a book is to make a journey. Yet as is so often the case with travel, the final destination may look quite different from what was initially imagined. In the early stages of research for this book, influenced by some recent studies on travel writing, I thought the distant parts of Asia might represent “a location of definitive Otherness” for late medieval European writers and readers. However, I have since moved far from that view, having found that the end location has a much more varied landscape than first envisaged.
This book examines European travel writing on central, east, south, and southeast Asia composed or in circulation from around 1245 to around 1510. “Orient,” “Asia,” “far East” (with lowercase “f”), “distant East,” and “farther East” will be employed as synonyms encompassing the whole area under discussion with due acknowledgment of the difficulties of these labels. Terms such as “Orient” and “East” have become problematic for modern commentators who rightly point to their geographic assumptions (“East” from where?), ideological baggage, and pejorative or romantic connotations. Yet to medieval Europeans the lands of Asia were literally in the distant “East” of their world. The book deals with descriptions of places we now call Mongolia, China, India, and Southeast Asia. It largely excludes the Holy Land and surrounding regions on the grounds that western Europe’s relations with middle eastern (and, indeed, northern African and southern Iberian) people were shaped by Christian rhetoric that sought to emphasize the religious basis of relations with, and alienation from, Islam and Judaism to a greater extent than discourse on cultures further east. Although Christian crusading rhetoric and anti-Judaic traditions had their own complexities—indeed, were not univocally damning—one cannot deny the persistence of later medieval Christian tendencies to condemn most stridently the religious and cultural traditions closest to its own.2 John Tolan is among a number of scholars who have commented on Christianity’s harsher treatment of Judaism and Islam than more distant faiths, such as Animism and Buddhism, with whom they would seem to have less in common: “It is precisely because Christians and Jews [and Muslims] are fighting for rightful ownership of a common spiritual heritage that their disputes are so bitter.”3 Geographical proximity and military threats may similarly raise tensions. As we will see, Europeans were most hostile in portrayals of Mongols in the early to mid-thirteenth century when the physical peril of “Tartars” was nearest.
This book does not tell the travelers’ stories of discovery again, apart from some necessary background material on authors, books, and audiences, nor is it a history of exploration and discovery. It does not treat the travelers’ narratives as sources of information on Asian cultures historians might use to supplement or support what they have learned from non-European sources. Rather, it attempts something different: a cultural history of aspects of the encounter between late medieval Latin Christians and Asian cultures with a focus on themes that have not usually been granted headline attention. In particular, it asks how prevailing European preoccupations with food and eating habits, gender roles, sexualities, civility, and the human body helped shape late medieval perspectives on eastern peoples and societies. It aims to contribute to European cultural history, not Asian history. Its central argument is for a distinctive European perspective on Asia during the era c. 1245–c. 1510. Attitudes were moving away from tendencies to create a homogenous “India” of marvels and monsters yet were little touched by the colonialist mentalities that would emerge through the early modern era and dominate the modern. It argues that desire for information and for pleasure were two chief impulses guiding late medieval readers’ interest in travel writing on Asia. In regard to the first motivation, some authors supplied specific information to help with immediate military and evangelical necessities. Other travelers, particularly when writing on China, sought to satisfy a more generalized hunger for knowledge about civilized living that pervaded late medieval burgess and noble life. Readers’ appetites for pleasure were also variously satisfied. Some representations of eastern peoples fulfilled the urge to wonder, which has been noted as an important characteristic of medieval cultures, while other elements of their descriptions met desires for amusement or delight. Monstrosity or alien customs were comprehended within ancient conventions on the “barbarian” and could assist an emerging European sense of selfhood or in some cases provide a kind of pleasure through horror.
Some studies of Christian engagement with Islam and Judaism have justifiably spoken of a “medieval Orientalism” identifiable in literature, art, and learned texts—a particularly valid approach given the middle eastern focus of Edward Said’s work and his neglect of medieval testimonies—and a few have extended the term to medieval travelers’ characterizations of Mongolian and east Asian peoples.4 As I will show in Chapter 1, the “Before” of my title is potentially provocative but is not meant as a quarrel with those who have explored all the complex configurations that western Orientalism can take. In arguing that the term, in the ways it is defined by Said, is a mainly postmedieval development, my title points to the distinctiveness of late medieval views on the peoples and cultures of the distant East before concerted colonialist ventures were initiated. While Muslims and Jews occupied regions throughout Asia, and indeed Muslims were becoming dominant in places such as India under the Delhi Sultanate and the islands of southeast Asia, the animosity characterizing Christians’ perspective loses some of its sting in the travel narratives dealing with places in the distant East. In the latter, Jews and Muslims were among many religious groups including Buddhists, Confucians, Hindus, Animists, Shamanists, and Nestorian Christians, and battles over territory or holy sites were irrelevant. To be sure, differences between perspectives on nearer and more distant Easts were never absolute and Christian rhetoric (for example, against “idolaters”) naturally had some role in shaping the latter. The relevance of traditions of crusader and pilgrim discourse for works that also deal with a farther Orient is perhaps seen best in The Book of John Mandeville, the first part of which incorporates pilgrim narratives and presents Jerusalem as the center of the world, seeks the garden of Eden at the earth’s eastern edge, and constructs a world image dominated by spiritual concerns. This overflow of narratives concerning the Saracen Orient and realms further east will occasionally be noted in the thematic chapters that make up Part 2. Yet where Christian perspectives on closer peoples were formed out of religious confrontation, late medieval Europeans’ reactions to the peoples of India, Mongolia, and I’extrême orient were more often dominated by pleasure, pragmatic fears, and curiosity.
Late medieval Europeans were no strangers to colonialist enterprises, but few were seriously contemplating such ventures in the ancient civilizations of the distant East. A concise definition of “colonialism” may be helpful, such as one provided by Christopher LaMonica: “The term colonialism refers to a process of domination of one group (the colonizing metropole or core) over another (a colonized other or periphery).”5 Jürgen Osterhammel’s summary is also incisive:
Colonialism is a relationship of domination between an indigenous (or forcibly imported) majority and a minority of foreign invaders. The fundamental decisions affecting the lives of the colonized people are made and implemented by the colonial rulers in pursuit of interests that are often defined in a distant metropolis. Rejecting cultural compromises with the colonized population, the colonizers are convinced of their own superiority and of their
