and use no language in dealing with the travellers.”21 Mela commented on the peoples of India, emphasizing their diversity. He says their dress and customs vary a great deal, from linen or wool to the skins of birds or animals to complete nakedness or covering only of private parts. “Some are short and puny, others so tall and huge in body that routinely and with ease they use even elephants—the biggest ones there—in the same way we use horses.” Some think it wrong to eat any kind of meat, others eat only fish, and still others kill and eat their ailing parents. Some withdraw from society to die quietly, while others hasten death by hurling themselves on fires.22 Evidently, reliable information had to contend with rumor, exaggeration, and outright fiction from the earliest days of East-West contact.
European travel beyond the eastern Mediterranean slowed to a trickle after the decline of the western Roman Empire and Islam’s advances in the seventh and eighth centuries. Pilgrimages (and, from 1096, crusades) kept up eastward passage of Europeans to the Holy Land, but the way to the more distant Orient was ventured by few before the rise of the Mongol Empire from the early thirteenth century. Benjamin of Tudela, a Navarrese Jew, managed to travel to Basra in the second half of the twelfth century and in his narrative mentioned lands as far east as China without benefit of eyewitness experience. His section on China (“Zin”) amounts to only a legend of the Sea of “Nikpa,” where ingenious sailors ensure their safety in fierce winds by making themselves false prey for “griffins.” On India, he says only that the land is very mountainous and contains many Jewish communities.23 After Temüjin, renamed Chinggis (“Genghis”) Khân (c. 1167–1227), had united the tribes of central Asia by 1206, the Mongols steadily conquered territories stretching from Hungary to Korea. In the 1220s, 1230s, and early 1240s, terror touched Europe as the Mongols ravaged Russia, Hungary, and Poland. A chronicler of Novgorod conveyed the foreboding: “The same year [1224], for our sins, unknown tribes came, whom no one exactly knows, who they are, nor whence they came out, nor what their language is, nor of what race they are, nor what their faith is, but they call them Tartars.”24 Realms as far west as France trembled before the threat of conquest. In Gregory Guzman’s view, “It was clear that no military power in Europe was capable of withstanding the Mongols, who could easily have marched to the Atlantic if they had wanted to do so.”25 A new era opened with the death of Ögödei in December 1241 when ensuing internal divisions among Mongols contributed to the halt of their westward advances. From 1245 to the mid-fourteenth century, during the perhaps ill-named Pax Mongolica, Mongolian policies of controlled dialogue with external powers complemented European attempts to build alliances in their crusades against Islam. The result was the Mongol Empire’s opening to a number of Latin emissaries, missionaries, and merchants.26
The heyday of medieval land-based travels to the far Orient was the mid-thirteenth to mid-fourteenth century. A decisive factor in the decline of eastern travel was the Ming dynasty’s seizure of Mongol-held China in 1368 and its initial hostility to Christianity. Despite gradual closure of land routes, some travelers continued to find their way east on Arab ships bound for India and the Spice Islands. Yet perhaps the most significant development of the fourteenth century took place not on sea or land but in the European imagination, with the growing popular and scholarly taste for tales of oriental lands. In the epigraph to this chapter, Italo Calvino’s Marco Polo tells his Mongol host, “It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.” European audiences, not least Marco Polo’s, were developing a sense of what they wished to hear about the distant East and commanded that certain tales be told.
The present book is based on written or dictated accounts of more than twenty European men who traveled or claimed to have traveled to Mongolia, China, India, Sri Lanka, Burma (Myanmar), and southeast Asia from around 1245 to 1510 or who wrote important associated texts.27 Of these, the works by John of Plano Carpini, William of Rubruck, Marco Polo, Ricold of Monte Croce, John of Monte Corvino, Hetoum of Armenia, Jordan Catala of Sévérac, Odoric of Pordenone, John of Marignolli, “Sir John Mandeville,” and Niccolò dei Conti, as well as The Letter of Prester John, have been most useful. The selection by no means represents every medieval text dealing with the far Orient but provides fair coverage of western European works that may be gathered under the heading of travel writing (to be defined in Chapter 3). Descriptions of eastern contexts in learned encyclopedic works are also relevant but used here only for purposes of comparison or to identify sources or results of some travelers’ perceptions. Many other Latin Christians made similar journeys during the period, but most did not leave written accounts.28 I also pay attention to the texts’ known or likely audiences, the cultural contexts within which they found a foothold, and the broader impact of their oriental descriptions. Some of the travelers and pseudo-travelers had large medieval reading publics while others were almost completely obscure before the modern era, and where many of the sources amount to only a few pages others fill whole volumes in modern editions. Some authors (such as Carpini, Rubruck, and Monte Corvino) produced accounts by their own hands that can mostly, but never entirely, be trusted as eyewitness statements. Certain authors (such as Ricold and Marignolli) worked alone but on texts affected by circumstances in their motives for production. Several others (notably Marco Polo, Odoric, and Niccolò) worked with amanuenses who had not been to Asia to produce hybrid works of unstable authorship and sometimes dubious veracity. A notorious few (especially “Mandeville,” Witte, and the author of The Letter of Prester John) were solo authors of books founded in plagiarism and imagination. Even the apparently faithful eyewitness accounts are not always reliable as they often include hearsay material and snippets of older myths of the Orient, and all the works are complicated by the processes of textual transmission, scribal alteration, and the metamorphoses wrought by translation. The words “travelers” and “authors” are in this context sometimes only loose terms of convenience. Each author and his work are discussed in Chapter 2.
Medieval travelers’ accounts of Asia have interested scholars for centuries. The Italian Giambattista Ramusio (1485–1557) and Englishmen Richard Hakluyt (c. 1552–1616) and Samuel Purchas (c. 1577–1626), the first travel anthologists of the age of print, published the travelogues of several medieval authors; Purchas, for example, included versions of Rubruck, Polo, Hetoum, “Mandeville,” and Niccolò in his anthology.29 Luke Wadding (1558–1657), an Irish Franciscan, published the letters of the early fourteenth-century Franciscan missionaries to China, which might otherwise have sunk into obscurity. From the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century Sir Henry Yule, Anastasius van den Wyngaert, A. C. Moule, Paul Pelliot, Christopher Dawson, and various editors for the Hakluyt Society produced translations and editions. The emergent discipline of geography had its own historians, notably C. R. Beazley, whose three-volume Dawn of Modern Geography (1897–1906) discussed most of these medieval travelers and provided information on surviving manuscripts. The later twentieth century also saw publication of a number of essential studies of late medieval contact with Asia.30 The key words of many works on premodern travels, especially those dealing with the Renaissance era of c. 1400–c. 1600, are “exploration,” “discovery,” and “expansion,” as evident from titles of key works.31 A strong theme of existing scholarship is the wish to place exploration by early modern European travelers to the Americas in a longer context, showing the later travelers were the heirs of a long medieval tradition.32 However, if we read medieval travelers’ accounts of Asia primarily within the framework of a longer history of expansion and conquest, we will find much within their writings that seems not to fit. More recent works have begun to emphasize the distinctive nature of late medieval travel writing on the East.33 The travelers’ names are bound to become recognized among a still broader readership in medieval European studies (Asianists, of course, know them all well already), with the present renewal of interest in histories of travel and encounter.
The geographical boundaries of this study are harder to draw than the chronological ones. The eastern, southern, and northern edges of the territory included are not so difficult, as none of the travelers went east of Hangzhou and the East China Sea, north of the Altai Mountains, or south of Java. Marco Polo includes a description of Japan (Cipangu) in his book, but it is based on secondhand accounts. Carpini and Polo offer descriptions of the lands and peoples of mysterious
