but of the various religions and beliefs of the world. Quite unlike a sequestered theologian—say, Thomas Aquinas—Mandeville’s narrative is the tale of a man who achieves wisdom through all he experienced about the other, through the people he came to know, the friendships created, the relationships developed. If the hero of the narrative realizes that God loves everyone “even if they are not Christian,” it comes at the end of a long journey and through experiences that are closer to the writing of history than to philosophy, closer to Herodotus than to Thomas Aquinas (in fact, a lot like the traveler of Thomas More’s Utopia).19
The protagonist of the narrative, in short, finds his classroom in the wide world of human experience. Like a peripatetic philosopher or naked Brahmin wandering the world, he is not confined to a cell or university. His pedagogy is tied up with his wandering outside the walls of universities, cities, cultures, civilizations. He is a champion of what the medieval Latin tradition referred to as sapentia, an experiential wisdom distinct from a scientific, theoretical approach to knowledge (scientia). Mandeville is a medieval pilgrim driven by curiosity and wonder at the strange and peculiar creations that God has put on the earth. His path is remarkably inventive and original.
To take another example, Mandeville tells a fantastic story about the first approach of Alexander the Great into the lands of the East. As Alexander approaches the land of the Brahmins, one daring sage confronts Alexander and challenges his conquering impulse: “Wherefore then do you gather the riches of this world? . . . Out of this world you will take nothing with you, but naked as you came hither shall you pass hence, and your flesh shall turn back into the earth from which it was made. And yet, not having any regard to this, you are so presumptuous and proud that, just as if you were God, you would make all the world subject to yourself; yet you do not know how long your life will be, nor the hour of your going” (SJM, 179–80).
The lesson is a clear censure of all dreams of invincible wealth and power. Alexander’s conquering drive is a subtle subterfuge hiding his essential nakedness and mortality, says the Brahmin. If Alexander has come to the East to conquer, wearing his pride and presumption like a coat of arms, Mandeville has come for the wisdom of the East. He has come for understanding, to enlarge and expand the horizons of his being and, even more, his culture’s own self-understanding. His exploration of foreign lands teaches him, as Greenblatt remarks, that no one is ever quite at home. His travel narrative is a sketch of homelessness, a disruption of any secure sense of belonging. It is a journal of permanent displacement and alienation, of wandering without possessing. The end of Mandeville’s wandering amounts to an uprooting in his origins.20
All of that is to say that Mandeville has a large, capacious soul, and only by the route of dispossession does he make room for the largesse that he demonstrates in his writings. By dispossessing himself of his ego’s darkest impulses, he suddenly notices manifestations of this drive in his culture at large and does not hide his disapproval and displeasure. European and Christian triumphalism now appears to him just as shameful and disgraceful as any other deadly sin. As Mandeville crosses borders in his wandering, he is interrupting and dislocating his entire culture’s haughty and vain feeling of centeredness (ethnocentrism, Eurocentrism, Christocentrism, etc.). As unsettling and disquieting as this experience can be, Mandeville finds virtue in this cultural derailment the way he finds wisdom in his nomadic ways. He finds value in dispersion.
As much of this ethic of dispersion demonstrates his intellectual magnanimity, it surely also includes an ethics of barrenness and poverty. He tells us numerous stories in the book, but many of them return to the theme of renunciation and abnegation. In his travels to the Middle East he tells us that he lived and served the great Sultan for a long time and even fought on his behalf in wars against the Bedouin. Consequently, the Sultan sought to reward him for his loyalty: “And he would have arranged a rich marriage for me with a great prince’s daughter, and given me many great lordships if I had forsaken my faith and embraced theirs; but I did not want to” (SJM, 59). “I did not want to”: this concise comment typifies his renunciation. He turns away from the lure of wealth and power as Jesus had when facing similar temptations in the desert. His ethic is desertlike, sparse and meager, a Quaker-esque spirituality.
The wisdom Mandeville gains from his encounters with other cultures returns him to his homeland a changed man. He now sees his Western church and culture as an outsider might and the portrait is unflattering. He appeals to the wisdom of the East in hopes that it might help Christianity recover what has been lost, a spirit of humility and simplicity and an appreciation for the rich diversity of God’s creatures. While Columbus carried with him the tales of Mandeville’s journeys to the East, he provides us with a good case of the prophetic warning “they have eyes but they do not see.” Because whatever Columbus saw in these tales, he did not tend to the narratives of dispossession—and they might have been redemptive to his soul.
At the very least, Columbus might have walked away with a richer understanding of wonder, one that is a “disclaimer of dogmatic certainty, a self-estrangement in the face of the strangeness, diversity, and opacity of the world.”21 Wonder might have been rescued from Columbus’s profane version, his execrable conflation of wonder and dogmatic certainty. And it would have also been far more faithful to other more ancient, venerable wanderers, like Herodotus. For Herodotus and Mandeville both, dogmatic certainty is denied by wonder if only because there is so much of the world to see and so much variety and difference under the sun. Dogmatic certainty is surrendered the moment these travelers enter foreign lands and confront the bewildering uncertainties of various cultures, the dizzying variety of truths, the plurality of conceptions of the good, the different faces of beauty. Their narratives are thick with wonder because they are at pains to explain phenomena that are like nothing encountered before, like nothing imagined or dreamed. Short of remaining speechless and stupefied—short of remaining silent, that is—they indulge in the language of wonder as a way of remaining silent while speaking, as a way of communicating what is incommunicable.
In reference to the travels of Herodotus, Greenblatt highlights the epistemological significance of his nomadic method: “Herodotus had raised to an epistemological principle and a crucial rhetorical device the refusal to be bound within the walls of a city. Knowledge depends upon travel, upon a refusal to respect boundaries, upon a restless drive toward the margins. . . . Scythian nomadism is an anamorphic representation of . . . the historian’s apparently aimless wandering.”22 If Herodotus’s historical method follows the example of Scythian nomadism, Mandeville follows in the footsteps of the desert nomads of the Bible, including the descendants of Ishmael, Muslim Saracens (the word Saracen derives from the Greek generic term Sarakenoi, for “nomadic peoples,” and was eventually attributed to Arabs in the seventh century as Islam conquered al-Andalus). Herodotus and Mandeville might have never approached these insights if not for their refusal to remain put. These prophets without a home found wisdom in wandering the earth.
In the age of the Conquest of the New World, there were numerous prophets of Mandeville’s breed. They would come to record with their feet as much as the pen the catastrophes of the age. Cabeza de Vaca was one of the most fascinating of them.
Cabeza de Vaca
With Cabeza de Vaca we get another kind of wanderer, even more striking than Sir John Mandeville since Cabeza de Vaca plays a key role in the exploration of the New World, and the account of his adventures and captivity (covering the 1527–36 period) is the first narrative of the land and cultures of North American territory. Cabeza de Vaca’s experience in the New World is the stuff of which fiction is made. The events and circumstances of Cabeza de Vaca’s life seem to have rolled off the pages of some great novel—and a fantastic one at that.23 For nine long years, Cabeza de Vaca fights to stay alive after being shipwrecked off the coast of Florida with three hundred other Spaniards sent to conquer more New World territory. Only four of them survive.
After being separated from the leader of the expedition, Pánfilo de Narváez (a seasoned colonizer who had achieved wealth and
