many among the cannibals who will make great converts. When he arrives in Marmadonia, Andrew swiftly rescues Matthew from prison and begins to spread the word of God throughout the city. Soon afterward the jailors “came so that they could lead the men out and make them into food, and they found the doors of the prison open and the seven guards lying dead,” causing them great consternation. A fight between the Devil, on the side of the Marmadonians, and Andrew ensues, during which Andrew is imprisoned and tortured. While captive Andrew sends forth a flood through the city from his mouth, drowning the children and animals, while God surrounds the city with fire so that no one can escape. After this the cannibal Marmadonians repent and become devout followers of Christ.31
This rather absurd tale provides a nice bridge between the accusations of cannibalism lodged at Christians in the late Roman Empire and the discourses of cannibalism in medieval Europe. The story makes Christians’ denial of their man-eating rituals explicit as it presents them as warriors against the scourge of cannibalism. While this reversal turns one aspect of prevalent cannibal discourses on its head, it preserves much of the spirit of cannibalism as an Othering device. It also reinforces the idea that cannibalism is common on the fringes of civilization, especially in Scythia. By the fourth century, when Christians dominate in Rome, they are presented as heroes over pagan cannibals. No longer were the Christians the enemy within.
From the fall of the Roman Empire to Columbus’s landing in the Caribbean, tales of cannibalism were prevalent throughout western Europe. Such tales took a number of different forms, from travel literature to romances, church histories, and folk tales. The tendency for stories of cannibalism to locate man-eaters on the fringes of civilization continued, and so the Scythians remained a common recipient of these accusations. Instead of pointing fingers at Christians in the late Roman Empire, the accusations shifted toward other groups whose beliefs, rituals, and practices seemed mysterious, savage, or heretical. Common among these accused man-eaters were Jews, Muslims, pagans, witches, Africans, and Asians. As with the classical examples above, I will proceed chronologically, focusing on a number of key texts that appear to have had the greatest impact on Europeans in the Americas.32
Following the example set by Pliny in the Natural History (among others), the seventh-century Spanish bishop Isidore of Seville compiled an encyclopedia, called Etymologiae, which had a profound impact on medieval culture and knowledge. Over the next millennium, Isidore’s work was published and republished so often that nearly a thousand copies survive to this day, a staggering number in comparison to other extant medieval manuscripts. Isidore drew heavily from classical writers, including Pliny the Elder, Tertullian, and Martial; much of the Etymologiae is merely a rehashing, and often a direct borrowing, of earlier sources. It should come as no surprise that cannibalism is among the vast number of topics that Isidore discusses. In his exhaustive list of the peoples of the world, he describes the Scythians and their various neighbors and subdivisions. He indicates that the Scythians are descended from Magog, the second son of Japheth (the supposed forebear of all Europeans), who was the son of Moses. Isidore describes the Thracians as the most ferocious of all peoples living around Scythia. Echoing Pliny the Elder, he writes, “Indeed, they were the most savage of all nations, and many legends are recorded about them: that they would sacrifice captives to their gods, and would drink human blood from skulls.” He says that the Albanians are born with white hair (“because of the incessant snow”), differing slightly from Pliny, who argued that they were bald from childhood. Despite these descriptions of the Scythians and their neighbors, Isidore specifically locates the homeland of the Cannibals as somewhere beyond India. “The Anthropophagians . . . feed on human flesh and are therefore named ‘man-eaters.’”33
He also describes many different kinds of monstrous humans, the Plinian races, as they have come to be called, but adds a new dimension to the subject. Since Isidore is writing from a Christian perspective, unlike many of the sources he draws from, he cannot discuss monsters without clarifying their place in God’s creation. As he tells us, there are no beings that are contrary to nature, and nothing can be contrary to God’s will. He is concerned with developing a more rational approach to understanding monsters and human monstrosities and is careful to distinguish between beings that are portents and those that are unnatural. Nonetheless he reports on the existence of Cynocephali, Cyclopes, Blemmyes, Sciopodes, Giants, Pygmies, the Hippopodes, and the Panotians (people with ears so large that they cover their whole body). While not all of these monstrous beings lived in Scythia, several did, and Isidore reports that among the tribes that reside in this region “some cultivate the land, whereas others are monstrous and savage and live on human flesh and blood.”34 Thus the Etymologies maintain the earlier traditions of representing cannibals as both actual monsters, residing near monsters, or being like monsters. Anthropophagi do not appear to fit neatly into any category, but it seems that Isidore views man-eaters as human—perhaps monstrous but human nevertheless.
Isidore presents a common premodern understanding of human temperament as directly related to the climate and geography of the region that a group inhabits: “People’s faces and coloring, the size of their bodies, and their various temperaments correspond to the various climates. Hence we find Romans are serious, the Greeks easy-going, the Africans changeable, and the Gauls fierce in nature and rather sharp in wit, because the character of their climate makes them so.”35 This climatic theory of human development will be echoed repeatedly by European travelers to the Americas well into the modern era.
A few centuries after Isidore of Seville composed his encyclopedic work, European Christians embarked on series of conquests of the Holy Land. The accounts of the First Crusade, which lasted from 1096 until 1099, add another important, and perplexing, layer to the medieval discourse on cannibalism. While one might expect that the Catholic Crusaders would follow earlier precedents and accuse their Muslim enemies of cannibalism, this is not the case. Rather the firsthand reports describe Catholic soldiers consuming Muslims. In 1098, during the Siege of Ma’arra, in modern-day Syria, there were a surprising number of reports that the Crusaders ate the bodies of their enemies. While the reports agree that bodies were consumed, the how, why, and who are not quite as clear. Some chroniclers blame the acts on a perhaps fictitious group of impoverished soldiers known as the Tarfur, reinforcing that even if acts of cannibalism did happen, they were committed by an outsider group. Equally important, however, is the fact that these reports stressed that the only bodies the Crusaders consumed belonged to Muslims; even when driven to desperate acts, the soldiers maintained a distinction between the bodies of their compatriots and those of their enemies. Symbolically, of course, treating the bodies of one’s enemies as food dehumanizes them. But it also, in some ways, dehumanizes the consumer. As the historian Jay Rubenstein notes, however, “behind each narrative direction lies a common impulse: the recognition of cannibalism not as an aberration from the ethos of holy war but as an aspect of it.”36 In a holy war, which is by its nature understood as justified, the means must always support the ends. This same logic will be repeated by English settlers in North America who resorted to cannibalism to survive in a world that they believed was hell-bent against them.
Medieval Travel Narratives
Typically in the Middle Ages cannibals were portrayed as either distant foreigners from the East, witches, Jews, or savage forest-dwelling wild men. The cannibal was always an individual who resided outside of mainstream Christian culture. European traditions about the Other reinforced a civilizing agenda, in which strangers were meant to be converted to the proper Christian way of life or eliminated. Because these processes were set in motion long before the first European set foot in the “new world,” the writings of early explorers tended to focus on the differences between themselves and the inhabitants of the Americas. As it was common in medieval Europe for individuals to label peoples and cultures that were quite different from their own as cannibalistic, this led to an abundance of references to cannibalism in the Americas. Additionally medieval European writings were rife with references to the threatening powers of women, as evidenced by the numerous accounts of witches, for example. The medieval tendency to portray women’s sexual freedom as threatening was continued in the Americas.37
Writings about travel to exotic lands were enormously
