of cannibalism. Two of the most important travel narratives for our concerns are those of Marco Polo and John Mandeville. Columbus read both of their works and to varying degrees used them as guides for his own explorations. Polo’s writings helped Columbus to determine what he believed to be the circumference of the Earth (he turned out to be quite wrong).38 More important, however, it was Polo’s writings that kept Columbus searching for Cathay (China), Cipangu (Japan), and the Great Khan. Just as Columbus’s quest was shaped by Polo’s own journey, so too did Polo impact discourses of cannibalism.
The travelogue of Marco Polo remains one of the most enduring narratives of the later Middle Ages. The Travels were actually written down by Rustichello of Pisa, who shared a prison cell with Polo in Genoa in the late thirteenth century. The work itself is a blend of travel narrative, fantastic history, and romance. Polo traveled much of the known world, from Acre to Beijing around the Indian peninsula and back to Constantinople. He traveled to the seat of Mongol power and met with Kublai Khan, who asked Polo, along with his father and uncle, who traveled with him, to carry a letter to Pope Clement IV requesting an official delegation of Christians. Polo’s opinions on the peoples he encountered range from outright disgust to measured admiration.
Alongside marvels of ingenuity, wealth, and engineering, Polo’s narrative discusses marvels of custom, behaviors that were decidedly outside the norms of Roman Catholic societies. He was fascinated in particular by women’s sexual licentiousness. In the majority of cultures he discusses, women are depicted as either chaste and modest or overly passionate and without shame. He describes the women of Cathay as “excel[ling] in modesty,” which profoundly shapes their lives. These women go to great lengths to preserve their hymens (and thus the assumption of their virginity): “The maidens always walk so daintily that they never advance one foot more than a finger’s breadth beyond the other, since physical integrity is often destroyed by a wanton gait.” He was fascinated and appalled by the range of sexual practices that he heard about on his journey. In central Asia he met a group of people whose notions of hospitality went well beyond acceptability in Polo’s mind. When a stranger arrived, the host was warm and welcoming, offering his house, and his wife, to the guest. The host then departed for several days, leaving the guest to do “what he will with her, lying with her in one bed just as if she were his own wife; and they lead a gay life together. All of the men of this city and province are thus cuckolded by their wives; but they are not the least ashamed of it. And the women are beautiful and vivacious and always ready to oblige.” A lack of “proper” attitudes regarding gender and sexual norms was enough for Polo to describe a group of people as “liv[ing] like beasts.”39
The first reference to anthropophagic practices in the Travels comes from a description of religious leaders in Tibet and Kashmir. According to Polo, holy men in these regions are filthy and have “no regard for their own decency or for the persons who behold them.” They are so physically and spiritually abhorrent that they eat the corpses of convicted criminals (but never those who die a natural death). In a region of China subject to the Great Khan, Polo tells of a group of bloodthirsty people who “relish human flesh,” whose armies are devoted to killing men for their feasts of flesh and blood. However, it was not until Polo and his companions arrived in the South Pacific that he reported extensively on the presence of monstrous humans and cannibals. Residing on islands between India and Japan is a group of people who kidnap all strangers to ransom them for money. If their ransom demands are not met, however, they kill and consume the captive in a great feast, for “human flesh they consider the choicest of all foods.” One might question why these people bother with ransom demands if human flesh is their favorite delicacy, but perhaps Polo is implying that their greed supersedes their unnatural anthropophagous appetites. He refers to this group as idolaters (which in this case implies that they are pagans of some sort), but near Java, Polo describes an island on which people living in the cities are Muslim and those in the country are pagan. The people who reside in the mountains “live like beasts,” eating human flesh and other unclean animals, and they worship “whatever they see first in the morning.”40 While Polo certainly has no great love for Islam, he does believe that Muslims are less “savage” than believers in animistic religions.
Figure 1.1 “Dog-headed cannibals on a Caribbean island.” Hand-colored woodcut. In Lorenz Fries, Uslegung der Mercarthen oder Cartha Marina (Strasbourg, 1525). This image of the Americas closely resembles Marco Polo’s description of cynocephali in Southeast Asia. (Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.)
There are fewer references to monsters, monstrous humans, and other supernatural marvels in the Travels than one might expect. Polo is skeptical about some accounts, reporting that the Pygmies supposedly brought back from India are in fact elaborate frauds created from monkeys. However, he readily accepts more dubious creatures, such as unicorns. He describes people who have tails “as thick as [a] dog[’s]” but are not covered in hair, as he expected.41 The most well known of the creatures that Polo encountered are the dog-headed men who supposedly inhabit the Andaman Islands.42 He describes them as idolaters who live like beasts, but more remarkably “all the men of this island have heads like dogs, and teeth and eyes like dogs; for I assure you that the whole aspect of their faces is that of big mastiffs. They are a very cruel race: whenever they can get hold of a man who is not one of their kind, they devour him.”43 Not only are the residents of the Andaman Islands cynocephalic, but they are also man-eaters. The question of whether or not they are fully human is important, for cannibalism implies the consumption of the same species; a dog that eats a human being is not a cannibal but simply a man-eater. If we are to accept that humans come in a variety of physical forms, including with the heads of other animals, then the Andaman Islanders are guilty of consuming their own species. However, if we discount the possibility of diverse humans forms, then the Cynocephali are a different species altogether and so cannot be the recipient of moral condemnation for their act.
The dubious fourteenth-century travel narrative of Sir John Mandeville also describes the “evil customs” of lands to the east. It is likely that Mandeville never actually existed but was a character created by an unknown individual. Yet his travelogue was enormously popular and appealed to the desires of some literate Europeans who wished to retake Jerusalem and continue the Crusades. Far more copies of his narrative survive than Polo’s; it remained a best seller well into the sixteenth century and was especially popular in England. The work itself drew from the writings of other travelers, Crusader histories, general chronicles, and encyclopedic works. Mandeville describes women who transform into dragons, give birth to snakes, or reside in women-only lands. He also writes about people in Africa with feet so large that they can be used like parasols, and giants, Cyclopes, and centaurs in Asia who are the offspring of human women and demons.44 Following the patterns of the sources he drew from, the author of Mandeville’s travels indicates that the farther one travels from Europe, the more marvels one will encounter but also the more riches and natural resources the lands will possess. It seems that the lands occupied by the most monstrous beings were often the richest.
Similar to Polo’s work, much of Mandeville’s Travels is devoted to reporting the gendered and sexual customs of the people he encounters. He describes widespread polygyny but also women who dress indecently or like men, and even one island where a class of men are charged with deflowering all brides on the night of their wedding to other men. In the land of the legendary Christian prince of India, Prester John, Mandeville finds uncommon virtue among vice, noting that Prester John has multiple wives but has sex with them only four times a year for procreative purposes.45
Unlike the true tales of Crusader cannibalism, Mandeville reserves his accusations of anthropophagy for non-Europeans only. His portrayal of the practices of the people of the Isle of Lamary presage many of the descriptors that European writers would later employ to depict American cannibals. The people of Lamary are described as unabashedly naked, promiscuous, and communalist. However, it was their practice of cannibalism that most astonished Mandeville: “In that country there is a cursed custom, for they eat more gladly men’s flesh than any other flesh.
