‘I IOHN MAUNDEVYLL KNIGHT’ JULIA BOLTON HOLLOWAY . . . our imaginary knight sets out on his grand voyage of discovery through the books of his closet. Having left St Albans to visit Jerusalem, China, the country of five thousand islands, he journeys and sails through Pliny, Marco Polo, Odoric de Pordenone, Albert d’Aix, William of Boldensale, Pierre Comestor, Jacques de Vitry, bestiaries, tales of travel, collections of fables, books of dreams, patching together countless marvels . . . 1 British Library, Court of the Great Khan, Mandeville’s Travels Norfolk provenance, Harley 3856, fol. 46 S ince 1889, this has been the scholarly decision concerning the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, which describes journeys from England to China, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans – that their author was not Sir John Mandeville, that he was not English, but Flemish, and that his travels are fabrications, culled from the books of others. Since 1889, he has been dubbed a ‘knight of the closet’. Then, perhaps, the tide began to turn in his favour.2 The following will demonstrate not the mendacity of Mandeville, but the veracity of his authorship, his nationality and his achievement. In reading Mandeville, I found that the famous charge of plagiary rang a cracked note like a bell with a serious flaw. Josephine Waters Bennett’s monograph, published in 1954, disproved the theories in a thoroughly scholarly way that d’Outremeuse or de Bourgogne authored the Travels.3 This gives the reader leave to experiment accepting Mandeville at his word. Let us see where that will take us. The best texts of the Travels are written in an English hand in Norman French and are still preserved in English libraries. Let us assume that Mandeville’s dating for his travels (1322, 1356) is correct (the d’Outremeuse and de Bourgogne authorship adherents date it later to fit in with their imposed theories). We have then, an English knight, speaking and writing in Norman French, well educated, broadminded, and highly observant. St Albans had a fine school and there are records of a Sir John, a younger son of the Mandevilles of this area, about whom the records go silent from 1321-1358, after he sells up his property to go abroad when in political difficulty.4 Younger sons were given a better education than the heir of the family for they did not inherit property and would have to fend for themselves, the Church and the Crusades providing sustenance for them. Let us, then, take the following at face value: I Iohn Maundevylle knight all be it I be not worthi that was born in Englond, in the town of seynt Albones & passed the see in the yeer of oure lord jhesu crist M ill ccc & xxij in the day of seynt Michel & hiderto have ben longe tyme over the see and have seyn and gon thorgh manye diverse londes & many provynces & kyngdomes & jles And have passed thorghout Turkye Ermonye the lityll & the grete thorgh Tartarye Percye Surrye Arabye Egypt the high & the lowe thorgh lybye Caldee & a grete partie of Ethipe thorgh Amazoyne Inde the lasse & the more a gret partie & thorgh out many othere jles that ben abouten Inde where dwellen many diverse folk & of diverse maneres & lawes and of diverse schappes of men . . . to visite the holy cite of Ierusalem & the holy places that are thereaboute . . . I schall tell the weye that thei schull holden . . . For I have often tymes passed & ryden that way with gode company of many lords, god be thonked.5 He left his land in 1322. At the end of the manuscript, he states that he not only left England in 1322, but that he travelled abroad for 34 years, coming home finally because he was incapacitated by arthritic gout, and recorded his travels in 1356. He wrote the Travels, he says, in Norman French. ‘Sachez que ieusse cest (liverette) mis en latyn pur pluis briefment deuiser; mes, pur ceo que plusours entendent romantz que latin, ieo lay mys en romance’.6 From the slips made, it is obvious that the translators of the text into English are not the author.7 Yet the language of Norman France at this period was closer to English word order than is French. For this reason, the Travels translated with ease into Middle English to become a major document of Middle English prose style.8 The scholars (in the main, Belgian), forgot that England after the Conquest remained for some time a trilingual land and that a man of Mandeville’s birth and education would be more at home in Norman French than in homespun English. As a crusading knight and a world traveller, his lingua franca would definitely have been a more useful piece of baggage. Indeed, the work was not translated into English for another fifty years, although it was immediately translated into the French of Paris and into Latin. It is these French redactions that gave rise to the authorship controversy whose adherents overlooked completely the original Norman French texts in England (as also happened with the Oxford Chanson de Roland), the French and Belgian scholars maintaining that ‘Mandeville’ was a fraud, the ‘true’ author being Jean d’Outremeuse or de Bourgogne or de la Barbe whose works do indeed contain interpolations from the Travels. But it is really a question of who borrowed from whom. The translations into English occurred at the same time as the translations into German, Spanish, Italian, Danish and Czech. The British Library Egerton 1982 and Cotton Titus C.16 versions, one northern and one southern, were made from the Norman French text and are dated in the first two decades of the fifteenth century, while the original text which spawned these many translations was extant in 1356 – if we trust the author. In 1496, a short, popular version in print, known as the Pynson edition, made from the Cotton test with the help of an imperfect French text, appeared. This was the version to be re-printed and popularized for four centuries. It was read by Shakespeare and used by him in Othello. It concentrates on the extraordinary marvels and skips the more serious, rational, first hand observations. This helped to lend to the innocent Mandeville his reputation for audacious mendacity. I went through the text and noted each statement where Mandeville claims to have seen what he narrates, each instance where he uses the first person singular, and in each case, he is plausible. And more than plausible. I know of no fiction writer who could present such a human stance in his character. Were this fiction, it would be too brilliantly contrived. As fact, it rings clearly and with an unflawed note. Though the main charge against Mandeville is that of plagiary, a great deal of his writing being derived from other sources, in checking these sources against Mandeville’s text, one sees that Mandeville, in the medieval manner of valuing texts of ‘auctoritee’ above eye witness ‘experience’, compile the books of other travel writers as reference works to check the accuracy of his own memory and to describe the whole mappa mundi, not just those sections he himself saw. The strange beings that Europe accepted since Pliny, Mandeville includes, as had Marco Polo, Brunetto Latino, and many others in their accounts. Such source books, Pliny being the real culprit, contained all those strange being, the ‘Anthropophagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders’, and their ilk. Mandeville never says he saw them. One can gloss over such material but other observations, which Mandeville says he saw and which one knows to be true, are amazing. Mandeville describes the Indian practice of suttee and of the Juggernaut car, Parsee burial and monkey worship (which he saw on the way to Cathay and which is still practiced at Simla in the Himalayas). He describes the long fingernails of Chinese nobles and the binding of feet of baby girls. He describes the Tartar pony express system. He describes the versatility of bamboo which can be used to make boats and houses. He describes bananas. He describes the incubation of eggs. These he has seen. His listens to the tales of marvels, for he thinks them true, and these, too, he writes down, but they are given as facts within the public domain, not as things which he himself saw. Of all his sources, only one, that of Ordoric de Pordenone, is really close to what Mandeville relates. It is true he used Johannes de Piano Carpini’s account of his journey in Tartary. But he describes Tartary and then adds: I have not ben in that contre ne be tho weyes but I have ben at other londes that marchen to tho contreyes. As in the lond of Russye & in the lond of Nyflan & in the reme of Crako & of lette & in the reme of Darestan & in many other places that marchen to the costs, but I wente neuer by that weye to Ierusalem, Wherefore I may not wel tell you the manere’ (83). Earlier in the description, he adds, ‘as men seyn’. And where Carpini says the people did not wash, Mandeville says ‘thei ben right foule folk’. His copying even here is not slavish. He uses the Letter of Prester John, the encyclopaedic Speculum Mundi of Vincente de Beauvais, and William of Boldensale’s account of the Holy Land, but this he does with the intent of turning personal reminiscences into a scholarly and authorized geography of the world. He is modest and leans on authority. The gravest problem is that of the account of Odoric de Pordenone. It is obvious that either Mandeville saw the same things and even travelled with Odoric - or plagiarized. Now Odoric was a Friar Minor of Lombardy, and Mandeville travelled in company with others: And ye schull undirstonde that my felawes and I with oure Yomen we serveden this Emperor & weren his soudyoures, xv, monethes agenst the kyng of Mancy that held werre agenst him. And the cause for we hadden gret lust to see his noblesse & the estat of his court & all his governance to wite yif it were such as we herde seye that it was. And treuly we fond it more noble and more excellent and ricchere & more merveyllous than ever we herde speke offe. In so moche that we wold never han leved it, had wee not a seen it (44). He visited the same places as Odoric, their itinerary is the same, and at one point his travelling companions materialize to shrive him before the venture into the Valley Perilous: So there weren with us, ij, worthi men Frere Menoures, that weren of lombardy that seyden that yif ony man wolde entren thei wolde gon in with us (188). The Mandeville debunkers say this is a clever fabrication to cover up his plagiarizing, yet it makes just as good sense for Odoric’s group and Mandeville’s group to have proceeded together and to have shared their credentials and letters of introduction to the various courts. The dates are feasible: Mandeville travelled between 1322 and 1356, Odoric being in India and China between 1321-1329, dying in Udine, 1331. It is obvious in reading the two accounts that two very different persons saw the same things and heard the same tales. It is not impossible that the two men wrote their books with the knowledge of each other’s contrary views. There are points where they seem to be digging at each other. Odoric is narrow-minded and zealous in his religion. Mandeville frankly admires the piety of the Brahmins: Where that ben gode folk & trewe and of god lyvyng after hire beleve and of gode feyth. And all be it that thei ben no cristned ne have no parfyt lawe, yit nathelas of kyndely law thei ben full of all vertue . . . and they ly not ne thei swere not for non occasioun . . . In that yle is no thef ne mordrere in that contree. And thei ben so chast and laden so gode lif as that they weren religious men, and they fasten all dayes (194). Odoric upbraids the monks who feed monkeys because they believe in them are contained the souls of the dead. Mandeville reacts not in terms of bigotry, but of humanity. And I asked hem yif it had not ben better to have goven that relief to pore men rathere than to the beestes and thei answered me & seyde that thei hadde no pore men amonges hem in that contree (137). This difference in attitude is consistent throughout in the works of the two men. Yet it is such a subtle one that it is difficult to see how a writer could fabricate it with material he had only read and had not experienced himself. Another problem is Mandeville’s use of eye-witness materials. Nowhere does he use the first person where an imaginary knight of the closet might have in discussing material which we know today not to be true but which in Mandeville’s day could easily have been believed. Many scholars scoff at Mandeville for saying that he drank of the fountain of youth, but here is what Mandeville actually says: . . . at the foot of that mount (Polombe) is a fair welle & a grete that hath odour & savour of alle spices . . . and whoso drynketh .iij. tymes fasting of that water of that well he hool of all maner syknesse tht he hath And thei that dwellen there & drynken often of that well thei nevere han sekeness & they semen all weys yonge. I have droken there of. iij. Or .iiij. sithes & yit me thinketh I fare the better. Sum men clepen it the well of youthe for thei that often drynken there of semen allweys yongly & liven withouten sykeness. And men seyn that welle cometh out of paradys & therefore it is so virtuous (113). It is amusing to read this in the light of what a Mandeville critic and editor, whose eyes are apparently blinded by the assumption that the knight is a forgery, says about this cautious passage: Mandeville tells that he fought against the Bedouins and that the Sultan of Egypt would have married him to a prince’s daughter if he would have abandoned his faith, but in my view, not more reliance can be placed in this than on the assertion that he fought for the Great Khan, that he drank of the Fountain of Youth, or that he dwelt for a long time at Prester John’s court.9 Mandeville specifically says that he did fight for the Great Khan and it is not impossible; he is immensely cautious in his statement about the well and its medicinal properties, and though he describes Prester John’s land, as it was thought to be from the famous Letter, he nowhere says he resided at that court. With the account of the Holy Land, which is recounted in the time-worn way, encrusted with legends and tales, Mandeville also writes of his sojourn with the Sultan of Cairo (a city known to the Crusaders as Babylon the less from the Arabic Báb-al-ún).10 There dwelleth the Soudan in his Calahelyk for there is commonly his see in a fayre castell strong & gret & well sett upon a roche. In that castell dwell all wey to kepe it & for to serve the sowdan more than .mlvj. persones that taken all here necessaries of the sowdanes court. I ought right wel to knowen it for I dwelled with him as soudyour in his werres a gret while, agen the Bedyones And he wolde have maryed me full highly to a gret Princes doughter yif I wolde han forsaken my lawe & my believe. But I thanke god I had no will to don it for nothing that he behighte me (21). This is not impossible. Jay Williams, in his Knights of the Crusades, describes the great intermingling between Christian and Saracen.11 In the 1300’s, the Crusades were technically over and Mandeville was a curious pilgrim knight, a Baedeker of the East. And he travelled from one kingdom to the next as a modest English condottiere, what today we would call a mercenary, offering his services, as did Chaucer’s ‘Knyght’, in exchange for a temporary place at court, a vantage point from which he may observe marvels of wealth and strange customs.12 His comments on his sojourn at the Sultan’s court are interlarded with the discussion of the Holy Land in the first section of the Travels. He speaks of the Saracen religion and of the sections of the Koran that mention Jesus. Then continues: And therefore I schall tell you what the Soudan tolde me upon a day in his chamber. He leet voyden out of his chambre all maner of men, lords & othere, for he wolde speke with me in conseill. And there he asked me how the cristene men governed hem in oure contree, and I seyde him right wel, thonked by god, & he sayde me treulych nay, for yee cristene men ne recche right noght how untrewly to serve god; yee scholde geven ensample to the lewed people for to do wel & yee geven hem ensemple to don evyll (88). There follows an account straight from Gulliver’s Travels (or, rather the other way round) where the Sultan remonstrates with Mandeville for all the ethnocentricity, the prejudices, the evil in his land, the folly of his people’s fashions. He tells Mandeville that he and his court speak French and send emmisaries throughout all Europe and know exactly the condition of each Christian nation: Whereof I had gret mervaylle. Allas, that it is gret sclaundre to oure feith & to oure lawe, whan folk that ben withouten lawe schull repreven us & undernemen us of oure synnes. And thei that scholden be converted to crist & to the lawe of Ihesu be oure gode ensamples . . . ben thorgh our wickedness & evyll lyving fer fro us & straungeres fro the holy / very believe schulle thus appelen us to holden us for wykkede lyveres & cursede (89-90). This attitude was prevalent amongst the Crusaders who came to admire and emulate their enemy. While Lemuel Gulliver is a fictional persona created by Dean Swift, ‘John Mandeville, Knight’, I believe, was no fiction, but England’s Marco Polo. The tragedy of Mandeville is that the greater number of the scholars who have studied him and disbelieved him are Belgian and French. They are eager to place the Mandeville work in Liège or Ypres. P. Hamelius, the editor of the Cotton text, which was published in 1919 by the Early English Text Society, was professor of English literature at Liège University, and he was convinced of the d’Outremeuse/de Bourgogne authorship. Then Guy de Poeck of Ghent University, whose failed lifework was the task of collating some sixty French Mandevilles for his critical edition of the French texts, inherited that mantle. Josephine Waters Bennett’s book (The Rediscovery of Sir John Mandeville disproving the D’Ouremeuse and de Bourgogne authorship theories) receives from him a savagely indignant and scholarly attack in the 1956 Romanica Gandensia. It must be rough to see years of scholarship crumble away before one’s eyes. But for at least a century, Mandeville’s editors have been convinced that he was a fake. Sir George F. Warner first uncovered the sources Mandeville used when he was editing the Egerton text for the Roxburgh Society in 1889. The French and Belgian critics took over and Paul Hamelius brought out the edition of the Cotton text with ‘proof’ that the work originated in the Liègeois Jean d’Outremeuse’s canon of writings. Malcolm Letts and A.W. Pollard feel that Jean de Bourgogne is the author. Guy de Poerck is of the same ilk. John Larner posits Jean de Langhe as author. And yet Mandeville survives all this. He emerges as a mind not only capable of thinking the world is round, but with the tenacity and strength of purpose to set out to prove it. On his voyages, he takes along his astrolabe and makes sightings of the stars. He observes the Pole Star to vanish and new stars appear. ‘And be hem turneth all the firmament right as doth a wheel that turneth be his axill tree (121), he declares thus that the earth is a sphere and: Be the whiche I sey you certainly that men may envirowne all the erthe of all the world as wel under as aboven & turnen agen to his contre (121), And says also, at the Pacific shore: And yif I hadde had companye and schippynge for to go more beyond I trowe wel in certeyn that wee scholde have com all the roundness of the firmament all aboute (120). Perhaps the Lombard Friar Odoric talked him into turning back or else refused to go further. It would be just like him. It is said by the detractors who are the redactors, his editors, that Sir John Mandeville is fiction, not fact; that he wrote to entertain, not to inform, and finally that he was not English, but Belgian. However, Mandeville, through writing in England’s Norman French, tells us that: Wee in Englond have in oure langage & speche .ij. lettres more than they have in hire .A.B.C. & that is: þ & 3. the whiche men clept thorn & yogh (92). The English manuscripts of the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the Egerton and the Cotton, make ample use of these letters. Mandeville’s comment, that not only are the letters peculiarly English, but also their sounds, is true. Imagine a Frenchspeaking Belgian projecting this comment upon a fictional persona. It would be impossible, just as impossible as it would be for him to say the sounds. Today’s English alphabet conforms to that of the Latin, much as Belgian editors foisted their nationality upon Sir John Mandeville. But consider how much simpler it would be to still be able to write or type ‘þ’ than ‘th’, a key stroke less. And how fine to have an English Marco Polo contemplating the voyage to America and beyond, from China’s shores, now nearly six hundred years ago. Notes 1 J.J. Jusserand, A Literary History of the English People (New York, 1895), p. 409, reflecting Sir George Warner’s conclusions in the edition of the Cotton Titus C.16 manuscript published in 1889 by the Roxburgh Club. 2 Josephine Waters Bennett, The Rediscovery of Sir John Mandeville (New York, 1954); Giles Milton, The Riddle and the Knight, In Search of Sir John Mandeville, The World’s Greatest Traveller (Oxford, 1996). 3 Bennett, chapters 6-12. A further suggestion, adding to d’Outremeuse and de Bourgogne, comes from John Larner, of Jan de Langhe, yet another Fleming. 4 Bennett, pp. 176, 265-286; Milton, p. 88. 5 Sir John Mandeville, Mandeville’s Travels, ed. P. Hamelius (Oxford: EETS, 1919), p. 3 (the Cotton version). Page numbers of this text will follow quotations, within brackets. 6 Bennett, p. 6. 7 Fernand Mossé, A Handbook of Middle English, p. 276. The translator mistakes ieusse (‘should have’) for ‘have’ and, therefore, believes Mandeville first wrote the Travels in Latin; Montaignes becomes the hills of Aygnes and signes du ciel is rendered swannes of hevene. 8 Bennett, p. 10. ‘The truth is that the English is a translation of the Norman French version of the Travels which has an English word order and a cadence that sounds rough and crude to a French ear but converts easily into idiomatic English. Credit is due to the author, therefore, for much of the style of the translation’. 9 Malcolm Letts, Mandeville’s Travels: Texts and Translations (London, 1953), pp. xxxiv-xxxv. 10 Letts, p. 24. It arose by false etymology from the Egyptian Pi-Hapi-n-On, the Nile city of On. The Arabs dropped the name because of the confusion but the Copts retained it, as did the West. Brunetto Latino, Dante Alighieri and John Milton also confuse Babylon as Cairo. Mandeville, though he makes the distinction clear between the two cities yet blunders by setting the tale of the fiery furnace in Cairo. It is a slip that can be excused by his: For thinges passed out of longe tyme from a mannes mynde . . . turnen sone in to forgetynge because that mynde of manne may not ben comprehended . . . for the freeltee of mankynde (4). 11 Williams (New York, 1962), p. 66 and passim. 12 Terry Jones, Chaucer’s Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary (London, 1980), describes how Henry IV and Sir John Hawkwood would travel abroad, accompanied by Squire and Yoeman, hiring themselves out in this manner.