The World As They Knew It

[mgc1961]

Since the dawn of history, travel has been a constant part of human experience. Hunters tracked prey, tribes migrated to fertile lands, merchants sailed to new markets, and pilgrims walked from one holy site to another.

For those who resisted the urge to travel, the world was often imagined to be a completely inhospitable place. Great dangers roamed the unseen regions and beyond that lay the very edge of the world. For their adventurous neighbors however, the world was a place full of wonders to be discovered in spite of the dangers, real and imagined.

The most famous traveler of the medieval world was the Venetian merchant Marco Polo (1254-1324) who spent 24 years traveling through and around Persia, Central Asia, Tibet, Burma, and Mongolia where he truly met the Emperor Kublai Khan.

When Polo returned home, he found himself in the midst of a war between Venice and Genoa. He was captured and imprisoned. But Polo didn't sit idly in his cell. He dictated a record of his travels to Rustichello da Pisa in which he sets out to entertain as well as inform curious readers.

Polo guides his readers through a realm of fabulous cities, pigmies, exotic plants and birds, ornate palaces, wild beasts, vast deserts, rivers of gems, beautiful women, fine silks, spices, miracles, legends, cannibalism, matriarchal societies, and bizarre marriage customs and funeral rites. Perhaps because of his exuberant and sometimes hyperbolic style, Polo's contemporaries treated his descriptions of the Far East with skepticism. Although the important discoveries underlying Polo's account were largely ignored and did not result in the maps of the world being redrawn, they had untold impact on the European imagination for centuries to come."

Another well-known travel writer of the medieval world was Sir John Mandeville, the possible nom de plume of a self-described English knight of St. Albans who recounted his Travels for public consumption. The book, published during the second half of the 14th century is notable for its original merging of religious pilgrimage and worldly exploration.

During most of the Middle Ages, pilgrimage was the most commonly approved form of journeying for Christians. Sanctioned places of worship like Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago de Compostela, and Canterbury were permissible worldly destinations because they had a significance that was not worldly. By Mandeville's time, however, the spiritual worth of pilgrimage had declined, and more frankly secular motives were inspiring medieval Europeans to travel abroad.

Mandeville's book neatly reflects these older and newer urges to travel. Roughly the first half of the work is a guide book for the Holy Land pilgrimage, full of information and practical advice for the pious wayfarer. Beyond Jerusalem, however, and in the remainder of the Travels, Mandeville turns a curious, worldly eye to the newly discovered non-Christian mysteries of Asia. Here we find not relics and miracles but worldly marvels: one-eyed peoples, the extravagant Great Khan of Cathay, the legendary Prester John, the Garden of Eden. This is the Asia that Marco Polo and intrepid missionaries like Odoric of Pordenone, John of Plano Carpini, and William of Rubruck had lately revealed to Western Europe; but Mandeville's alternately skeptical and amazed report of the region had a wider and more lasting effect on readers and on travel literature.

No travel book before Mandeville's had so subordinated the aims of pilgrimage to those of exploration, and none had suggested with such finality that a belief in the existence of God might well be implanted in all men by the light of natural reason. As Mandeville concludes, "No man scholde haue in despite non erthely man for here dyuerse lawes, for wee knowe not whom God loueth ne whom God hateth." This tolerant belief is related to Mandeville's firm opinion that the earth is not only round but inhabitable "vnder as above" and that, indeed, it is inhabited everywhere. His scientific proofs for this notion and his own plan to undertake a circumnavigation ("yif I hadde had companye and schippyng for to go more beyonde") were astounding for the time, and they explain why exploders and geographers of the next centuries - Columbus, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Martin Frobisher among them - were deeply influenced by Mandeville's Travels on their own voyages.

Mandeville, however, was not really a traveler in the physical sense of the word that Marco Polo was. Some critics might even say he was a liar. He was in fact more of a book traveler who seems to have used the unreliable texts of previous writers to complete his own travel account. Among his claims: India was populated with yellow and green people, he visited the mythical Christian kingdom of Prester John, he found the fountain of youth from which he drank, and he even claimed to have reached the border of Paradise but said he considered himself too unworthy to enter.

There's more.

No account of the exotic East would be complete without a discussion of spices, and when it came to this subject, Mandeville skirted close enough to the truth to lure unsuspecting readers into taking his description seriously. He sounded entirely knowledgeable about a "forest" of pepper in a Neverland he called Combar, which might or might not have been based on the Spice Islands or some other actual place. "You must know that pepper grows in the manner of wild vines beside the trees of the forest, so that it can rely on them for support. Its fruit hangs in great clusters, like bunches of grapes; they hang so think that unless they were supported by other trees, the vines could not carry their fruit. When the fruit is ripe, it is all green like the berries of ivy. They gather the fruit and dry it in the sun, then lay it on a drying floor until it is black and wrinkled." This account was convincing enough to inspire European merchants and governments to attempt to find the mythical spice.

As for the getting there, I can't help wondering how much of these travel accounts circulated among sailors, merchants, and courtiers. Perhaps more importantly, what weight they were given? When Portuguese Ferdinand Magellan (c. 1480-1521) set out to find a westward route to the Spice Islands for the Spanish crown, he was probably confident in his knowledge of the eastern half of the Atlantic Ocean and even parts of the Indian Ocean. But Magellan attempted to conceal the true extent of the westward voyage from his crew. Could it be he was aware of the stories of magnetic rocks which drew iron to them that contributed to his concern for secrecy about their voyage? Or, was his concern the "great and violent storms of the Ocean Sea whither he would go."

As it turned out, neither magnetic rocks or violent waves thwarted the captain-general's circumnavigation of the globe. According to the Italian scholar and extreme tourist Antonio Pigafetta's (1491-1534) diary entry for April 27, 1521 Magellan's death came in the mundane form of bamboo spears and cutlasses wielded by Filipino natives.

Meanwhile, back in Europe, one satirist in particular had a field day with the ridiculousness of the fables that passed for 16th century knowledge of their world.

Accounts of the natural world circulating throughout Europe were so terrifying and fantastic that Francois Rabelais (c. 1494-1553), the French friar and physician turned popular author, enthusiastically satirized them in his comic epic Gargantua and Pantagrue, which appeared as a series of books beginning in 1532. Rabelais mocked the unreliable accounts by the revered figures of antiquity with his own farcical version of exotic lands and the strange creatures to be found there. Among his authorities on the world was a blind old hunchback called Hearsay, who possessed seven tongues, each divided into seven parts, and maintained a school. In Rabelais's hands, this figure becomes a vicious parody of a cosmologist and his entourage of flunkies. "Around him I saw innumerable men and women listening to him attentively, and among the group I recognized several with very important looks, among them one who held a chart of the world and was explaining it to them succinctly. Thus they became clerks and scholars in no time, and spoke in choice language - having good memories - about a host of tremendous matters, which a man's whole lifetime would not be enough for him to know a hundredth part of. They spoke about the Pyramids, the Nile, Babylon, the Troglodites, the Himantopodes, the Blemmyae, the Pygmies, the Cannibals, the Hyperborean Mountains, the Aegipans, and all the devils - and all from Hearsay." Rabelais had a serious point to make: he was directing his readers back to the classical Greek concept of autopsis, seeing for one's self (and the origin or our word "autopsy"). Autopsis stressed the value of firsthand reporting; the next best thing was obtaining a reliable account from an eyewitness with firsthand knowledge.

Smethurst, Paul, The Travels of Marco Polo, 1921. pgs. xxvii - xxviii

Zacher, Christian K., Dictionary of The Middle Ages, 1987. vol. 8, pgs. 81-82

Bergreen, Laurence, Over the Edge of the World, 2003. pg. 82

Bergreen, Laurence, Over the Edge of the World, 2003. pgs. 83-84