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Chapter 1

On Orientalism

The title Before Orientalism is at once a hook, a tease, and a statement of intent. The book could have been called Alongside Orientalism, or perhaps Between Orientalisms, without alteration to its fundamental arguments. Though Orientalist elements have been identified in medieval representations of Islam and Arab cultures, they apply much less to the rest of Asia. This chapter examines the chronology of the three main strands to Orientalism as they relate to medieval Europe’s more distant “Easts.” It finds that while elements of two out of the three may be tentatively identified in medieval writings on far eastern places, they do not add up to a version of Orientalism as defined by Said. A developed Orientalist discourse would have to wait until the early modern period or even beyond. Ultimately, late medieval writings on distant Easts are pre-Orientalist primarily because they are precolonialist.

Edward Said offered three interlinked definitions of Orientalism in his classic work. First, the European academic study of Asian societies; second, a tendency to group the diverse cultures of “the East” under one heading and those of “the West” under another to produce the binary distinction of “Orient” and “Occident”; and third—the most controversial one—an ideologically loaded discourse by which western societies have extended, developed, and justified political, economic, and other domination over eastern territories. This third element is best expressed by Said himself: “Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient!”¹ Lucy Pick notes that the first two elements have, in Said’s presentation, an almost timeless, eternal quality, while the third arose in the eighteenth century in response to the “colonial aspirations of post-Enlightenment Europe.”² She and other medievalists have queried most aspects of his chronology with regard to the Middle Ages, especially concerning Latin Christendom’s relationship with Islam, but there has been less attention paid to Orientalism’s potential application to other Asian regions in the medieval era.

It must be said at the outset that few specialists in Middle Eastern or Asian studies have been persuaded by Said’s appraisal of scholarly endeavors by academic Orientalists.³ Indeed, his book has been found to be riddled with errors, flagrant omissions, and drastic overgeneralizations. Some of this critique will be discussed in what follows. On the other hand, Said’s concept has had wide utility and application when treated as a tool for interpreting certain western representations of subjected cultures, especially in literature and the visual arts, rather than as a reliable guide to entire branches of scholarship. Recurrent themes in cultural Orientalism include a tendency to portray Middle Eastern, North African, and Asian cultures as decadent, decayed, corrupt, and effeminate. Key elements are identified in Dawn Odell’s analysis of Jean-Leon Gerome’s painting The Snake Charmer (c. 1870), a reproduction of which adorned a 1979 edition of Said’s Orientalism. The painting represents a “European stereotype of the Orient as the site of danger, luxury, effeminacy, degeneration and superstition, including strong suggestions of sodomy, penetration and submission in the central figure of the boy and his position, bare-buttocks to the viewer.”⁴ In a colonial context such caricatures of the Orient and its inhabitants helped justify their submission to western powers. That, at least, is the broad argument.

Said focused first on the Middle East and Egypt, though his book makes regular passing references to south and east Asian contexts and his subsequent Culture and Imperialism extended the basic premise to colonial contexts including “Africa, India, parts of the Far East, Australia, and the Caribbean.”⁵ Other scholars have found his theories relevant, at least as a starting point, in studies of various Asian regions but particularly Japan, China, and India.⁶ Odell’s question—“Is this the Orient?”—is pertinent, as is her recognition that Said’s book posits a distinction between an authentic geographical location and its ideological construction in western representations.⁷ Said admits that his own “awareness of being an ‘Oriental’ as a child growing up in two British colonies” lies behind his initial Middle Eastern focus. He wanted “to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals. That is why for me the Islamic Orient has had to be the center of attention.”⁸ While acknowledging both the narrow and very broad geographical potential of the term, “Orientalism” is examined here primarily in relation to Asian regions beyond the Middle East.

It is in this sense that the book could be retitled Alongside Orientalism. Some scholars have explored medieval European representations of the Islamic East that reveal a tendency to eroticize, romanticize, and/or demonize contemporary Islam. Note, for example, Suzanne Conklin Akbari’s wide-ranging recent exploration of a specifically medieval “Orientalism” in representations of Islam and Saracens.⁹ Akbari explains that she excludes European views of east Asia from her study “simply to make clear the extent to which medieval Orientalism was shaped by a very specific discourse of religious alterity centered on the relationship of Christianity to Islam.”¹⁰ That is an important distinction, one with which the present book strongly agrees, though by no means does it intend to paint the medieval era as a pre-Orientalist “golden age, free of the representational violence inventoried by Said,” as suggested by some medievalists.¹¹

The three elements of Said’s “Orientalism” developed over different periods of time, so there cannot really be said to be a single point of origin. Said suggests that the discourse as “a field of learned study” dates to 1312, with the Council of Vienne’s decision to establish chairs in Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac at Paris, Oxford, Bologna, Avignon, and Salamanca, but his critics have found this either a little early or too late. Some have suggested the sixteenth or early seventeenth century as a better marker of concerted European scholarship on Oriental themes;¹² others have asserted the Council of Vienne’s efforts were “the last salute to a dying ideal” of Christian engagement with Islamic and Jewish philosophy.¹³ Such discussions focus on study of the Middle East, however, and the Islamic world in particular. European academic study of farther eastern cultures came later still.

France’s École Spéciale des Langues Orientales, now Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO), was founded in 1795 within the Bibliothèque Nationale.¹⁴ French chairs in Chinese were established at the Collège de France in 1814 and École des Langues Orientales in 1843. Munich and Berlin also founded Chinese professorships in the early nineteenth century.¹⁵ France’s Journal Asiatique, first published in 1823, was slanted more toward coverage of far eastern than Arabic matters, reflecting developing interest in l’êxtreme orient over the course of the nineteenth century.¹⁶ In Britain the first chair in Chinese came in 1837 at University College, London, though it lapsed by 1843, and in 1851 a new one was endowed at King’s College, London. Oxford’s Bodleian Library began to collect Chinese books in the seventeenth century, but the university did not establish a chair in Chinese until 1876. Cambridge followed in 1886 and Manchester at the turn of the twentieth century.¹⁷ U.S. universities would quickly outstrip the British in this field following establishment of a chair at Yale in 1876 and strong development in the early part of the twentieth century.¹⁸ As T. H. Barrett chronicles in his study of Sinology in Britain, formal academic recognition was preceded by three centuries of book collection by individual European enthusiasts and missionaries and the scholarly endeavors of members of the various East India companies. Indeed, to an extent, scholarly enthusiasm for information on Asia can be seen even in the later Middle Ages given the grouping of writings on eastern contexts in single manuscripts.¹⁹ Yet given that study of Asian languages, which are at the heart of modern Asian studies, was hardly developed before the late eighteenth century, it is clear that formal scholarly interest in the far Orient was a postmedieval phenomenon.

The second sense of Orientalism, as a structure of thought or “imaginative geography” dividing the world between “East” and “West,” “Orient” and “Occident,” might seem rather older. Orient and Occident derive from the Latin for rising and falling, orior and occido, alluding to the sun’s apparent passage across the sky. Some educated medieval Europeans possessed a sense of “East” or “Orient” as opposed to “West” or “Occident,” but they were not preoccupied by the overarching binary inherent in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Orientalism. Generalities about the East or Indies were attempted by numerous encyclopedists, cartographers, and cosmologists who were working out of classical and early medieval traditions but were challenged by travelers who ventured east from the mid-thirteenth century. Thus one can identify only a limited medieval “Orientalism” in Said’s second sense, and furthermore this would have to be modified by uncertainty about the existence of an opposing “West.”

“Oriens” appeared regularly on medieval mappaemundi, notably the “T-O” maps that survive in over a thousand exemplars, mostly as manuscript illuminations, from the seventh to late fifteenth centuries.²⁰ However, in this cartographic context Oriens refers not to a geographic area but to one of four cardinal points or the winds of the earth along with Occidens, Septentrio, and Meridies.²¹ “Asia” is used to mark the largest of the world’s three continents, filling the top half of the globe, with “Europa” and “Africa” filling the lower quarters. This tradition dates back to antiquity. Akbari shows that medieval authors’ attempts to match up the four cardinal winds with the three continents were often awkward; she also argues that while the concept of a “whole, homogenous East” can be identified in medieval encyclopedic texts, it lacked a mirroring West as representative of “us.” The East may be where “they” are; “It does not follow, however, that the West is where ‘we’ are.”²² Instead, Europeans were usually conceived as people of the cold North.²³ More recently she has proposed that an East-West binary becomes increasingly visible by the fourteenth century, in some lines from Gower’s Confessio amantis, for example, but the evidence for this contention seems scanty.²⁴ The Orient-Occident binary was known but not yet common in late medieval geographical thinking. The East was also considered in climatic terms, particularly by medieval scholars who incorporated the four directions into a quadripartite cosmology encompassing the four seasons and four humors. Most agreed that the East was “hotter” than the West, though there was disagreement over whether it was also wet or dry; William of Conches, for example, plumped for a hot, damp East, while Bartholomaeus Anglicus argued for hot and dry.²⁵

“India” was a common designation for large swathes of the Asian continent, particularly south and east, and was generally divided into three parts. “Nearer” or “Lesser” India often referred to the northern Indian subcontinent while “Further” or “Greater” India was the southern, though in Marco Polo the two are reversed. “Middle” or “Intermediate” India was Ethiopia—“half way to India.”²⁶ “Mandeville” focuses on climate rather than geography: India Major is very hot, India Minor is more temperate, and the third part, “to the north,” suffers extreme cold.²⁷ Alternatively, in some texts Further or Greater India extended indefinitely eastward from Malabar (the southwest Indian coast), as in Jordan’s Mirabilia descripta, or from the Ganges, as in Poggio’s report of Niccolò dei Conti’s journey, encompassing east and southeast Asia.²⁸ Medieval “India,” however conceived, constituted a vaster range of territory than implied by its modern reference to the Indian subcontinent and potentially encompassed south, east, and southeast Asia as well as east Africa.

By the time that actual travelers began to produce accounts of Asia, earlier authors’ claims about the Indies or Orient had achieved authoritative status. For example, Honorius Augustodunensis, in his widely read Imago mundi (c. 1110, surviving in at least 160 manuscripts), had spoken of the great cities of the Indies, vast populations, great quantities of gold and silver, monstrous and remarkable creatures, ferocious nations of Gog and Magog who eat human and raw animal flesh, tribes of mountain pygmies who give birth at three and are old at eight, and people who kill their elderly parents, cut them up, and serve the flesh at banquets.²⁹ The tradition of the “Wonders” or “Marvels” of the East, already old by Honorius’s day, populated eastern realms with diverse monsters, marvelous beasts, and hybrid creatures.³⁰ There dwelt “Headless men with eyes and mouths in their breasts [who] are eight feet tall and eight feet wide”; “The donestre [who] live on an island on their own in the Red Sea. They are partly human. They can speak various tongues and can entice men whom they eat up, save for the head over which they mourn”; “women with boar’s tusks, hair down to ankles, tails, bodies as white as marble, camel feet, and boar-like teeth”; and “a kindly long-lived people who send visitors home with wives.”³¹ Some mappaemundi such as the Hereford World Map (c. 1300) depicted monstrous creatures in the extreme East (in this case, sciapods, pygmies, dogheads, and people who live off the scent of apples), but on this and other celebrated exemplars such as the Ebstorf (c. 1230–50) and “Psalter” (c. 1250) maps the monsters are usually placed on the African margins of the world. Given the conflation of “Ethiopia” and “Middle India,” perhaps such African monsters were understood as “Indian.” On these maps the extreme East was pictured as the location of the Terrestrial Paradise and the source of the four ancient rivers that gave the Orient its extraordinary fertility. The “Marvels of the Indies” endured in many texts until at least the fifteenth century, notably with Pierre d’Ailly’s influential Imago mundi of 1410–14, which had a great impact on Christopher Columbus, among others, and we shall see its associated imagery recurring in late medieval travel writing.³² The diverse marvels could be the object of European horror, pleasure, or admiration; for an example of the last, in many medieval texts Indians, especially “Brahmans” (Bragmanni), were viewed as models of simplicity and virtue.³³

An unusually detailed comparison of “West” and “East,” which does create a binary division in the way modern Orientalism does, appears in Gerald of Wales’s argument in Topographia Hiberniae (c. 1185) that “The advantages of the West are to be preferred to those of the East [Quod occidentalia commoda sunt orientalibus preferenda].”

What riches has the East then to offer in comparison with these [Quas igitur hiis comparabiles orientales regio diuitias habet]? It has, of course, many-colored silken cloth produced by the silk-worm; it has precious metals of certain types, sparkling gems and aromatic spices. But what are these in comparison with the loss of life and health? They are obtained only by enduring constantly the enmity of an enemy that one cannot get away from—the air that is within, and that surrounds one.³⁴

All the elements of the East, he explains are pestiferous; they

threaten his wretched life, deprive him of health, and finally kill him. If you put your naked foot upon the ground, death is upon you; if you sit upon marble without taking care, death is upon you; if you drink unmixed water, or merely smell dirty water with your nostrils, death is upon you; if you uncover your head to feel the breeze the better, it may affect you by either its heat or its coldness—but in any case, death is upon you. The heavens terrify you with their thunder and threaten you with their lightnings. The sun with its burning rays makes you uncomfortable. And if you take more food than is right, death is at the gate; if you take your wine unmixed with water, death is at the gate; if you do not hold your hand back from food long before you are satisfied, death is at the gate.

Furthermore, Gerald continues, poison is all around, dealt out by stepmothers to stepsons, wives to husbands, and cooks to masters, and if poisoned food and drink do not get you, the toxic “clothes, chairs and seats of all kinds” will. In contrast, the pleasant mildness of the western climate is incomparable: “Let the East, then, have its riches—tainted and poisoned as they are.”³⁵ Gerald’s references to gems, silks, and spices indicate a concept of the East extending to China.

In Gerald’s account, and those of other high medieval writers such as Honorius, “the East” is a place one can generalize about no matter how vast its area and variety of peoples. Yet when travelers from the Latin West (or “North”) stepped east from the mid-thirteenth century, representations of the Orient changed. Although several late medieval travel writers weave strands of the European “Indies” tradition into their narratives, their works represent a new phase in European perspectives. Asia becomes varied, particular, familiar, or knowable. In this sense, their narratives from the period c. 1245–1510 could be described as Between Orientalisms.

Even in Gerald’s description, where climate is the key marker of regional identity, the cultural homogenization that Said finds definitive of modern Orientalism is lacking. “Orientals,” says Said on modern writing, were portrayed as “almost everywhere nearly the same.” For example, British imperialist discourse painted Indians as “gullible, ‘devoid of energy and initiative,’ much given to ‘fulsome flattery,’ intrigue, cunning, and unkindness to animals.” They are dishonest, devious, depraved, childlike, and above all irrational.³⁶ Caricatures of oriental despotism, passivity, and sensuality also abound.³⁷ Disregard for cultural differences across Asia is thus exacerbated by negative stereotyping. Now, we must again acknowledge that Said’s account offers a very narrow and one-dimensional view of modern views on Asia and is remarkably reductive particularly in relation to the works of Orientalist scholars. Nonetheless, if we limit our acceptance of his stereotype to some novelists, artists, and travel writers, we may observe that this tendency in modern western perceptions of oriental cultures was little shared by the travelers of our present study. Medieval travelers and pseudo-travelers rarely lumped diverse oriental cultures together or resorted to overarching caricatures. As we shall see, most genuine medieval travelers made some attempt to provide descriptions of the places they passed through and the customs of their inhabitants. When vagueness, generalization, or literary tradition crept in, it was generally because the traveler had shifted to description of a location he had not visited himself and/or was working with an amanuensis not always much concerned with accuracy. Poggio Bracciolini’s version of Niccolò dei Conti’s account of “India beyond the Ganges” falls into this category, as Niccolò seems not to have ventured into China and in any case did not pen his own narrative.³⁸

Concepts of “Orient,” the “East,” “Asia,” or “India,” then, circulated in a range of European discourses, and each potentially posits an East against which the West might be set, but their generalizations deal mainly in matters of geography, climate, and marvels. The inattention to cultural differences that offends Said in modern Orientalist discourse is much less apparent. Thus, in the second part of Said’s definition, later medieval travel narratives represent perspectives “before” Orientalism.

Orientalism potentially emphasizes attractive aspects of Asian Otherness, but in Said’s version the juxtaposition of western superiority with eastern inferiority is paramount, and it is this that justifies imperial and colonial projects. Said suggests “the essence of Orientalism is the ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority.”³⁹ Here we have the key to the third strand of Said’s definition (“The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony”),⁴⁰ which has helped give birth to postcolonial studies but has also attracted outrage from established parties wishing to defend western scholarship. To take one of the more recent critiques as an example, Robert Irwin’s 2006 For Lust of Knowing (titled Dangerous Knowledge in its U.S. edition) offers an impassioned riposte to Orientalism, a book he blames for the decline of Oriental studies.⁴¹ Irwin’s concern is not so much with Orientalism as a theme of literature and the visual arts but with the reputation of generations of scholars whom he believes Said defamed in his “work of malignant charlatanry.”⁴² Said’s effort to apply Foucauldian theories about the interrelated nature of knowledge and power particularly offends Irwin, yet he does acknowledge a connection between European imperialism and Orientalism from around the early eighteenth century. For example, discussing Peter the Great’s expansion of the Russian Empire into largely Muslim Central Asia and the Caucasus, he notes that study of oriental languages and the Qur’an received royal patronage as “it was obviously desirable to understand Islam better in order to govern those Muslims more effectively.”⁴³ Furthermore, in the 1770s, while a number of French Orientalists were engaged in academic work on the Middle East, “French politicians, merchants and soldiers had developed a more predatory interest in that region” and “[t]here were plenty of French theorists ready to argue that Ottoman Turkey, a typical Oriental despotism, was in full decay, because … despotism conduced inevitably to slavery, polygamy and softness.”⁴⁴ The founding and expansion of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) was explicitly linked to British foreign expansion, while the “belated beginnings” of American Orientalism paralleled the United States’ growing hunger for oil and “ambitions to supplant Britain as the leading power in the Middle East.”⁴⁵ Irwin reluctantly acknowledges “it must be conceded that Said has perhaps as much as half a point.”⁴⁶

Said is unfortunately prone to dramatic overstatements in Orientalism, which may explain why specialists have found his influence so galling. Take, for example, the following: “Islam excepted, the Orient for Europe was until the nineteenth century a domain with a continuous history of unchallenged Western dominance. This is patently true of the British experience in India, the Portuguese experience in the East Indies, China, and Japan, and the French and Italian experiences in various regions of the Orient.”⁴⁷ One would not be advised to take this as a guide to the history of European influence in Asia. Yet a broader point, which might have been more seriously pursued, is that financial support for the development of European intellectual study of Middle Eastern and Asian languages and cultures corresponded with the growth in European commercial and political interests in the regions. France’s École Spéciale des Langues Orientales was founded in 1795 between phases of French economic colonialism in Asia and in prelude to the Napoleonic and later eras of direct French rule in Indochina, and the school’s founding document stated that its mission was to teach living Oriental languages “of recognized utility for politics and commerce.”⁴⁸ The distinguished British Sinologist Herbert A. Giles (1845–1935) complained at the end of his career that while a professor he had had “only one student at Cambridge who really wished to learn the language for its own sake”: the rest were aspiring diplomats and missionaries.⁴⁹ Britain’s celebrated School of Oriental Studies (“African” was added in 1938) was founded in 1916 at the height of direct British imperial rule across the globe. Its Royal Charter of Incorporation noted that the founding of the school “would be for the public advantage.”⁵⁰ Irwin himself states that “Orientalists had sold to the government the idea of the School as an imperial training centre,” although “most of those appointed seem to have been academics who despised the idea of vocational training.”⁵¹ Regardless of the high ideals of scholars, by the 1940s the British government clearly found the school invaluable for indirectly aiding its control of the Middle East: “Towards the end of the [Second World] war, Britain directly or indirectly controlled most of the Middle East from Iran to Morocco. One consequence of this was that in London … (SOAS) was crowded with servicemen, diplomats and administrators taking language and culture courses before setting out for the Far East, India and Sudan.”⁵² In the 1940s, dismayed by Britain’s decline, a government committee recommended pumping resources into the school to help reassert its far eastern influence.⁵³ Irwin blames Said for destroying his discipline, but the decline of European eastern imperialism in the later twentieth century is a more likely cause. Pure as the motives of the academic Orientalists may have been, those of their funding bodies and many of their students may have often been more pragmatic.⁵⁴ Orientalism, for all its faults and errors, poses piercing questions about western production of scholarship and cultural representations of non-western cultures that one should not ignore in any study of colonialist or imperialist cultural encounters.

Yet—and here we return to the central point of this book—“colonialism” or “imperialism” does not describe relations between Latin Christians and Asian peoples before the turn of the sixteenth century. Prior to that, to be sure, mercantile, diplomatic, and missionary activities placed a European toehold in Asian locations that would pave the way for later large-scale expansion. It seems likely, furthermore, that the fifteenth-century Portuguese had commercial ambitions in the Indies and lacked only technological advancement and maritime knowledge to bring them to fruition. The exploits of Vasco da Gama, deployed by the Portuguese crown in 1497–98 to find routes and establish a trading base in western India to help gain access to the eastern spice trade and overturn Venetian monopolies, show how quickly western European encounters in the distant east turned ugly with the growth in commercial ambitions. Soon after he landed on the Indian coast near Calicut, the trajectory of western colonial aggression with which we are now familiar became apparent. By the time that Afonso de Albuquerque was planting a definitively Portuguese presence on the Malabar Coast and around the Indian Ocean in the early sixteenth century, European interests in the East had taken a radically belligerent turn.⁵⁵ In 1503 Portugal set up a trading outpost in Cochin (Kochi, in Kerala). Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Portugal and the Netherlands established an extensive network of trading stations in south and southeast Asia, and the French and British became active in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries while the Russian Empire expanded steadily in the north. The greatest formal European possessions in Asia were the Dutch East Indies (1800–1942), British India (1858–1947), and French Indochina (1887–1954), but the European nations at different times held a large number of other desirable territories, both large (for example, Burma, Ceylon/ Sri Lanka) and small (Macau, Malacca, Hong Kong). D. K. Fieldhouse, in an oft-quoted statistic, calculates that by the 1930s 84.6 percent of the world’s land surface was covered by European colonies or ex-colonies, and “parts of Arabia, Persia, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Tibet, China, Siam and Japan were the only states which had never been under formal European government.”⁵⁶ Given that every one of these exceptions is an Asian country, and compared with the total or near total European domination of the Americas, Australasia, Africa, and the Pacific, Asia might appear to have escaped relatively lightly. Yet the phrase “formal European government” (or colonialism proper) veils a good deal of colonialist or imperialist activity, especially commercial. Before Asian locations became formal crown colonies they had often long been in the hands of trading companies, notably the various East India companies (Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British). China, apart from Russian Manchuria and some small but significant areas such as Hong Kong and Macau, was not formally in European hands, but it was subject to intense economic pressure, particularly from the British from the time of the First Opium War (1839–42). American military and economic interests in Asia saw the growth of its “informal empire” there from the turn of the twentieth century. From the late eighteenth century through to the mid-twentieth, south, east, and southeast Asia were subject to European colonizing forces.⁵⁷ Varied as these forces undoubtedly were, no one could seriously argue that these factors prevailed before the early sixteenth century; indeed, they did not achieve their full potency before the eighteenth century.

Western Europeans did not suddenly develop a new, Orientalist sensibility in the early sixteenth century. A problem for early modern and modern historians is to identify at what point it becomes possible to speak of Orientalism as an explanatory framework for European writings about India and the far East. Joan-Pau Rubiés, for example, denies that the concept is adequate for describing Portuguese writing on India up to the end of the sixteenth century.⁵⁸ Robert Markley also demonstrates that laudatory perspectives on China remained powerful right through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.⁵⁹ Both China and Japan, partly as a result of Jesuit influence that sought to emphasize those nations’ high levels of civilization and rationality, remained the subject of European admiration at least until the early eighteenth century.⁶⁰ It appears that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are the best available candidates for the high-water mark of Orientalism, in all senses of the word. Stereotyping, homogenizing, and demonizing became regular, but never inevitable, features of western discourse on far eastern regions only from the early eighteenth century. They were never more than part of the story, yet assertions of European superiority such as Samuel Purchas’s in 1613 (quoted below, pp. 63–64) may indicate the beginning of a sea change. His claims for European greatness are illustrative of the profound shift in consciousness wrought by European exploration and conquest of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. That supreme secular self-confidence or ethnocentrism has few distant echoes in the writings of our medieval travelers (discussed further in Chapter 3), though confidence in religious rightness was second nature to medieval Latin Christians.

Orientalism”s lasting value is not in providing the answers but in offering a starting point for scholarship that can provide textured accounts of the complicated and many-layered views “westerners” of different eras have formed of Asian cultures. They have been wondering, curious, admiring, inquiring, envious, avaricious, possessive, superior, censorious, denigrating, stereotyping, and demonizing but not generally all at the same time. Medieval travelers knew nothing of the world that would succeed them. They could never have envisaged the extraordinary European takeover of later centuries. To them, Mongolia, China, the Indian subcontinent, Burma, the kingdom of Champa (southern and central Vietnam), and the multitudinous islands scattered across the ocean at the farthest reaches of their known earth represented new and fascinating worlds meriting diverse responses. The peoples of these places were variously regarded with fear, disdain, wonder, and awe and were the focus of wariness, curiosity, and pleasure. Conspicuously absent from medieval western responses to Asia was the urge so familiar in more recent times: the desire to possess.