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Chapter 2

Travelers, Tales, Audiences

Travelers’ tales are often the preserve of the young, vigorous, and egocentric, yet it fell to an aging, overweight Franciscan friar to be among the first to travel into the heartland of a far Asian empire and return to tell his story. John of Plano Carpini (Giovanni di Pian di Carpine, c. 1180–1252), born in Pian di Carpine, now Magione near Perugia, was an early stalwart of the Franciscan order and near contemporary of St. Francis.¹ He had spent the 1220s and 1230s traveling Saxony and Spain to help establish the new order in those places, gaining a reputation for trustworthiness and sound judgment, kindness, and piety. His fellow Franciscan Giordano da Giano left a vivid image of him as, in de Rachewiltz’s paraphrase, “a kind, genial and heavily built man, so heavy in fact that he used to ride a donkey instead of the prescribed horse, thereby attracting notice and sympathy wherever he went.”² By 1245 he had surely earned some quiet and comfortable twilight years but instead was called by the new pope, Innocent IV, to head one of four diplomatic missions into Mongol territory. He was not the first—there had been some earlier Hungarian expeditions into Mongol-held territories—but he is distinguished for the distance traveled and for his account of the journey. Carpini, accompanied first by Friar Stephen of Bohemia, who fell ill en route and was replaced by Benedict the Pole, departed from Lyon on 16 April 1245 and took the route via Bohemia, Poland, and southern Russia. He reached the camp of Güyük Khân under Mongol escort just west of the capital Karakorum on 22 July 1246.

It was a heroic journey of several thousand kilometers into dangerous territory, strewn in places with “skulls and bones of dead men lying on the ground like dung.”³ They kept up a cracking pace with five or seven changes of horses every day in the later phases, traveling from dawn to nightfall with no stopping for meals and indeed often no chance to eat in the evenings as they made camp so late. Benedict the Pole tells how they bandaged their limbs to “bear the strain of continual riding.”⁴ Ruy Gonzáles de Clavijo, Castilian ambassador to Temür in the early fifteenth century, concurred that “it is scarcely to be believed, had we not ourselves seen it and thus we can vouch for the truth, what a distance these [Mongol] riders can encompass in a day. … By the roadside many were the dead horses we saw during our journey, which had been thus ridden to death and the carcass abandoned.”⁵ Carpini’s return journey took place through the winter of 1246–47, finally arriving at Lyon in November 1247. As he tells it, the friars slept on the freezing open ground, often waking to find themselves covered in snow. On reaching Europe, Carpini and his companions were greeted “as if we were risen from the dead.”⁶ Presumably Carpini no longer sported the corpulent figure for which he had previously been celebrated.

At the same time Lawrence of Portugal, also Franciscan, was to have approached the Mongols via the Levant but nothing is known of his journey; he may have died on the way or perhaps did not go at all.⁷ Two further missions via the eastern Mediterranean were headed by Dominicans, that of Ascelin and his companion, Simon of St. Quentin, who reached the camp of Baiju in the Armenian highlands in May 1247, and that of Andrew of Longjumeau, who traveled to a Mongolian encampment near Tabriz in Persia in 1245–47 and to the camp of the regent Oghul-Qaimish, widow of Güyük Khân, southwest of Lake Baikal at the request of King Louis IX in 1249–51.⁸ All these journeys required considerable courage, given the Mongolians’ reputation as ferocious warriors. As Peter Jackson and David Morgan comment drily, “The Mongol imperial government held a fairly uncomplicated view of international relations.” They believed Tenggeri (the “Eternal Heaven”) had granted the entire world to the Mongols, and it was the duty of all other rulers and peoples to submit to them or pay a terrible price.⁹

Carpini’s, Ascelin’s, and Andrew of Longjumeau’s missions resulted in written accounts of Mongol peoples and represent some of the earliest European ethnographic writing on Asia.¹⁰ However, descriptions of Mongols had already begun to circulate from the 1220s, when Europe was under threat of total conquest. Some of these were preserved in Matthew Paris’s Chronica majora.¹¹ The papal emissaries offered less panicky descriptions that sought not to demonize but to warn and inform. Each of their accounts, however, has a complex textual and authorial history. Benedict the Pole, Carpini’s companion, left a short dictated account of their journey.¹² Ascelin’s journey is represented by the record of his companion, Simon of St. Quentin, but this does not survive in any independent copy and is known only from extracts Vincent of Beauvais copied into his Speculum historiale (c. 1253) along with excerpts from Carpini.¹³ Likewise, Andrew of Longjumeau’s work has not survived independently, though copies of his translations of letters from eastern Christians and Mongols are in Papal registers. Parts of his record of the first journey and a little on the second are preserved in Matthew Paris’s Chronica majora, while Joinville’s Histoire de Saint Louis includes information from the latter.¹⁴ However, from the point of view of medieval as well as modern readers, Carpini’s book, titled Ystoria [Historia] Mongalorum in key manuscripts, is the most important. It was produced upon the friar’s return to Lyon in 1247 and survives in two main versions. The shorter is extant in twelve copies and contains the chief ethnographic and military chapters. The longer, which adds a lengthy final chapter narrating the friars’ itinerary, is in three manuscripts and is the version used here.¹⁵

Among variant versions of Carpini and Benedict’s itinerary, one, generally known as The Tartar Relation, was discovered in 1957. This became famous because of the manuscript’s inclusion of the so-called Vinland Map, reputed to be a fifteenth-century redrawing of a thirteenth-century original and depicting a large island labeled “Vinland” to the west of Greenland.¹⁶ This first excited the attention of book dealers and historians who believed it the earliest European cartographic depiction of North America, but it is now widely accepted as a twentieth-century forgery. However, the remainder of the manuscript, consisting of The Tartar Relation and a copy of Vincent’s Speculum historiale, is considered authentic.¹⁷ Coming from the pen of one C. de Bridia, The Tartar Relation was probably written down by someone who heard Benedict and/or Carpini speaking of their travels at some point on their homeward route.¹⁸ The text is close to Carpini’s but with plausible additions and variations: there is nothing to ring alarm bells over anachronism. Carpini himself says that versions were made on their journey home.

Many have suggested that one of Innocent IV’s motives in sending envoys to the Mongols was to investigate the possibilities of a joint Mongol-Christian campaign against the Saracens in the Holy Land, though Menestò, Carpini’s recent editor, finds no direct evidence for this. Rather, the missions were “diplomatic, but also exploratory.”¹⁹ With the Mongol threat to Latin Europe still very real and their bloody conquests ongoing, Innocent’s chief aim was to compile a dossier of useful information on their territories, way of life, and above all weapons and techniques of war to better prepare themselves for the defense.²⁰ From the Historia Mongalorum itself one may gather that Carpini’s motivations in writing were to produce a work recognized as the true and full version of the journey and provide detailed practical information to aid in future dealings with Mongols. He lists European merchants and dignitaries whom the friars met while in Mongolian-controlled territory “to avoid any doubt arising in the minds of anyone as to our having been to the Tartars.”²¹ According to the chronicler Salimbene de Adam, who met with Carpini on two occasions after the latter’s return to Lyon, he saw him “carrying with him the book which he had written on the Tartars. And the friars read it in his presence; and he commented on and clarified to them those things which appeared obscure or difficult to believe.”²² In her comparison of the two main versions of Carpini’s text, Maria Cristiana Lungarotti shows how the second draft consistently expands upon the first for the purposes of clarification and to reemphasize its truthfulness.²³ Around one-fifth of the second version is devoted to geographic and ethnographic material, another fifth to Mongol history and the rise of their empire, a quarter to military tactics and technologies, and the final third or so to the itinerary and experiences of the friars. The work is readable but was not designed for entertainment.

King Louis IX called upon another Franciscan, William of Rubruck from Flanders, to travel to the Mongols in 1253. Rubruck and his companions reached the camp of Möngke Khân at Karakorum on 27 December 1253.²⁴ Like Carpini, Rubruck was a heavy man,²⁵ and he, too, suffered physical hardship on his journey: “There is no counting the times we were famished, thirsty, frozen and exhausted.”²⁶ His insistence on the Franciscan habit of going barefoot despite December snow near Karakorum suggests, however, that some of this suffering was self-inflicted.²⁷ After almost six months at the Khân’s court Rubruck gained leave to depart, but his companion, Bartholomew of Cremona, could not face the journey home and elected to live out his days among the Mongols on the harsh steppes of the Khân’s empire.

The reasons for Rubruck’s mission are harder to determine than those of his predecessors. Rubruck’s own motivations seem to have been religious—to convert Mongols to Christianity and to console Christians under Mongol occupation—but Louis’s intentions, as a man persistently obsessed with crusading, were probably more political. In any case, Rubruck’s book bears similarities to Carpini’s as a record of useful information though is markedly different in form. Where Carpini’s book is part ethnography, part history, part military intelligence report, and part itinerary, Rubruck’s is mostly itinerary. Less than 10 percent of his book (chapters 2–8) is given over to direct ethnography; the remainder tells of his journey and personal experiences, with further ethnographic descriptions scattered throughout. Rubruck’s account of the Mongols is more negative than his predecessor’s but still relatively moderate; it could not be called an attempt at demonization. Rubruck’s work has appealed very much to some modern readers of “travel writing” (discussed in Chapter 3) but was little known in the Middle Ages, with only five manuscripts extant and one of those is merely a fourteenth-century copy of the oldest one surviving. These are all in Latin and of English origin and show his audience was primarily educated and monastic, including the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, St. Mary’s Abbey in York, and Simon Bozon, Prior of Norwich Cathedral Priory (1344–52).²⁸

Furthermore, Roger Bacon interviewed Rubruck in Paris and used his geographical information in the Opus majus. Indeed, Bacon provides justifications for the inclusion of geographical knowledge in his work. It has value for missionary efforts and for eschatological forewarning:

This knowledge of the places of the world is very necessary to the state of the believers, and for the conversion of unbelievers and for opposing unbelievers and Antichrist and others. … For the most vigorous men sometimes through their ignorance of the places in the world have destroyed themselves and the business interests of Christians, because they have passed through places too hot in the hot seasons and too cold in the cold seasons. They have also met with countless dangers because they did not know when they encountered the regions of believers, or of schismatics, Saracens, Tartars, Tyrants, men of peace, barbarians, or of men with reasonable minds. He who is ignorant of the places in the world lacks a knowledge not only of his destination, but of the course to pursue.²⁹

On the need to foresee what the end of the Second Age of the world might entail, “the Church should have excellent knowledge of the situation and condition of the ten tribes of the Jews, who will come forth in the days to come.” Alexander the Great found these nations dwelling in Hyrcania on the Caspian Sea and confined them more strictly behind high mountains:

Since, then, these nations shut up in certain localities of the world will come forth to desolate regions and meet Antichrist, Christians and especially the Roman Church should study carefully the location of places, that it may be able to learn the ferocity of nations of this kind and through them to learn the time and origin of Antichrist; for these races must obey him. … Friar William, moreover, whom the lord king of France sent to the Tartars in the year of our Lord 1253, when he was beyond sea, wrote to the king aforesaid that he crossed with Tartars through the middle of the gates that Alexander constructed.³⁰

It seems relevant that the copy of Rubruck’s book held by the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds also contains a copy of the “Liber Methodius,” the influential seventh-century Syrian Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius.³¹

Missionaries and diplomats would continue to be among the chief witnesses in text of Asian civilizations to around 1500, but chronologically the next major contribution came from the son of a Venetian merchant. Marco Polo and his book, Le Divisament dou monde (Description of the World) (c. 1298), are exemplary of the unstable nature of medieval authors and books. There is no single manuscript representing the original text or even a “definitive version,” given the great diversity found among the approximately 150 extant copies, no two of which are exactly alike.³² Moreover, there is no book we can truly say is by an “author” called Marco Polo, given that the original version of our surviving texts was produced in collaboration with a professional romance writer, and the diversity among manuscripts demonstrates that individual scribes and translators often made free with the text, inserting editorial comment and even purportedly informative content without any apparent sense of transgression. It went by various names in medieval manuscripts: Divisament dou monde (in French, Devisement du monde) but also Le Livre des merveilles du monde, Li Livres du Graunt Caam, De mirabilibus mundi, and De condicionibus et consuetudinibus orientalium regionum. The Travels, however, is a postmedieval title.³³ The book is a challenging prospect for editors, to put it mildly, and has prompted a vast array of scholarly studies. Even to attempt to supply a reasonably extensive bibliography would require a book in itself.³⁴ Yet enormous riches await anyone who turns to the Divisament for its depiction of the Asian continent through medieval European eyes.

Marco (1254–c. 1325) was the son of Niccolò Polo, who with his brothers Marco and Maffeo owned a prominent Venetian family business. The Polos had a trading base at Soldaia (Sudak) on the Crimean Peninsula, and it was from here in c. 1260 that Niccolò and Maffeo set out to trade jewels at Sarai (near present-day Volgograd), seat of Berke Khân, who was then ruler of the Golden Horde. The Polo brothers found themselves forced farther northeast when violent Byzantine reprisals against Venetians followed the Byzantine recapture of Constantinople and fighting broke out between Mongol rulers of Persia and the Golden Horde. After three years in Bukhara (Buxoro) they accepted an invitation from an embassy from Persia to travel to the court of the Great Khân, Khubilai (r. 1260–94), and journeyed far to the north and east to an uncertain location in the Mongolian heartland. Khubilai saw an opportunity to make contact with the West and sent the brothers back to Italy with a letter to the pope requesting one hundred Christians to return east to teach Mongols about Christianity. Delayed by the papal vacancy of 1269–71, the brothers finally returned to Khubilai’s court with the blessing of the new pope, Gregory X, in 1271, accompanied not by one hundred missionaries but by Niccolò’s seventeen-year-old son, Marco. They reached Khubilai at Shangdu, his summer capital in Cathay (northern China), in 1274. They departed probably in 1291, escorting a Mongol princess to Persia, and arrived back in Venice around 1295.

Marco spent about seventeen years in China and around twenty-four years abroad in total. He left Venice an adolescent and returned a middle-aged man. Details of his life in China remain mysterious. Although he is regularly described as a “merchant” in modern scholarship, it is unclear whether he and the elder Polos engaged in profitable trade so far from home. A number of Venetian and Genoese merchants went to China and India in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries so one must presume some commerce between Italians and Chinese, but such ventures are not described in the Divisament.³⁵ The book claims rather that Khubilai took an instant liking to Marco and engaged him on numerous diplomatic missions throughout his eastern realms. It more dubiously states that Khubilai made him governor of the great city of Yangzhou for three years, that the three Polos played a decisive part in the subjection of Xiangyang, one of the last cities of the Southern Song dynasty to fall to Khubilai’s forces, and that Marco’s diplomatic ventures on behalf of Khubilai provided the initial impetus for his attempts to describe what he had seen.³⁶ Many of the Divisament’s modern readers have scorned these details, citing a lack of contemporary Chinese records substantiating them. The claim of governorship is unlikely to be true, and from chronology alone the military claim is certainly invented as the siege of Xiangyang ended in 1273, two years before the Polos’ arrival.³⁷ A few have gone further and contended that his whole book is a fiction, notably Frances Wood in Did Marco Polo Go to China?³⁸ However, that argument is now discredited. Igor de Rachewiltz shows that numerous details were previously unrecorded in European texts and must have been the result of observation.³⁹ He argues that Marco probably had relatively little to do with Chinese people and did not speak Chinese; rather, he moved among the Mongol, Persian, and Turkic peoples in residence and communicated in the Persian lingua franca of foreign denizens, which helps explain many alleged “omissions,” such as tea drinking and foot-binding. The lack of any description of the Great Wall is accounted for by the fact that the wall as we know it was not built before the sixteenth century. De Rachewiltz further shows that the embassy in which the Polos accompanied Princess Kökechin to Persia to marry the il-khân Arghun (a marriage that did not occur owing to Arghun’s death in the interim) could only have been described as a result of direct experience, as it was not recorded in any Chinese or other sources available to a European by 1298. The inclusion of descriptions of a range of locations suggests Marco traveled widely while in China, particularly in the north and down the eastern coast to “Zaiton” (Quanzhou), but also that he related tales he had heard of other regions from other travelers or his Mongol or Chinese hosts. His account of Cipangu (Japan), for example, is a result of hearsay rather than observation, and it has been suggested that his frequently mundane descriptions of south and east China came about from conversation rather than witness.⁴⁰ The book’s account of the three Polos’ roundabout and strangely lengthy journey to “Cambaluc” (Khanbalikh or Khanbaliq) has also been doubted. John Larner acerbically remarks, “It is like travelling from Toronto to New Orleans by way of the Rocky Mountains.” The efforts of modern readers to identify the route taken by the Polos and provide accompanying maps are, Larner argues, a result of reading the book as an account of “travels” rather than what it states itself to be: a “Description of the World.”⁴¹

The slippery nature of the work becomes clearer still when we consider its composition. According to the Divisament, following his return to Venice Marco was caught up in a sea battle between Venetian and Genoese forces and became a prisoner of war in 1298.⁴² While interned he met Rusticello da Pisa, an author of Arthurian romances, and during their long hours of incarceration they together concocted the book in a hybrid Franco-Italian.⁴³ The book caught on and was swiftly translated into French, Tuscan, and Venetian. The Dominican Friar Pipino produced a Latin version with a stronger Christian tone between 1314 and 1324, and this version represents 43 percent of surviving copies.⁴⁴ German, Bohemian, Catalan, Aragonese, Portuguese, Gaelic, and other Latin versions followed. It was, in Larner’s words, “an unparalleled record in the Middle Ages for translations effected during the life of the author.”⁴⁵ Only four surviving copies are extensively illuminated though a number of others are illustrated on a more modest scale and no doubt other illuminated copies have been lost.⁴⁶ It is noticeable that the early fifteenth-century artists who worked on the grandest copies of the book (in Paris, Bib. Nat. fr. 2810 and Oxford, Bodley 264) regularly enhanced or exaggerated the oriental “Otherness” of places and peoples described, to the point of adding monstrous races where none is described in the text or portraying Mongol warriors as small, dark-skinned, “functional Saracens.”⁴⁷ Such emphasis on difference is at odds with much of the book’s textual content. On the other hand they portray a light-skinned Khubilai Khân and Chinese courts, civilized habits, and cities as comparable to European counterparts. Manuscripts of Pipino’s Latin translation are parchment or high-quality paper productions and were aimed at a well-educated Christian readership seeking knowledge of the world God had created. The French manuscripts tend to be high-quality, luxury items while many of the Venetian, Tuscan, and other copies are paper manuscripts perhaps owned by gentlemen or mercantile readers.⁴⁸

Figure 1. The Travels of Marco Polo (The Million or Le Livre des Merveilles). Map with the route of the journey [modern interpretation]. Drawing. Photo credit: © DeA Picture Library / Art Resource, NY.

While it has become conventional to stress that the Divisament was viewed as mostly an incredible fiction by medieval readers—the nickname “Il Milione” is thought by some to refer to the author’s alleged habit of concocting extravagant fables⁴⁹—Dutschke and Larner go to lengths to counter this libel. They show that fourteenth- and fifteenth-century chroniclers, theologians, geographers, cartographers, and other intellectuals looked to the Divisament for moral insight and valuable information on the earth’s distant reaches. Both cite the testimony of Paduan professor Pietro d’Abano, who stated he had spoken to Marco in seeking instruction on the habitability of the equatorial parts of the world.⁵⁰ Indeed, Larner claims skepticism about the book did not become widespread until the later seventeenth century.⁵¹

Another way to approach the question of reader reception is to focus on specific contexts. Suzanne M. Yeager shows that the Divisament had a different readership in England from its readership in many Continental contexts. Pipino’s Latin translation was by far the dominant version of the Divisament in England, with other Latin versions also in circulation there, and indeed the book did not receive English translation until 1579. The English readers were well educated and seem to have treated the book as a serious factual account with moral value; it often appears in manuscripts alongside scientific treatises, histories, and devotional works.⁵² Its Italian appeal was broader. Christine Gadrat’s research into fourteenth-century Italian Dominican uses of the Divisament shows that it had not only moral and edifying appeal (as in Pipino’s Chronicon, Pietro Calo da Chioggia’s Legendary, and Nicoluccio of Ascoli’s sermons) and educative value (as in Jacopo d’Acqui’s Chronica ymaginis mundi) but also lighter functions. Filippino da Ferrara used about twenty anecdotes from the Divisament in his Liber de introductione loquendi (c. 1325–47), a guide to pleasant conversation aimed at friars dealing with a range of social contexts from dining with the laity to visiting ill friends. These included the anecdote (discussed in Chapter 6) concerning oriental peoples who offer their wives to travelers as part of their hospitality and another about the people who make a kind of pasta from the meal produced from sago trees. Filippino writes, the dish “is very good and master Marco tasted it several times. This can be told when good pasta is on the table.”⁵³

The Divisament appealed in various ways to its diverse readers. We shall see in the next chapter that modern readers are often baffled or repelled by the Divisament’s repetitive style and the apparent laziness of its linking phrases—“And why should I make you a long story?”—yet Larner suggests this “was designed to produce a lulling, undemanding, hypnotic rhythm which carried them forward effortlessly.”⁵⁴ While some readers sought epic elements, others involved in European-Asian trade may have been drawn to the book’s lists of places, natural resources, and commodities such as salt, silk, and spices. Others looked for geographic and chorographic information to aid them in placing Asia within a Christian cosmology, especially once Friar Pipino’s Latin translation gave the book greater authority for Christian intellectuals. The Divisament’s attention to certain kinds of Asian marvels appealed to medieval audiences’ persistent, if fading, sense of wonder. Its accounts of abundant foods, splendid cities, and freedom from Christian monogamy and sexual restraint were among the elements that made the book a miscellany of earthly pleasures. Marco Polo’s Orient, but particularly his Mongol-ruled China, was a place of sophistication and sensual delights. Indeed, such readings were not necessarily mutually exclusive. Benedetto, Dutschke, and Larner cite the testimony of humanist Domenico di Bandino, who gave the book ample space in his thirty-five-volume encyclopedia around the turn of the fifteenth century, taking it to be instructive in the way that the geographical statements of Pliny, Isidore of Seville, and Brunetto Latini were, while also describing it as “delightful” (delectabilem).⁵⁵ As the longest and most detailed of the travel narratives studied here, it exemplifies the argument that medieval readers sought variously information, edification, wonder, and pleasure in contemporary travelers’ tales of the Orient.

In the wake of diplomatic envoys and merchants came a wave of missionaries. Ricold of Monte Croce’s Liber peregrinacionis, also called his Itinerarius, was produced after his return to Italy from Baghdad in 1301 following thirteen years of voyaging in the Middle East.⁵⁶ Ricold (1242–1320) was a Dominican missionary from Florence who embarked on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1288 and continued through Turkey and Persia to Baghdad in 1289, remaining for twelve years. He learned Arabic and gained a relatively high level of knowledge about Islam—though viewing it as Christian heresy—and though his written work, notably the Contra legem sarracenorum, denigrated the Muslim faith, he was more generous in describing Muslim peoples. His Liber peregrinacionis reserves its most negative ethnological assessments for Turks, Kurds, and Mongols. In its original Latin the work was not very widely transmitted. Seven manuscripts survive, three of which are fragmentary. There are also six extant manuscripts of John le Long’s 1351 French translation and three late medieval copies of Italian translations, two fragmentary.⁵⁷ For the present work, Ricold’s text is valuable primarily for its account of Mongols. Persia was under Mongol control during his stay in Baghdad so some of his observances could be drawn from witness. On the other hand, his account includes historical and mythological material that may be taken from Persian associates, their Mongol leaders, or both.

A number of Franciscan missionaries journeyed to Khanbaliq and Zaiton in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Three wrote letters to the leaders and brothers of their orders, the originals of which do not survive but were copied into a Franciscan chronicle c. 1335–36: John of Monte Corvino (letters dated 1305 and 1306), Peregrine of Castello (letter dated 1318), and Andrew of Perugia (letter dated 1326).⁵⁸ Unfortunately they wrote relatively little about the countries and cultures of the East in these brief epistles, telling mainly of successes or failures in conversion of local populations. The same is true of the letter or letters of Jordan Catala of Sévérac, a Dominican writing from India around 1321.⁵⁹ Jordan traveled to the Indian subcontinent with a group of Franciscan missionaries in 1320, returning to Avignon by 1329. His Franciscan companions were killed in Thana near Bombay (Mumbai) in 1321, and it appears that in 1324 he handed their remains to Odoric of Pordenone, who took them to the Catholic archdiocese in Khanbaliq. The Spanish Franciscan Pascal of Vittoria also wrote briefly from Almaliq about his experiences among the Saracens in 1338.⁶⁰ A related letter from “Friar Menentillus” claims to relate views of a Franciscan missionary who had traveled to India with the Dominican Nicholas of Pistoia.⁶¹ Yule and Wyngaert deduced that this traveler, named “Friar John the Cordelier” (i.e., the Franciscan) by Pietro of Abano, must have been John of Monte Corvino, writing from his time in India, c. 1292–93.⁶² However, given its unclear provenance and its difference in content and tone from Monte Corvino’s two signed letters, this attribution is not certain. The letter reads less as a firsthand account of personal experience in the East than as a general description of eastern regions and peoples.

Although the missionary epistles survive only as copies and were subjected to revision by their earliest scribes, they seem to have circulated among Franciscan and curial circles in the early to mid-fourteenth century.⁶³ Jordan Catala of Sévérac’s Mirabilia descripta was read in similar contexts but survives in only one manuscript.⁶⁴ More an account of natural wonders than an ethnography, its occasionally breathless tone is quite different from the author’s mournful letters. “Mirabile” is his frequent refrain: “Everything indeed is a marvel in this India,” he says of India the Greater, which to him is all of south and southeast Asia.⁶⁵ A work called “Le livre de l’estat du grant caan” (The Book of the Estate of the Great Caan [Khân]), composed in the late 1320s or early 1330s, had apparently wider impact. It celebrates achievements of Franciscan missionaries in Cathay, naming John of Monte Corvino, Andrew of Perugia, and Peter of Florence, and offers a highly favorable account of Cathay and the potential for the whole population’s conversion to Roman Christianity. A Latin version (“De statu, conditione ac regimine magni canis”), copied in 1346, has only recently been discovered and edited; previously only six manuscript copies of John le Long’s 1351 French translation were known.⁶⁶ Christine Gadrat, who discovered the Latin manuscript, shows the traditional ascription to the “Archbishop of Soltaniah” (Sultaniyeh in Persia) is based on a mistranscription of Saltensis, from which historians derived Soltaniensis. Rather, it was presented by the Archbishop of Salerno (Salernitanum) by the command of Pope John XXII, and the Latin text of the 1346 copy, possibly made in German lands, is probably translated from an Italian Franciscan original. The traditional attribution to the Dominican John de Cora, who took up the see of Sultaniyeh early in 1330, is therefore discounted. The work was probably not a traveler’s account but instead composed in Europe from written sources. It shows influences from the Divisament, Odoric of Pordenone’s Relatio, Jordan’s Mirabilia, and the letters of Franciscan missionaries to China. Gadrat suggests that the work began to circulate rapidly, especially within circles connected to the curia at a time when the Avignonese papacy was renewing interest in the oriental missions.⁶⁷

A late contribution to this wave of missionary accounts comes in unusual form from John of Marignolli (c. 1290–after 1362), a Florentine Franciscan intellectual sent as part of a papal delegation of more than thirty people into east and south Asia (1338–53) to investigate the state of oriental Christianity and consider prospects for future missions. He spent perhaps three or four years in Khanbaliq (c. 1342–47), then journeyed to Zaiton from where he embarked for India and Ceylon en route to Europe. While compiling a world history (c. 1356) Marignolli took the opportunity—prompted by speaking of Creation and Eden—to record scattered observations on the East.⁶⁸ Henry Yule, in a felicitous phrase, describes these as “like unexpected fossils in a mud-bank,” buried as they are in the Bohemian chronicle surviving in one full and one partial manuscript, unedited until 1768.⁶⁹ This is not a work, then, that had a significant audience or influence upon later texts; however, it is interesting as a distinctive, sometimes fanciful account of eastern places. Marignolli’s reminiscences lose their narrative thread and become rambling and anecdotal as he goes on. He mentions the Terrestrial Paradise, “Adam’s garden,” and the dress and food of Adam and Eve along with other Old Testament allusions. The biblical past and the exotic East are thus intertwined for Marignolli, in a way not uncommon for medieval authors but not usually found in the works of genuine travelers. On the other hand, he demonstrates scrupulous rationality in discussing monstrous peoples.

By far the most important work on the distant East to derive from missionary experience is Odoric of Pordenone’s Relatio.⁷⁰ Odoric (c. 1286–1331), also a Franciscan, had already spent around twenty years doing missionary work in Russia, Turkey, and Persia when with James of Ireland he took the seaward route to China via India and southeast Asia around 1318, collecting the remains of the martyred Franciscans in Thana in 1324 and reaching John of Monte Corvino’s archbishopric in Khanbaliq in 1325. After three years he returned via a land route across the center of the Asian continent, intending to visit Pope John XXII at Avignon to request more missionaries, but fell ill at Pisa and returned to die in his home monastery of Udine. The Relatio avows that his motives were those of a missionary—“I crossed the sea and visited the countries of the unbelievers in order to win some harvest of souls”—but that detail is thought to have been added by Odoric’s posthumous promoters, and his book is unlike those of other missionaries in important respects.⁷¹ For one, Odoric did not write it himself. A version was apparently dictated to a fellow friar, William di Solagna, in 1330 and reworked by various subsequent scribes. It appears to have been influenced in part by Marco Polo’s book. For another, it enjoyed significant popularity in its day. The other missionary works exist in only one or two manuscripts, while Odoric’s book survives in around 117 manuscripts (ten of which postdate c. 1500) in Latin (approximately sixty), Italian, French, and German copies.⁷² “Sir John Mandeville” plundered the book for his fictional travels.

The process of the book’s production remains mysterious. No doubt it was truly informed by Odoric’s own experiences, but its mélange of eyewitness impressions, ethnography, hagiography, biblical geography, and oriental mirabilia produce a shifting and uncertain narrative. The Latin authors responsible for its earliest manifestations, who were probably involved in ultimately unsuccessful efforts to see Odoric canonized, are among a large number of copyists and later translators who adapted and transformed the text according to reader interest. The existence of vernacular versions indicates a significant lay as well as ecclesiastical readership, but this may have varied from one location to another. Marianne O’Doherty argues on the basis of manuscript comparisons that English copies are mostly in Latin and their readers mostly educated scholarly and/or monastic men, whereas Italian copies are more often vernacular, often part of miscellanies, and aimed at lay audiences. If manuscript survival rates are an accurate guide, English readers treated the book, along with others such as Carpini’s Historia, Polo’s’s Divisament, and The Letter of Prester John with which it was sometimes bound, as a serious work for scholars interested in the geography, ethnography, religions, and natural history of the Indies, while Italian readers were often more dubious about its authority but entertained by its accounts of diverse lands and mirabilia.⁷³

To turn away from missionaries and double back a little in time, we come to Hetoum of Armenia’s La flor des estoires de la terre d’Orient (1307).⁷⁴ Dictated first in French to scribe Nicholas Falcon during Hetoum’s stay at the papal court in Poitiers in 1307, Falcon himself produced a Latin version later that year at the request of Clement V. It survives in around sixty manuscript copies mostly in Latin and French and became widely popular in the early era of the printing press.⁷⁵ Hetoum (Hayton, Haiton, or Hethoum, before 1245–c. 1310/14) was an Armenian monk, probably a canon regular of the Premonstratensian order, though previously married and a father.⁷⁶ Hetoum’s visit to Clement V at Poitiers was prompted by desire to see a joint crusade mounted for the reconquest of Jerusalem. Although in part a work of crusade propaganda, La flor surveys geography and peoples from Cathay to Syria and is valued by modern scholars particularly for its third book, a history and description of Mongol peoples. Glenn Burger believes Falcon had little input into Hetoum’s text, given the text’s accuracy on dates and claims about Mongol history and culture,⁷⁷ but the involvement of an amanuensis should be taken into account. Moreover, it is unlikely that Hetoum undertook any eastern travel, although his uncle, King Hetoum I, had traveled on a diplomatic mission to Karakorum in 1254–55 and an account was produced.⁷⁸ We must therefore acknowledge the secondhand nature of much of his material and its propagandistic purpose. Hetoum’s relatively positive account of the Mongols, for example, should be read with the understanding that he hoped to persuade the French pope to form a crusading alliance with them.

While missionaries maintained their hopes for eastern converts, Italian merchants kept up their small but steady flow to India and China. Francesco Balducci Pegolotti’s guidebook for merchants, Libro di Divisamenti di Paesi (Book of the Descriptions of Countries), named La Pratica della Mercatura by its eighteenth-century editor, was produced sometime between 1335 and 1343 and survives in a single manuscript. Pegolotti was not a traveler but worked for the Bardi Company, and his book is a thoroughly practical work of advice and information on long-distance trade.⁷⁹ It is valued by travel historians for its information for merchants wishing to make the journey to Cathay: grow one’s beard; obtain a Turkish translator, some good male servants, and perhaps “a woman” at Tana to assist on the journey; and obtain a certain amount of provisions. Although lacking in ethnographical information on the peoples of the East, the book indicates that trade and travel between Italian merchants and Asia were not uncommon at the time. Indeed, Pegolotti claims the road from Tana to Cathay is “perfectly safe” (sicurissimo) by day or night.⁸⁰

Niccolò dei Conti (c. 1395–1469) was a Venetian trader whose observations on India and southeast Asia are preserved in book 4 of Poggio’s De varietate fortunae (1448).⁸¹ The genesis of the book was unusual. Niccolò returned to Venice in 1439 after around twenty years of travel across the Indian Ocean to India, Burma, the islands of southeast Asia, and possibly Champa (southern and central Vietnam). Following a confession to the pope that he had been obliged to adopt a false Muslim identity and dress for his personal safety while abroad, he was required as penance to dictate an account of his travels to the papal secretary, humanist scholar Poggio Bracciolini, which he did in Florence. De varietate fortunae, true to its name, is a study of the vicissitudes of fortune, beginning with a description of the ruins of ancient Rome and a meditation on Rome’s passage over time from greatness to decay (book 1). Books 2 and 3 deal with the turbulence of more recent history, before Poggio turns in book 4 to the more pleasing topic of Niccolò’s travels, hoping “it may serve for relaxation and at the same time turn the minds of the readers from the severity of fortune to a gentler fate, so to speak, and to the pleasant vicissitudes of things.”⁸² Joan-Pau Rubiés nonetheless emphasizes the serious and scholarly intention of the work and locates it within Poggio’s broader humanist endeavors to found a new era of secular scholarship and the quest for objective information about the world.⁸³ The book was quite popular: Merisalo lists thirty-one extant manuscripts of the full work or first two books and a further twenty-three containing fragments of the first or fourth book.⁸⁴ Niccolò’s account garnered special attention and was soon detached from the remainder of Poggio’s work and circulated independently as a work of travel literature, India Recognita (1492), and subsequently translated from Latin into Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and English.⁸⁵ A shorter independent discussion of Niccolò and his travels appears in the travelogue of Spanish nobleman Pero Tafur, who says he met the Venetian with his “Indian” wife and their children in Egypt on Niccolò’s homeward journey in 1437.⁸⁶ Niccolò’s experiences, then, come to us only via Poggio and Tafur. The version in Poggio’s book is presented in Latin rather than in the Venetian or other vernacular in which it was presumably dictated and no doubt involved Poggio’s selection and reorganization. The book must be seen as a collaborative work, with Poggio’s own authorial intentions and inclinations brought to the fore. These were both to provide the reader with useful and interesting information and to give pleasure.⁸⁷

Four other accounts from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries will merit brief mention. Ruy González de Clavijo (d. 1412) was a Castilian nobleman who traveled to the court of Temür in 1403–4 as ambassador for Henry III of Castile.⁸⁸ His testimony is valuable chiefly as witness to the new Turkic-Mongol regime of the early fourteenth century and the splendid court at Samarkand. Johann (“Hans”) Schiltberger (c. 1381–1430) is a hazy figure, by his own account a Bavarian soldier captured by Turks at the battle of Nicopolis in 1396 and subsequently enslaved by Temür and various of his kin and vassals. If we are to believe him, Schiltberger spent around thirty years in servitude to these eastern potentates before finally escaping while on campaign near the Black Sea and returning to Germany in 1428. The circumstances of his book’s composition are unknown. Though it is written in a Bavarian dialect, it may have been dictated. Four fifteenth-century copies survive and it was often printed in the early modern era.⁸⁹ Hieronimo di Santo Stefano was a Genoese merchant who left a short tale of travel to the East Indies via the Coromandel Coast of India around 1499. He has been little regarded by modern scholars; consequently, not much can be said about the book’s composition or circulation.⁹⁰ The Bolognese Ludovico de Varthema (c. 1470–1517) is the last of our authentic travelers, having made a voyage to India via Arabia in 1502–8.⁹¹ His Itinerario was printed in Italian in 1510, was soon translated into Latin, and remained popular through the sixteenth century with many vernacular translations. Significant doubts hang over the authenticity of parts of his narrative, and indeed it seems unlikely that he ventured beyond the Bay of Bengal to Burma and the eastern Spice Islands as he claims.⁹² Ludovico is interesting as a representative of a new breed of traveler in the sixteenth century—that is, of a practically motiveless traveler, who undertakes journeys for their own sake out of a thirst for novelty rather than for specific diplomatic, mercantile, or missionary purposes. His was also a work of travel writing produced for the age of print with the new sense of a potentially unlimited audience.⁹³

To these reports by genuine travelers we must add fictive travelogues often regarded as true by medieval readers. One work stands above all others in this respect: the Book of “Sir John Mandeville.” With about 300 manuscripts surviving across Europe in around ten languages, it had far greater popularity than many of the other great works of medieval literature commonly studied in modern universities.⁹⁴ No serious reader now believes the author undertook the voyage described, though he may at some point have traveled to the Holy Land, and many think his nom de plume is borrowed or invented. For a long time Jehan de Bourgogne (“Jehan le Barbe”), a Liège physician, was presented as a candidate for authorship, and there have been various alternative hypotheses.⁹⁵ M. C. Seymour and John Larner favor Jean le Long (Jan de Langhe), abbot and historian at the Abbey of St. Bertin in St. Omer in northern France in the mid-fourteenth century, chiefly because he had benefit of access to a large monastic library that contained Mandeville’s identifiable sources and in 1351 had produced French translations of a number of these (Hetoum, Odoric, and William of Boldensele, as well as Ricold, “The Book of the Estate of the Great Caan” and some letters from the Khân to Pope Benedict XII). Odoric’s book, Vincent of Beauvais’s encyclopedia (notably Vincent’s excerpts from Carpini), Hetoum’s La flor, and The Letter of Prester John were the Mandeville author’s most important sources for the far eastern parts of his narrative, though some also believe he must have read Marco Polo’s book; Polo’s influence, alternatively, may have been filtered through Odoric.⁹⁶ Jean le Long’s contemporary and disciple at St. Bertin, Thomas Diacre, completes the picture with a vivid description: “A man who was erudite, pious, who delighted in the study of history, and had such a large belly that he could hardly walk, nor could he sleep unless he were sitting.”⁹⁷ However, Christiane Deluz and Michael Bennett are among those who have recently argued for English authorship.⁹⁸

A book composed from so many fragments, by an author whose identity and motive remain uncertain, resists definitive summary of its purpose. Iain Macleod Higgins, one of the foremost recent authorities on Mandeville, offers an appealingly non-dogmatic assessment of the Book’s nature. It “represents a new kind of work that attempts to entertain, instruct, persuade, chastise, challenge, and console its imagined audience,” and its author is “an entertainer, teacher, moralist, and geographer, as well as a trickster and an artist.”⁹⁹ Higgins recommends that readers embrace the heterogeneity of the Book and the diversity among its myriad versions rather than seeking a “best text” or trying to identify a single message among its “sometimes unsettling contradictions” and argues that it is more than a compilation of existing texts and its author no mere plagiarizer. In his view, the Mandeville author achieves a kind of originality in his collation, revision, and “sometimes inspired overwriting of its sources” and that one of its goals is to place the marvelous East as envisioned by previous authors “under the sign of Christian history.”¹⁰⁰

Johannes Witte de Hese’s book provides a less well-known fictional travelogue. Scott Westrem, its editor and translator, explores how the author “combined reading, conversation and fantasy to construct a unique image of the world.”¹⁰¹ Next to nothing is known about Witte, whose name itself may be a fiction, except that he appears to have been Dutch and possibly a cleric. He claims to have traveled eastward on pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas via Jerusalem, Egypt, Sinai, and Ethiopia, then carried on to the Land of Prester John, India, China, the Earthly Paradise, Purgatory, and an island of extraordinary races and beasts. This all supposedly took place in the late 1300s, and the earliest manuscript of the book is datable to about 1424. Westrem, while taking the book’s fictional status as obvious, points out that fifteenth- and sixteenth-century readers “accepted it as a source of generally factual information” and it was not until the eighteenth century that its veracity was challenged.¹⁰² The Itineraries’s distinction lies in its effort to link widely diverse geographic and mythical locations within a Christian framework. Also, like Mandeville, the author seems to have done his work in a scriptorium, although he does not make his borrowings as obvious as his predecessor does.¹⁰³ Westrem counts eight Latin and three Dutch manuscripts in current collections and numerous incunabule and sixteenth-century Latin and Dutch printed copies, but as three of the surviving manuscripts are merely handwritten copies of an early printed edition the work probably had a limited pre-1500 audience.¹⁰⁴ Ethnographic or practical details are of no interest to the author; his East is a Christianized world of marvels.

The final item on our tour is The Letter of Prester John, chronologically the earliest of our chief sources as well as the most broadly influential. The Letter was a major source for both Mandeville and Witte and indeed in some ways a foundational text for all late medieval travel writing.¹⁰⁵ It was produced probably around 1165, and though it purports authorship by a magnificent Indian priest-king, it was almost certainly written in Latin by a western European author. It contains very little that its author could not have picked up from sources widely available in Europe.¹⁰⁶ In a classic essay, Bernard Hamilton argues the Letter was produced for imperial propagandistic purposes on behalf of Frederick Barbarossa. The identity of Prester John and his Christian kingdom were drawn from two earlier texts. The first of these, by Odo, abbot of St. Rémi at Reims and independently by an anonymous source, described the meeting of a mysterious “Indian” archbishop (named “John” in the anonymous text) with Pope Calixtus II in Rome in 1122. The second, from 1145 (just after the Fall of Edessa in 1144), was Otto of Freising’s account in The Two Cities of “a certain John, king and priest, who lived in the extreme east beyond Armenia and Persia” and had won a major victory against the Persians. Hamilton makes the case for the Letter’s forgery in support of Barbarossa’s quest to establish imperial power over his papal rival: “In the utopian world of the Indies supreme power in both church and state was vested in the Priest King. Prester John’s kingdom mirrored the kind of empire which Barbarossa was trying to establish.”¹⁰⁷

The Letter’s evocation of a spectacularly rich Christian kingdom in the distant East, presided over by a ruler who was at once priest and king, possessed a powerful and flexible appeal for European readers well beyond the reign of Frederick Barbarossa. Generations of crusaders and their promoters took heart from the notion of a vast realm under Christian kingship somewhere to the east of Saracen territory.¹⁰⁸ The ongoing significance of the Letter, for our purposes, lies partly in the continuing quest for Prester John in Asia and, from the early fourteenth century, Africa.¹⁰⁹ Carpini, Simon of St. Quentin, Rubruck, Marco Polo, Monte Corvino, Jordan, Odoric, Mandeville, Witte, and Niccolò all speak of Prester John as a true king, contemporary or historical.¹¹⁰

The widespread popularity and shifting content of the Letter indicate its appeal went beyond both propagandistic and crusading impulses. There are more surviving copies of The Letter of Prester John than almost any of the travel narratives discussed in this book, rivaled only by Mandeville, with over 260 manuscripts in Latin and many vernaculars.¹¹¹ As a relatively short piece it presumably had the advantage of cheapness and seems to have been purchased by readers of varying social backgrounds. An interesting instance of this is the copy in Oxford, Bodleian MS Digby 86, a late thirteenth-century “layman’s common-place book or miscellany.”¹¹² Its Anglo-Norman and Middle English contents include prayers, devotional works, charms and prognostications, romances, fabliaux, humorous lyrics, games and party tricks, medical recipes for people and hunting birds, and other useful tidbits including different procedures for removing unwanted guests and malignant spirits from a house. The largely lighthearted content of the manuscript might reveal the Letter’s entertainment value.¹¹³ In contrast, a number of the Letter’s manuscripts were found in monastic and scholars’ libraries.¹¹⁴ These audiences perhaps responded to the theme of moral utopia in the Prester’s Christian Indies, where all travelers and pilgrims are greeted with hospitality and there are no poor, thieves, plunderers, flatterers, or liars, as well as no avarice, division, adultery, or vice.¹¹⁵

The Letter of Prester John would have satisfied a range of desires for educated laymen, friars, and enclosed monks. Its vivid evocation of a vast distant realm of incredible fertility, riches, and marvels must have met a European hunger for the exotic and wonderful. Prester John describes his own dominion in almost biblical terms: “If you truly wish to know the magnitude and excellence of our Highness and over what lands our power dominates, then know and believe without hesitation that I, Prester John, am lord of lords and surpass in all riches which are under heaven, in virtue and in power all the kings of the wide world.”¹¹⁶ His land contains all manner of exotic beasts and monstrous peoples, from elephants and dromedaries to one-eyed men and Cyclopes.¹¹⁷ “Milk is flowing and honey abundant,” and it produces pepper in large quantities. The river Ydonis, with its source in Paradise, flows throughout the realm and contains precious gemstones.¹¹⁸ The Letter devotes most of its latter section to a description of Prester John’s own palace, adorned and indeed partly constructed of gems, crystal, and gold reminiscent of Revelation’s description of the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21:9, 18–21).¹¹⁹

The Letter of Prester John seems at first glance to be the definitive account of eastern alterity—and has been plausibly construed as such by recent scholars¹²⁰—yet the biblical imagery and cadences of its prose fasten it securely to the traditions of the European, Latin imagination. Indeed, it could be said to evoke Sameness as much as Otherness. Prester John is an eastern potentate who provides a shining model of what western rulers would like to be. The king and his people—and this can hardly be too strongly emphasized—are Christian. In the cultural context of high and late medieval western Europe, where religious faith served as the ultimate marker of identity, these eastern Christians are like long-lost brothers or spiritual kin: “We wish and long to know if, as with us, you hold the true faith and if you, through all things, believe our lord Jesus Christ. … I am a devout Christian, and everywhere do we defend poor Christians. … We have vowed to visit the Sepulcher of the Lord with the greatest army, just as it is befitting the glory of our majesty, in order to humble and defeat the enemies of the cross of Christ and to exalt his blessed name.”¹²¹ Later versions of the Letter made Prester’s realm even more definitively the West’s spiritual twin. The French printed translation of c. 1500 affirms, “And since you say that our Greeks, or men of Grecian race, do not pray to God the way you do in your country, we let you know that we worship and believe in Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost, three persons in one Deity and one true God only.”¹²² Prester John is not only a Christian but a true Christian, upholding the Trinity unlike the schismatic Greeks. Indeed, he warns against “false and treacherous Hospitallers,” whom “we have killed in our country as it should be done with those who turn against the faith” and against “those treacherous Templars and pagans.”¹²³ His may be a land of crocodiles and camels, not to mention horned men, anthropophagi, Amazons, centaurs, pygmies, unicorns, and dogheads, yet theologically Prester John has more in common with the French king who is by now the Letter’s co-addressee than with the perceived enemies of Latin Christendom who lie on or within its borders.¹²⁴

Through this diverse body of sources, which we may gather under the heading of medieval “travel writing,” Europeans of the Latin West embarked on bold new textual voyages. The Mongol incursions of the early thirteenth century had revealed the world was far larger and more diverse than either classical or biblical authorities had suggested. Once European travelers began to make their own journeys deep into the Asian continent they immediately began to record their observations and experiences, and audiences at home responded with enthusiasm. The boundaries of the world were suddenly expanded. Previously unknown peoples and cultures came into view; eastern cities, landscapes, and natural wonders began to stir the European imagination. To some extent the authors and audiences of these new books sought to fashion eastern realms in conformity with familiar structures of thought; thus monstrous peoples, the Earthly Paradise, mythical beasts, and biblical waterways recurred in certain texts but most particularly in the fictional travels of Mandeville and his ilk. However, the writings of genuine travelers—while certainly not immune from traditional imagery, especially when amanuenses and later copyists made their own mark—painted pictures of Asia with many details entirely new to European readers. For the modern reader intrigued to explore these, it is tempting to jump straight to the content of medieval travelogues, but this would be to overlook their textual production, literary form, and the responses of contemporary readers. Considering the production of travelogues requires much more than straightforward examinations of authorship. When we try, as twenty-first-century readers, to come face-to-face with Odoric, Rubruck, Marco Polo, and others we find ourselves chasing fleeting ghosts. Trying to confront fictional travelers such as Mandeville or Johannes Witte de Hese is even more confounding, as they recede like Cheshire cats. Through considering matters of audience, textual transmission, and relative popularity we may arrive at a more grounded understanding of the resonances of writings on the distant Orient for medieval readers.