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Chapter 3

Travel Writing and the Making of Europe

“Travel writing” is a modern term for a recognized branch of literature, but we need to consider its suitability to medieval texts. Many modern readers, as we will see, find some medieval “travel” texts disappointing because they fail to live up to certain expectations, such as that travel literature presents a first-person narrator with an exciting tale of encounters with the foreign or that it documents the formation of both personal and cultural identity. Not only a version of personal memoir, travel writing also allows the author to explore the broader cultural encounter of Self (for example, “the West” or “Europe”) and Other (“the East” or “Orient”). Can travel writing exist without a first-person narrator, need it incorporate the kind of individual reflection most likely to engage modern readers, and to what extent did medieval descriptions of far eastern places adopt a perspective one might truly call “European” in an era before European identity was necessarily a strong preoccupation?

This chapter finds that our expectations about the nature of travel writing need to be reset before we can fully appreciate medieval reports of Asia and that concepts of European identity, as opposed to a notion of Christendom, are identifiable but not yet dominant during this early stage of European-Asian encounter. It contends, and the remainder of the book will illustrate, that while responses to Otherness presented a common refrain in many travelers’ tales, sameness, similarity, or a sense of relationship between a traveler and peoples newly encountered were also regular motifs. When foreignness and estrangement were asserted, it was often for particular pragmatic reasons or because the authors in question were fictional travelers more prone to repeating old stereotypes of nomadic barbarians or the marvels of the Indies. Curiosity and the hunger for knowledge, it is argued, were at least as important as either hostility or wonderment for many of our authors and their audiences.

Travel Writing

“Travel” as such is not usually the main subject of works produced out of late medieval encounters with the far Orient, though details of journeys feature particularly in Carpini’s, Rubruck’s, Odoric’s, Clavijo’s, Witte’s, and Ludovico’s books and to some extent in Marco Polo’s. Some of these (notably Rubruck’s and sometimes Odoric’s) were given the title Itinerarium in manuscripts, but it would be futile to pin great significance to contemporary titles given that they vary so much from one manuscript to another. More than half the works pay little or no attention to the subjective experience of travel. On what grounds, then, are they labeled “travel writing” here, and would medieval readers have viewed them as having anything in common?

The new interdisciplinary field of “travel writing studies” has put some energy into defining travel writing as a genre and asks whether it is indeed a genre at all. There is some agreement that works so named should contain matter drawn from actual or imagined journeys, even though in some cases the journey itself is not described. The style or form in which that content is expressed may, however, vary substantially and include itineraries or travelogues, letters, diaries, guidebooks, and geographic, ethnographic, or chorographic description.¹ Does “genre” refer primarily to the style of text or its thematic content? Hans Robert Jauss’s concept of “horizon of expectations” would encompass both, but in the case of travel writing it seems unproductive to focus too much on form.² Joan-Pau Rubiés, a specialist in late medieval and Renaissance travel writing, focuses on content in offering a flexible yet precise definition:

[Travel literature] can be defined as that varied body of writing which, whether its principal purpose is practical or fictional, takes travel as an essential element for its production. Travel is therefore not necessarily a theme, nor even a structuring element, within the body of literature generated by travel. … The crucial point is that the writer, who could easily be an armchair writer, ultimately relied on the materials and authority of first-hand travelers.³

This capacious formulation has the virtue of applicability to travel texts from any era or cultural context and is better suited to describing late medieval travel writing than definitions suggested by specialists in modern travel books. It does not require “travel writing” to provide a descriptive first-person account of a journey undertaken, for example, as Jan Borm and Tim Youngs do:

[Travel writing] is not a genre, but a collective term for a variety of texts both predominantly fictional and non-fictional whose main theme is travel. … [The travel book is] any narrative characterized by a non-fiction dominant that relates (almost always) in the first person a journey or journeys that the reader supposes to have taken place in reality while assuming or presupposing that author, narrator and principal character are but one or identical.⁴

[T]ravel narrative is always controlled by the first person singular. Predictably, therefore, questions of identity are frequently to the fore, suggesting the degree to which physical travel often tends, in its writing, to become symbolic of interior journeys of the mind or soul.⁵

Mary B. Campbell, one of medieval travel writing’s greatest interpreters, also makes the subjective perspective a definitive element: “Travel literature is defined here as a kind of first-person narrative, or at least a second-person narrative (as in the travel guide: ‘thence you come to a pillar near the chamber of the holy sepulchre’).”⁶ As her example indicates, the personal viewpoint is a common feature of medieval pilgrimage literature.⁷

While many late medieval travel texts dealing with the distant East do involve a first-person narrator who undertook a journey, or pretended to have done so, some take the form of a descriptio of distant lands more than an itinerarium through them. This is particularly the case for Ricold’s Liber peregrinacionis (despite its title), Hetoum’s La flor des estoires de la terre d’Orient, Jordan’s Mirabilia descripta, “Le livre de l’estat du Grant Caan,” and Poggio’s account of Niccolò dei Conti’s observations, but even Marco Polo’s book is more chorography than travelogue.⁸ Pegolotti undertook no journey himself, yet his account of the merchant’s route to Asia can be understood as “travel writing” according to Rubiés’s definition as it is based on information provided by travelers. The odd one out among the items discussed in this book is the anonymous Letter of Prester John, which is not known to be based on the testimony of actual travelers. Despite its lack of perfect fit with Rubiés’s classificatory scheme, the Letter’s later influence determines its inclusion.

The matter of a travel narrative’s truth status is more vexed for medieval texts. In modern travel-writing studies, whether or not a narrative is actually true—or, rather, has its basis in lived experience and observation—is not so relevant; what matters most is that readers generally believe in its veracity. In Borm’s words, a “referential pact” exists between author and reader. The “horizon of expectations” (in Jauss’s famous phrase) a reader brings to a work of travel writing includes the belief that it is based to a degree on real experience.⁹ Scott D. Westrem concurs that “the success of a travel book depends on a thread of faith extending from narrator to audience. Only when a traveler’s experience is accepted at least tentatively as legitimate can travel’s lessons—whether meant to be informative or entertaining—be learned.”¹⁰ But as we saw in Chapter 2, medieval accounts of the distant East were widely but not invariably seen as authentic. It is perhaps better to set aside the requirement for credibility in drawing tentative lines around what we might count as medieval travel writing.

One way to address the question of whether medieval audiences would have perceived the texts gathered here as having anything in common is to look at their manuscript contexts. While sometimes the longer works, especially the Divisament, are found alone in their bindings, they were much more often bound up with several other texts of our interest. To take a handful of examples from dozens of potential exempla, Bern, Burgerbibliothek Cod. 125 contains French versions of Marco Polo, Mandeville, Odoric, “L’estat du Grant Caan,” Hetoum, and Ricold along with William of Boldensele’s itinerary of pilgrimage to the Holy Land and letters exchanged between the Great Khân and Benedict XII; London, BL MS Additional 19513 contains the unique surviving copy of Jordan’s Mirabilia descripta and Pipino’s version of Marco Polo along with the first book of Jacques de Vitry’s Historia Hierosolimitana, Marino Sanuti’s book on the Holy Land, and an abbreviated version of Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hiberniae, along with some non-travel literature; London, BL MS Arundel 13 contains only Marco Polo and Odoric; London, BL MS Royal 14 C xiii (owned by Simon Bozoun, Prior of Norwich, 1344–52) contains Rubruck, Odoric, and Marco Polo along with works by Jacques de Vitry and Gerald of Wales among others; Cambridge, UL MS Dd. i. 17 contains Marco Polo, Hetoum, and Mandeville among numerous other works.¹¹ The regularity with which works on eastern contexts (both in the Holy Lands and farther east) are bound together (though we need to be cautious about the possibility of postmedieval compilation) suggests owners and readers perceived relationships among these kinds of texts, though many of the manuscripts in question also contain works that had nothing whatever to do with travel including lists of European archbishoprics, cures for worms in children, saints’ lives, Aesop’s fables, and treatises on urine. What, then, did they have in common? In addition to the spiritual edification supplied, especially by works on the Holy Land, they filled a European hunger for learning about faraway peoples. They supplied visions of oriental realms, often associated with the ancient notion of the “Indies” but also lands brought more recently into the spotlight such as Mongolia and China that helped satisfy a craving for knowledge, and were particularly prized when they fired the imagination too. A chief difference between their expectations and those of more recent readers, however, is that medieval readers did not regard a first-person account of the journey or a meditation on personal development as essential elements in making a work valuable and interesting. If travel writings are texts that take “travel as their essential condition of production,” then it is reasonable to put the works being considered in this book in this category. “Ethnographic writing” is another postmedieval term that has been applied to medieval travel writing with excellent results but perhaps does not have quite the range suggested by “travel writing.” Ethnography is, primarily, writing about human cultures; travel writing naturally encompasses this but also takes in matters of climate, geography, and other natural phenomena and does not imply the scientific distance that the former term properly holds.

It is worth considering further the ways medieval travel books often seem to disappoint or confuse modern readers, no doubt because they have become accustomed to common elements in recent travel literature. These include a distinctive authorial personality, forward narrative momentum, and a persistent emphasis on the strangeness of worlds encountered, whether that strangeness takes the form of the charming, bizarre, contemptible, savage, or ridiculous. In Campbell’s words, “travel literature as we know it today [is] … fully narrative, fully inhabited by its narrator, self-conscious about the problem of presenting difference in terms that neither inadvertently domesticate nor entirely alienate.”¹² The importance of strong authorial presence is in keeping with the powerful desire to denote Self as separate from Other, which many scholars see as central to modern travel writing. Casey Blanton states that “travel books are vehicles whose main purpose is to introduce us to the other, and … typically they [dramatize] an engagement between self and world.”¹³

Medieval travel writing’s failure to meet some modern readers’ horizons of expectation helps explain their often mixed, contradictory, or negative reactions to Marco Polo’s Divisament dou monde. Descriptions of the Divisament vary so much, whether by popular or scholarly writers, one might think the readers had picked up different volumes:

In the account of Marco Polo—Il milione, to Italians—we have the most balanced and lush of all medieval re-creations of the East: the grotesque titillations of [The] Wonders [of the East] and the splendor and fertility of Paradise are here combined in a single comprehensive image. It was that “mirage” that drew Columbus to our shores.¹⁴

Yet the book is surprisingly dull. Polo did not set out to write an account of his travels, despite the name by which it has always been known [sic]. … Instead he wrote a dry, factual guide to commerce in the East, a book by a merchant for other merchants, containing mainly lists of the merchandise available for sale on the caravan routes, as well as advice on how to overcome the difficulties that might be met along the way. … It is not a romance, nor a book of wonders, nor a history of the world in the manner of Herodotus.¹⁵

Marco Polo travelled to tell a fantastic story. He is singularly obsessed with difference and the desire to represent it. The world that sprouts from Marco Polo’s pen is as strange as the dreamscape of old fables. The text authorizes its vocation to capture this world by invoking the imperial command of the Great Khan himself, who, Marco Polo says, “would rather hear reports of these strange countries, and of their customs and usages, than the business on which he had sent them.”¹⁶

Unfortunately, those who actually read the Description of the World will discover that much of Marco Polo’s account of the East does consist of tons of salt and distances. Though these descriptions are sometimes intermingled with stories about Caliphs and Magi, they are fundamentally practical and, even without following a logical itinerary, the book serves more as a merchant’s view of the world than that of a creative writer.¹⁷

Marco Polo, whose rather limited vocabulary for describing marvels does not seem to have undercut the popularity of his descriptions, called the peacocks of the East “larger and more beautiful,” asserted that ostriches there were “as big as donkeys” and chickens “the most beautiful in the world,” and concluded enthusiastically, “in fact everything is different! … almost every animal he met (the “horrible” crocodile as well as the “beautiful” giraffe) was a marvel.¹⁸

Thus readers are split between those who value Polo’s book as a typically medieval repository of wonders and those who feel let down by the lack of precisely those same marvels. They find it dull because the Divisament gives little sense of the author’s personality or the tribulations he may have endured on his odyssey. Others allege that it represents an early instance of colonialist discourse. Casey Blanton quotes Polo’s rather out-of-character description of the inhabitants of Zanzibar, a country he never visited and whose inhabitants must have been described to him by another traveler (perhaps an Arab seafarer), concluding, “Marco Polo’s assumptions that the other is a demon or beast is [sic] a prelude to the long and complicated history of aggression upon indigenous peoples that characterizes the works and acts of Western Renaissance explorers.”¹⁹ Here, as one sees quite often, Marco Polo stands as the forebear of later uses of travel writing to help justify harsh treatment of non-Europeans. Campbell’s often brilliant and poetic Witness and the Other World claims in its opening sections that many of the medieval works she will examine, one of which is Polo’s book, “begin or end with explicit references to the future conquest of the lands or peoples described”—a claim not subsequently verified—and that “[t]he specter of the American holocaust will fade into the background of this study. But it haunts the whole.”²⁰ Yet such haunting is not apparent in her own sensitive readings of medieval writings on the East.

Syed Manzurul Islam reads the Divisament as a precursor to modern imperial racism, repeatedly naming the book a “machine for othering.”²¹ This is, in my view, stunningly wide of the mark. When Polo’s book was composed c. 1298 he had been back in Italy only three years; the whole of his prior adult life (from age seventeen to forty-one) had been spent in Asia. The Great Khân’s empire was not a place he had any wish to represent as “Other”; rather, he seems to have wanted to convey, in a proud, perhaps even proprietary tone, the splendors of a realm he identified with and wished to promote. In parts, it is not so much a “machine for othering” but for “sameing,” or at least for “making similar.”²² A related view, though not dealing with Marco Polo, is Andrea Rossi-Reder’s contention that “[i]n Wonders of the East, India is identical to the India depicted by [E. M.] Forster,” that classical and medieval western perceptions of a monstrous Indies constituted an aspect of an “incipient colonial or even a proto-colonial discourse to assert Western superiority and justification for dominance over the strange creatures encountered,” and that “[t]he Eastern creatures in works such as Ktesias’s Indika and Wonders of the East are clearly the precursors of colonialist images of Indians.”²³

John Larner, in contrast, considers and rejects a number of genres earlier scholars have suggested for the Divisament: adventure story, merchant’s manual, missionaries’ handbook, and book of wonders, suggesting finally that it should be considered primarily a work of geography or rather chorography.²⁴ He wonders if Polo was influenced by Chinese authors, given that nothing in European tradition is quite like his book, and suggests its schizophrenic style was the result of dual authorship with Polo providing the mundane “raw material” and Rusticello spicing up the prose with marvels and the exotic.²⁵ This may be too neat, but Larner’s reading has the virtue of acknowledging the diversity and inconsistency within Marco Polo’s book and of attempting to assess it on its own merits.

Where many are baffled by the Divisament and disparaging of its author, modern readers tend to sing the praises of William of Rubruck. Rubruck’s account of his mission to the Mongols at Karakorum in 1253–55 satisfies expectations of travel writing where Polo’s book fails: exciting narrative; distinctive personality; emphasis on the strangeness of worlds encountered; and endurance in the face of danger and hardship.²⁶ Campbell appreciates Rubruck’s book for having “a plot and a character”: “It satisfies curiosity, answers questions that never occurred to Marco, such as How did you get there? What was it like? Were you afraid?” When Rubruck adds a detail such as his frozen toes at the Karakorum camp he takes us into his moment of experience with a vividness, she argues, that Marco Polo entirely lacks.²⁷ Major scholars of medieval travel literature from Sir Henry Yule and William Rockhill to Leonardo Olschki, Christopher Dawson, and John Larner express a special regard for William of Rubruck and his book.²⁸ Campbell even suggests Rubruck was “Europe’s first modern traveler” and that the qualities of his book “were not of his time.”²⁹ Modern readers have also been captivated by the fourteenth-century narrative of the Moroccan Ibn Battuta, who claimed to have traveled as far as southern China, which provides an adventure story complete with swaggering hero.³⁰

Against the ambivalent modern reactions to Marco Polo’s book and the praise heaped on William of Rubruck’s one must set the uncomfortable fact that few people in medieval Europe read Rubruck’s book (although it was drawn upon by Roger Bacon, as previously discussed), while Marco Polo’s was a sensation—widely copied, translated, and influential. As noted in the previous chapter, there are five surviving manuscripts of Rubruck’s book, four of them in England and all in Latin, and around 150 manuscripts of the Divisament in Latin and many vernaculars, scattered across European collections.³¹ Much has been lost between the medieval period and the present, including the aesthetic sense and brand of curiosity that made Marco Polo’s book of greater appeal than Rubruck’s. Medieval travel books will generally disappoint readers hoping to be taken on a quasi-biographical journey of conscious engagement with the world, composed with a linear narrative and literary flair; we need to appreciate them for their contemporary appeal.

However, by the early sixteenth century a taste for the modern mode in travel writing was already emerging. Lincoln Davis Hammond contrasts the relatively impersonal style of Poggio’s book of Niccolò’s experiences with Ludovico de Varthema’s Itinerario of 1510 and argues that Ludovico represents a new kind of traveler.³² Where medieval travelers had particular purposes—usually mercantile, missionary, or ambassadorial—and produced works shaped by their motivations and overwhelmingly influenced by later scribes and readers, Ludovico enjoys travel for its own sake.³³ Where Poggio’s humanistic desire was to provide a body of useful knowledge, Ludovico added an acknowledgment of the reader’s desire for vicarious experience of the dangers of the journey: “whereas I procured the pleasure of seeing new manners and customs by very great dangers and insupportable fatigue, they will enjoy the same advantage and pleasure, without discomfort or danger, by merely reading.”³⁴ He tells of how he left Alexandria “longing for novelty (as a thirsty man longs for water).”³⁵ The passive reader is invited to project himself onto the figure of the adventurer, and the armchair traveler is born.

Marco Polo’s book may not have been a “machine for othering,” but concepts of Otherness underlie rather a lot of recent scholarship on travel writing. These draw on insights regarding modern colonialism in which the West is seen as needing to emphasize the strangeness of the non-West in order to buttress its own sense of identity and to justify claims to superiority.³⁶ In colonial discourse the Other may be demonized, stereotyped, caricatured, stigmatized, denigrated, and even dehumanized in the political effort to claim superiority for colonizer and justify acts of conquest and dominion. Homi K. Bhabha states, “The object of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction.”³⁷ Modern travel writing is one among many genres in which textual representation of other peoples and cultures is implicated in colonial domination: “Travel and its cultural practices have been located within larger formations in which the inscriptions of power and privilege are made clearly visible. … There is a sense in which all travel writing, as a process of inscription and appropriation, spins webs of colonizing power.”³⁸ The Orientalizing, possessing, imperial eye, in this view, can rarely be absent.³⁹ Peter Rietbergen, in his 1998 cultural history of Europe, states, “Everything, including Europe, exists only by virtue of its contrast or its opposite. Moreover, everyone has an ‘unknown side,’ some characteristics of fears and desires, which define that person. Man, European man as he defines himself, has made and known himself only through a confrontation with the ‘other.’”⁴⁰

Mary B. Campbell, Michael Uebel, and Michèle Guéret-Laferté are among those who have argued for medieval texts’ construction of a strange eastern Other to aid in the formation of European identity.⁴¹ Matters of the alienation or at least discomfiture experienced by particular travelers in eastern locations should of course not be ignored. William of Rubruck’s statement that upon entering Mongolian territory “it seemed indeed to me as if I were stepping into some other world [aliud saeculum]” has often been quoted.⁴² Yet my own view coincides closely with Albrecht Classen’s assessment that “intolerance might well have been the birthmark of the early modern age, whereas in the Middle Ages the relationship between ‘self’ and ‘other’ was still a matter of complex and open-ended negotiation,” and with Paul Freedman’s persuasive dismissal of any easy application of anxieties about “Otherness” to medieval perceptions.⁴³ Furthermore, it is worth pointing out that definitional boundaries are not only drawn by appeal to binaries and opposites. They are also made by recourse to synonyms—by drawing attention to similarity and sameness as much as to difference. This is, after all, the principle on which modern dictionaries work. The development of a European identity was aided by its reading public’s interest in places and peoples akin to them as well as alien.

Moreover, the relationship between medieval European and Asian regions was by no means one of a submissive, feminine East to the masterful, masculine West, as in Said’s construction of Orientalism. Europeans were conscious of the much greater military might, economic force, and social organization found in various eastern contexts. Even when writing of places with simpler and poorer societies, such as parts of southeast Asia, it was not with a colonial or imperial eye. When travel writers offered negative views on eastern peoples this was due to the threat the latter posed as actual or potential enemies to Christian Europe (especially in depictions of Mongols up to the late thirteenth century) or due to ancient European bias against unsettled peoples. With regard to the latter, W. R. Jones has demonstrated how medieval authors inherited ancient Greek and Roman views of “Barbarian,” “sylvan,” or nomadic peoples as belligerent, cruel, lawless, deceitful, and senseless.⁴⁴ To Cicero, for example, sylvestres homines were truly “brutes” barely distinguishable from wild animals, lacking in all reason, law, discipline, or civility and likely to eat raw human flesh and drink blood from skulls. Early medieval authors added “pagan” to this list of defects. Barbarian imagery was successively applied to Cimmerians, Scythians, Celts, and Germans, and by the thirteenth century the Mongols had become the obvious target; later it would be the turn of the Turks. In subsequent chapters we will see that not only nomadic Mongols but also some southeast Asian villagers were more often constructed through images of barbarism such as anthropophagic habits and monstrous morphology than were the dwellers of the great cities of China and south India. Yet even while we pay heed to such ancient influences, we must be wary of assuming that medieval travel writers imposed a simple template on the peoples observed. This will be particularly apparent in the complex perspectives on Mongolians supplied by such intelligent observers as Carpini and Rubruck.

“Europe”

What, then, was “Europe"? Denys Hay’s 1957 work on the medieval formation of European identity insists on a distinction between Europe and Christendom. He argues that the latter, which had already existed from late antiquity to refer to a more abstract body of the Christian faithful without territorial limits, began to emerge as a geographical entity and political identity with the Muslim expansion of the sixth to ninth centuries and became stronger during the period of Gregorian reform and the production of crusading propaganda from the late eleventh century.⁴⁵ In Hay’s exercise in “historical semantics,” however, “Europe” is found to have been employed very sparingly by writers before the later thirteenth century, most often in geographic texts or cartography.⁴⁶ The scriptural tradition of the partition of the world between the three sons of Noah—Asia to Shem, Africa to Ham, and Europe to Japheth—was elaborated in Latin and vernacular writings across the medieval centuries and this, too, helped keep the idea of Europe culturally current. Yet before the later thirteenth century, Europe “is a word devoid of sentiment, Christendom a word with profound emotional overtones.”⁴⁷ This began to change, Hay argues, with the late medieval crisis of confidence concerning papal authority arising out of the “Babylonian captivity,” Great Schism, and Conciliar movement, which were damaging to Christian unity. The situation was compounded by the Reformation movements of the sixteenth century. In the meantime Humanists were turning to the word “Europe,” which had appeal for its classical resonances, and the development of portolani (maps charting shorelines) gave the geographic outline of Europe clearer visual expression. The process was slow, however, and it was not really until the eighteenth century that “Europe” fully supplanted “Christendom” as a magnet for loyalties and site for the projection of personal and group identities. (Even today it remains a fragile unity without a singular linguistic, religious, racial, legal, or political identity.) Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is also skeptical, suggesting that ‘“Europe” as a unifying concept is a fairly recent fiction.⁴⁸

On the other side, there have been several attempts to supply a genealogy of Europe in recent years, especially since the formation of the European Union in 1993. Jacques le Goff finds references to “Europe” scattered in a number of early and high medieval texts and argues ardently for a medieval conception of Europe.⁴⁹ Robert Bartlett, in his magisterial account, argues for its emergence by the later Middle Ages. “By 1300,” he asserts, “Europe existed as an identifiable cultural entity.”⁵⁰ He examines the emergence of “Christendom” (the region under the spiritual jurisdiction of the pope, following the rites and liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church) as a territory and “Christian” as a racial category, though “Europe” and “European” are not studied in the same fashion.⁵¹ William Chester Jordan’s essay on the subject, which argues strongly for a sense of unity within the Latin West from the eleventh century, avoids the terminological problem by averring that people “rarely used the word Europe (Latin, Europa)”; instead their “word of choice … was Christianitas (Christendom).”⁵² The view of Timothy Reuter is that “Europe” (though not “Europeans” so much) emerged “to denote the Roman, Latin-speaking lands to the north of the Mediterranean” between 300 and 600 CE and that although it appears only infrequently in medieval texts it retains a continuity as a way of expressing an “usness” (Wir-Gefühl) even within polyethnic early medieval empires and should be seen as far from negligible before the late Middle Ages.⁵³

Particularly relevant to the present book is Felicitas Schmieder’s contention that European contact with Mongols and journeys to eastern regions in the thirteenth century constituted a “world historical moment,” as from that time some Latin Christians became increasingly aware of themselves as Europeans and chose “Europe” rather than “Christendom” to convey a collective identity.⁵⁴ We might add that in 1241, according to Matthew Paris’s Chronica majora, Emperor Frederick II wrote to King Henry III of England imploring for help in countering the Mongol onslaughts, and his letter moves from speaking of “the whole of Christendom [totius Christianitatis]” to “the West [Occident]” and “the European empire [imperialis Europae].” His letter identifies Germany, France, Spain, England, Almaine, Dacia, Italy, Burgundy, Apulia, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and Norway, each with its own virtues in valor and topography yet together lying under “the royal star of the West [sub occiduo cardine regio]” in a manner indicating a conception of Europe composed of autonomous powers and united not only by Christianity but also by military cause against a common enemy. However, his is not a modern way of thinking about Europe: Frederick’s “European empire” is his own domain as Holy Roman Emperor and his key conflict is with the papal leader of Christendom.⁵⁵

Clearly “Europe” existed as a medieval construct: what is more difficult to determine is how widely its influence was felt among the kinds of readers who sought out travelers’ accounts of the far Orient. For our purposes, it is interesting to note that at least one Irish person in the fifteenth century, Prince Finghin MacCarthy Reagh, wanted a copy of Marco Polo’s Divisament translated into his vernacular so that he could read it alongside lives of Irish saints and a historical narrative of Patrick’s conversion of pagan locals to Christianity.⁵⁶ We cannot be sure what the basis of the Irish reader’s interest in Polo’s book was, but it is intriguing that a fifteenth-century Irish prince could have found relevance in a thirteenth-century Venetian’s description of distant oriental lands. This shared interest could be called “European,” for want of a better word, without going overboard in seeking to identify the components of European sensibility. Medieval inhabitants of what we now term Western Europe possessed cultural commonalities—however loose and fragmentary—that gave them certain preoccupations and attitudes; however, they did not often seek to articulate or define these commonalities. “Europe” existed but was not yet so important that it needed detailed and frequent discussion.

More pressing, perhaps, is to seek medieval perceptions of a secular Eurocentricism. This is a different task from identifying a sense of Christian superiority. Presumption of the truth and authority of Christianity—in this case, Latin Roman Christianity—over all other religions was after all a prerequisite of the faith. Religious pluralism was not a feature of medieval Catholicism, though it was possible for medieval Christians to look favorably on aspects of non-Christian religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism even if in the case of missionaries their positive views were influenced by optimism about the chances for conversions to Christianity.⁵⁷ Frederick II’s letter to Henry III certainly qualifies as an assertion of European might. Another statement of European superiority has been identified in the writings of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, the thirteenth-century encyclopedist, in his De proprietatibus rerum. Akbari states that his chapter on “Europa,” building on Isidore of Seville, revises notions of the primacy of Asia by arguing for the superiority of northern (that is, European) people by virtue of their cold climate. The cold breeds white men with closed pores who are “more ful and huge” of body and “more bold and hardy” of spirit than other men. Africans, because of burning sun, are black and short and the heat causes their spirits to pass through their open pores, making them “more cowards of herte.” Men of Asia are in the middle of these two extremes, though we should also note Bartholomaeus’s statement that Europe is “pere [peer]” to Asia “in nombre and noblete of men.”⁵⁸

In the travel literature of our present focus, Eurocentrism of a secular sort was not entirely unknown but not a dominant motif. Jordan Catala asserts in his Mirabilia descripta that “there is no better land, no more beautiful, no people so honest, no foodstuffs so good or savoury, no dress so handsome, or manners so noble, as here in our own Christendom; and, above all, we have the true faith, though it be ill-kept,” and though he refers to “nostra Christianitate” rather than “Europa,” the former in this instance designates a worldly as well as spiritual entity.⁵⁹ Another statement of European superiority, though with specifically military connotations, is Carpini’s assertion that the wily Mongol forces may be defeated if engaged in battle “because they are fewer in number and weaker in body than the Christian peoples.”⁶⁰ “Mandeville” states his English nationality in the opening and closing sections of his Book in a way that might be taken for a kind of fictional patriotism, though not Eurocentrism as such. As we will see in Chapter 7, however, it was more common for medieval travelers to the far Orient to remark on the superiority of eastern realms and cultures, especially Chinese.

Early modern specialists would need to answer the question of whether imperialist and colonialist enterprises in the Americas, Africa, and parts of Asia changed European self-perception dramatically, but in 1613 English travel anthologist Samuel Purchas made an assertion of European superiority that does seem novel in its hyperbole and in the range of endeavors covered. Europe surpasses other continents, he writes, not only in climate and in geographical advantages but also in people, cities, and great powers. Where else, he asks, do we find “such resolute courages, able bodies, well qualified minds?” What other lands are so “fortified with Castles, edified with Townes, crowned with Cities?” Purchas claims superiority for Europe in its “Arts and Inventions.” Asia and Africa may have supplied the birthplaces for the “Liberall Arts,” but Christian Europe is now preeminent in learning, “Mechanical Sciences,” “Musicall Inventions,” cooking, horse management, chemistry, the making of paper, mills, guns, printing, and all manner of scientific advances. “China yeelds babes and bables in [printing and guns] compared with us and ours: the rest of the World have them borrowed of us or not at all.” The military prowess of European nations is also unsurpassed, as are their feats of exploration. Europeans, moreover, are more than any other people God’s chosen, and few others will be saved. The European right to mastery over Africa, Asia, and the Americas, “almost every where admitting Europæan Colonies,” is thus proclaimed.⁶¹ Purchas’s claim for European greatness in every respect is not echoed in medieval travelers’ accounts of the Orient. It is, therefore, worth stressing that Eurocentric attitudes are not eternal but have a history. Even such an authority as Anthony Pagden can sketch a straightforward line of European sense of technological superiority from Herodotus through medieval crusaders and missionaries to Vespucci, stating that “[a]fter Columbus’s discovery of America and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope … the European belief in the capacity of European science to dominate the world became even more assertive.”⁶² Such linearity is simply not justified.

During the period c. 1245 to c. 1510, then, “Christendom” endured but was ailing, and “Europe” existed but was yet to be fully asserted. In the late medieval period the concept of Europe, as a region united not only by papal lordship and adherence to the Roman rite but also by a sense of ethnic and cultural unity, was gaining momentum as a replacement for the Christendom of the high Middle Ages but in relatively undeveloped form. Without a universal feeling of European cultural superiority, and without the sense of racial unity that later theories would endow—such as Blumenbach’s linking of European peoples under the banner of “Caucasian”⁶³—the idea of Europe was not in the forefront of authors’ minds when penning their accounts of distant Easts. As a result, the motivation to portray Asian peoples as Other to the European Self was not a pervasive theme.

Curiosity, Wonder, and the Desire for Knowledge

Medieval travelers’ responses to distant Orients were multifaceted. One cannot identify a single or dominant impulse guiding their texts or indeed the expectations of their audiences. One was the desire for hard information about peoples and places. This prevailed particularly in descriptions of Mongols, as the patrons of diplomatic travelers needed intelligence dossiers to help combat that new foe and consider options for alliances. Many of the missionary travelers also sought to provide their superiors with data on local populations and the friars’ successes with conversions. A further explanation may be proposed for late medieval interest in travel writing that applies particularly to works that were not produced to satisfy any obvious and immediate need and yet became the most widely reproduced. That is, readers of these books were seeking answers to big questions confronting them and their time. How does one live in a city? What should we eat? How should we dress? How should we talk? How should we conduct our sexual lives? What constitutes ideal femininity and masculinity? What is courtliness? What kinds of luxury should be admired? What is beautiful? In short, what should we be? How should we live?

In late medieval Europe the “primarily agrarian, feudal, and monastic”⁶⁴ characteristics of early and high medieval Europe were gradually giving way to a more urbanized and mercantile society with growing interest in political theory and a splendid court culture. Fashion was emerging among the aristocratic elite, who also began to enjoy increasingly luxurious households and personal etiquette. Domestic and urban rituals were employed for the staging of power as a form of theater. At the same time the cataclysms of famine, plague, and warfare plunged European people into frequent periods of instability and hardship. Long detailed works like that of Marco Polo were popular partly because they dealt with so many topics that were of interest in a changing Europe: how to exchange currency, how to send information, how to enjoy life, how to govern well, how to organize a city, how to ensure food supply. The Divisament presents the idealized figure of Khubilai Khân as a model of benevolent governance and lauds his great palaces, fine dining, courtly entertainments, festivities, and hunting expeditions as exemplary of noble life.⁶⁵ Such topics were of increasing interest among European nobility, gentry, and, in certain regions, mercantile elites.

Recent scholarship on curiosity and wonder in late medieval and early modern Europe can help frame our discussion of readers’ desires. “Curiosity” might be defined as an essentially intellectual or cognitive impulse to seek causes of phenomena and thus expand the range of human understanding, while “wonder” is a primarily affective response to the mysteries and diversity of God’s creation. Many historians have asserted that curiosity was considered a vice in the Middle Ages and came to be appreciated as a path to new knowledge only during the course of the early modern period.⁶⁶ Peter Harrison, for example, has argued that patristic authorities, citing the Genesis narrative on the Creation and Fall, identified curiosity as an impulse that was useless at best and at worst could lead to greater sins of pride, vanity, or a desire to be akin to God. In Augustine’s view it was a trait characteristic of pagans, heretics, and necromancers, a form of concupiscence that was to be condemned as it corrupted the mind rather than the body. Such views, says Harrison, endured in clerical discourse down to the Renaissance era and were overturned in the seventeenth century, paving the way for modern scientific thought.⁶⁷

However, Edward Peters offers a more complicated overview, noting that while curiositas was viewed warily by many Christian authors who remarked on its capacity to augment the vices, its connection with travel and gaining knowledge of the world through personal experience or study was by no means incompatible with the Christian ethos. To be a Christian was indeed to be a traveler, a pilgrim: “the actual existence of the Christian was a peregrinatio, the existence of a stranger in a strange land. … Christians were to consider themselves viators in peregrinatione, homines viatores.”⁶⁸ Pilgrims, kings, and indeed all Christians had reason to be curious about the world that God had created, and with the broadening of European mental horizons following the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century their version of “holy curiosity” took in a vastly expanded geography. Citing Friar Pipino’s pious preface to Marco Polo’s Divisament, Peters asserts, “If the variety of the world, its ‘secrets’ in this sense, existed to demonstrate to man the power of his Creator, then failure to encounter that variety might be considered a failure in religious duty.”⁶⁹ Richard Newhauser also argues for a more finessed understanding of vitium curiositatis, emphasizing that it should be thought of as excessive curiosity and considered in relation to the specific concerns of moral thinkers such as the perceived secularization of theological studies and teaching and exaggerated care for worldly matters. Not every medieval mention of curiositas, he points out, should be read as indication of vitium curiositatis. Seriously seeking knowledge was not sinful.⁷⁰

Wonder is an impulse or response with less investment in the goal of reaching understanding of phenomena through cognitive processes than is implied by curiosity. It is a condition of fascination, of hunger for what is outside oneself, which may or may not lead to comprehension.⁷¹ Wonder—admiratio—had a respectability in medieval theological thought that the vitium curiositatis was frequently seen to lack as it avoided dangers of intellectual pride and the wish to approach an omniscience properly pertaining only to God. Some things, it was thought, reached beyond “ability to comprehend and explain; and such marvels as werewolves, hybrids, and miracles, for all their tortured reflections, remained the object of admiration and amazement and wonder rather than simply of appropriation and analysis and generalization.”⁷² The medieval sense of wonder is impossible to reduce to a single definition, as Caroline Walker Bynum’s article on the subject demonstrates, but was an emotive and intellectual response to unfamiliar or extraordinary phenomena that could manifest as awe, pleasure, dread, or horror.⁷³

The worlds and peoples described in some medieval travel writing were inspired by a wonder impulse, where the representation of the marvelous, including much that does not look strange to modern eyes, is enough in itself, inspiring pleasure, awe, disgust, or other affective responses. The accounts found in other travel writing, or the responses by other readers, were guided by the desire to learn of distant worlds and peoples: that is, they were guided by serious curiosity. Yet in many works the two impulses seem to be blended. New knowledge was sought to satisfy a range of needs. Some were pragmatic—strategic, military, or mercantile. Carpini’s Historia and Pegolotti’s manual for merchants, for example, served essentially practical aims. Other works, such as the epistles of John of Monte Corvino and the other early Franciscan missionaries to China, served a combination of spiritual and pragmatic ambitions, offering their readers encouraging views of evangelical prospects in the East. We have seen that Roger Bacon explicitly justified the importance of geographical knowledge on evangelical and eschatological grounds in his Opus majus. Yet the translation of many of the key texts into various vernaculars and their transmission among secular as well as clerical readers suggest much more varied appeal. It was also during this late medieval period that interest in instructional, courtesy, and conduct literature began to take hold. The great age of the conduct book would not come until the early modern period when print made improving literature available to a much wider audience, but one sees the beginnings of the phenomenon from the later thirteenth century. Works on governance such as the Secretum secretorum and Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum were widely copied and translated; manuals of advice on proper gendered behavior began to emerge; and by the mid-fifteenth century, under the influence of the elaborate Burgundian courts, one sees a growing preoccupation with household ritual among the aristocracy and interest in personal manners and hygiene.⁷⁴ Travel writing does not share conduct literature’s prescriptiveness—the ways of life that it holds up for examination could serve as models to follow or to avoid—but the two discourses developed at around the same time and for some of the same purposes. Chapter 7 of the present work, titled “Civility,” explores some aspects of oriental city and court culture held up as exemplary for European readers.

Conclusion

There was a utopic quality to some medieval writing on the distant East. The human need to believe in possibilities for a better life found some succor in travelers’ visions of the East. In Oscar Wilde’s much later words, “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.”⁷⁵ The spirit of Wilde’s statement may have made some sense to medieval readers although the language of utopianism had yet to be invented. The travel writing of the later Middle Ages was not in some way an inferior precursor to a true travel literature but, instead, appealed to its readers because it spoke to their interests and concerns which happen in many cases to be different from ours.

Travel and the quest for knowledge go hand in hand, as Roxanne L. Euben argues in one of the most stimulating recent contributions to travel-writing studies: “[F]rom Bacon’s characterization of travelers as ‘merchants of light,’ to Montesquieu’s description of his fictional Persian travelers as searchers after wisdom, to Nietzsche’s contention that ‘we must travel, as old Herodotus travelled’ in part because ‘[i]mmediate self observation is not enough, by a long way, to enable us to know ourselves,’” travel recurs.⁷⁶ I have suggested that late medieval readers looked to travel literature not only to know but also to change themselves and their society, while also indulging in the many pleasures of the text and in their long-held myths of oriental marvels. They felt that the cultures of the East held much that was not only, variously, horrifying, strange, or marvelous but at times also admirable and instructive. While pragmatic or spiritual aims guided the production of certain texts, many of the books that resonated most for contemporary readers were those that inspired new ideas about how to live and presented an enticing vision of a world without want. They were produced within a period on the cusp between a spiritually defined “Christendom” and a “Europe” that was primarily secular in conception. Late medieval travel writing on the Orient had a part to play in the making of that Europe.