The Indies and the Medieval West: Thought, Report, Imagination (Medieval Voyaging) 2503532764, 9782503532769

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The Indies and the Medieval West

MEDIEVAL VOYAGING General Editors Margaret Clunies-Ross, University of Sydney Geraldine Barnes, University of Sydney Editorial Board Alfred Hiatt, Department of English, Queen Mary College, University of London Kim Phillips, Department of History, University of Auckland Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto John Tolan, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Ange Guépin, Université de Nantes

Volume 2

The Indies and the Medieval West Thought, Report, Imagination by

Marianne O’Doherty

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

© 2013, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2013/0095/192 ISBN: 978-2-503-53276-9 Printed on acid-free paper

Contents

Illustrations vii Acknowledgements xi Abbreviations xiii Introduction 1

Part i. Vere unus alter mundus: Traditions and Travellers Chapter 1. Classical Traditions of India and Medieval Transformations

13

Chapter 2. Other Coordinates: The Indies of Late Medieval European Travellers

53

Part ii. Embodied Encounters: Travellers’ Texts and their Readers Chapter 3. Changing Places: The Unstable Indies of Vernacular Readers

105

Chapter 4. A Moral and Geographical Education: Latin Accounts of the Indies and their Readers

161

Contents

vi

Part iii. Geographical and Cartographic Reorientations Chapter 5. Debating Diversity in an Interconnected World: The Indies in the Book of Sir John Mandeville 203 Chapter 6. Placing the Indies in Space and Time: Cartographic Representations, c. 1200–c. 1450 241 Conclusion: Multiple Medieval Indies, Globalization, and Rebellion

297

Appendices: Manuscripts of Travel Accounts Discussed in Part ii 305 Bibliography 329 Index of Manuscripts

357

General Index

363

Illustrations

Figures Figure 1, p. 22. World map from a manuscript of Macrobius, Commentarii c.  1000 (? south German). Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS D’Orville 77, fol. 100r. Figure 2, p. 136. Miniature accompanying the Devisement du monde’s chapter on ‘la contree de Cianda’ (southern Vietnam). Paris, 1330s. London, British Library, MS Royal 19 D.i, fol. 120v. Figure 3, p. 136. Miniature showing Quinsai (Hangzhou) surrounded by water, Devisement. London, British Library, MS Royal 19 D.i, fol. 113r. Figure 4, p. 137. Crusaders arrive in the Holy Land in Jean de Vignay’s Directoire a faire le passage de la Terre Sainte. London, British Library, MS Royal 19 D.i, fol. 187v. Figure 5, p. 137. Crusaders and Saracens in battle in Jean de Vignay’s Directoire. London, British Library, MS Royal 19 D.i, fol. 189v. Figure 6, p. 138. Illustration accompanying the chapter on ‘la province de Manabar’ (the Coromandel Coast), Devisement. London, British Library, MS Royal 19 D.i, fol. 125r. Figure 7, p. 138. City of Quinsai (Hangzhou), Devisement. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264, fol. 258v. Figure 8, p. 139. Port of Zaiton (Quanzhou), Devisement. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264, fol. 259v. Figure 9, p. 139. The islands of India: illustration accom­panying the opening chapter of the ‘Livre de Inde’, Devisement. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264, fol. 260r.

viii

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 10, p. 140. Monstrous races in the illustration accompanying the chap­ ter on Cianba (southern Vietnam), Devisement. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264, fol. 262r. Figure 11, p. 140. Alexander’s army defeats the wild men, Alexandre de Paris’s Li Romans du bon roy Alixandre. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264, fol. 66v. Figure 12, p. 141. The Islands of Men and Women, Devisement. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M. 723, fol. 245r. Figure 13, p. 141. The island of Seillan, Devisement. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M. 723, fol. 225v. Figure 14, p. 142. Brahman merchants in India, Devisement. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M. 723, fol. 237r. Figure 15, p. 142. Monstrous races, Devisement. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds français 2810, fol. 29v. Figure 16, p. 143. Animals of Ely, Greater India, Devisement. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds français 2810, fol. 85r. Figure 17, p. 143. Fishing for jewels in Sillan (Sri Lanka), Odorico, Itinerarium. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds français 2810, fol. 106v. Figure 18, p. 144. Collecting flour, honey, and poison from the trees in Naten, Itinerarium. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds français 2810, fol. 105r. Figure 19, p. 144. Kublai Khan hunting, Ciandu (Shangdu), Devisement. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds français 2810, fol. 31v. Figure 20, p. 145. Brahman merchants bring jewels to the king of Lar, with labourers in the background, Devisement. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds français 2810, fol. 83r. Figure 21, p. 145. Cynocephali, attributed to Angamanan (Andaman), Devise­ ment. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds français 2810, fol. 76v. Figure 22, p. 146. Cynocephali, attributed to Nicuveram (Nicobar), Itinerarium. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds français 2810, fol. 106r. Figure 23, p. 146. Pepper harvesting at Coilun (Kollam), Devisement. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds français 2810, fol. 84r.

ILLUSTRATIONS

ix

Figure 24, p. 185. Annotated leaf from a fourteenth-century English copy of Odorico da Pordenone, Itinerarium. British Library, MS Arundel 13, fol. 30v. Figure 25, p. 187. Annotated leaf from a late fifteenth-century Italian copy of Poggio Bracciolini’s India. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Canon. Misc. 280, fol. 71v. Figure 26, p. 243. Ptolemaic world map from the Atlante of Andrea Bianco. Venice, 1436. Venezia, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS It. Z. 76 (=4783), fol. 9. Figure 27, p. 245. Mappamundi in Andrea Bianco’s Atlante. Venezia, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS It. Z. 76 (=4783), fol. 8. Figure 28, p. 247. Detail of the Indies from the Ebstorf World Map (recon­struc­ tion), with East at top. Reconstruction at Ebskart, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg. Figure 29, p. 249. East-oriented mappamundi from a copy of Honorius Augusto­ dunensis’s Imago mundi from Sawley Abbey, Yorkshire. Twelfth to thirteenth century. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 66, p. 2. Figure 30, p. 250. World map in a Psalter copied around the 1260s. London, British Library, MS Additional 28681, fol. 9r. Figure 31, p. 252. East-oriented mappamundi of Ranulf Higden, Polychronicon England, c. 1340s. San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 132, fol. 4v. Figure 32, p. 260. Larger east-oriented mappamundi accompanying Ramsey Abbey’s copy of Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon England, later fourteenth century. London, British Library, MS Royal 14 C.ix, fols 1v–2r. Figures 33 and 34, pp. 274–75. The Indies on Cresques Abraham’s mapamondi, the Catalan Atlas. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds es­ pagnol 30. Figure 35, p. 290. Detail of subcontinental India and the Indian Ocean from Fra Mauro’s mid-fifteenth-century Venetian world map. Venezia, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana.

Map Map 1, pp. 62–63. The Indian Ocean and surrounding regions with key medi­ eval locations noted.

x

ILLUSTRATIONS

Plates Plate 1, p. 267. Ebstorf World Map (reconstruction). East is to the top. Recon­ struc­tion at Ebskart, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg. Plate 2, pp. 268–69. World Map of Fra Mauro. Mid-fifteenth century. South to the top. Venezia, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. Plate 3, p. 270. Atelier of Pietro Vesconte, world map to accompany Marino Sanudo Torsello, Liber secretorum fidelium crucis, c. 1325. East is to the top. London, British Library, MS Additional 27376*, fols 187v–188r.

Tables Table 1, pp. 310–11 (Appendix 1a). Vernacular Manuscripts of Marco Polo from France and Franco­phone Europe. Table 2, pp. 312–13 (Appendix 1b). Marco Polo Manuscripts in Italian Ver­ naculars. Table 3, pp. 314–15 (Appendix 1c). Odorico da Pordenone Manuscripts in Francophone Europe and Iberia. Table 4, pp. 316–17 (Appendix 1d) Odorico da Pordenone Manuscripts in Italian Vernaculars. Table 5, pp. 318–21 (Appendix 2a). Latin Manuscripts of Marco Polo by Region. Table 6, pp. 322–25 (Appendix 2b). Latin Manuscripts of Odorico da Porde­ none by Region. Table 7, pp. 326–27 (Appendix 2c). Latin Manuscripts of Poggio’s India.

Acknowledgements

T

he idea behind this book can be traced back to my PhD thesis, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and submitted at the Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds, in which I first started to examine the reception of eyewitness accounts of the Indies in later medieval texts and maps with the support of a team of supervisors including Wendy Childs, Catherine Keen, and Claire Honess. I also received valuable support and encouragement from my thesis examination team, Brian Richardson and Robert Bartlett, and my then Head of Department, Mary Swan. In the process of taking elements of that work and turning it into a monograph of a very different character, a good many colleagues and friends have been helpful. Alexander O’Doherty, Leonie Hicks, Guyda Armstrong, Elizabeth L’Estrange, Rhiannon Daniels, John McGavin, Chet van Duzer, and Suzanne Paul kindly read and provided fruitful comments and invaluable bibliographical advice on early drafts of chapters. Stephanie Jones provided valuable advice and comments in the project’s formative stages. Lena Wahlgren-Smith and Suzanne Paul provided patient and timely commentary and corrections on my draft Latin translations, and Geert de Wilde of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary offered advice on Insular French. Conversations with Christine Gadrat provided much additional information and new perspectives upon the reception of Marco Polo, while Flora Ward and Annalia Marchisio helped me through intermittent communication difficulties — and occasionally much more — with Spanish and Italian libraries. Simon Forde of Brepols and the ‘Medieval Voyaging’ editorial board provided helpful guidance and answered queries promptly and fully, whilst the insightful comments of editorial board member, Alfred Hiatt, both on the volume proposal and on chapter drafts, were exceptionally valuable and supportive. All errors that remain are, of course, mine.

xii

Acknowledgements

Financially, the work has received significant support both from an Arts and Humanities Research Council Early Career Fellowship in 2011 and through the University of Southampton’s research leave scheme. The Faculty of Humanities at Southampton has also made generous contributions towards the otherwise onerous financial costs of image reproductions and indexing. The generous cooperation of a number of university and institutional libraries should also be mentioned here. The Hartley Library, University of Southampton, dealt with my often obscure interlibrary loan requests promptly and without error. Many other libraries in Britain and overseas kindly answered cataloguing queries, and dealt promptly and courteously with requests for reproductions and permissions to publish: the British Library; Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford; University of Cambridge Library; Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; Special Collections, University of Glasgow Libraries; Devon Record Office, Exeter; Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris; the national libraries of Italy in Florence, Venice, and Naples; Bibliothèque municipale, Saint-Omer; Bibliothèque royale, Brussels; Biblioteca nacional, Madrid; Biblioteca de Catalunya, Barcelona; Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden, Leiden; Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; Huntington Library, San Marino; and Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Finally, my thanks go to family, friends, and in particular my husband, who have all been constantly supportive and generous about the inevitable mental abstraction such a project entails.

Abbreviations

CRM Gaius Julius Solinus, Collectanea rerum memorabilium, ed. by Th. Mommsen (Berlin: Weidmann, 1895) Div.

Marco Polo, Divisament dou monde, in Milione—Le Divisament dou monde nelle redazioni toscana e franco-italiana, ed. by Gabriella Ronchi (Milano: Mondadori, 1982)

DVF, iv Poggio Bracciolini, De varietate fortunae, in De l’Inde: les voyages en Asie de Niccolò de’ Conti; De varietate fortunae, livre iv, ed. and trans. by Michèle Guéret-Laferté (Turn­hout: Brepols, 2004) EETS Early English Text Society e.s.

extra series

HS

Hakluyt Society

ISTC Incunabula Short Title Catalogue, British Library MD

Jordan Catala, Mirabilia descripta, in Une image de l’Orient au xive siècle: les ‘Mirabilia Descripta’ de Jordan Catala de Sévérac, ed. and trans. by Christine Gadrat (Paris: École des chartes, 2005)

Milion Marco Polo, Liber de consuetudinibus et conditionibus huius mundi, trans. by Francesco Pipino da Bologna, in Milion, ed. by Justin Václav Prášek (Praha: Ceské akademie Císare Frantiska, 1902)

Abbreviations

xiv

MT

Mandeville’s Travels, ed. by M. C. Seymour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967)

NH

Pliny the Elder, Natural History (see Bibliography for publication details of books listed individually)

o.s.

original series

PN

The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, ed. by Richard Hakluyt, 3 vols (London: Bishop and Newberie, 1589; facs. repr. in Principall Navigations, ed. by David Beers Quinn and Raleigh Ashlin Skelton, HS, e.s. 39a and b (Cambridge: HS, 1965))

RTC Thomas of Kent, Roman de toute chevalerie, in The Anglo-Norman Alexander, ed. by Brian Foster and Ian Short, 2 vols (London: AngloNorman Text Society, 1976–77) s.s.

supplementary series

SF

Sinica franciscana: itinera et relationes fratrum minorum saeculi xiii et xiv, ed. by Anastasius van den Wyngaert and others, 6 vols (Quaracchi: Ad claras aquas, 1929–61)

Vl

La Version liégeoise du ‘Livre’ de Mandeville, ed. by Madeleine Tyssens and René Raelet (Bruxelles: Académie royale des anciens auteurs belges, 2011)

Introduction Anyone who studied the use of the phrases Near East and Middle East by British Government departments during the last half century might well suppose that our higher civil servants were ignorant of either geography or logic.1 In an ordinary way, the study of ‘real’ (i.e. social) space is referred to specialists and their respective specialities — to geographers, town planners, sociologists, et alii. As for knowledge of ‘true’ (i.e. mental) space, it is supposed to fall within the province of the mathematicians and philosophers. Here we have a double or even multiple error. To begin with, the split between ‘real’ and ‘true’ serves only to avoid any confrontation between practice and theory, between lived experience and concepts, so that both sides of these dualities are distorted from the outset.2 For over a thousand years, India represented for the West […] a neutral space [i.e., a space that possesses, in place of geographical fixity, perceived ideological fixity]. India — or, more properly, the Indias — was more a floating toponym than a specific, indeed specifiable region of the world.3

T

he present work is about an idea that is also a space: India (or, in the plural, the Indies) as it appeared in the eyes, minds, and experience of Western Europeans following what we might call its ‘rediscovery’ by commercial and religious travellers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but prior to the establishment of the sea route between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in 1497. In 1974 the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre reacted against what he saw as a scholarly tendency to atomize the study of space, that is, a tendency to allot the study of physical geography to physical geographers, geometry (in its original and medieval sense of earth-measurement) and mathemati1 

Beckingham, ‘The Achievements of Prester John’, p. 19. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. by Nicholson-Smith, pp. 94–95. 3  Uebel, Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages, p. 20. 2 

Introduction

2

cal and formal abstractions about space to mathematicians and philosophers, and the study of peoples in space to human geographers, anthropologists, and social scientists.4 Lefebvre’s long exposition of a unified theory of space takes as its starting point the seemingly obvious but often overlooked proposition that people experience space as the interaction of all its aspects. If we accept this proposition about our world, there is no reason to suppose that peoples’ spatial understanding and experience worked particularly differently in the medieval period.5 The ‘Indies’ of this book’s title and their singular cognate ‘India’ were, for medieval Western Europe, at once abstract concept and realm of imagination, as well as perceived and experienced as lived, travelled spaces. Of course, medieval Western Europe’s intellectual, cultural, and political relationships and preoccupations with all things Eastern have been the objects of scholarly attention for several decades, and the body of work that has resulted from this focus has inevitably influenced the present book. The ‘Medieval Orient’ — and in particular the question of the relationship between knowledge about the Orient, its representation in literature, and the desire for political dominance over Oriental peoples — became something of a theme in cultural-historical and literary analysis in the wake of Edward Said’s controversial Orientalism (1978) and the critiques and counterclaims that followed it.6 But this period of sustained focus on the discursive construction of the Orient 4 

p. 14.

Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. by Nicholson-Smith, passim, but see, for example,

5  Lefebvre, however, thinks that they did, hence his work has certain limitations for medievalists: Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. by Nicholson-Smith, p. 53. For a critique of the rationale behind the scholarly tendency to create a sharp distinction between ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ varieties of space, see Gautier Dalché, La Géographie de Ptolémée en Occident, pp. 8–10. My view is not that ‘medieval’ spatialities do not differ from ‘modern’ ones but, rather, that all spatialities are always culturally produced and context dependent, making the medieval/modern distinction irrelevant. I take the term ‘spatiality’ from current usage in theoretical human geography, in which it is now used to refer to a culture or group’s distinctive, historically and socially specific way of constructing and conceptualizing space and its relationship with that spatial environment. See, for example, its usage in the introduction to Hubbard, Kitchin, and Valentine, Key Thinkers on Space and Place, pp. 3–10. 6  Said, Orientalism. Early critics of its medieval coverage include Lewis, ‘The Question of Orientalism’. But most recently, see Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge, in particular Chapter 1. Works on medieval culture (particularly literary culture) produced under the influence of or in reaction to Said’s approach are too many to list in full. A few noteworthy book-length examples include Heffernan, The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance, Heng, Empire of Magic, and, more recently, Akbari, Idols in the East. Among articles, Rossi-Reder, ‘Wonders of the Beast’, is a particularly striking example of a very Saidian interpretation of the representation of India in literature.

Introduction

3

has not been without its problems for medieval scholarship, the most intractable of which is a lack of conceptual clarity about what exactly is meant by ‘the Orient’. Once this question is addressed, it emerges that many scholars who have approached the subject of the Orient in medieval thought are not talking about the same thing. To take just a few examples, writing on Mandeville’s Travels, Ian Higgins defines the medieval West’s Orient as ‘between Constantinople and the Earthly Paradise’, a reference to two jointly conceptual and spatial coordinates. Carol Heffernan, meanwhile, attempts to cross-refer her Orient to modern concepts in political and physical geography, taking it ‘to refer to North Africa and the Near and Middle East’, at least two of which categories lack, as Beckingham points out in the quotation at the head of this chapter, both internal logic and any stable external referent.7 A more explicit and nuanced exploration of the interplay between location, association, the literal, and the metaphorical in medieval spatiality is to be found in Suzanne Conklin Akbari’s investigation of premodern orientalism. Akbari suggests that, whilst the Orient may be located in medieval texts as east of the world’s centre ‘in a literal and metaphorical sense’, so stretching literally from Jerusalem to India, the discourse of the Orient converges in the late medieval period with a discourse of Islam to produce a distinctive but more associative, non-literal ‘medieval Orientalism’.8 And indeed, elsewhere, the same author notes explicitly that the books of Marco Polo and Jean de Mandeville simply do not ‘participate in the construction of the same Orient’.9 The continued production of different scholarly explanations of ‘what the medieval Orient was’, of course, highlights the fact that not only was the Orient discursively and differently constructed in the medieval period but also that this process of variable discursive construction continues in modern scholarship. In this book, I focus on a conceptual and spatial unit generally considered core to the medieval Orient, but I take an alternative approach to that unit. As analyses as diverse as Jacques Le Goff ’s ‘The Medieval West and the Indian Ocean’ and Michael Uebel’s Ecstatic Transformation have amply shown, the conceptual space that the Indies form is highly significant in medieval thought and imagination. It stands in for the furthest eastern reaches of the world in many a medieval commonplace (‘from Denmark unto Ynde’), is proverbially 7 

Higgins, Writing East, p. vii; Heffernan, The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance, p. 2. Akbari, Idols in the East, p. 18 and Chapter 2, passim. 9  Akbari, ‘Currents and Currency’, p. 128. See also Akbari, ‘Introduction: East, West, and In-between’, p. 8. 8 

Introduction

4

wealthy, and gives birth to some of the more culturally pervasive and enduring of the period’s legends: the empire of Prester John and the Indian adventures of Alexander (see Chapter 1 below). 10 It is also, as has already been noted by various scholars, a key constituent in the larger geographical-conceptual units of ‘the Orient’ and ‘Asia’. Indeed, it sometimes, through a synecdochic process, becomes interchangeable in certain geographical descriptions with one or other of these larger entities.11 But, from Le Goff ’s insistence that the medieval West ‘knew nothing of the real Indian Ocean’, which functioned as a screen onto which a dreamscape could be projected, to Uebel, for whom the Indies are ideologically defined, ‘more a floating toponym than a specific, indeed specifiable region of the world’, an urge emerges amongst cultural historians to separate Indies of the mind from terrestrial, experienced space.12 And yet, in addition to their importance as a conceptual category, the medieval Indies also have a self-evident yet seldom recognized continuity with the Indies of the early modern period, a geographical-conceptual unit shaped through constructs such as the Portuguese Estado da India, through which Portuguese domains in places as distant as East Africa and Indonesia were administratively, politically, and conceptually united.13 The distinct, diverse, yet culturally linked and economically interconnected network of ports, islands, coastal regions, and their hinterlands that are all centred on the economically critical Indian Ocean is often in modern scholarship given the name ‘Indian Ocean world’.14 I would not wish to claim identity between the Indies of the medieval period and the Estado da India or any modern metageographical or political entity. Nonetheless, con10 

See the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, in Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson and others, III.824 (p. 116). This commonplace use is also noted in Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. by Trask, p. 160. 11  For example, Lach suggests that by around 1300 ‘India’ was used to designate much of Asia, including ‘the subcontinent, the East Indies, and everything in the distant East’: Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, i (1965), 24. 12  Le Goff, ‘The Medieval West and the Indian Ocean’, pp.  189,  191; Uebel, Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages, p. 20. 13  On the Estado da India, see Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India, pp. 23–71 (in particular, pp. 26–28). 14  On the validity of the Indian Ocean world as a unit of analysis (on the model of Fernand Braudel’s analysis of the Medieval Mediterranean), see Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean, pp. 2–3; and Chaudhuri, ‘The Unity and Disunity of Indian Ocean History’, esp. pp. 1, 7. A good recent overview of the theory here, including discussion of the appropriateness or otherwise of the terminology ‘Indian Ocean’ for this interconnected group of seas, is to be found in Pearson, The Indian Ocean, pp. 5–13.

Introduction

5

centrated focus on ‘the Orient’ as the principal unit of analysis on the one hand and on the Indies as a deracinated dreamscape with no territorial link on the other have combined, I suggest, to occlude the cultural and historical importance of other ways of representing this space. As emerges in Chapters 3 to 6 of the present work, notions of the Indies as an insular, littoral, and maritime region, stretching not just across the eastern reaches of the known world but also into the seas and lands to the south, became increasingly influential in descriptions and cartographic representations over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. And yet, in contrast with the much broader yet, perhaps, more problematic cultural-geographical category of the medieval Orient, that of the medieval Indies has generated relatively little scholarly work. For sustained attention to the premodern cartography and geography of the region, we have to go back to the early decades of the twentieth century, when considerable effort and erudition were devoted to the tasks of identifying and tracing the geographical and cartographical histories of places and peoples described by travellers and geographers and marked on maps.15 More recent work has been more cultural-critical in nature, yet nonetheless leaves much to be done.16 My unit of analysis, the Indies, is neither a fixed, bordered entity that can be plotted on a modern map nor an abstract discursive construct without referent in the physical world or impact upon individuals. Like the late twentieth- and 15  See, for example, Hallberg, L’Extrème Orient dans la littérature et la cartographie de l’Occident. Hallberg’s work is largely a gazetteer identifying medieval with ancient and modern toponyms. We see the same scholarly trend, towards the provision of a complete gloss of toponyms and ethnographic data, in the extensive notes accompanying Cathay and the Way Thither, ed. by Yule and Cordier; Polo, The Book […] Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, ed. and trans. by Yule; and Pelliot, Notes on Marco Polo. 16  Approaches tend to take the form of articles in periodicals or chapters approaching a single genre, form, or historical or cartographic corpus in books devoted to larger topics, thus offering stimulating but one-dimensional approaches to a multidimensional issue. See, for example, Polomé, ‘The Vision of India in Medieval Encyclopaedias’; and Rossi-Reder, ‘Wonders of the Beast’. The most detailed study of the premodern cartography of the region, now somewhat dated, is Pullè, La cartografia antica dell’India, ii. Late medieval and Renaissance cartography is looked at in Knefelkamp, ‘Indien in der Kartographie des 15 und 16 Jahrhunderts’, as well as in Raman, Framing ‘India’. Attention is paid to ecclesiastical diplomatics in Richard, ‘Les Missionaires latins dans l’Inde’. More recently, García Espada has posited the existence of a ‘description of the Indies’ genre in the fourteenth century in García Espada, ‘Marco Polo, Odorico of Pordenone, the Crusades, and the Role of the Vernacular’. A book-length study, but one nonetheless focused upon the single issue of the relationship between such descriptions and crusade appears in García Espada, Marco Polo y la cruzada.

Introduction

6

twenty-first-century politico-geographical discursive categories ridiculed by Beckingham in the excerpt at the head of this chapter, and, like the modern metageographical categories sharply critiqued by Lewis and Wigen in their work The Myth of Continents (1997), it is a discursive category that both influences and is shaped by a combination of perceptions, desires, fears, and spatial experience in the physical world.17 Produced both by language and experience — discursive practice and social practice — under always-changing conditions, the Indies of this book are many. They are a constellation of ideas and visualizations in the mind’s eye of geographers and cartographers, a useful umbrella term in ecclesiastical or secular diplomacy to encompass known or imagined regions and polities far to the east, a helpful shorthand for a set of associations and characteristics that a poet or rhetorician might wish to invoke, and at the same time, a real place that European merchants, missionaries, and legates encounter and shape through spatial experience and representation. The interaction of all these ways of knowing, both with one another and with other metageographical categories — such as Asia and, of course, the Orient — is what produced the spatial relationships that Western Europeans developed with the Indies in the later Middle Ages. The multiplicity of meanings explicit and implicit in the seemingly innocuous term ‘the Indies’ brings me to a further assumption that underlies my methodology. Spatial concepts, whether the medieval Orient of modern scholars or the Indies of the Middle Ages, are constructed differently by different people, cultural or social groups, and for variable purposes and audiences. My concern in this book is therefore with the multiple ways in which different groups constructed their Indies in the later Middle Ages and with the distinctive spatial relationships those groups created. Indeed, the Indies are here discussed in the plural not only because they are often so described in sources that distinguish ‘Nearer India’ from ‘Further India’, ‘Greater’ from ‘Lesser’, and — sometimes — ‘Middle’, ‘Third’, or ‘Furthest’ from both of these. The Indies are a plural entity throughout the later medieval period because travellers, geographers, cartographers, and audiences engage in an endless process of reinventing them in accordance with their own or their culture’s changing knowledge, needs, fears, and desires. The book falls into three parts. Part i, ‘Vere unus alter mundus: Traditions and Travellers’, looks first (Chapter 1) at the ways of thinking about and representing the Indies that the Middle Ages inherited from classical and early 17 

Lewis and Wigen, The Myth of Continents.

Introduction

7

Christian learning, and their influence and development in medieval cosmography, history, and legend. In Chapter 2, it offers an overview of contact and exchange between Latin Christendom and the lands and islands of the Indian Ocean world between around 1250 and this book’s approximate end point of 1497, the year in which Vasco da Gama set out to reach the west coast of India by sea. I have consciously minimized the common academic practice of describing each traveller’s journey, plotting their travels on modern maps, and identifying and cross-referencing toponyms and ethnographic data between different travellers or between travellers’ accounts and modern cartography. Whilst such scholarly conventions may be helpful in telling us where, on a modern map, places, peoples, and features might once have been, I cannot help but find that they divert attention from the fact that the ideas of these medieval travellers, writers, cartographers, and geographers as to what ‘where’ means often differ from one another’s and our own. Chapter 2, then, is more concerned with how medieval travellers, their amanuenses, and audiences understood what ‘where’ meant with respect to the Indies that they described than with translating medieval spatialities into twenty-first-century terms. Indeed, for medieval travellers and their amanuenses, spatial, temporal, and theological coordinates of different kinds were used to mark out and give meaning to this space. In Part ii, ‘Embodied Encounters: Travellers’ Texts and their Readers’, Chapters 3 and 4 take the accounts of these same travellers and their amanuenses as their objects of focus, but from a different perspective. The chapters investigate the Indies of readers of vernacular and Latin versions of firsthand accounts of travel in and around the Indian Ocean world (Chapter 3 on vernaculars, with particular focus on French and Italian; Chapter 4 on Latin). Through attention to features such as the manuscript contexts of accounts, mise-en-page, illustrations, likely or known ownership of copies, and notes and comments left by readers, I look at some of the social, cultural, and literary contexts within which these firsthand accounts were read, the cultural uses to which they were put, and the distinctive spatialities and constructions of ‘the Indies’ that emerge from them. Part iii, ‘Geographical and Cartographic Reorientations’, investigates the changing vision of the Indies in selected textual and cartographic contexts between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries. Chapter 5 begins by addressing the most widely read ‘traveller’s’ account of the Indies of the later Middle Ages. The Book of Sir John Mandeville (c. 1356) is not a firsthand account but, rather, the imaginative product of interplay between cosmological, historical, and eyewitness visions of these regions. The chapter shows how two selected versions of this ‘multi-text’, translated and reworked many times for different

Introduction

8

audiences and purposes, constructed strikingly distinct, context-related spatial relationships between the Indies and their Western European audiences.18 Finally, I turn in Chapter 6 to the Indies as a cartographic space, and in particular to the relationships created between this space and its Latin European beholders in cartographic works produced between the thirteenth and the mid-fifteenth centuries. A comparison of the historical and spatial dimensions of representations of the Indies in European cartographic works reveals that these too are variable and context-dependent. That medieval maps do not map ‘what there is’ — an objective external reality — is something that few would now dispute; that every map is a lie, now as in the medieval past, is a truism.19 But Chapter 6 makes plain the extent to which cartographers’ representations do much more than act as reflections of a culture’s image of the world. The maps discussed create, manipulate, and reflect their cultures’ preoccupations in proportions that are sometimes very difficult to determine. In so doing, their representations of the Indies engage with time and history, as well as space, in complex and sometimes idiosyncratic ways. Maps map, on the same twodimensional surface, the known, perceived, or imagined present, actions and spaces past, and futures desired or feared.20 Finally, as well as looking at the role of cartography in constructing relationships with the Indies, the same chapter also considers the role of the problematic, multiple, contradictory Indies of the early fifteenth century in shaping mapmakers’ conceptions of the functions of cartography and spatial representation. For the sake of practicality I have not attempted to cover all primary sources potentially relevant to what is a rather broad topic, and I have no doubt that some readers will find themselves puzzled at the artificial limits I have had to place around the corpus of evidence I discuss here. My coverage of sources of German, Dutch, or Central European origin is limited, as is my engagement with the more limited material known to be in Iberian libraries and archives.21 In Chapters 3 and 4, moreover, I have chosen to confine my discussion to phys18 

On the concept of the multi-text, see Higgins, ‘Defining the Earth’s Center in a Medieval “Multi-Text”’. 19  Peter Barber, quoted in Liston, ‘The Lie of the Land’. 20  See Wood and Fels, The Power of Maps, p. 7. 21  Specific recent work on Iberian, German, and Central European sources will be referenced where appropriate in Chapters 3, 4, and 6. For a broad survey including attention to German and Iberian sources, see Reichert, Begegnungen mit China, passim. I have used the Italian translation in Reichert, Incontri con la Cina, trans. by Sberveglieri. A still broader English-language survey is found in Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World.

Introduction

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ical texts in manuscript rather than to attempt coverage of the early printed editions of travellers’ accounts. It has seemed more important to me to offer a longer, deeper analytical treatment to a more strictly defined corpus than to offer merely adequate coverage to a broader one. My main aim in writing this book has been the perhaps naive and old-fashioned one that readers should feel that they know a good deal more about the subject after finishing it than they did before they started. But it has also been very important to me throughout the writing process that this work should be methodologically invigorating and challenging. In the six chapters, I bring together evidence from historiography, cosmography, the incipient medieval genre of the traveller’s narrative in its physical incarnations, polemic, ecclesiastical documents, maps, and manuscript illustrations to consider the formation of multiple Indies and multiple spatialities for and by diverse individuals and communities. My approach has been informed by the key principles outlined in this introduction, the works of the spatial theorists introduced here, and certain others whose ideas will become significant in later chapters. But my aim has nonetheless been that the resulting work should be accessible enough to be read without a background reading list. I also hope that in its delineation of shifting, multiple, context-dependent but nonetheless real medieval Indies, continually produced both imaginatively and experientially, this book will underline the many affinities between medieval and modern ways of producing, experiencing, and representing space.22

22 

This is in contrast to some theorists who posit a breach between medieval and modern spatialities: Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. by Nicholson-Smith, p. 53; de Certeau, ‘Spatial Stories’, p. 120.

Part i Vere unus alter mundus: Traditions and Travellers

Chapter 1

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M

edieval conceptions and spatial representations of the Indies developed neither in a vacuum nor in direct response to lived experience. In fact, the cosmographical frameworks and descriptions of the world that late medieval Europe inherited, via late antiquity, from Greek and Roman cosmology and chorography became vital components in later medieval ways of conceptualizing and describing the region. Also from Greece, via Rome, came medieval Europe’s enduring obsession with the conquests in India of Alexander of Macedon (327–326 bce), ‘long regarded’, as Merrills puts it, ‘as a proto-Roman in his annexation of India’.1 This obsession brought in its train a fascination with the strange peoples and creatures reported to have been uncovered by his campaigns and catalogued by Megathsenes, ambassador of Alexander’s successor, Seleucus I Nikator, to the Indian king Sandracottus (Chandragupta) in 303 bce.2 Nonetheless, as this chapter will show, the spatial and conceptual characteristics associated with India in classical geographical and historical writing do not remain static through the medieval period but develop and metamorphose through medieval geographical writing, historiography, and legend.

1 

Merrills, History and Geography in Late Antiquity, p. 26. For Megathsenes’ own sources, see Wittkower, ‘Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters’, pp. 46–47. See also Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought, pp. 82–94. 2 

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This chapter begins with an outline of the spatial, conceptual, and historical ways of constructing and representing the Indies that medieval Europe inherited from the late antique world. It then identifies the principal spatial characteristics associated with the region in different later medieval textual forms and generic traditions. Fed by late antique and early medieval cosmographical and literary depictions of ‘India’, we see multiple, intersecting spatialities emerge and develop in the works of writers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as they attempt to make sense of competing visions of the world and the place the Indies might hold within it, conceptually and imaginatively as well as geographically. To redeploy a term once coined by Edward Said, it is possible to trace — across genres from cosmography to encyclopaedia, to history, to epic and romance — the contortions of an elastic ‘imaginative geography’ of the Indies, in which the region is characterized not so much through location and physical geography as through associations, relationships, vignettes, and the kinds of happenings and human experiences imagined as taking place within its unfixed borders.3

The Classical and Late Antique Inheritance Medieval Europe inherited many of the elements that made up its vision of the world and its parts from ancient Greece and Rome. But the process of transmission was rarely direct. Rather, late medieval writers drew on the cosmographers and historians, pagan and Christian, who composed compendia of classical and early Christian learning in late antiquity. The discussion that follows does not pretend to offer a comprehensive account of classical and late antique representations of the eastern edge of the known world; this material is available elsewhere.4 Instead, it focuses on identifying the authors, works, and elements of classical and late antique writing most influential on the geographical conceptions of the Indies that developed in late medieval Western Europe.5 3 

The concept is discussed in most detail in Said, Orientalism, p. 55. But it should be noted that my usage of the term here differs somewhat from that outlined by Said. 4  For annotated and commented collections of the relevant texts, see Ancient India as Described in Classical Literature, ed. by McCrindle; and L’Inde vue de Rome, ed. by André and Filliozat. For a comprehensive discussion of Rome’s conceptions of India and their Greek influences, see Parker, The Making of Roman India. 5  Important classical descriptions of India not discussed here include Arrian’s Indica in the Anabasis Alexandri and Strabo’s Geography, because these were not directly influential on the

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Pliny the Elder: Naturalis historia The single text that exerted the greatest, albeit often indirect, influence on classical, late antique, and, through these, medieval representations of India was unquestionably Pliny the Elder’s first-century Naturalis historia (NH).6 The geography of Pliny’s comprehensive encyclopaedia, which is often referenced but rarely examined in detail by medievalists, is sometimes misrepresented and therefore merits a detailed discussion here. The NH contains a cosmographical account of the universe and the situation of the world within it (Book ii), a region-by-region description of the world, of which the book’s account of India and Taprobane (Sri Lanka) forms part (Book vi), and thematically organized sections on peoples, animals, plants, precious metal and stones, and so on. Identifying Indian space principally through the peoples who occupy it, Pliny in Book vi places the ‘gens Indorum’ (‘nation of the Indians’) in the eastern and southern quarters of his known world. These peoples are bordered to the north by the Emodus mountains (Himalayas), to the east by the Eastern Ocean, and to the south by the Southern Ocean, otherwise known as the Indian Ocean.7 Pliny then gives the country’s measurements according to the authorities Eratosthenes and Agrippa and puts the sailing time around its coastline at forty days and nights (NH, vi.21.57). However, he almost immediately proceeds to cast doubt on the geographical limits that he himself has set. Many authors, he adds, extend the boundaries of the country northwest of the Indus to include the satrapies of Gedrosia, Arachota, Arios, and Paropanisidas; many similarly insist that it includes the city of Nysa and Mount Meroe, sacred to ‘Liber Pater’ (Dionysius).8 The islands Chryse and Argyre, the soil of which is reputed to later medieval period’s received image of the region: Arrian, Anabasis Alexandri, ed. and trans. by Blunt, ii (1983), Bk 8; Strabo, Géographie, ed. and trans. by G. Aujac and others. 6  The most recent, best, and most fully annotated edition is the multi-volume Pliny the Elder, Histoire naturelle, published by Belles Lettres with multiple editors and translators. No English translation of the work comes highly recommended. I have referred to Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. by Bostock and Riley, though I have generally found it necessary to retranslate. 7  Pliny the Elder, Histoire naturelle. Livre vi, 2e partie, ed. and trans. by André and Filliozat, Chapter 21, paragraph 56. See André and Filliozat’s comprehensive endnotes for toponym identifications. Subsequent references to Pliny’s Histoire naturelle provide shortened abbreviations of chapter and paragraph. 8  A reference to the legend that Dionysius was transported to Nysa (whose name consequently derives from his) in the thigh of Jupiter to escape the anger of Juno: Pliny the Elder, Histoire naturelle. Livre vi, 2e partie, ed. and trans. by André and Filliozat, 23.78–79 and p. 107, n. 1.

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be powdered gold and silver, belong to the Indies, as does the great island of Taprobane (Sri Lanka). Taprobane, which ‘alterum orbem terrarum diu existimatum est Antichthonum appellatione’ (‘formerly was thought to be another world, known by the name of the Antichthones’; NH, vi.24.81), has subsequently been proven to be an island through the deeds of Alexander the Great’s era. Once thought twenty days distant from the Prasians on the mainland, the island was now, Pliny adds, only seven days’ sail away from India in a Roman vessel (NH, vi.24.82). A few characteristics of Pliny’s representation of the Indies demand notice. Pliny presents the country as ‘patefacta’ (‘opened up’; NH, vi.21.58) as a result of Alexander’s campaigns and the embassies that preceded and succeeded it. Its size and populousness are overwhelming. It is a land that comprises, in some estimates, one-third of the world. Its cities and peoples are beyond number, probably, Pliny suggests, because the Indians are so reluctant to quit their lands’ borders (NH, vi.21.59). In fact, although Pliny has something of a reputation as the source of the ‘marvels of the east’ tradition that was to exert such a great influence on the medieval world, the account of the Indies in Book vi of the Naturalis historia suggests that his reputation as an ‘uncritical’ fabulist is not wholly deserved.9 Very few mirabilia (wonders) appear in Book vi. Indeed, Pliny himself calls the contents of the marvellous reports made available by ambassadors such as Megasthenes ‘diuersa et incredibilia’ (‘varying and unbelievable’; NH, vi.21.59). The few examples of what criticism often terms the monstrous or Plinian races in the Book vi description are not the most extreme examples of their kind: pygmies appear, as do the Pandaeans, whose distinguishing feature is that they are ruled by women (NH, vi.22.70 and 23.76).10 Even the Bragmanae (Brahmans), later to become emblematic of pagan virtue, receive only a brief mention in Book vi (NH, vi.21.64). Nevertheless, Book vi does feature a fairly detailed account of a functioning caste system (NH, vi.22.66). For tales of wonders, Pliny refers the reader, with detectable caution, to other books of his vast compendium: 9 

Wittkower calls Pliny’s Historia naturalis ‘a vast uncritical collection’, noting that ‘the geographical parts have been censured as the most defective portions’: Wittkower, ‘Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters’, p. 49. For a more nuanced and detailed comparative discussion of Pliny’s methods, see Parker, The Making of Roman India, in particular, pp. 78–103. 10  For a detailed study, see Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought. Wittkower terms the same peoples the ‘Plinian’ races throughout Wittkower, ‘Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters’.

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Quae memoranda ac prope fabulosa de fertilitate terrae et genere frugum arborumque aut ferarum ac volucrum et aliorum animalium traduntur, suis quaeque locis in reliqua parte operis commemorabuntur. (NH, vi.23.79) Those noteworthy and indeed almost fabulous things that are said concerning the fertility of the land, the types of fruit, trees, wild beasts, fowl, and other animals, will be mentioned in their correct places in the rest of this work.

Tales of monstrous races taken from Megathsenes and his fabulist precursor Ctesias of Cnidos (fifth century bce) appear not in Pliny’s geographical book but in his anthropology (NH, vii.2), where they follow the statement that ‘Praecipue India Aethiopumque tractus miraculis scatent’ (‘India, and particularly the region of Æthiopia, abounds in wonders’), apparently on account of the marvellous fertility of the soil.11 Noteworthy peoples include: satyrs; troglodytes; the gymnosophists, who stand on one foot all day staring at the sun; cynocephali (dog-headed men); the one-footed, surprisingly fast monoculi; the headless people whose eyes are in their shoulders; and the astomi who, living near the source of the Ganges, have neither mouth nor need of food but live off the nourishment of certain scents (NH, vii.2.21–32). Amongst the marvellous plants discussed in Book xii (flora), one finds evidence of the soil’s fertility. At the very limits of the regions traversed by Alexander is a type of tree, ‘[m]ajor alia pomo et suauitate praecellentior, quo sapientes Indorum uiuunt’ (‘larger and of greater sweetness than others, by which the wise men of India live’).12 Each of its fruits is large enough to feed four people. Nonetheless, in the geographical situs orbis terrarum of Book vi, in place of these monstrosities and marvels that Pliny himself admits are ‘prope fabulosa’ (‘almost fabulous’), we find a series of surprising statements about India’s accessibility and links with the Graeco-Roman world. India has, Pliny reminds us, been traversed by Alexander the Great, whose campaign across it left physical marks on its landscape in the form of cities founded such as Bucephala, containing the tomb of the conqueror’s steed, Bucephalus, and altars erected to mark out the limits of his progress (NH, vi.23.77; vi.21.62). But, as well as Alexander, Seleucus I Nikator’s ambassador Megathsenes and Ptolemy Philadelphus’s ambassador Dionysius have also resided in India (NH, vi.21.58). In recent memory, ambassadors have travelled from Taprobane to Rome (NH, vi.24.84). Pliny also collates evidence of voyages between the 11  12 

Pliny the Elder, Histoire naturelle. Livre vii, ed. and trans. by Schilling, 2.21. Pliny the Elder, Histoire naturelle. Livre xii, ed. and trans. by Ernout, 12.24.

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Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and India (NH, vi.26.96–100; vi.28.109–11) and, elsewhere in his encyclopaedia (Book ii) suggests that the Indian Ocean is reachable, and indeed has been reached, via the encircling ocean from Europe to the west and the Caspian Sea to the north (NH, ii.67.167–70). Rather than presenting the Indian Ocean as inaccessibly distant, Pliny presents Roman navigational, diplomatic, and mercantile links with the region as strong and constantly improving. Driven by commerce, advances in route-finding have made the 1335-mile journey between Arabia and the Indian port of Patale faster, with a resulting change, Pliny’s phraseology suggests, in the spatial relationship between India and Rome: ‘conpendia invenit mercator lucroque India admota est’ (‘a merchant discovered a shortcut, and India was moved nearer by profit’; NH, vi.26.101).13 Finally, Pliny, as his information about recent embassies from the island indicates, is at pains to bring Taprobane (Sri Lanka), an unknown possible ‘alter orbis’ (‘other world’) in the eyes of his precursors such as Pomponius Mela, fully into his own known world.14 But if the survey to be found in Pliny’s geographical chapters — the list of voyages, embassies, details of journey times from Rome, details of cities, rulers, military forces, and so on — combine with implied scepticism about the marvellous tales related by Megathsenes to create a sense of spatial and conceptual proximity to Rome, there are nevertheless forces in Book vi of the NH that push in a quite different direction. A sense of the separateness of the peoples living close to the ocean to the south is created through Pliny’s explanation that their lands are only reachable overland by crossing deserts ‘harenis ambientibus haud alio modo quam insulas mari’ (‘with encircling sands, in no way different 13 

Pliny’s discussion of advances in Indo-Roman trade is somewhat general but broadly supported by contemporary texts and ongoing archaeological work. Grant Parker contextualizes Pliny’s information with reference to publilshed archaeological work, contemporary Indian texts, and, in particular, the first-century ce Egyptian-Greek text the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, in Parker, The Making of Roman India , in particular, pp. 171–83. See also Blue, ‘Boats, Routes and Sailing Conditions of Indo-Roman Trade’. 14  ‘Taprobane aut grandis admodum insula aut prima pars orbis alterius […] dicitur, et quia habitatur, nec quisquam circum eam isse traditur, prope verum est’ (‘Taprobane [Sri Lanka] is said to be either a very large island or the first part of the second world, but because it is inhabited, and because no one reportedly has circumnavigated it, the latter interpretation is as good as true’): Pomponius Mela (writing 43–44 ce), Pomponius Mela, Chorographie, ed. by Silberman, Bk iii, 7, 70. Silberman notes (p. 298, n. 3) that some manuscripts ascribe the tradition that Taprobane is an island to Hipparchus, but not without textual problems, so I leave the name out here. Translations here and elsewhere are taken from Pomponius Mela, Description of the World, trans. by Romer, p. 122.

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to islands of the sea’). Distinct in customs too, their inhabitants are ‘liberi et regum expertes’ (‘free and lacking in kings’; NH, vi.23.73–74). The India of Book vi is also often associated with ideal environmental characteristics. Favoured by healthful winds, it enjoys two summers every year and navigable seas even in winter (NH, vi.21.58), while its nations are powerful and enjoy great resources (NH, vi.21.58). But the place that enjoys the most ideal characteristics in Pliny’s account is Taprobane. Although part of the oikoumene (known world) in the NH, the island nevertheless has extreme, even otherworldly environmental and social characteristics. Its elephants are larger, and it produces more gold and pearls of greater size even than India (NH, vi.24.81). More strangely still, an ambassador from the island who reached Rome in the time of Claudius testifies that, near Taprobane, trees grow on the ocean floor and that the sun rises and the shadows fall in the opposite directions to their habit in Europe (NH, vi.24.87). No slavery exists on the island, and it has an exemplary system for the election of kings, the avoidance of hereditary monarchy, and the administration of justice (NH, vi.24.89–90). Pliny’s NH sets out, then, a very detailed descriptive account of the southeasterly reaches of the known world. But it is an account that endows this geographical area with a range of not always consistent characteristics, dependent in part upon the section of the NH to which the reader refers. The dominant picture provided by the geographical Book vi is of a vast, populous region, of disputable borders but nevertheless fully urbanized, civilized, militarized, and known, marked out by the physical traces in the landscape of Alexander the Great’s campaigns. The maritime and littoral reaches of the Indies are, moreover, whilst admittedly hard of access by land, now closely linked to the imperial Roman world through improving commerce and increasing navigation. But elements of Book vi and, to a far greater extent, other parts of the NH also contribute to a very different picture of these southern and eastern regions, emphasizing their healthfulness, their production of marvels both great and fearsome, and peoples exceptional both in their monstrosity and virtue. Above all, it is this unresolved double image that is critical to the formation of geographical and imaginative conceptions of the Indies amongst late antique and medieval writers. Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages Pliny’s complex spatial representation of the continental and maritime Indies was not well served by the processes of abridgement and selective editing that his work underwent in late antiquity. Yet it was this process that brought it into

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the conceptual world of medieval scholars, who very rarely had access to Pliny’s NH in its entirety.15 Four works produced under the later Roman Empire and one early medieval compendium in particular exerted exceptional influence on medieval conceptions of Asia and of terrestrial (ecumenical) geography.16 Gaius Julius Solinus’s geographically organized third-century De mirabilibus mundi, also known as the Collectanea rerum memorabilium or Polyhistor, relied extensively on the NH and enjoyed great and long-lasting popularity. The fifthcentury Commentarii in somnium Scipionis of Macrobius and De nuptiis philo­ logiae et mercurii of Martianus Capella, a treatise on the seven liberal arts featuring a dissertation on geometry, each offered a pagan cosmological overview of the late Roman world.17 A Christian terrestrial geography that was to prove highly influential appeared in Paulus Orosius’s fifth-century Historiarum libri septem contra paganos. Writing in the early seventh century, Isidore, Bishop of Seville, produced, in the geographical, anthropological, botanical, and zoological books of his Christian encyclopaedia the Etymologiarum, a further recontextualization and distillation of Solinus’s Plinian material. What all these books have in common is their attempt to select and abridge the geographical knowledge current at the time of their production. Although organized as an enumeration of the earth’s regions and their distinguishing features, Solinus’s Collectanea rerum memorabilium demonstrates, 15 

Stahl, Johnson, and Burge, Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, i (1971), 129. Here and throughout this book the phrases ‘terrestrial’ and ‘ecumenical’ geography (or cartography) refer to that which concerns the then-known world (oikoumene), considered to comprise Europe, Asia, and Africa. The term excludes those parts of cosmographical writings or cosmological maps that speculated upon or attempted to represent the globe’s then-unknown regions. Terrestrial geography, of course, often appeared within a wider cosmographical context. 17  There has been a protracted and not wholly conclusive discussion of the date of each work and, indeed, the identity of each writer. Stahl concludes, on reviewing the scholarship and internal evidence, that Martianus’s De nuptiis was the work of a Carthaginian writing c. 410–439: Stahl, Johnson, and Burge, Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, i (1971), 12; 15–16. Stahl accepts a date of before 395 for Macrobius’s Commentarii, at the same time cautiously accepting a wider scholarly trend to identify its Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius with three ‘Macrobii’ cited in different contexts in the early fifth century: see the ‘Introduction’ to Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. by Stahl, pp. 5–9. But Alan Cameron has argued that scholars have erred in conflating three late antique Macrobii into one. On distinguishing these, he identifies the author with a Theodosius, praetorian prefect of Italy in 430, placing the publication of the Commentarii and Saturnalia around 430: Cameron, ‘The Date and Identity of Macrobius’. His dating, if not his identification, has the broad support of the Commentary’s most recent editors: see the ‘Introduction’ to Macrobius, Commentaire au songe de Scipion, ed. by Armisen-Marchetti, i (2001), xvii–xviii. 16 

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as its medieval nickname of De mirabilibus mundi suggests, a structural bias towards human geography and ethnography and a particular focus on marvellous and strange flora and fauna. Solinus excises all but the barest minimum of locative detail (that India begins at the Medes Mountains and stretches along the southern ocean as far as the dawn) and most of Pliny’s copious information about navigation between the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and India. 18 The CRM instead offers only, in a scant ninety-eight words, the bare bones of a route from the Nile to Kerala, without distances or travel times but noting the monsoon and the winds required to sail from India and the Red Sea in December (CRM, liv.7–11). Although Solinus is equally brutal in his curtailment of Pliny’s detailed list of cities, peoples, and their rulers’ military capacities, he nevertheless expands his ethnographic section with accounts of more or less fabulous beasts and monstrous races taken not from Pliny’s geographical book but largely from NH Book viii (fauna) and NH Book vii (anthropology), with occasional extra spice drawn from Pomponius Mela’s less detailed De chorographia.19 Additional animals include snakes so large they can swallow a whole stag (CRM, lii.33; NH, viii.14.36) and the anthropophagous manticore (CRM, lii.37). Indeed, the manticore is just one of the fabulous creatures that have migrated from Pliny’s Ethiopia, already associated with India by Pliny through both lands’ production of marvels, to Solinus’s India (NH, vii.2.21; viii.30.75). Solinus also adds a catalogue of extraordinary peoples, drawn almost exclusively from Pliny’s anthropological book: gymnosophists, who stand all day on one foot staring at the sun; cynocephali (dog-headed men); those who live near the source of the Ganges on the odour of apples; those who lack necks; headless men with eyes in their shoulders; women who bear only one, white-haired child in their life; children born white-haired, whose hair darkens with age; monoculi; women who conceive at five years and do not live beyond eight; and wild, hairy people with the teeth of dogs.20 The overall 18 

‘A Mediis [a corruption of Pliny’s Emodi (Himalayan)] montibus auspicatur India, a meridiano mari porrecta ad eoum’ (‘India begins at the Medes mountains, stretching out along the southern ocean towards the dawn’): Solinus, Collectanea rerum memorabilium, ed. by Mommsen, lii, 1 (my translations throughout). 19  For example, exotic ethnographic detail, such as the refusal among some people to kill animals and eat meat and the existence of others who live on fish alone: Solinus, Collectanea rerum memorabilium, ed. by Mommsen, lii, 21–22; Pomponius Mela, Chorographie, ed. by Silberman, iii, 7, 63–64. 20  Mommsen’s marginal notes identify Pliny as the source of these descriptions, between lii.24–32. Within the text, Solinus cites Ctesias and Megasthenes as his sources, but compari-

22

Chapter 1

Figure 1. World map from a manuscript of Macrobius, Commentarii c. 1000 (? south German). The Mare Indicum and Mare Rubrum are represented as separate entities, both situated within the zone labelled ‘perusta’. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS D’Orville 77, fol. 100r. Courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

impact of Solinus’s changes is to simplify Pliny’s multi-perspective, complex representation of India and its spatial relationships with its region and the world. In Solinus’s hands, the multidimensional becomes one-dimensional, and India’s principal and governing characteristic becomes its association with the strange, the monstrous, and the marvellous. son shows that the information is largely culled from Pliny’s NH (see Pliny the Elder, Histoire naturelle. Livre vii, ed. and trans. by Schilling, Chapters 22–30).

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Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis takes Solinus’s tendency to abridgement yet further. Unlike Solinus, Martianus places his terrestrial geography in a cosmographical framework ultimately derived from Greek science.21 In common with Macrobius and writing around the same time, Martianus elaborates a system in which the round globe is divided into five zones, demarcated by horizontal lines encircling the earth (see fig. 1). Around the poles one finds two frigid zones, where human habitation is impossible on account of the extreme cold. Around the equator, conversely, one finds a zone rendered uninhabitable by heat.22 Both Macrobius and Martianus additionally divide the spherical globe into two hemispheres, one ‘supernatem, quam nos habitamus et ambit oceanus’ and one lower, each of which contains two habitable regions unable to communicate with one another (‘[A]n upper hemisphere, which we inhabit and which Oceanus encircles’; De nup­ tiis, vi.603; see also Martianus Capella, ii, p. 226).23 This zonal system places Rome, Greece, and surrounding lands in the northern temperate zone between the uninhabitable extremes of heat and cold in the torrid and frigid zones.24 The system was immensely influential in the Middle Ages, but its significance for our purposes is that it places India and the whole region of the Indian Ocean in a very peculiar situation. Following through the implications of his zonal theory, Macrobius writes that:

21 

On Martianus, Roman chorography, and Greek mathematical geography, see Stahl, Johnson, and Burge, Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, i (1971), 130–33. 22  Macrobius, Commentarii in somnium Scipionis, ed. by Willis, v.7–15; Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. by Stahl, pp. 201–02. I quote from this translation where possible in the following, but it has occasionally been necessary to modify it lightly. Martianus Capella, Martianus Capella, ed. by Willis, vi.602; I quote throughout from the translation of Martianus’s work in Stahl, Johnson, and Burge, Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, ii (1977), here at p. 225. 23  On the impossibility of communication between separate parts, see Macrobius, Commentarii in somnium Scipionis, ed. by Willis, v.31–33; Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. by Stahl, pp. 205–06. 24  The zonal system is often referred to as ‘Macrobian’, but from the nature of Macrobius’s commentary it is clear that he is summarizing views widely held amongst the erudite of his day rather than setting out a new cosmological system. Indeed, the dating controversy outlined earlier (n. 21) shows that it is not even clear that Macrobius summarized this system before Martianus Capella. For an explanation of Macrobius’s cosmology and the illustrations commonly found with the text, and in particular Macrobius’s conception of the linkage between terrestrial and celestial zones, see Obrist, La Cosmologie médiévale, pp. 171–94; pp. 309–10.

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partes tamen quae perusto cingulo vicinae sunt, ceteris calidiores sunt, ut est Aethiopia, Arabia, Aegyptus et Libya, in quibus ita circumfusi aeris corpus extenuat, ut aut numquam aut raro cogatur in nubes, et ideo nullus paene apud illos usus est imbrium. the portions near the torrid zone are hotter than the rest — Ethiopia, Arabia, Egypt, and Libya, for example. In these lands the atmosphere has become so rarefied that it is seldom or never condensed into clouds. Consequently there is almost no rainfall there.25

The regions bordering the southern arm of the Ocean Sea — the Indian Ocean region — are therefore characterized as on the borderline between the habitable and uninhabitable world: technically habitable, but hotter than elsewhere in the temperate zone and with too little rain. In so saying, Macrobius calls to mind Pomponius Mela’s first-century characterization of the regions between the Indus and the Red Sea: contra Indi ostia illa sunt quae vocant Solis adeo inhabitabilia, ut ingressos uis circumfusi aeris exanimet confestim, et inter ipsa ostia Patalene regio, ob aestus intolerabilis alicubi cultoribus egens. Ariane inde ad principia Rubri maris pertinet, ipsa inuia atque deserta; humus cineri magis fit quam pulueri similis, ideoque per eam rara et non grandia flumina manant. Opposite the mouths of the Indus are the so-called Islands of the Sun, so uninhabitable that the pressure of the atmosphere instantly sucks the life out of anyone who enters, and between the rivers’ very mouths is the district of Patalene, which is unbearable in some places because of the heat and lacks inhabitants. From there the district of Ariane, itself impassable and deserted, stretches to the beginning of the Red Sea [Arabian Gulf ]. Its land is more like ashes than dust, and that is why the rivers that trickle through it are scarce and scant.26

Statements such as these seemingly engendered a certain amount of confusion in the representation of the southeasterly reaches of the world in the world maps that accompany the Commentarii in its medieval manuscripts. These maps, generally styled ‘Macrobian’, are in fact so variable that the possibility of ever ascertaining the form of a presumed ‘original’ attributable to Macrobius 25 

Macrobius, Commentarii in somnium Scipionis, ed. by Willis, vii.19. Translation lightly modified from Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. by Stahl, p. 211. 26  Pomponius Mela, Chorographie, ed. by Silberman, iii, 8, 71 (editor’s emendations accepted without signal here); Pomponius Mela, Description of the World, trans. by Romer, p. 122. I have replaced Romer’s ‘unlivable’ with ‘uninhabitable’.

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has been doubted.27 But their representations of the southeasterly quarter of the oikoumene are all the more telling for their variety, since they show mapmaking scribes or illustrators of the early Middle Ages grappling in different ways with the relationship between the zonal system and the physical geography of the known world. Earlier versions of the map rarely give much detail on the lands within the oikoumene, including the Indies, Africa, or parts of Asia; indeed, Alfred Hiatt suggests that their principal function was to ‘illustrate the direction of ocean flows, the formation of seas, and the relationship of the known world to unknown but hypothesized regions’.28 But many earlier examples place the Mare Rubrum (Red Sea) and Mare Indicum (Indian Sea), bodies of water thought to border the Indies, within the purportedly uninhabitable ‘zona perusta’ (‘torrid zone’).29 Other maps, responding to the same text, represent these bodies of water as close to the ‘Zona Perusta’ but just to its north.30 Macrobius’s close contemporary Martianus provides not only a cosmological overview of the globe but also, in his ‘De Geometria’ (Book vi of De nuptis), a chorographical and ethnographic account of the world untroubled by the questions of habitability that are raised by his cosmology. Martianus’s account of the maritime and continental Indies is Plinian, but simplified yet further than that simplification already found in Solinus. As William Stahl has pithily put it, ‘Pliny’s four books of geography, together with excerpts from other books, which had been reduced by Solinus to a treatise of less than one hundred pages, were condensed by Martianus into an excursus one fourth as long as Solinus’s book’, with sometimes ‘ludicrous’ results.31 Martianus gives the same minimal 27 

For a detailed discussion of the maps produced before 1100 and some reference to adaptations over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, see Hiatt, ‘The Map of Macrobius before 1100’, p. 154. Hiatt suggests (p. 156) that the earliest surviving maps in the manuscripts (tenth century) may be the result either of scribal reconstruction or of the recopying of a late antique exemplar. 28  Hiatt, ‘The Map of Macrobius before 1100’, p. 151. Hiatt finds ‘India’ indicated on only one pre-1200 Macrobian map (Douai, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 759, fol. 109r). 29  See Hiatt, ‘The Map of Macrobius before 1100’, figs 3 (BAV, MS Palatini latini 1341, fol. 86v, 10c); 5 (Bamberg, Staatsbibl., MS Class. 38, fol. 20r, 10–11c); 6 (Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS D’Orville 77; shown here). On the manuscripts of the In somnium Scipionis, see BarkerBenfield, ‘Macrobius’, pp. 222–34. 30  Hiatt, ‘The Map of Macrobius before 1100’, figs 8 (München, Bayerische Staatsbibl., MS Clm 6362, fol. 74r, 11c); 12 (München, Bayerische Staatsbibl., MS Clm 18208, fol. 32v, 12–13c); and 13 (Bruxelles, BRB/KBB, MS 10146, fol. 109v, 9–10c). 31  Stahl, Johnson, and Burge, Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, i (1971), pp. 133–34.

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and erroneous locative detail as Solinus, followed by a short and sweeping epitome of India’s geographical characteristics and historical associations. It is a healthy land that enjoys two summers and Etesian (summer, trade) winds. Its towns number five thousand. Rivers mentioned are the Indus, Ganges, and Hipanis, this last known as the limit of Alexander’s campaign. Pliny’s lists of nations, their military capabilities, and elephants are replaced by a summary statement of the ‘great diversity’ of peoples. The only cities mentioned are two: the magnificent Palibothra of Megathsenes and Nysa, sacred to Dionysius. The mountains Maleus and Merus belong to the region; the curiosity that shadows fall on the former to the north in winter and the south in summer is noted, as is the latter’s dedication to Jupiter. From the NH, Martianus also adds mention of the Pandaeans (apparently ruled by a daughter of Hercules), the pygmies, and a short reference to those peoples at the edges of the ocean who ‘sine regibus degunt’ (‘manage without kings’).32 Martianus then adds summary information about the associated islands of Chryse and Argyre, producers of gold and silver, and somewhat confused selections on Taprobane, whose otherworldly characteristics are slightly exaggerated due to a certain amount of confusion with Pliny’s account of the nearby Seres (Chinese; De nuptiis, vi, 696, mangling NH, vi, 88). Finally, Martianus places the fish-eaters encountered by Alexander and the legendary ‘insula solis’ — Pliny’s island of the sun — in the same part of the world (De nuptiis, vi, 694–99).33 Like Solinus, Martianus has removed almost all Pliny’s information about navigation in the Indian Ocean and between the Nile, Tigris, Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Indian ports. Only heavily abridged versions of Pliny’s anecdotes about shipping passing between northern Asia and India and between Arabia and Spain remain in support of Martianus’s stated argument that the ocean surrounds the whole inhabited, known world (De nuptiis, vi, 617–22). After the relatively lengthy discussions of the Indian Ocean regions in these influential late antique pagan works, the briefer notices of Asia and the Indian 32  Martianus Capella, Martianus Capella, ed. by Willis, vi.695; Martianus Capella, The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, trans. by Stahl, Johnson, and Burge, p. 259. Possibly paraphrased directly from Pliny: see Pliny the Elder, Histoire naturelle. Livre vi, 2e partie, ed. and trans. by André and Filliozat, 23.73–74. 33  See Pliny the Elder, Histoire naturelle. Livre vi, 2e partie, ed. and trans. by André and Filliozat, 22.86. The editors, Filliozat and André, spend some time discussing possible geographical identifications for this island without resolution (p. 116, n. 4), but Akbari’s discussion of the associative geography of this legendary island is arguably more fruitful: Akbari, Idols in the East, pp. 69–72.

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Ocean region provided in Paulus Orosius’s early fifth-century Christian history, the Historiarum libri septem contra paganos, and in Isidore of Seville’s encyclopaedic Etymologiarum will not detain us long. For Orosius, an understanding of the physical world formed an essential, but ultimately subordinate, basis to a proper understanding of the unfolding of Christian history.34 The notice of India in his highly influential geographical introduction is therefore a brief but very visual sketch. It simply locates Asia in the East, surrounded on three sides by the Ocean. Eos (sometimes meaning the dawn or East, sometimes the eastern ocean) and the mouth of the Ganges are to its east; on its left the promontory of Caligardamana, and the island of Taprobane is to the south. From this point ‘oceanus Indicus uocari incipit’ (‘the Ocean is called the Indian Ocean’). On its right are the Imaui (Himalayan) mountains, Samara Promontory, and the mouths of the river Ottorogorra, after which the encircling ocean begins to be called the Serican (Chinese) ocean. Within his description of Asia, Orosius gives India first place: In his finibus India est, quae habet ab occidente flumen Indum quod Rubro mari accipitur, a septentrione montem Caucasum; reliqua ut dixi Eoo et Indico oceano terminatur. Haec habet gentes xliiii, absque insula Taprobane, quae habet decem ciuitates: et absque reliquis insulis habitabilibus plurimis. In this region lies India, the western boundary of which is the Indus River, which empties into the Red Sea, and the northern boundary of which is formed by the Caucasian range; the other sides, as I have said, are bounded by the Eastern and Indian oceans. This land has forty-four peoples, not including either those who dwell on the island of Taprobane, which has ten cities, or those who live on the many other densely populated islands.35

A couple of points about this minimalist description demand notice. Firstly, unlike Pliny, Solinus, and Martianus Capella, Orosius begins his description of the world in the East, a pattern that becomes conventional among later medieval texts, including Isidore’s Etymologiarum, in which the encyclopaedist’s account of India follows directly on from his description of Paradise. 36 34  On geography as integral to history in Orosius, see Merrills, History and Geography in Late Antiquity, pp. 35–99. See pp. 70–73 on the possible sources and closest analogues of Orosius’s geographical introduction. 35  Summarized from Orosius, Histoires, ed. by Arnaud-Lindet, i.2.2 and i.2.13–14; Orosius, Seven Books of History, trans. by Raymond, p. 35. Quotation at i.2.15–16 and p. 36. 36  Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum, ed. by Lindsay, xiv.3.5–8; all translations are from Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, ed. and trans. by Barney and others (here p. 286). Merrills notes

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Additionally, although Orosius talks about ‘many islands’, his geography is almost wholly focused on the land mass; no locations are given for most islands, nor does there remain anything of the Plinian discussions of navigation to and from India or the Indian Ocean. Finally, mirabilia are wholly absent; Orosius’s situs orbis is principally locative, in direct contrast to the associative character of the description in Solinus’s Collectanea. Isidore’s Etymologiarum, although similarly abbreviated, in some ways represents a return to Plinian organizational methods, but with a Christian slant. Thus his geographical information is dispersed across multiple books on peoples, animals, precious stones, and plants. But his summary description of India appears in the description of the world that, in Book xiv (‘De terra et partibus’; ‘Concerning the earth and its regions’), follows his account of its division into three continents and his description of Paradise. As is the pattern in the Etymologiarum, India’s name is first explained and the land’s chief characteristics sketched out: India vocata ab Indo flumine, quo ex parte occidentali clauditur. Haec a meridiano mari porrecta usque ad ortum Solis, et a septentrione usque ad montem Caucasum pervenit; habens gentes multas et oppida, insulam quoque Taprobanen gemmis et elephantis refertam, Chrysam et Argyren auro argentoque fecundas, Tilen quoque arboribus foliam numquam carentem. Habet et fluvios Gangen et Indum et Hypanem inlustrantes Indos. Terra Indiae Favonii spiritu saluberrima in anno bis metit fruges: vice hiemis Etesias patitur. Gignit autem tincti coloris homines, elephantos ingentes, monoceron bestiam, psittacum avem, ebenum quoque lignum, et cinnamum et piper et calamum aromaticum. Mittit et ebur, lapides quoque pretiosos: beryllos, chrysoprasos et adamantem, carbunculos, lychnites, margaritas et uniones, quibus nobilium feminarum ardet ambitio. Ibi sunt et montes aurei, quos adire propter dracones et gryphas et inmensorum hominum monstra inpossible est. (xiv.3.5–7) India is so called from the river Indus, by which it is bounded on the west. It stretches from the south sea to the place where the sun rises, and reaches in the north up to the Caucasus range. It has many peoples and towns, also the islands Taprobane […], full of precious stones and elephants, Chrysa […], ‘gold’ and Argyre […], rich in gold and silver (argentum), and Tile, where the trees never lose their foliage. It also has the rivers Ganges, Indus, and the Hypanis, which make India famous. that Orosius’s geography’s closest analogues, an anonymous fourth-century Divisio orbis ter­ rarum that survives in Dicuil’s ninth-century De mensura orbis terrae and the fourth- or fifthcentury anonymous Dimensuratio provinciarum, both also begin in India and work westwards: Merrills, History and Geography in Late Antiquity, p. 70.

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India’s soil, very healthful because of the breeze of the west wind, yields two harvests annually; in winter in turn it submits to the Etesian trade-winds. It produces human beings of color, huge elephants, the animal called monoceros […], the bird called parrot, a wood called ebony, and cinnamon, pepper, and sweet calamus. It also yields ivory and precious stones: beryls, chrysoprase, and diamonds, carbuncles, white marble, and small and large pearls much coveted by women of the nobility. There are also mountains of gold there, which one cannot approach because of dragons, griffins, and human monsters of immense size. (Etymologies, p. 286)

Although the information in Isidore’s description is culled from Solinus, abbreviation and recontextualization have changed its character. India is located in the far east of Asia, as is usual, but also next to Paradise, which is imagined, following Augustine, as a real place in the world, a ‘hortum deliciarum’ (‘garden of delights’) and perpetually temperate locus amoenus, the idyllic environment of classical poets.37 This locative detail combines with the nature of Isidore’s abridgements to change the way one reads his description. Following a cursory nod towards urban settlements and populations, the description dwells on the gold, silver, precious jewels, and plants produced by its mainland and islands. The new literary and geographical contexts both of mainland India and its island of Tile underscore their relationship to Paradise. Both enjoy idyllic environments: one has two harvests and, even in the winter, moderate winds, while the other has the appearance of an eternal summer. But Isidore balances this vision of a wealthy, healthy ideal environment with caution. The omission of all information about navigational connections between the Indies and the Graeco-Roman world, combined with the location of hideous human and animal monsters between the reader and the mountains of gold that are the region’s most conspicuous symbol of wealth, increases the sense of the distance and isolation of these lands. The late medieval world, then, inherited from antiquity and the early Christian era a library of representations of the Indies that characterized the region in spatially and conceptually diverse ways. In them, we find by turn Indies densely populated, sparsely populated, and barely habitable. The lure of precious goods and luxury produce stressed in some texts is tempered by the obstacles in the form of outsized human and animal monsters. Some survey geographies clearly delineate India’s location with reference to natural, conceptual, or constructed boundaries, whilst others locate the region geographi37 

Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. by Trask, pp. 195–200. On the development of notions of the location of the Terrestrial Paradise, see Scafi, Mapping Paradise, pp. 44–49.

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cally only in vague terms but endow it with abundant wonders and, by association, a marvellous identity. This marvellous identity and sense of extremity also links it associatively and geographically with Ethiopia, named by Pliny as particularly productive of marvels. The names of cities, mountains, and rivers retained by compilers often call to mind either the conquests of Alexander the Great or associations with pagan Gods: the Hipanis, famous for marking the limit of Alexander’s progress; Dionysius’s Nysa, and Jove’s Mount Meroe. The later compilers retain and sometimes, particularly in Solinus’s case, extend Pliny’s evocations of alterity in India’s environment, location, and ethnography. Crucially, however, attempts to preserve details of the navigational connections that, for Pliny, created a new sense of proximity between the Indies and the Graeco-Roman world become rarer over time.

Medieval Transformations The themes and motifs that characterized descriptions of India in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages fed into later works of very different genres. The Indies had a place in descriptions of the world in histories in the tradition of Orosius, descriptions of the universe or cosmos (imagines mundi), and encyclopaedias of Christian knowledge. But these distant lands could also form part of the setting in hagiography, legend, epic, and romance, above all, those concerned with the Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great. At the same time, the fabulous report on India produced by Megathsenes, the ambassador of Alexander’s successor to the court of Chandragupta (c. 300 bce), developed into a distinct, independent textual tradition, termed the Wonders of the East, that helped to ensure that monstrous beasts, peoples, and fabulous flora became key characteristics of India and its surrounding regions.38 Across this variety of genres and texts, two trends of particular importance emerge: the single India of the classical world splits into the shifting, multiple Indies of late medieval Europe, and these multiple Indies develop extreme, otherworldly, idyllic, and monstrous associations. The following exploration makes no claim to comprehensiveness but, rather, through a comparative approach highlights cross-fertilization among different genres and forms. The spatial representations under examination cut 38 

I do not dwell on the Wonders of the East tradition here. The essential discussions are Wittkower, ‘Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters’; and Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought.

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across Latin and vernacular texts and genres from universal history to chivalric romance, and thus they require a word of explanation. The encyclopaedias, cosmographies, and universal histories discussed in the first section have been selected on the grounds of their representativeness and cultural influence; the writings and maps discussed in later chapters often, as we shall see, draw directly or indirectly on their spatial representations. Also in focus here, however, is the distinctive, Christianized vision of the Indies that develops in the hagiography of India’s evangelist, St Thomas the Apostle, and in certain influential texts associated with the legendary priest-king Prester John. The origins and purpose of the Letter of Prester John, written around 1165 and ostensibly addressed, in most copies, to the Byzantine emperor Manuel Comnenus, have been contested, and many efforts have been made between the medieval period and now to identify both its sources and a mythologized but real historical person behind the figure of the priest-king.39 A more important object of focus here, however, is the manner in which Indian space is reconfigured in the letter and other texts in its tradition, such as the anonymous letter describing a visit of an Indian patriarch to the court of Pope Calixtus II that preceded it as well as its many later interpolations.40 Finally, the chapter also discusses the characteristics of Indian space evoked in medieval Alexander-books. Versions of Alexander of Macedon’s exploits in India (c. 326 bce) reached the Latin Middle Ages through the outline history in the Old Testament (i Maccabees 1. 1–9), through purportedly historical accounts in universal histories (e.g., Orosius), and the Augustan Gesta Alexandri magni of Quintus Curtius Rufus on the one hand, and, on the other, through the colourful Alexander Romance tradition. Alexander romances drew upon a Greek text attributed in one version to Alexander’s counsellor and companion Callisthenes, generally through the medium either of an epitome (known as the ‘Zacher Epitome’) of Julius 39 

On the history of this process, see Hamilton, ‘Continental Drift: Prester John’s Progress through the Indies’. Persuasive hypotheses regarding the Letter’s original context and purpose are presented in Hamilton, ‘Prester John and the Three Kings of Cologne’ and Franco, ‘La Construction d’une utopie’. The development of the legend is succinctly outlined in Beckingham, ‘The Achievements of Prester John’. For examples of modern historians’ identifications and research into the sources of the legend, see Nowell, ‘The Historical Prester John’; and Gumilev, Searches for an Imaginary Kingdom, trans. by Smith. For a critique of such approaches, see Ramos, Essays in Christian Mythology. For a full bibliography of recent research, see Jackson, ‘The Letter of Prester John’. 40  A detailed recent engagement that discusses Prester John’s Indies as a desert space and a utopic alternative reality appears in Uebel, Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages, pp. 85–126.

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Valerius’s fourth-century Res gestae Alexandri Macedonis or through the tenthcentury Nativitas et victoria Alexandri magni of Leo of Naples and its many derivatives, generally referred to as the Historia de proeliis.41 Leo’s version added the well-known stories of Alexander’s aerial flight and submarine voyage to the tradition. Following this lead, subsequent Latin and vernacular texts in the same tradition incorporated increasing volumes of material developed from other apocryphal sources. In this way, material such as the putative correspondence between Alexander and Dindymus, king of the virtuous Brahmans, letters from Alexander to his tutor Aristotle, journeys to Paradise and Jerusalem, and narratives of Alexander’s enclosure behind an iron gate of the evil nations (Gog and Magog) entered the tradition.42 Indeed, the episodic structures of the many vernacular Alexander romances seem to invite apocryphal and imaginative expansions. Within this complex tradition I have attempted to find a balance between texts that are influential or representative on the one hand and spatially inventive on the other. The Indies evoked in Walter of Châtillon’s twelfth-century Virgilian epic Alexandreis, based on the more sober tradition of Quintus Curtius Rufus, are therefore set alongside the more outlandish and marvellous lands sketched out in the fluid Latin Pseudo-Callisthenes tradition and in selected influential, inventive, and spatially distinctive vernacular

41 

I summarize here from Cary, The Medieval Alexander, pp.  9, 16–17, 24, 38; Bunt, Alexander the Great in the Literature of Medieval Britain, pp. 5–7; and Stoneman, ‘Primary Sources from the Classical and Early Medieval Periods’. For discussion and analysis of India in the Greek Alexander Romance, see Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought, pp. 109–20. 42  The complex textual history of the Leo’s Nativitas et victoria, the Historia de proeliis, and its interpolated reworkings is treated by Bunt, Alexander the Great in the Literature of Medieval Britain, pp. 7–10; and Stoneman, ‘Primary Sources from the Classical and Early Medieval Periods’, pp. 17–19. The twelfth-century Roman de toute chevalerie discussed below folds detail from the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle into the narrative it develops from the Zacher Epitome and often appears with interpolations from the French Roman d’Alexandre tradition: see the editors’ ‘Introduction’ in Thomas of Kent, The Anglo-Norman Alexander, ed. by Foster and Short, i (1976), 63; and Bunt, Alexander the Great in the Literature of Medieval Britain, p. 19. Manuscripts of Kyng Alisaunder, a Middle English reworking of the same poem, feature further interpolations: Bunt, Alexander the Great in the Literature of Medieval Britain, pp. 21–25. The Roman d’Alexandre, already featuring many new episodes when compared with the earliest version of the Historia de proeliis that forms its main source, often appears in manuscript with an interpolated narrative concerning Alexander’s attempt to reach the Terrestrial Paradise: Cary, The Medieval Alexander, p. 31. On patristic and medieval traditions of the virtuous Brahmans, see Hahn, ‘The Indian Tradition in Western Medieval Intellectual History’.

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romans that draw upon these.43 In looking eclectically across this variety of genres and traditions, the chapter shows how threads from the late antique and classical texts and traditions concerning the Indies were woven, in later medieval Western Europe, into distinctive spatial representations that gave new life and meaning to this inheritance. From India to the Indies Perhaps the most immediately striking change in the characterization of the southeasterly reaches of the known world between late antiquity and the later Middle Ages is the shift from the ‘India’ described and characterized in classical and late antique descriptions of the world to the multi-part complex that is the Medieval Indies. Whilst works that drew heavily on classical and late antique geographical authors, such as Honorius Augustodunensis’s Imago mundi (c. 1100) or its thirteenth-century vernacularization by Gossouin de Metz, both discussed below, continued to describe India as a single country at the eastern edge of the land mass that forms the oikoumene, in other texts this single India fractures into many, each with its own distinguishing adjective. What follows investigates the history and textual contexts of this shift in nomenclature and conceptualization before illustrating some of the ways in which writers were able to take advantage of the imaginative possibilities afforded by this plural and unfixed geographical and imaginative space. The earliest Latin text that I have encountered that witnesses the shift from a single India to the multiple Indies is a fourth-century translation of a Greek text, Expositio totivs mvndi et gentium, in which ‘India major’ is distinguished from ‘India minor’. A fifth- or sixth-century apostolic hagiography, the Passio sancti Bartholomaei, is credited with the first mention in a Latin source of the ‘three Indies’, though these do not become proverbial until much later. 44 By 1200, however, imagined divisions within the region had proliferated. Indeed, they resolutely resist the repeated attempts of scholars — even Jacques Le Goff, Charles Beckingham, and Jean Richard — to fix them to stable external, geo43 

On Walter of Châtillon, see Lafferty, ‘Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis’; on the medieval French Alexander tradition, see Harf-Lancner, ‘Medieval French Alexander Romances’. 44  Excerpts from the Expositio appear with French translation in L’Inde vue de Rome, ed. by André and Filliozat, pp. 208–09; on the Passio, see Gautier Dalché, ‘Maps in Words’, p. 232. Beckingham attributes the first such reference to Guido of Pisa, writing in 1118: Beckingham, ‘The Achievements of Prester John’, p. 17.

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graphical referents.45 As well as India Major and Minor, we find parts of the region distinguished as Prima, Secunda, and Tertia; Superior, Inferior, and Media; Ultima and Ulterior, Intra and Extra Gangem. Ethiopia, which Pliny associated with India through its production of marvels (NH, vii.2.21) and whose associations with India date back to ancient Greece, is also sometimes identified in the later Middle Ages as one of three Indies.46 While geographical texts occasionally testify to links between individual Indies and other sites of religious significance, it is principally through legends of the region’s evangelization by the apostles Thomas, Matthew, or Bartholomew that the three Indies take shape.47 Following the diffusion of versions of the apocryphal Life and Miracles of Thomas the Apostle in the Latin West, the belief that Thomas evangelized a portion of India shortly after the resurrection of Christ became pervasive.48 Indeed, according to one commentary, as part of his evangelical mission to the Indies Thomas found and baptized there the Magi or Three Kings, who, according to the Gospel of Matthew (2. 1), had brought gifts from the East to the Christ-child.49 The schematic division of India into two or three parts found in many late medieval texts appears closely related to Christian tradi45 

See, for example, attempts by Le Goff, ‘The Medieval West and the Indian Ocean’, pp. 195–96; and Beckingham, ‘The Achievements of Prester John’, pp. 17–19. Le Goff simply avoids mention of variety, whereas Beckingham imagines an originally internally consistent system corrupted ‘later, when ignorant writers drew inferences from these terms’ (p. 19). Richard asserts direct continuity between Ptolemy’s India intra Gangem and India minor and India extra Gangem and India major, though he admits ‘confusion’ about this amongst medieval travellers: Richard, ‘Les Missionaires latins dans l’Inde’, p. 231. 46  Romm points to early Greek writings that suggest that Africa and Asia are joined below the equator, an idea later espoused by Claudius Ptolemy: Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought, p. 82. See also Mayerson, ‘A Confusion of the Indias’. 47  The biblical land of Havilah, ‘where there is gold’ (Gen. 2. 10–12), is identified as a province of Greater India in Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s thirteenth-century De proprietatibus rerum and its later translations. Ophir, a land famed for its gold (i Kings 10. 11), is also placed next to it in the same work. At the time of writing there is no critical edition of the work that includes Bk xiv on the world’s regions, so I have used the thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman abridged translation, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Le Livre des regions, ed. by Pitts, pp. 21, 35. 48  See the Old Latin Passio sancti Thomae apostoli and the De miraculis beati Thomae apos­ toli, in Die alten lateinischen Thomasakten, ed. by Zelzer, pp. 3–42 and 45–77. The dates of the translations are disputed; see Die alten lateinischen Thomasakten, ed. by Zelzer, pp. xxv–xxvi; and Chadwick, ‘Review of Die alten lateinischen Thomasakten’, p. 156. 49  See Hamilton, ‘Prester John and the Three Kings of Cologne’, p. 181 and n. 29.

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tions concerning the evangelization of the East beginning, as we saw, with the Passio sancti Bartholomaei. The division between ‘upper’ (superior) and ‘lower’ (inferior) India appears in the Old Latin Passio sancti Thomae and De miraculis beati Thomae apostoli of the fourth or fifth century and is carried over into its later versions.50 India Superior is, in these works, identified as the location of many miracles as well as of the saint’s martyrdom. However, a tripartite division of India is established in other texts that relate to the tradition that the apostles Thomas, Bartholomew, and Matthew each evangelized a different division of India. A little later than the Passio sancti Bartholomei, in which the three Indies first appear, the seventh-century De historia certaminis apostolici of the Pseudo-Abdias testifies that ‘India superior’ was evangelized by Bartholomew, ‘India inferior’ by St Thomas, and ‘India tertia’ by St Matthew. 51 But links between a particular apostle and a particular India were far from stable. The thirteenth-century Otia imperialia of Gervase of Tilbury, for example, follows the same tradition as the Pseudo-Abdias but adds that Matthew evangelized ‘India meridiana que tangit Echiopiam’ (‘southern India, which touches upon Ethiopia’), a land sometimes characterized as near to the Indies, sometimes one of them, and sometimes as inhabited in part by Ethiopian Indians.52 Yet the single text that does most to popularize, right across Western Europe, the notion of a vast, diverse, tripartite Indies is surely the mid-twelfth-century Letter of Prester John. The Letter shows the influence by this time of traditions of St Thomas on the conceptualization of the Indies. The letter writer identifies himself as a fabulously wealthy priest-king who rules over pagan, Christian, and Jewish subjects in an ideal, ordered ‘tribus Indiis’ (‘three Indies’).53 Only one of these Indies, however, is distinguished by name: ‘ulteriore India, in qua corpus sancti Thomae apostoli requiescit’ (‘Ulterior India, in which rests the body 50 

See, for example, ‘Saint Thomas, Apostle’, in Jacopo da Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. by Ryan, i, 29–35 (p. 33). 51  Hamilton, ‘Prester John and the Three Kings of Cologne’, p. 172. 52  Gervase of Tilbury, Otia imperialia, ed. and trans. by Banks and Binns, pp. 182–83. On Gervase’s ‘Indian Ethiopians’, see Hamilton, ‘Continental Drift: Prester John’s Progress through the Indies’, p. 239. Details of different attributions to the same three evangelists, as well as an attempt to explain the Ethiopia problem, are given in Beckingham, ‘The Achievements of Prester John’, pp. 17, 19. 53  The Letter (Der Brief) and its interpolations are edited in Der Priester Johannes, ed. by Zarncke, and repr. in Beckingham and Hamilton, Prester John, the Mongols and the Ten Lost Tribes, pp. 872–934; for his rulership ‘in tribus Indiis’ see Der Priester Johannes, ed. by Zarncke, p. 910. It is referenced henceforth as Der Brief, with my own translations.

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of the holy apostle Thomas’; p. 910). But the letter writer goes further than this. Drawing on the traditions of St Thomas for both geography and inspiration, the priest-king claims that his palace is built ‘ad instar et similtudinem’ (‘in the semblance and likeness’; p. 919) of the heavenly palace that Thomas constructed for Gundophorus, king of the Indians. Whilst the Letter was probably responsible for spreading the idea of the ‘three Indies’ across Europe, it did little to shape readers’ sense of these as distinct regions. Other texts and maps produced around the same time, however, provide evidence of writers redefining these plural Indies associatively and imaginatively. Copies of a world map accompanying the early twelfth-century Liber floridus of Lambert of St Omer show three Indies. ‘India Ultima’ appears to be used associatively on Lambert’s map to denote the furthest reaches of the east where the Alexander of medieval romance, whose exploits are also recounted in the Liber floridus proper, encountered the Trees of the Sun and Moon that prophesied his impending death.54 Amongst the imaginative writings that I have examined, however, it is Thomas of Kent’s Roman de toute chev­ alerie (RTC), a twelfth-century Anglo-Norman poem that weaves the so-called ‘Zacher Epitome’ of Julius Valerius’s Res gestae Alexandri Macedonis together with the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, early medieval geographical sources, and a good deal of imagination, that makes the most inventive use of multiple Indies.55 The RTC, which Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas has identified as one of the most geographically aware of the French Alexander adaptations, considerably expands upon and modifies not just the narrative line of its main source texts but also their geography and spatial associations.56 As in its main Latin narrative source, the ‘Zacher Epitome’, Alexander marches eastwards following his defeat of Darius. However, not simply a king of India, as in the ‘Epitome’, Thomas’s 54 

Leiden, Universiteitsbibl., MS Voss. lat. F. 31, fols 175v–176r. Reproduced in Hoogvliet, Pictura et scriptura, pp. 356–57, and discussed at pp. 139–40. The map is discussed and its legends transcribed in full in Lecoq, ‘La Mappemonde du Liber Floridus’. Lambert’s idiosyncratic treatment of Alexander in the Liber floridus is discussed by Akbari, Idols in the East, pp. 77–89. See also ‘India Superior’, ‘India Inferior’, and ‘India Ultima’ in the so-called (misleadingly) ‘Jerome’ map of Asia: BL, MS Addit. 10049, fol. 64, reproduced and discussed in Edson, Mapping Time and Space, pp. 26–30. The legends are transcribed in Miller, Mappaemundi, pp. 3, 1–21. 55  On the sources of the poem, see Cary, The Medieval Alexander, pp. 35–36; and Bunt, Alexander the Great in the Literature of Medieval Britain, pp. 19–20. 56  Gaullier-Bougassas, Les Romans d’Alexandre, pp. 239–47. For a discussion of the use of cardinal directions in the Roman, see Akbari, Idols in the East, pp. 90–102.

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Porus is king of ‘Inde majur’ who commands the support of barons and allies in India, Ethiopia, and distant oceanic islands.57 Later, the poet explains — with a misleading reference to Solinus — that En la fin d’orient, de Inde i ad deus paire Inde superior e Inde la maire Mais ensemble merchent, cum Solin est viaire. (RTC, laisse 242, ll. 4601–03) At the end of the East, there are two equal Indies: Upper India and India the Greater. But they share a border, as it seems to Solinus.

The poet makes use of this associative and relational geography to draw out and stage the process of Alexander’s conquest. When Alexander conquers ‘Inde majur’, represented in the poem as just one part of Porus’s domains, he enters Porus’s palace and discovers its magnificence and wealth:58 ‘Tiel realme ne fut,’ ceo dit a ses privez, ‘Si riche ne si bon, ne ja tant honorez. Ja ne m’en partiray ainz qe ere roy coronez E de Inde superior emperere clamez’. (RTC, laisse 230, ll. 4413–16) ‘Such a kingdom never existed’, he said to his aides, ‘so rich nor so good, nor at any time so honourable. I will not leave before I am crowned king, and proclaimed emperor of Upper India.’

Here and later in the poem (laisse 240, ll. 4553–56), success in ‘Inde majur’ encourages Alexander to aspire to conquer its more distant, greater neighbour, of which he will be not just king but emperor.59 ‘L’Inde majur’ draws upon the Plinian traditions discussed above of India’s wealth and populousness. The only absolute geographical information readers are ever given about it is that it is 57 

Valerius, Epitome, ed. by Zacher, Bk iii, paragraph 2. The RTC is quoted throughout from Thomas of Kent, The Anglo-Norman Alexander, ed. by Foster and Short, i (1976), with my own translations (here lines 3962, 3994–95, 4008). 58  The Anglo-Norman Dictionary (Version 2) lists ‘mair’ and ‘majur’ as variant forms of the same word: Anglo-Norman Dictionary2, , ‘mair’ (2) [accessed 20 May 2013]. 59  ‘Superior’ seems to be used in the sense of ‘more distant’ when, later in the poem, Alexander and Porus return to it following expeditions to Taprobane and the Terrestrial Paradise: Thomas of Kent, The Anglo-Norman Alexander, ed. by Foster and Short, i (1976), l. 5627.

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‘vers septentrion’ (‘towards the north’; laisse 343, ll. 5638–39) of Taprobane. ‘Inde superiore’ — inconsistently distinguished from ‘l’Inde majur’ throughout the poem — in this instance denotes a land above and beyond it geographically and in magnificence. In a further departure from its main narrative source (according to which Porus has now been killed by the conqueror), the RTC at this point also tells of the Indian king’s escape into ‘Inde la dereine’ (‘ultimate India’). ‘Inde la dereine’ is a region of ‘granz illes foreines e […] deserz sotils’ (‘great, strange islands and […] desolate deserts’), reached by a ‘dotus’ (‘dangerous’) path, travellers along which risk being devoured by serpents and dragons.60 Thomas locates this ultimate India neither in terms of cardinal direction points nor cosmology but instead gives a set of extreme attributes. Deserts suggest its extreme heat, while islands suggest proximity to the ocean at the edge of the oikoumene, and monsters suggest lands beyond human habitation and control. Such characteristics recall those of the lands that, in the cosmology of Pomponius Mela and Macrobius, border the ocean under the Torrid Zone. Thomas of Kent’s creative redeployment of the multiple Indies that were emerging by the twelfth century is unusual amongst Latin and vernacular Alexander books. Nonetheless, it draws attention to the fact that, in defiance of all scholarly efforts to pin them down to stable external referents, multiple medieval Indies were constituted in provisional, contingent ways, sometimes with reference to their broader cosmological context, but often associatively, according to need, or through relationships to one another.

Marvellous Medieval Indies Medieval writers drew upon and developed the physical and metaphorical associations of extremity found in late antique and early medieval sources on India and the Indies. Michael Uebel has suggested that ‘[i]n great part, the ideological meaning of India in the Middle Ages depended on its location at the margins of the known world’, while, in a recent discussion of India and Ethiopia in the Prester John tradition, Mary Baine Campbell has termed India the ‘zone of the limit’.61 Here, I explore how, in cosmological and geographical texts produced between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, we see the Indies form 60  Thomas of Kent, The Anglo-Norman Alexander, ed. by Foster and Short, i (1976), laisse 232, ll. 4437–44 and 4447–48. The editors’ emendations to ‘dereine’ are accepted here. 61  Uebel, Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages, p. 21; Campbell, ‘Asia, Africa, Abyssinia’, p. 29.

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a site of negotiation between conflicting positive and negative conceptualizations of their marginal location. In the legendary and romance traditions that develop particularly over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, writers take yet further the notion of the Indies as a space of monstrous and marvellous extremes. At the edge of the world in a literal and metaphorical sense, the Indies also accommodate liminal sites that give rise to mystical human experiences and invite allegorical interpretations. The Indies and the Edge in Medieval Geographical Writings In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, geographical writing almost invariably appeared in the context of larger historical, cosmographical, or encyclopaedic works. In these, we tend to find the Indies situated, as in their classical, late antique, and early medieval forebears, in the furthest eastern reaches of the known world. In a description heavily influenced by Isidore of Seville, whom he often quotes verbatim, influential thirteenth-century encyclopaedist Vincent de Beauvais describes India as ‘a meridiano mari porrecta (‘extended from the southern sea’) and stretching ‘vsque ad ortum solis et a septentrione, vsque ad montem Caucasum’ (‘as far as the rising of the sun and, in the north, as far as Mount Caucasus’).62 Whilst Vincent’s description conjures an image of a vast land stretching into the rising sun, Gervase of Tilbury, writing an educational entertainment for the young Holy Roman Emperor in the early thirteenth century, refers to an India ‘Eoo et Indico occeano terminatur ex uno latere, ex altero [i.e., in the north] regione tenebrarum’ (‘bounded by the eastern and the Indian oceans on one side, and by the region of darkness on the other’).63 Yet conflicting interpretations of what it means to be located on the edge emerge from different geographical works. On the one hand, the Indies were bordered to the east and south by the ocean that demarcated the edge of the oikoumene. This ocean, as Gautier Dalché has observed, tended to be regarded with suspicion as fundamentally ‘other’ to the circle of dry lands that, through physics and the grace of God, had emerged from it to provide a habitation for men.64 On the other hand, in the many Christian geographical texts that drew upon Isidore’s Etymologiarum, the east was not only the edge of the world but 62 

Vincent de Beauvais, Speculum historiale, Bk i, p. 24, Ch. 64. Gervase of Tilbury, Otia imperialia, ed. and trans. by Banks and Binns, pp. 182–83. 64  On the alterity of the ocean in medieval Europe, see Gautier Dalché, ‘Comment penser l’Océan?’. 63 

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also the locus of its beginnings in the Garden of Eden. In some texts, indeed, India’s privileged proximity to this key biblical locus ensures that its extremity is constructed in a quite different way. Perhaps of primary significance amongst later medieval texts that locate India in relation to the Terrestrial Paradise is Honorius Augustodunensis’s influential Imago mundi. Like Isidore, Honorius places India close to Paradise, where it is watered by one of Eden’s four rivers, the Phison (Ganges). 65 But Honorius is careful to institute a separation between Paradise and India. In a passage that has clear parallels with Isidore’s explanation for India’s inaccessible mountains of gold, Paradise is separated from India by ‘loca multa deserta et invia ob diversa serpentium et ferarum animalia’ (‘many places both uninhabitable and impassable on account of various snakes and wild animals’).66 As a widely read schoolroom cosmography, Honorius’s Imago mundi influenced many other cosmographical and encyclopaedic works, including the Image du Monde of Gossouin and exiled Florentine Brunetto Latini’s Livres dou tresor, both thirteenth-century French vernacularizations. But these works do not wholly respect the distinction that Honorius creates between the Indies and the Terrestrial Paradise. After situating India next to the deserts that separate the Terrestrial Paradise from the inhabited world and describing Probane (Taprobane), a fertile island that enjoys two summers each year and is rich in precious metals and stones, the prose redaction of Gossouin’s Image du Monde draws the conclusion that ‘Si y a mainz autres lieus si douz et si delitables et si espirituels que, se uns hons estoiet dedenz, il diroit que ce seroit paradis’ (‘In that place there are many other places so sweet and delightful and so spiritual that, if one were in them, one would say that it were paradise’).67 Latini, though, goes one step further: En Inde est li paradis terrestres, ou il a de totes mainieres de fust et des arbres et des pomes, et de toz les fruis ki sont en terre, et li arbres de vie ke Dieus vea au premier home. Et si n’i a froit ne chaut, mes perpetuel atemprance.68

65 

own. 66 

Honorius Augustodunensis, Imago mundi, ed. by Flint, pp. 49–53. Translations are my

Honorius Augustodunensis, Imago mundi, ed. by Flint, p. 52. Gossouin de Metz, L’Image du monde, ed. by Prior, p. 110 (my translations). 68  Latini, Livres dou tresor, ed. by Carmody, Bk. i, Ch. 122, p. 114 (my translations). 67 

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In India is the terrestrial paradise, where there are all kinds of woods and trees and of apples, and of all the fruits that there are in the world, and the tree of life that God forbade the first man to touch. And it is neither cold nor hot there, but perpetually temperate.

In the Tresor, India, a land whose paradisiacal associations are implied in so many texts, has subsumed paradise, although Brunetto is careful to make clear that it is inaccessible to humans since man first sinned. While India’s links to Paradise are explicitly asserted in Gossouin’s and Latini’s texts, other, less favourable associations of extremity undercut evocations of its ideal environment in both texts, as well as in the descriptio orbis in Vincent’s near-contemporary Speculum historiale. Although Gossouin explicitly likens India’s sweet, delectable and spiritual spaces to Paradise, he also fills a chapter on the ‘diversites d’Ynde’ with tales, drawn from sources such as Solinus, Honorius, Isidore, Alexander romances, and Gervase’s Otia, of the monstrous and strange behaviours and appearances of peoples. Alongside Gog and Magog — transported from northern Asia — Gossouin also places there the pygmies, ‘Groing et Bragman’ (the virtuous Brahmans), peoples of great beauty who throw themselves onto pyres for love of the afterlife, peoples who kill, cook, and eat their aged parents, sun-worshippers, and a great variety of beast-human hybrids.69 Gossouin creates an India that is a pastiche of idyllic, exotic, but often monstrous extremes. Latini’s Tresor, like Pomponius Mela’s De Chorographia, also implies at one point that the combination of ocean and excessive heat to which the seas around the Indies are subjected bring particular wonders and dangers. Because of the strength of the heat, the sea ‘es parties d’Inde […] croist et descroit merveilleusement’ (‘in the regions of India […] this sea rises and drops in level in a marvellous way’).70 Following his source in Isidore of Seville, Vincent de Beauvais similarly sets up a parallel structure in which India’s fertility, healthfulness, and wealth are balanced by warnings of fearsome beasts, such as the ‘dracones et gryphas et immensorum hominum monstra’ (‘dragons and gryphons and monstrosities of enormous men’) that prevent one from reaching its mountains of gold.71 Influential geographical descriptions such as these, then, characterize the Indies as extreme, but not 69 

Gossouin de Metz, L’Image du monde, ed. by Prior, pp. 111–13. Comparison shows that it has been greatly expanded from Honorius Augustodunensis, Imago mundi, ed. by Flint, pp. 53–54. 70  Latini, Livres dou tresor, ed. by Carmody, Bk i, Ch. 124, p. 121. 71  Vincent de Beauvais, Speculum historiale, Bk i, p. 24, Ch. 64.

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always in consistent ways. The extreme characteristics of the space may initially be determined by the extremity of its physical location both in the healthful east, near the Terrestrial Paradise, and bordering on the torrid south. Yet, having provided the environmental basis for the characterization of India as extreme, location then recedes in importance as a determining characteristic of Indian space. In Gossouin’s Image, India is associatively stretched to incorporate monstrous peoples such as Gog and Magog, normally placed in northern Asia, and marvellous creatures such as the Phoenix, normally placed in its native Phoenicia.72 India is remade associatively, rather than through location, as a space for all that is monstrous and strange. Extremity, Alterity, and Liminality in Literature and Legend Alongside the geographical sections of cosmological, historical, and encyclopaedic works produced around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the same period also witnessed the development of distinctive Indian imaginative landscapes in Alexander-books and the corpus of literature associated with the legendary priest-king, Prester John. In this ‘imaginative geography’, writes Uebel, India is endowed with ‘mythical status as a place embracing two extremes: Earthly Paradise and a sort of hell on earth’.73 The link between this characterization and that of the geographical writings discussed in the previous section is clear. However, unlike the geographical writings that describe, summarize, or collate, these imaginative writings explore what it might mean to inhabit or encounter a landscape of monstrous and marvellous extremes. Whilst the Alexander-books, on the one hand, imagine the Indies as a site of desired or actual conquest, of military encounters with hostile forces or monstrous beasts, the Letter of Prester John and its interpolations, on the other hand, set out a vision of a seemingly ideal society, under the rule of a Christian priest-king, in an environment where the wondrous becomes almost commonplace. In both traditions, a vision emerges of the Indies as not only a space of marvellous and monstrous extremes but also a site of places on earth that seem to bear the touch of the divine or promise access to a transcendent reality. 72 

For Gog and Magog, see Gossouin de Metz, L’Image du monde, ed. by Prior, p. 111; for the phoenix, see p. 121. 73  Uebel proposes that India served in the Middle Ages as a ‘neutral space’ where such extremes can coexist and contradictions be provisionally resolved: Uebel, Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages, p. 20.

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The Alexander-books that circulated around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are so varied in sources and content that, beyond the basics that Alexander of Macedon campaigned in India, there defeating a great Indian ruler named Porus, their Indian episodes rarely agree on anything. In some versions of the story, drawing on Leo of Naples, Alexander attacks India in revenge for Porus’s support of his enemy Darius, whilst in others, such as the twelfth-century Alexandreis of Walter of Châtillon, who reworks Quintus Curtius Rufus’s late Roman history, Alexander simply desires dominion over the whole world and, as we shall see, others beyond.74 The two most widely reworked medieval Latin sources, the so called ‘Zacher’ Epitome (of Julius Valerius’s Res Gestae) and the Nativitas et victoria Alexandri magni, both narrate Porus’s death in single combat at Alexander’s hands and the subsequent surrender of his peoples, whilst some later reworkings of these, in common with Walter’s Alexandreis, see Alexander show chivalric magnanimity in allowing the defeated Porus to live and returning his lands to him.75 Indeed, in the twelfth-century Roman d’Alexandre of Alexandre de Paris and Anglo-Norman Roman de toute chevalerie (RTC), the Indian king agrees to act as a kind of tour guide to his conqueror, guiding him through his lands as far as the Pillars of Hercules in the furthest east.76 There is variety not only in the narrative arcs of these texts but also in their visions of Indian space. Walter of Châtillon, following Quintus Curtius, narrates Alexander’s battles with Porus and other Indian peoples and his plans to breach the limits of the known world. Works in the Alexander romance tradition add encounters with marvellous beasts and races, mystical experiences, and philosophical debates with virtuous pagans. Yet, amongst all these variations, a core of common themes and concerns emerge. Without doubt, the Indies are the edge of the world in these texts. But they are also a site where 74  For this episode in Leo’s Nativitas et victoria, see Leo of Naples, Der Alexanderroman des Archipresbyters Leo, ed. by Pfister, iii, 102. See Alexander’s speech in Walter of Châtillon, Alexandreis, ed. by Colker, ix, ll.  546–77; and Walter of Châtillon, Alexandreis, trans. by Pritchard, pp. 214–15. 75  See Leo of Naples, Der Alexanderroman des Archipresbyters Leo, ed. by Pfister iii, 106; and Valerius, Epitome, ed. by Zacher, Part iii (here p. 54). Translations are my own. For Walter of Châtillon, I refer throughout to Walter of Châtillon, Alexandreis, ed. by Colker; and Walter of Châtillon, Alexandreis, trans. by Pritchard (noted in text simply as Pritchard, with page number); here ix, ll. 317–25, and Pritchard, p. 207. 76  All quotations are from Alexandre de Paris, The Medieval French Roman d’Alexandre, ed. by Armstrong and others, and translations are my own (here Branch iii, laisse 139); Thomas of Kent, The Anglo-Norman Alexander, ed. by Foster and Short, i (1976), laisses 318–19.

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boundaries are tested and challenged, affirmed and breached. Not merely the edge of the physical oikoumene, the Indies become home to sites of transcendence, where the physical and metaphysical touch. Furthermore, Alexander’s twin desires to probe the secrets of the furthest reaches of the world and to rule over these also raise the spectre of the relationship so controversially postulated by Edward Said with reference to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century orientalism: that between the desire for knowledge and the impulse to dominate space and peoples in the world.77 In the high-medieval Alexander-books there is invariably a strong sense of the extremity of the regions through which Alexander travels, but this is conjured and built upon in different ways. Walter of Châtillon’s Latin epic conceives of India as geographically extreme — lying beneath the rising sun to the east and climbing towards the sky to the south — but nevertheless populated by ordinary peoples who submit, initially or eventually, to Alexander’s rule (Alexandreis, ix, ll. 9–13 and 326–40). But India then becomes a springboard from which the conqueror contemplates launching a more ambitious campaign, one that breaks the established boundary of the oikoumene: the ocean. From India, Alexander wishes ‘[o]rbis in extremas conuertere prelia gentes | Oceanique suis populos adiungere castris’ (‘to turn the fighting against the furthest nations, and to add the peoples of the Ocean to his camp’: ix, ll. 332–33; Pritchard, p. 207). It is these desires, to dominate the peoples of the ocean (ix, ll. 501–14) and, when he has subordinated the whole world, even ‘Antipodum penetrare sinus aliamque uidere | [n]aturam’ (‘to penetrate the recesses of the antipodes and see another universe’: ix, ll. 569–70; Pritchard, p. 215), which rouse nature’s wrath against the conqueror and bring about his ultimate downfall (Book x). The ocean forms a barrier in versions of the Alexander Romance, too, but one that Alexander famously breaches. Leo of Naples relates how, having defeated Porus and traversed the regions of monstrous beasts described in his letter to Aristotle, Alexander reaches the ‘fines Oceani maris, in quo sunt cardines caeli’ (‘the edge of the Ocean, in which are the doors of heaven’; Alexanderroman, p. 111). Hearing voices speaking Greek from its depths, a soldier attempts to enter the water, whereupon a monster arises to drag twenty of Alexander’s men into its depths. Later in the same romance and those that draw on it, of course, Alexander famously triumphs even over the ocean, visiting its floor in a specially constructed diving machine (p. 127).

77 

Said, Orientalism, passim, e.g., p. 2.

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Spectacular breaches of limits occur in some of the vernacular Alexanderbooks too. In the RTC, once Alexander has defeated Porus and, in an elaborate ritual described in feudal terms, returned the king’s lands to him (laisses 315–16), he asks a service.78 Porus must show him the country as far as ‘le fin de l’Orient’ (‘the end of the orient’; laisse 318). Porus, now Alexander’s vassal, conducts him through an extreme landscape of deep valleys, steep hills, narrow passes, fords, and burnt deserts (laisse 319, ll. 5370–71) as far as the signs (‘mercs’) that the demigod Hercules set in the sea to mark out the geographical limits of his achievements. Intercepted by an old man there, Alexander is told of ‘riches idles’ (‘rich islands’, l. 5420) situated in the ocean, never yet subjected to kings (l. 5424). The chief of these islands, Taprobane, he says, was conquered neither by Liber Pater (Dionysius) nor Hercules (laisse 326, ll. 5436–37). Alexander swiftly takes the opportunity to outstrip his legendary and divine predecessors (laisse 331), landing at Taprobane and receiving tribute (laisse 332, l. 5502), before pressing on to the ‘mer d’orient’ (‘eastern sea’; l. 5504). Following these adventures in the furthest Indies, Alexander returns with Porus, before eventually heading off to seek ‘les idles, les regnés e les pans/ Desques en Ethiope ou est li occians’ (‘islands, kingdoms, and regions as far as Ethiopia, where the ocean is’; laisse 367, ll. 5915–16). The Roman is consumed with Alexander’s efforts to reach and exceed the boundaries of human endeavour: to reach the encircling ocean at the edge of the known world; to receive tribute from unsubjugated islands; and to exceed the limits set by Hercules. Alongside accounts of Alexander’s efforts to breach physical limits, the romances also incorporate episodes in which the conqueror’s rights of domination are questioned and challenged. Sometimes this is through direct challenge, but sometimes it is through experiences in metaphysically liminal or transcendental sites that resist conquest, but invite allegorization. Philosophical challenges to Alexander’s programme of conquest in the Indies are posed by the gymnosophists and the Brahmans. As Thomas Hahn has shown, in the Middle Ages the Brahmans, often conflated with the gymnosophists, become for philosophers and theologians an exemplary people, situated prior to (or beyond the reaches of ) evangelization, whose exceptional virtue and obedience to the 78 

On the variety of ways in which the discourses of fiefs and vassalage are deployed in Alexandre de Paris’s contemporary Roman d’Alexandre, and their implications for historiographical debates on the existence and nature of ‘feudalism’, see White, ‘Giving Fiefs and Honor’. The relationship between Alexander and Porus represented in the RTC follows what White and others (e.g., Ganshof, Feudalism, trans. by Grierson) term the ‘contractual model’ (p. 128), in which a fief is given in return for future service.

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natural law nonetheless may arguably merit entry to heaven. 79 A lesson to Christians in exemplary and theological literature, in some Alexander-books, these remote, virtuous peoples themselves teach the conqueror a lesson. 80 In Leo’s Nativitas et victoria, the gymnosophists refuse to leave their simple huts and caves and, when asked by Alexander to name their desire, point out the limits of his power by asking the one gift he cannot give: immortality (Alexanderroman, pp. 106–07). In many versions, Alexander sets up camp opposite the island of the Brahmans, virtuous pagans who feel great love for a single Creator and desire for, as Thomas of Kent puts it, ‘Paradis et la glorie devine’ (‘Paradise and heavenly glory’; RTC, laisse 368, l. 5928). The apocryphal correspondence between Dindymus, king of the Brahmans, and Alexander is often interpolated into the narratives of later vernacularizations. One outcome of this decision is that the entire ethos of military conquest and domination is debated during a long, thought-provoking caesura in the action, after which the Brahmans remain an unconquered people. In the romances, Alexander’s capacity to dominate wholly the Indies is also challenged through experiences in liminal or transcendent locations. In Leo’s Nativitas et victoria, Alexander finds a great mountain, which he ascends with the aid of golden chains. In a temple at the top, he finds a man dressed in white, bedecked with gold and precious stones, whom he worships (Alexanderroman, p. 112). Many vernacular versions, of course, describe the conqueror’s encounter in an enclosed garden with the Trees of the Sun and Moon who prophesy, in Indian and Greek, his forthcoming betrayal and death (RTC, laisses 466–74). An interpolation in a later manuscript of the RTC, however, also narrates an arrogant Alexander’s attempt, following his success in Taprobane, to extract tribute from the Terrestrial Paradise (RTC, laisses 337–41). Instead, the conqueror receives only a stone from an old man, and through his teaching realizes his own mortality, the impermanence of his achievements, and that ‘cele terre [i.e., Paradise] n’est pas moy, ne jamés ne serra’ (‘this land is not mine and never will be’; l. 5611). But perhaps particularly worthy of mention, even amongst the many liminal spatial experiences that permeate the Alexanderbooks, is the hero’s encounter in the Valley of Shadows in the twelfth-century Roman d’Alexandre of Alexandre de Paris. This episode exemplifies particularly 79 

Hahn, ‘The Indian Tradition in Western Medieval Intellectual History’, pp. 229–31. But see Warren on the French prose Roman d’Alexandre, which Warren argues to be a more stridently pro-conquest text in which Brahmans’ critiques of Alexander are censored: Warren, ‘Take the World by Prose’, p. 150. 80 

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well how poets could exploit the figurative potential of such liminal locations and encounters. In the Roman, Alexander leads his troops into a seemingly fair Indian valley, more beautiful than anyone has ever seen.81 Upon riding around this ‘val tenebror’ (‘valley of shadows’: l. 2530), he discovers that there is no exit. Eventually, he sees an ancient stone on which is written: Que se tuit cil du mont ierent el val entré Des le premerain home que Dieus ot figuré, N’en istroient il mais en trestout lor aé, Se uns seus n’I remaint bonement de son gré; Et se uns i remaint, li autre erent sauvé Et par un tout seul home seront tuit delivré. (ll. 2259–64) That if all those in the world since the first man that God made enter this valley, none will leave it again in all their life, unless one man alone remains of his own good will. And if one single man remains there, the others will be saved, and by one man alone all will be delivered.

A type of Christ and yet no Christ, Alexander escapes the valley of ‘dolor mortal’ (‘mortal suffering’), taking from his experience a moral warning (l. 2876). The associations between the Indies, extremity, and liminality are particularly resonant in textual traditions associated with the legend of Prester John. From its earliest literary incarnations, the empire of Prester John benefits from its proximity to Paradise. In the anonymous report of the visit of the Patriarch of the Indians to the court of Calixtus II in 1122 (De adventu patriarchae Indorum ad Urbem sub Calisto II), from which the legend is thought to have developed, the paradisiacal river Phison runs through Hulna, the Indian royal capital, bearing the gold and precious stones that make the country so famously wealthy.82 In the immensely widespread Letter of Prester John itself (c. 1165), these associations are developed. The land, which stretches as far as the rising sun in the East, flows with milk and honey. One province is watered by a river of paradise, the Ydonus, in which precious stones are found. In another, no poisonous animals are able to live.83 But these sources build on the paradisiacal associations of ideal climate and environment, developing the idea that a 81 

Alexandre de Paris, The Medieval French Roman d’Alexandre, ed. by Armstrong and others, Branch iii, laisses 148–63. 82  References are to De adventu patriarchae Indorum, in Der Priester Johannes, ed. by Zarncke (here p. 839). Translations are my own. 83  Der Brief, in Der Priester Johannes, ed. by Zarncke, pp. 910, 912.

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perfect Christian society occupies this paradisiacal landscape. In the land of the Patriarch of the Indians, ‘nullus erroneus aut infidelis’ (‘there is no heretic or unbeliever’), whilst in Prester John’s Indies, people are universally hospitable to guests and pilgrims, there are no poor, no thieves, and neither greed nor social divisions exist.84 Moral virtues are perfected here: none can lie, no one is an adulterer, and vice is utterly absent. And, in a comment that reflects critically on the secular-ecclesiastical conflicts and divisions of twelfth-century Europe, offices of Church and state are said to be harmoniously united in the persons of the priest-king himself, his servants, and administrators.85 Although the letter writer admits the presence in his kingdoms of deserts, uninhabitable mountains, marvellous beasts, and monstrous races (pp. 914, 911), these are counteracted by the Letter’s overwhelming and detailed vision of religious and societal perfection. The uninterpolated Letter of Prester John is principally concerned with the order of an imagined Christian society. Yet it also suggests that a place so physically close to Paradise must surely enjoy the physical benefits of a prelapsarian world; the priest-king’s land boasts the fountain of youth, which will keep a drinker who fasts before tasting it healthy and permanently at the age of thirtytwo (p. 913). Later interpolators in the tradition reconceptualize this ideal space in yet more inventive ways. One interpolator, dubbed ‘E’ by Zarncke, gives life to the fantasy of a work-free existence, describing a food that needs no cooking, a stone that remains permanently hot and thus makes excellent cooking vessels, and a spring that supplies water that will never stop boiling.86 Others, however, imagine that this geographically extreme space, so close to the Terrestrial Paradise, must enjoy manifest, tangible connections to the divine. The De adventu Patriarchae Indorum vividly depicts the scene of the annual 84 

De adventu, in Der Priester Johannes, ed. by Zarncke, p. 839; Der Brief, in Der Priester Johannes, ed. by Zarncke, pp. 915–16. 85  Der Brief, in Der Priester Johannes, ed. by Zarncke, p. 923. Hamilton sees this as evidence that the letter was the product of the circle of Frederick Barbarossa during his support of the antipope Paschal III, arguing that the author’s aim was ‘to show that Frederick’s concept of church-state relations, unlike that of Alexander III, produced harmony in the Christian World’: Hamilton, ‘Prester John and the Three Kings of Cologne’, p. 186. 86  Der Brief, in Der Priester Johannes, ed. by Zarncke, Interpolation E, p. 922. Zarncke does not give a date range for this interpolator’s work, but the manuscripts in which his interpolations are found date to at least the thirteenth century: pp. 901–02. However, Zarncke worked with only a small sample of manuscripts of the Letter. His method of distinguishing between Ur-text and interpolations has been critiqued and problems with some of his datings have been identified: Ramos, Essays in Christian Mythology, pp. 32–33.

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feast of St Thomas at the apostle’s church, upon which the miraculously reanimated corpse of the apostle officiates at the Eucharist. Thomas’s divinely controlled hand withdraws the host from any ‘infidelis vel erroneus seu alia peccati macula infectus’ (‘an unbeliever, or a heretic or a person infected by another stain of sin’).87 Another interpolator adding to the Letter of Prester John tradition (‘B’) builds on the terrestrial-divine connection forged through the king’s palace, an earthly copy of that built by St Thomas in heaven. According to ‘B’, Prester John’s father, Quasideus, built a palace for his son in accordance with a divine revelation received before John’s birth.88 The Indies of the Letter of Prester John are, like those of the vernacular Alexander-books, punctuated by places with otherworldly or liminal characteristics. Some of the most striking are to be found in the letter’s many imaginative interpolations. ‘E’ tells of a great plain called Rimoc, fashioned high, flat, and four-sided by the Indian king Porus and featuring many fountains, sweet rivers, odiferous herbs, and a single great stone. On the stone grows ‘tanta et talis arbor, quanta et qualis numquam fuit visa a principio mundi, nec erit usque ad finem’ (‘such a great tree as was never seen since the beginning of the world, nor will be to the end’).89 Merely the contemplation and scent of the fruit of this tree can heal the sick, make the weak strong, feed the hungry, and quench thirst. The same interpolator also describes ‘quandam insulam magnam et inhabitabilem’ situated ‘[i]n extremis mundi partibus versus meridiem’, on which manna rains down twice a year (‘a certain great, uninhabitable island’; ‘in the furthest regions of the world towards the south’; p. 913). Those ambiguously described as ‘circumhabitantibus’ (‘living nearby’) collect this, live near-perfect lives, drink regularly from the fountain of youth, and are free of the need to plough, sow, or harvest. When, after five hundred years, they finally die, their bodies are borne to an island where they will hang from trees, uncorrupted until the coming of the Antichrist. This interpolator takes us full circle. Prester John’s Indies are conceived here not just as influenced by the proximity of Eden, the place of the world’s beginning, but also as awaiting its temporal end.

87 

De adventu, in Der Priester Johannes, ed. by Zarncke, p. 842. Der Brief, in Der Priester Johannes, ed. by Zarncke, Interpolation B, p. 920. Zarncke finds this interpolation in some twelfth-century manuscripts: p. 884. 89  Der Brief, in Der Priester Johannes, ed. by Zarncke, p. 921, interpolation E. 88 

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Conclusion Many features of classical and late antique descriptions of India and its surrounding oceanic region are gradually lost through the Middle Ages. Yet this is not a story of medieval degeneration and fragmentation from classical systems of knowledge. Instead, it is a story of meaningful changes in spatial representation that are linked to shifts in the conceptualization of Indian space. Topoi established in the classical period and late antiquity recur throughout the Middle Ages: the extremity of India; its association with the healthful east and the deserted, wild, ocean-bordered south; and its status on the borderline between the known world and the Torrid Zone or other worlds. The Indies’ association with mirabilia, already present well before Pliny, becomes predominant, even proverbial. But these topoi are remade, not simply reused. Among the changes in spatiality we see in many later medieval texts is the metamorphosis of geographical extremity into metaphysical liminality. The Indies touch not just the physical edge of the world but also its metaphysical borders, verging on the divine, the otherworldly, and the eternal. At the same time, the imaginative sacred landscape of the pagan late Roman world, associated with Hercules, Jupiter, and Dionysius, is partially overwritten by a Christian imaginative landscape; the Indies are close to the Terrestrial Paradise, watered by a paradisiacal river, and marked out by the traces of the Apostle Thomas and Prester John. In Alexander-books, the conqueror’s itinerary is extended, with almost infinite elasticity, through mystically allusive or figuratively Christian landscapes and environments. Indeed, in the ‘Valley of Shadows’ episode of the Roman d’Alexandre, Christian history and theology are written literally into the landscape; Alexander unwittingly both reads and prefigures God’s plan for humankind in the promise, engraved on a rock, that ‘by one single man all will be delivered’. And finally, as though fracturing under the stress of these multiple conflicting demands on a single geographical term, the classical world’s single India becomes a loosely defined bipartite or tripartite ‘Indies’, sometimes taking in Ethiopia with which it is so often associated and sometimes — as in the Roman de toute chevalerie — stretching out to encompass the many ‘idres’ (‘islands’) in the ocean that surrounds the edge of the world. Amongst the later texts, a tension emerges between the Indies as known and unknown, conquered and unconquerable. On the one hand, the region is marked out by the physical and toponymic traces of Alexander the Great. In Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis and romances like the RTC, the conqueror is explicitly motivated by the twin desires to break through existing boundaries and acquire knowledge of places unknown. But this desire to know is bound

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up with the desire to dominate. The Alexander of the Alexandreis wishes to bring to heel even the peoples of the ocean and the antipodes, whilst the hero of the RTC wishes to outperform Hercules in exacting tribute from the island of Taprobane. The twelfth-century RTC and related texts, moreover, tie Porus, India’s most powerful king, to Alexander in a bond of feudal obligation, using legal terminology to describe, at the point of conquest, the confiscation and subsequent grant of Porus’s lands. 90 Through these imagined scenes, Porus’s kingdoms and even Taprobane become part of the ‘proto-Roman’ Alexander’s inheritance, to which Western European poets may stake an imaginative claim. In parallel to what we might otherwise be tempted to see as an assertion of historical dominance over the Indies, on the other hand, we also find a tendency to represent the Indies as a space that can never be fully known or completely conquered. Prester John asserts God-given authority over his own lands in the Letter. But nevertheless, the extreme, liminal, allusive sites of the Letter and its interpolations, with their obviously figurative and mystical connotations, resist being fully known. The same is true for the liminal, figurative locations in the Alexander-books. Episodes such as the conqueror’s attempt to exact tribute from the Terrestrial Paradise, his experience in the Valley of Shadows and the Garden of the Trees of the Sun and Moon aim to teach the limits not only of Alexander’s dominion in the Indies, but of man’s dominion on earth.

90 

For example, the RTC narrates how Alexander is ‘saisi’ (‘seised; put in possession of ’) Porus’s lands (Anglo-Norman Dictionary1, 3: online edition, ; accessed 20 May 2013), and uses ‘bailler’ (‘to deliver seisin of ’: Anglo-Norman Dictionary2, 1: online edition, ; accessed 20 May 2013) to describe their return: Thomas of Kent, The Anglo-Norman Alexander, ed. by Foster and Short, i (1976), laisse 316, ll. 5335–38. On the significance of such terminology and its appearance in the contemporary French Roman d’Alexandre of Alexandre de Paris, see Pickens, ‘“Mout est proz e vassaus”/“Mout es corteis”’; and White, ‘Giving Fiefs and Honor’.

Chapter 2

Other Coordinates: The Indies of Late Medieval European Travellers

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his chapter’s central task is the exploration of spatial representations of the Indies relayed through the accounts of Christian Western European travellers. The period in focus began around the middle of the thirteenth century, when a confluence of political and economic conditions in Europe and Asia resulted in a spell of increased contact between European polities and the Indies, Central Asia, and China that lasted at least one hundred years.1 During this time, travellers in search of profit or conducting the business of the Roman Catholic Church travelled in and around the Indian Ocean world from East Africa, Arabia, and southern India to Indonesia and as far east as southern China. Some attempted to set their experiences down in writing for reasons clear or unknown; others entered into more or less fortuitous col1 

The conditions that prompted and facilitated increased direct trade, particularly between northern Italian cities and traders and Mongol lands, and the conditions that contributed to its decline are beyond the scope of this book. See Jackson, The Mongols and the West, pp. 290–328; Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade, pp. 106–36; and Lopez, ‘European Merchants in the Medieval Indies’, p. 173. I discuss Latin Christian travellers here. Benjamin of Tudela’s twelfth-century itinerary between northern Spain, Alexandria, the Red Sea, and Persian Gulf, staying among Jewish communities at each point, shows the early importance of Jewish trading networks in the region, which have been studied by S. D. Goitein; see: Goitein, ‘From the Mediterranean to India’; Goitein, ‘Portrait of a Medieval India Trader’; and India Traders of the Middle Ages, ed. by Goitein and Friedman. Benjamin’s text is translated in Benjamin of Tudela, Itinerary, ed. and trans. by Adler.

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laborations with literary amanuenses or editors. A few made use of their experiences for political or propagandist purposes. Nonetheless, in all cases, the texts that these peregrinations generated provide compelling and informative testimonies not merely concerning the travellers’ experiences but also travellers’ and amanuenses’ ways of constructing and visualizing Indian space and the cultural assumptions that underpinned these.

Contexts, Sources, Aims The travellers and texts in focus here are, for the most part, relatively well known and often referenced in the many existing scholarly accounts of cross-cultural contact and expanding medieval horizons.2 They are also all, in their way, indicative of the changing mercantile, cultural, and religious fourteenth- and fifteenth-century contexts that produced them. A collaboration between the Venetian son of a mercantile family, Marco Polo, and Rustichello da Pisa (otherwise known for a collection of Arthurian romances), Marco Polo’s Book — also known, depending on its language, as the Divisament dou monde, Devisement du monde, and the Milione — is now thought not to be the unique product of a wholly exceptional traveller. Rather, it is considered a rare narrative witness to a wider spirit of adventurousness in search of profit on the part of merchants from Italy’s maritime states.3 The Divisament narrates a series of sometimes unverifiable tales of the Polo family’s initial business ventures in Asia and of subsequent commissions in the service of the Great Khan Kublai (1260–1294) that included an embassy, c. 1270 to Gregory X, to seek one hundred scholars

2  Such accounts are too numerous to cite comprehensively. Particularly useful overviews are Jackson, The Mongols and the West; Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World; and Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe. The first chapter of the ‘Commentaire’ to Jordan Catala, Mirabilia descripta, ed. and trans. by Gadrat, pp. 11–38, also provides a good synthetic overview of the missionary context. An overview of fourteenth-century contacts with particular focus on mission appears in Ryan, ‘European Travelers before Columbus’. 3  Other surviving witnesses are either documentary or archaeological. See Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe, pp. 96–114; Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World, pp. 116–32; Jackson, The Mongols and the West, pp. 309–13; Balard, ‘Les Génois en Asie Centrale et en Extrème-Orient au xive siècle’; Lopez, ‘European Merchants in the Medieval Indies’; Lopez, ‘L’Extrème frontière du commerce’; Lopez, ‘Venezia e le grandi linee dell’espansione commerciale nel secolo xiii’; Lopez, ‘Nuove luci sugli italiani in Estremo Oriente prima di Colombo’; and Ryan, ‘European Travelers before Columbus’, pp. 661–62.

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to teach the Khan Christian doctrine.4 The bulk of the book then narrates a set of itineraries based on the journeys Marco claimed to have made through Asia in the Khan’s service before the family returned to Europe, via Indonesia, the Indian Ocean, and Persia, in 1295.5 As well as offering a vivid account of the awe-inspiring extent of Kublai Khan’s dominions, the Divisament presents a detailed picture of the flows of merchandise and wealth between distant regions and underlines their influence on the balance of power in the world. According to the Divisament, it was in no small measure due to the ruler of Aden’s military aid, funded by Indian Ocean trade through Aden’s port, that the army of the Baḥrī Mamlūk sultan was able to retake Acre in 1291.6 Several texts discussed here emerged from the activities of the missionary orders that often followed in the footsteps of merchants in Asia during the same period.7 In the wake of the eschatologically motivated zeal of the early thirteenth century to convert the remaining gentes (‘heathens’) — considered a necessary condition of the imminent apocalypse — the newly created Dominican and Franciscan missionary and preaching orders shared responsibility for the evangelization of Asia.8 Eventually, the Franciscans took responsibility for ‘Tartary’ in the late thirteenth century and the Dominicans were made 4 

The Dominicans William of Tripoli and Niccolò da Vicenza were sent: Richard, La Papauté et les missions d’Orient, pp. 84–85. 5  It is well known that Marco’s claims that he and his family travelled in the service of the Great Khan cannot be substantiated. However, it does not necessarily follow that, as Frances Wood suggests, Marco Polo did not travel to China at all: Wood, Did Marco Polo Go to China? Counter-arguments to Wood’s position are summarized in Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World, pp. 59–67; and Jackson, The Mongols and the West, Appendix i, pp. 363–66. The Divisament dou monde supplies very few dates. It is generally estimated, with reference to contemporaneous events, that the Polo brothers left Acre in 1271 and arrived at Shangdu in 1275: Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World, pp. 40–41. The dates of return to Venice (1295) and composition of the Book (1298) are given in the Franco-Italian Divisament dou Monde, edited in Polo, Le Divisament dou monde, ed. by Ronchi, pp. 324, 306. 6  Polo, Le Divisament dou monde, ed. by Ronchi, p. 605. 7  Loenertz suggests that the Dominican missionary structure in northwest Persia was modelled on the pre-existing Genoese mercantile infrastructure: Loenertz, La Société des frères pérégrinants, p. 31. See Richard, La Papauté et les missions d’Orient, pp. 94–95, for the growth of Franciscan mission stations along mercantile routes. 8  This intellectual context is covered in more detail in Chapter 5, concerning Mandeville’s Travels. The influence of apocalypticism on papal missionary bulls is discussed in Muldoon, ‘The Avignon Papacy and the Frontiers of Christendom’. On Dominican and Franciscan notions of mission, see Loenertz, La Société des frères pérégrinants; and Daniel, The Franciscan Concept of Mission.

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responsible for Persia and India in the early fourteenth. 9 These missions produced eyewitness descriptions of very different kinds. A letter sent in 1291 by the Franciscan Giovanni da Montecorvino, later Bishop of Khanbalik (Beijing; after 1307), to his confrères in Persia describes missionary activity in Mylapore (near Chennai, eastern India); letters and a dedicated treatise (the Mirabilia descripta) of the Dominican Jordan Catala de Sévérac, who in 1329 became the first Bishop of Columbum (Kollam), describe both missionary activity and the situation of mainland India.10 But while Giovanni’s and Jordan’s letters urgently press the case for missionary endeavours in India and China respectively, the French Dominican William Adam wrote of an altogether different vision for the Indies. Following twenty months travelling the Indian Ocean, including nine on the island of Socotra, William, like Marco Polo before him, came to view lucrative Indian Ocean trade as critical to the wealth and political power of the Muslim polities on its northwestern shores. Around 1317, William composed the De modo sarracenos extirpandi, one of a flurry of plans for the recovery of the Holy Land produced between the fall of Acre in 1291 and the second quarter of the fourteenth century.11 The De modo set out detailed plans for a new crusade and the military defeat of the Mamlūk Sultanate in Egypt, to be effected through a blockade of Indian Ocean ports.12 It must have brought him favour; elevation to the new Archbishopric of Soltaniyeh with authority over India followed in 1322.13 Two other Franciscan travellers of the earlier fourteenth century who took the established, multi-segment sea route between the Persian Gulf and southern China also left accounts of their journeys. The missionary Odorico da Pordenone’s Itinerarium appears to have been taken down 9  In 1288 the Franciscans received a special licence to preach ‘inter tartaros’, and by 1292 they had established the vicariates of Northern Tartary and Eastern Tartary to administer their missions: Richard, La Papauté et les missions d’Orient, pp. 132, 128–29. The Archbishopric of Soltaniyah in Persia, whose remit included India, was established in 1318. The Bishopric of Columbum (Kollam) followed in 1329: Richard, La Papauté et les missions d’Orient, pp. 171, 183. 10  On Giovanni da Montecorvino’s mission, see Richard, La Papauté et les missions d’Orient, pp. 145–52. On Jordan’s bishopric, see Richard, ‘Les papes d’Avignon et l’évangelisation du monde non-Latin à la vieille du Grande Schisme’, p. 306. 11  On this context, see Leopold, How to Recover the Holy Land, pp. 8–51. 12  Adam, De modo Sarracenos extirpandi, ed. by Kohler, pp. clxxviii–ccvii (introductory discussion) and 521–55 (text) at 550–51. Henceforth De modo, with my own translations. 13  But Richard notes that Adam never returned to his see as archbishop and was instead transferred to the see of Antivari in 1324. Richard, La Papauté et les missions d’Orient, pp. 180–81.

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by an amanuensis, Guglielmo da Solagna, in 1330 following his return to Italy after many years spent, in part, in India and China.14 Giovanni de’ Marignolli travelled as a papal legate overland to Cathay and back to Europe by the sea route around India between 1338 and 1353. He then interspersed reminiscences of his journey throughout the digest of Bohemian chronicles that he produced (c. 1354) at the request of Emperor Charles IV.15 For several reasons, not least of which is the fall of the Yuan dynasty in 1368 and the expulsion of the Europeans towards whom they had been welcoming, Giovanni is the last medieval Latin Christian missionary to leave a written account of travel in India and China.16 14  I have used Odorico da Pordenone, Relatio, in Sinica franciscana, ed. by van den Wyngaert and others, i (1929), 413–95 (translations mine). However, this edition is not without problems. Wyngaert did not attempt a complete collation and did not see the complexity of the manuscript tradition. He therefore emends using manuscripts from different recensions, making the edition a composite and representative of no specific phase in the transmission of the text: see Odorico da Pordenone, ‘Ratio edendi’, in Sinica franciscana, ed. by van den Wyngaert and others, i (1929), 411–12. Odorico claims to have spent fourteen years in the Orient, but, given that he departed after 1318, when he witnessed a document in Udine, and returned before 1330, according to an early dated redaction of his Itinerarium, his claim is impossible: Andreose, ‘Nota bio-bibliografica’, p. 31. The manuscript tradition is complex and has not yet been fully untangled, with the relationship between the version of the amanuensis apparently named in a colophon, Guglielmo da Solagna, and other versions still not fully clarified. Although some recensions of the text appear with Guglielmo’s colophon, other apparently early recensions do not. Moreover, the text circulates both in versions written before Odorico’s death and in others written afterwards, with material of some verisimilitude seemingly added at a later date. An attempt has been made to untangle the manuscript tradition in Chiesa, ‘Per un riordino della tradizione manoscritta della Relatio di Odorico’. Errata from this article are corrected in Chiesa, ‘Una forma redazionale sconosciuta della “Relatio” latina di Odorico di Pordenone’. 15  The digest now survives in only one complete and one partial manuscript. Where possible, I refer to and translate from the annotated extracts in Sinica franciscana, ed. by van den Wyngaert and others, i (1929), 524–59, which are taken from Giovanni de’ Marignolli, Kronika Marignolova, ed. by Emler, pp. 492–604. I reference Emler only where Wyngaert does not supply a passage. 16  On the impact of the fall of the Yuan dynasty and other unfavourable political conditions on international travel and trade, see Hunt and Murray, A History of Business in Medieval Europe, p. 180; Lopez, ‘European Merchants in the Medieval Indies’, pp. 181–84; and Lopez, ‘Nuove luci sugli italiani in Estremo Oriente prima di Colombo’, p. 359. On the impact of changing conditions in Central Asia on missions, see Richard, La Papauté et les missions d’Orient, pp. 229–78; and Jackson, The Mongols and the West, p. 260. Muldoon also points out that the Avignon papacy’s attention turned in the latter part of the century towards the unification of Christian churches and thus away from missions among non-Christians: Muldoon, ‘The Avignon Papacy and the Frontiers of Christendom’, p. 191.

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Fewer firsthand accounts of the Indies survive from the fifteenth century, and none from the previously active missionary orders. Nevertheless, despite deterioration in the conditions of travel between Western Europe and the further reaches of Asia towards the end of the fourteenth century, documentary evidence and occasional allusions in geographical works suggest that some Western Europeans continued to venture as far as the Indies, often for trade, right up until Vasco da Gama’s opening of the sea route in 1497.17 Around 1454 the Venetian physician and engineer Giovanni da Fontana claimed to have heard about Cathay by word of mouth from a Venetian named Constantinus.18 In 1472 Ioannes Griffenclorus was granted a letter of passage to allow him to pursue business in different parts of the world including India (‘etiam Indiae’).19 In the massive, still unedited Annales omnium temporum that he worked on in the later fifteenth century, the Sicilian Dominican humanist Pietro Ranzano tells of Pietro Rombulo, a native of Messina who, after entering the service of the King of Ethiopia, acted as his ambassador to Sri Lanka, to Cathay, and finally, in 1450, to Aragon and Rome, during which voyage the two Sicilians met. 20 But among all these hints and records of travel between Europe and the Indies, the case of the fifteenth-century Chioggian merchant Niccolò Conti stands out as the most widely known in its time. Niccolò’s story was taken down at least twice, as a result of two chance meetings. Following many years travelling as a merchant in the Indies, during which he converted to Islam to secure his safety, Niccolò returned to Italy to seek absolution from the pope in 1441.21 17 

Michèle Guéret-Laferté argues (citing Pearson, The Portuguese in India, p. 29) that whilst routes into China may have been closed to occidental travellers, the status of the Indian Ocean as a ‘mare liberum where no state tried to control maritime matters’ left it open to any occidental willing to do what was necessary in language learning, customs, and religion to become part of one of the communities trading on the sea: see the ‘Introduction’ to Bracciolini, De l’Inde, ed. and trans. by Guéret-Laferté, p. 29; see pp. 27–35 on travellers and journeying conditions in the fifteenth century more generally. 18  Giovanni da Fontana’s text, published as [Giovanni da Fontana], Liber Pompilii Azali Placentini, is discussed in Chapter 6. For Constantinus, see fol. 119r. 19  Supplementum ad Bullarium franciscanum, ed. by Cenci, ii, 758, no. 1657 (n. 72). Quite what ‘India’ means here is not clear, however. 20  There is a summary of Rombulo’s career according to Ranzano in Trasselli, ‘Un italiano in Etiopia nel xv secolo’. On Ranzano’s use of eyewitness accounts in his description of the world, see Figliolo, ‘Europa, oriente, mediterraneo nell’opera dell’umanista Palermitano Pietro Ranzano’. On the embassy of Zara-Iacob in which Rombulo participated, see De Witte, ‘Une ambassade éthiopienne à Rome en 1450’. 21  See the ‘Introduction’, in Bracciolini, De l’Inde, ed. and trans. by Guéret-Laferté, pp. 8–10.

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The Spanish diplomat Pero Tafur, with whom Niccolò travelled between Sinai and Cairo, both recorded and, according to Jacques Paviot, likely delivered to Philippe le Bon of Burgundy in 1438 a description of the kingdom of Prester John along with an account of the fantastical dangers that, he claimed, Niccolò had encountered in India.22 Tafur’s account highlights the continued and growing importance of Prester John not just in the imaginary but also in the political and diplomatic landscape of fifteenth-century European powers. Enticed by the possibility of a Christian ally against the Turks, popes, kings, and dukes throughout the century received embassies purporting to derive from this legendary potentate, whose ‘India’ was increasingly considered to be situated in or to encompass parts of Eastern Africa, namely Ethiopia or Abyssinia.23 Sometimes they sent letters in return and, eventually, financed expeditions in search of his African lands. Indeed, Philippe le Bon not only hosted Pero Tafur but also commissioned a report on outremer from his courtier Bertrandon de la Broquière that featured detail on Prester John, hosted purported subjects of the priest-king as visitors, and funded at least one Burgundian expedition to his legendary kingdom.24 However, when Niccolò Conti himself reached the Council of Florence in 1441 in pursuit of pardon for his apostasy, an altogether different version of his adventures, free of any mention of Prester John’s kingdom, was recorded by Poggio Bracciolini. Poggio, humanist and secretary to Pope Eugenius IV, published the account both independently and as Book iv of his De varietate fortunae (DVF).25 22 

I have used Tafur, Travels and Adventures, trans. by Letts. Tafur attributes to Niccolò an account of the great dangers and monstrous, barbarous peoples of India (pp. 81–95), but it is impossible to know who exactly concocted the description. A detailed comparison of Tafur’s account with that recorded by Poggio Bracciolini (see below) appears in Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance, pp. 117–24. Even basic details such as Niccolò’s precise departure and return dates are not ascertainable from either account. On Pero Tafur’s connections with the duke of Burgundy, see Paviot, ‘Le Grand Duc de Ponant et le Prêtre Jean’, p. 953. 23  These embassies and European responses to them are discussed in depth in Paviot, ‘L’Imaginaire géographique des decouvertes’. The impact of legends of Prester John on Portuguese diplomatic and navigational activity in the later part of the fifteenth century are discussed in Pistarino, ‘I portoghesi verso l’Asia del Prete Gianni’. Pistarino points in particular (pp. 113–19) to the role of the notion that Prester John ruled both in India and parts of East Africa in the conceptual unification of these two regions across continental divides. 24  Paviot, ‘Le Grand Duc de Ponant et le Prêtre Jean’, p. 955. 25  See the ‘Introduction’ in Bracciolini, De l’Inde, ed. and trans. by Guéret-Laferté, pp. 60–65. Future references to the De varietate fortunae (DVF), iv are to this edition, with my own translations. Niccolò’s travels were also known, perhaps through Poggio but perhaps

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The present chapter is not intended to provide a detailed history of Western European mercantile and missionary contacts with and travels in the Indies; this ground has been well worked by many of the scholars cited in the brief overview above. It neither seeks to map travellers’ journeys in abstract space — that is, space understood purely geometrically, as ‘a kind of absolute grid, within which objects are located and events occur’ — nor to repeat in the language of the present the observations of the travellers of the past.26 It does not attempt to sort the ‘truth’ of travellers’ accounts from borrowings or lies, or to divide real reports from the fantastical.27 Again, many editors and scholars of these accounts have chosen to do such work. Towards one extreme sits Jacques Le Goff, who concludes from cartographic and geographical comparisons that medieval Westerners ‘knew nothing of the real Indian Ocean’; occidental travellers there were ‘materializing their dreams’ in unfamiliar surroundings rather than producing accurate, empirical description. 28 Towards the other end of the spectrum sit the works of scholars who make the case for firm connections between described medieval spaces, peoples, settlements, and points marked on modern maps and for hitherto unrecognized levels of accuracy in travellers’ descriptions.29 There are, however, difficulties with both approaches. To attempt, for instance, verbally or graphically to map medieval representations of past spaces and spatial experiences onto a modern world-image not only sometimes fails to elucidate travellers’ spatialities but also risks ripping these apart only to rebuild them as more or less defective versions of our own. A modern through another, as yet unidentified medium, to fellow-Venetians Giovanni da Fontana and Fra Mauro, whose cosmography and world map are both discussed in Chapter 6. 26  Critiques of ‘absolute space’ have proliferated since the 1990s; this pithy characterization derives from Curry, ‘On Space and Spatial Practice in Contemporary Geography’, p. 5. 27  Scholars have pointed out, for example, apparent or possible borrowings from Marco Polo in Odorico’s Itinerarium and Jordan Catala’s Mirabilia descripta. See the ‘Notes’, in Odorico da Pordenone, Le voyage, ed. by Andreose and Ménard, pp. 64–231, e.g., on Casaye/Quinsai (Hangzhou), p. 160, and the footnotes to Jordan Catala, Mirabilia descripta, ed. and trans. by Gadrat, e.g., p. 250. 28  Le Goff, ‘The Medieval West and the Indian Ocean’, pp. 189, 191. 29  The trend for work in this area (too widespread to cite in full) and many now widely accepted identifications follow Sir Henry Yule, whose nineteenth- and twentieth-century editions featured copious identifying notes and maps showing reconstructed medieval geographies and itineraries: Polo, The Book […] Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, ed. and trans. by Yule; and Cathay and the Way Thither, ed. by Yule and Cordier. Scholars who have much more recently made judgements on the Book’s accuracy include Rubiés (Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance, p. 73) and Haw (Haw, Marco Polo’s China, p. 2).

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map of the world, but with medieval toponyms substituted for modern ones, is a common enough accompaniment to editions and discussions of medieval travellers’ accounts; indeed, I include one here.30 But such maps alone, even when modified to show coastlines and islands relocated as travellers might have imagined them or spaces inhabited by mythical places, peoples, or beasts, do not give access to a medieval understanding of space.31 Rather, they attempt to translate travellers’ observations and stated beliefs into the visual language and conventions of modern mathematical cartography. This chapter focuses instead on the kind of spatial detail that gets lost in that translation process. Medieval travellers, their amanuenses, editors, and audiences used coordinates other than latitude and longitude to delineate their world and their spatial relationships with people and places in it, coordinates that were, by turns, cosmological, spiritual, theological, and historical in nature. Also important for this discussion, moreover, is a question raised by Jacques Le Goff ’s equally problematic identification of the Indian Ocean as an ‘oneiric horizon’: that of the relationship between the conceptualization and experience of Indian space in the texts produced by travellers and amanuenses. In Le Goff ’s argument, an imagined, fantastical dreamscape — the oneiric horizon — largely or entirely displaces Indian landscape in travellers’ spatial experience. Conceptualization and imagination, Le Goff implies, had a determining impact upon the spatial experience of travellers, but experience, in contrast, is not considered to have influenced travellers’ ways of perceiving and understanding space. In line with the principles drawn from Lefebvre’s work and outlined in my Introduction, I here argue for a more fluid and reciprocal relationship between the Indies of the mind and the spaces of diverse social and cultural practices in the accounts of the Indian Ocean world left to us by enterprising late medieval merchants and missionaries. Travellers’ accounts reveal what imagination and belief contributed to spatial experience. But, at the same time, spatial experience, conditioned by the specific situation of the traveller, seeped into and, by degrees, modified the Indies in the minds of travellers and readers.

30 

See, for example, such maps in Polo, The Book […] Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, ed. and trans. by Yule, ii, plates at pp. 130, 312, 374; and Jordan Catala, Mirabilia descripta, ed. and trans. by Gadrat, Maps i–iv. 31  For example, Gadrat’s map of the world picture of Jordan Catala: Jordan Catala, Mirabilia descripta, ed. and trans. by Gadrat, Map v; Christiane Deluz’s reconstruction of the world picture of ‘Sir John Mandeville’ is another example: Mandeville, Le livre des merveilles du monde, ed. by Deluz, unpaginated plates.

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Map 1. The Indian Ocean and surrounding regions with key medieval locations noted.

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Spatial Practice and Spatial Representation The following two subsections both approach the question of the relationship between the spatial experiences of travellers and the textual representations that these informed. The question is a fraught one. Even from the short outline presented above, it is clear that none of the texts discussed here were unmediated products of a travelling, authorial consciousness. Many underwent untold interventions at the hands of at least one amanuensis or editor. The above précis also calls to mind and into question Jean Richard’s observation that medieval ‘récits de voyage’ are a ‘genre multiforme’, comprising itineraries, letters, treatises, and much in between.32 In fact, the generic links between some of these diverse products are sometimes tenuous; Jordan Catala’s Mirabilia descripta promises but only partially delivers a text in the Wonders of the East tradition, while Odorico da Pordenone’s Itinerarium shades into hagiography to the extent that certain scholars have suspected interpolation.33 However, in spite of their authorial, formal, and generic multiplicity — the implications of which will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3 — certain shared spatial experiences, preoccupations, and representative strategies underpin these texts. Indeed, the discussion that follows explores how specific ways of locating, marking out, and giving meaning to Indian space both unite and divide these travellers’ reports, indicating both shared experiences and perceptions on the one hand, and divergent cultural preoccupations and religious or political goals on the other. Producing, Navigating, and Describing the Maritime Indies One variety of spatial experience that unites all the travellers discussed in this chapter is the sea voyage. All made at least one leg of their journeys in the Indies via the multi-stage sea route that linked Zaiton (Quanzhou) or Canton (Guangzhou) on the southern coast of China to the Persian Gulf or Red Sea 32  Jean Richard identifies seven subgroups ranging from basic guides for pilgrims to detailed diplomatic reports, but even this range would not accommodate something as peculiar as the ‘Recollections’ in Giovanni de’ Marignolli’s Chronicle: Richard, Les Récits de voyages et de pèler­ inages, pp. 8–9. 33  Jordan’s text turns towards the end into an outright exhortation to a coordinated religious and military intervention in the Indies: Jordan Catala, Mirabilia descripta, ed. and trans. by Gadrat, pp. 265–66. For a suggestion that Odorico’s account of the martyrdom of his four Franciscan brethren at Tana is an interpolation, see Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance, p. 53, n. 49.

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(normally Hormuz or Aden), via Indonesia (Sumatra in the fourteenth century, but Malacca in the fifteenth), one of the port cities on the subcontinent’s southwest coast (e.g., Kollam, Cochin, Calicut), and sometimes via one of the port cities in its northwest (e.g., Cambay, Thane; see Map 1).34 This section explores the influence of the maritime perspective that results from this form of travel on texts’ representations and conceptualizations of the Indies, as well as instances of interplay between the perspectives of the traveller, and the geographer or cosmographer.35 As K. N. Chaudhuri’s detailed exploration of premodern Indian Ocean trade has shown, any traveller going by sea between Arabia or Africa and the southern coast of China would have been obliged to complete the journey in segments, with sailing times and stopover periods in port always dictated by the quarterly shift of the monsoon.36 The impact of this condition can be traced in all texts discussed here, even when it is not directly or clearly described by travellers. Book iii of the Divisament dou monde, known in almost all versions of this oft-translated and reworked text as the ‘Livre de Indie’ (‘Book of India’), provides the clearest and most detailed example of the kind of influence the maritime perspective and experience brings to bear.37 Although, as Leonardo 34 

Different routes and stopping points were favoured at different times, on account of changing political and coastal conditions. In southwest India, for example, Kollam and Eli decline around the middle of the fourteenth century, while Cochin and Calicut in particular rise in importance: Bouchon and Lombard, ‘The Indian Ocean in the Fifteenth Century’, p. 58. For a detailed account of ports and the trading communities frequenting them in different periods, see Agius, Classic Ships of Islam, pp. 63–108. For a chronological overview of route changes, see Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean, map 7 at p. 38. 35  Parts of the following are developed from an earlier discussion of this question, in O’Doherty, ‘A Peripheral Matter? Oceans in the East’, pp. 30–41. 36  Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean, p. 102. 37  Most surviving versions of the text follow the lead of its earliest surviving FrancoItalian version, which begins its final third with ‘Ci comance le livre de Indie’: Polo, Le Divisament dou monde, ed. by Ronchi, p. 529 (henceforth Div.). On the grounds of its early date and completeness, I have chosen to use as my base text throughout this book Ronchi’s edition of the Franco-Italian redaction (F in the accepted sigla system) of the most common ‘A’ family of texts, which exists in a single manuscript of around 1300. However, the manuscript tradition is very variable, and particularly stark differences emerge when F, or other manuscripts from the ‘A’ family, are compared with manuscripts from the ‘B’ family, which, though narrowly diffused and with few early surviving manuscripts, is closely connected with Venice and widely considered authoritative: see Gadrat, ‘Le Role de Venise dans la diffusion du livre de Marco Polo’. For passages not in ‘A’ versions, I have used Polo, Redazione latina del manoscritto Z, ed. by Barbieri (my own translations), which edits a unique Venetian ‘B’ manuscript of the 1470s. The most

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Olschki pointed out in 1957, the ‘Book of India’ (like the Divisament as a whole) synthesizes multiple journeys, including some to places Marco undoubtedly never personally visited, the shape of the narrative broadly follows the outline of a three-stage journey across the Indian Ocean, even to the point of recording a five-month wait in Sumatra for the monsoon shift.38 Irrespective of any influence from amanuensis Rustichello da Pisa on the composition process, in the ‘Book of India’, the influence of the subject-position of the maritime traveller on the perception and representation of Indian space emerges time and time again. The narrator, often an unspecified ‘je’ or ‘noç’ (‘I’/‘we’); sometimes ‘je meisme, Marc Pol’ (‘I myself, Marco Polo’), never presents pure directions between points in a quantifiable space apprehended through geometry. As the third-person narrator of manuscript Z of the rarer ‘B’ family of the text makes clear, this results in the Indies being described in manifestly relative, rather than absolute, terms. After describing Tana (Thane, northwest India), ‘quoddam magnum regnum et bonum versus ponentem’ (‘a certain great and good kingdom towards the west’), the narrator interjects: Et inteligatur ‘versus ponentem’ quia tunc dominus Marcus Paulo de versus lev­an­ tem veniebat, et secundum eius gresus et transitus pertractatur.39 And let ‘towards the west’ be understood because at that time Mr Marco Polo was coming from the direction of the east, and this book is being composed according to his journey and crossing.

A subjective, port-to-port itinerary is provided instead of a purportedly absolute geography along the lines of an Orosius or Honorius (Chapter 1). Sailing comprehensive account of the Divisament’s manuscript tradition is in Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’. 38  Olschki, Marco Polo’s Asia, trans. by Scott, pp. 12–14; 28–32. A reconstruction of journeys from multiple versions of the Book is provided in Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World, pp. 42–43. On waiting in Sumatra for the monsoon, see Polo, Le Divisament dou monde, ed. by Ronchi, p. 544. Marco’s return voyage across the Indian Ocean is discussed in Pryor, ‘Marco Polo’s Return Voyage from China’. 39  Polo, Redazione latina del manoscritto Z, ed. by Barbieri, p.  396. The narrator of Manoscritto Z is not clear. On the one hand, the name of Rustichello da Pisa is nowhere mentioned in the book; on the other, the text contains the same opening passage, mimicking Rustichello’s Meliadus, as the earliest Franco-Italian text of the ‘A’ family. The excision of Rustichello’s name from Z may therefore be a simple abridgement rather than evidence against his involvement in the composition process: Polo, Redazione latina del manoscritto Z, ed. by Barbieri, pp. 2–4, nn. 1, 4.

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directions are provided in place of absolute cardinal directions. Between Zaiton and Ciamba (an ancient kingdom in the region of Vietnam and Cambodia, sometimes written Zampa or Chamba), the ‘Book of India’ tells us that one must sail first ‘por ponent’ (to the west), then fifteen hundred miles ‘ver garbin’ (‘south-west’; Div, p. 538). Indeed, the Book depends on sailing directions to such a degree that one scholar has suggested that the book as a whole be read as an extended portolan, or nautical route-finding guide.40 Furthermore, in the ‘Book of India’, as in many other medieval accounts of travel by land and sea, ideas of distance are routinely conveyed by the period of time taken by a particular route. The trading circuit from Zaiton to Japan took a year, whereas to navigate the gulf between southern China and Ciamba took two months (Div, p. 537). But the Divisament’s account does more than simply reflect the personal subject position of a single, individual traveller. On reading the ‘Book of India’, in fact, it is difficult not to be struck by the number of impersonal formulas that the narrator uses to relate one point on its itinerary to another. The repetition of formulas such as ‘l’en s’en part […] et il naje’ (‘one leaves … and sails’), ‘l’en se part […] et ala’ (‘one leaves … and travels’), ensures that the text’s focus is not on the individual’s experience but on the patterns and conventions of movement around the region.41 Even the end of the oikoumene and the navigable, habitable world is conceived of in the text as the edge of the ocean’s navigated space. One cannot travel south of Mogdasio (Mogadishu merges with Madagascar here) and Çanghibar (Zanzibar) towards the ‘grant quantité’ of other islands towards the south where the gryphon or ruc of Arab legend is to be found, ‘por ce que la mer hi cort si ver midi que a poine s’en poroient venir; e por ceste achaisonç ni i v[o]nt les nes’ (‘because the sea in those parts flows in such a way towards the south that one can only return with difficulty. And for that reason the ships do not go there’).42 As I have argued in detail elsewhere, the text describes the Indian Ocean as what Henri Lefebvre terms a social space;

40  Vincentini bases his argument on the amount of information on fluvial and maritime routes and ports, ship types, and mercantile opportunities in the Tuscan translation of the book: Vincentini, ‘Il Milione di Marco Polo come portolano’. 41  See, for example, Polo, Le Divisament dou monde, ed. by Ronchi, pp. 538, 540, 549, 550, 551. 42  Polo, Le Divisament dou monde, ed. by Ronchi, Chapter cxci, quotation at p. 594. For references in Arab legend to the Rukh, also described by Jordan Catala, see Polo, The Book […] Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, ed. and trans. by Yule, ii, 415–21.

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like Fernand Braudel’s Mediterranean, ‘created by the movements of men, the relationships they imply, and the routes they follow’.43 Of all the travellers’ texts in focus here, the Divisament provides the most detailed description of a connected, regularly traversed medieval maritime and continental Indian Ocean world. But evidence of the maritime traveller’s perspective emerges across the board, though it often collides with travellers’ cosmological knowledge about the edges of the world. Giovanni da Montecorvino’s letter to his confrères, written in Maabar (the Coromandel Coast), which Giovanni locates in ‘India di Sopra’, explains that the sea on which he has travelled is the ‘mare mezano, uvero ocheano’ (‘the southern sea or ocean’) and that ‘da parte de merizo non si trova terra, se non izule’ (‘to the south there is no land, only islands’).44 But the same letter then proceeds to give garbled sailing directions and distances between Hormuz and Maabar, between Minabar (Malabar) and Maabar, and between Menabar (also Malabar) and one of those southern islands, called Guigimencote (unidentified), and to explain the workings of the monsoon. Odorico’s Itinerarium tends to use measurements of duration in place of distance but is often unspecific about both. When his itinerary reaches Polumbum (Kollam), the text states only that Odorico reaches it ‘per mare’ (‘by sea’) and leaves it on a ‘çocum’ (‘junk’) to travel towards Zaiton in ‘India Superior’.45 The text also reflects the subjective knowledge of the unaccustomed maritime traveller when it confuses island and mainland locations, sometimes sidestepping the requirement to distinguish between them by substituting ‘contrata’ instead.46 At the same time, however, we can see from its use of cardinal directions that Odorico’s Itinerarium’s maritime perspective is related not only to the subject position of the traveller but also to the traveller’s or amanuensis’ cosmological assumptions. As the itinerary moves southwards into the ocean beyond 43  See O’Doherty, ‘A Peripheral Matter? Oceans in the East’, pp. 31–33. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. by Reynolds, i, 276. 44  Giovanni’s letter is edited in Sinica franciscana, ed. by van den Wyngaert and others, i (1929), 340–45, esp. pp. 344, 345. Subsequently abbreviated in text as SF. 45  For example, Sumatra is given as fifty days south of Mobar (on the Coromandel Coast): Sinica franciscana, ed. by van den Wyngaert and others, i (1929), 445, 437, 438. 46  According to Sinica franciscana, ed. by van den Wyngaert and others, i  (1929): Polumbum (Kollam) is a ‘contrata’, then an ‘insula’ (pp. 440, 441); Mobar (the Coromandel Coast) is a ‘regnum’, then an ‘insula’ (pp. 442, 444); Hormuz is a ‘terra’ and a ‘contrata’ (p. 422), as is Tana (Thane, p. 423); and Lamori, a region of Sumatra, is equally a ‘contrata’, then an ‘insula’ (pp. 445, 446).

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mainland India, it describes encounters with peoples who become wilder, stranger, and more morally or physically monstrous. Fifty days to the south of the Coromandel Coast in the mare occeanum is Lamori, where naked men and women practise free love and hold property in common. But the people are a ‘gens pestifera’ (‘pestilential race’) who eat human flesh (SF, i, 445–46). To the south again one finds a people with branded faces, naked, who are always at war (SF, i, 446). The itinerary moves ‘versus meridiem’ (‘southwards’) yet again to a land named Boterrigo, before moving on to Java and the nearby country of Paten, where trees produce flour, honey, wine, and the most lethal poison in the world (SF, i, 445–46). Odorico places this island at the southern extremity of the known world, a border that is described not just as a physical boundary but as a boundary between the lands of the living and the ‘mare mortuum’, the sea of the dead:47 In ripa istius contrate versus meridiem est mare Mortuum, aqua cuius semper versus meridiem currit. Et si aliquis iuxta ipsius ripam vadit et cadit in aquam, nunquam talis ille invenitur. (SF, i, 449) On the coast of this country towards the south is the sea of the dead, the water of which always runs towards the south. And if anyone walks next to this coastline and falls in the sea, he will never be seen again.

Again and again in the Itinerarium the strange, the otherworldly, the monstrous and the barely human are situated on islands, and ‘towards the south’. Nicuveram, one of many islands found by navigating ‘per mare occeanum versus meridiem’ (‘through the ocean towards the south’; SF, i, 452) from Zampa, is the land of the dog-headed men attributed to the Indies since the ancients. On moving south from Seillan (Sri Lanka), the Itinerarium comes to Dondin (or Dandin), an island whose name means ‘immundum’ (‘unclean’) and whose inhabitants kill any relatives who fall sick, rather than allowing them to suffer, rot, and breed worms (SF, i, 455–57). Only when the Itinerarium begins to move ‘versus orientem’ (‘towards the east’; SF, i, 457) do the associations change. Mançi (southern China), also known as India Superior, is a ‘nobilem provinciam’ of ‘duo millia magnarum civitatum’ (‘two thousand great cities’). It lacks poverty or material want, and its ‘homines satis sunt corpore pulcri’ (‘men are beautiful enough in body’; SF, i, 457–58). The pattern that emerges is clear. In the Itinerarium’s spatiality, moral and spiritual directions and coordinates 47 

On islands as phenomena between experience and imagination and between the orbis ter­ rarum and worlds beyond, see Bouloux, ‘Les Îles dans les descriptions géographiques et les cartes’.

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are mapped onto physical cardinal directions. The far southern islands and seas, physically and morally at the edge of the world, are characterized by evil and dangerous extremes, inhabited by barely human peoples with barely human customs.48 The east, in contrast — the cardinal direction associated with Eden — is the location of well-formed, civil peoples and a healthful sufficiency of well-distributed material goods. European voyagers travelled, of course, on trading vessels and along the Indian Ocean world’s established trading routes. It should therefore not surprise that the Indies often appear as characterized by mercantile activities in travellers’ texts. The Divisament dou monde routinely characterizes cities with reference to the merchandise they produce, their possession or otherwise of a good port, the status of that port, and its connection with other maritime regions. In fact, the cumulative effect of such notices is such that, taken as a whole, ‘the Book of India’ carefully delineates the network of trading connections that join up the diverse parts of this oceanic region. All sorts of goods, it notes, including spices never seen in Italy, are shipped from Lesser Java (Sumatra) to southern and northern China.49 Cail (Kayal) is the Indian port at which ships from Hormuz, Quisci (Quinsai, i.e., Hangzhou, east coast of China), Aden, and Arabia put in with horses for sale (Div., p. 577). Coilun (Kollam) is a port of exchange frequented by merchants from Mançi (southern China) and Arabia (Div., p. 579). In Poggio Bracciolini’s India, preconceptions about the cosmologically peripheral status of the islands of the Indian Ocean collide with Niccolò Conti’s firm information concerning their economic centrality. Sumatra, which Poggio identifies as the classical island Taprobane, has a ‘nobilissimum emporium’ (‘most noble emporium’) with a six-mile perimeter (DVF, iv, 94). The two Javas ( Java and, perhaps, Borneo) are, he says ‘pæne extremis orbis finibus’ (‘almost at the most distant edges of the world’), their inhabitants as extreme as their location, ‘homines inhumanissimi omnium crudelissimique’ (‘the most inhuman and cruel of all people’; DVF, iv, 112–14). And yet even these are venues of exchange for the spices (nutmeg, mace, cloves) grown in the islands of Sandai and Banda further to the east still, at the very edge of the navigable ocean (DVF, iv, 118). 48 

On the mapping of moral qualities (associated with climate) onto cardinal direction points and, subsequently (in her view, in the fourteenth century) onto the orient/occident division, see Akbari, ‘From Due East to True North’. On the associations of the hot south, see also Metzler, ‘Perceptions of Hot Climate in Medieval Cosmography and Travel Literature’. 49  The full passage is given only in manuscripts of the ‘B’ family. See Polo, Redazione latina del manoscritto Z, ed. by Barbieri, p. 286.

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This vision of an Indian Ocean traversed by trade routes and bristling with fully laden ships is not confined to mercantile accounts of travel; it is in evidence in the accounts of travelling religious too. However, while missionaries like Giovanni da Montecorvino and Odorico da Pordenone confined themselves to noticing elements of Indian produce and trade in accounts that range across religion, social organization, flora, and fauna, for William Adam, the Dominican who was later to become Archbishop of Soltaniyeh, produce, merchandise, and trade were the Indian Ocean’s most important characteristics. In the De modo Sarracenos extirpandi (c. 1317), a treatise focused on the military and economic subordination of Egypt and the recuperation of the Holy Land, the now-familiar vision of the Indies as a mercantile maritime space is co-opted for specific political and ecclesiastical goals. Emotively and figuratively, Adam describes a worldwide economic system of which the Indian Ocean is the head: Omnia enim que in Egipto venduntur, ut piper, zinziber et alie species, aurum et lapides preciosi, sericum et panni illi preciosi, tincti Indie coloribus, et omnia alia preciosa […] apportantur de India in Egiptum. Nam sicut cibus a capite in gutture et a gutture in stomachum et de stomacho ad ceteras partes corporis se transfundit, ita predicte merces preciose a mari Indico, quasi a capite, ortum habent et per predictum gulfum Eden, quasi per guttur, dehinc in Egiptum per mare Rubrum, quasi in stomachum, et deinde, quasi ad partes corporis, ad ceteras mundi provincias disperguntur. (De modo, pp. 549–50) Everything sold in Egypt — pepper, ginger, other spices, gold and precious stones, silk and other precious cloths dyed with the colours of India, and all other precious things […] are carried from India to Egypt. For, just as food is transferred from the head to the throat and from the throat to the stomach and from the stomach to other parts of the body, so this precious merchandise has its origin in the Indian sea (like the head) and is dispersed through the gulf of Aden, of which I have spoken (like the throat). From here it passes into Egypt through the Red Sea, as food passes into the stomach, and thence, just as nutrients pass to other parts of the body, so it is transferred to the other provinces of the world.

To subdue Egypt, it follows, one must first cut off this trade at the head. Adam presents the Indian Ocean as a central, causative element in an interconnected economic system that brings great wealth to Egypt and that is dominated by merchants of Aden who, ‘per se et suos famulos, causa mercacionum, circuent omnes terras Indie et frequentant’ (‘in person and through their servants, travel around all the lands of India for the sake of merchandise’; De modo, p. 551). For Adam, and indeed for later authors of treatises on the recovery of the Holy Land who followed his lead, the quasi-mythical configuration of coasts, islands,

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and oceans at the edge of the world — Le Goff ’s ‘oneiric horizon’ — had given way to a vision of a known, practised space at the heart of the world’s economic system.50 In the De modo, the Indies are all but eclipsed by the trade, with no ontological significance beyond the economic. Adam’s reconceptualization of the Indian Ocean as a space characterized principally by its role in his vision of world economics brings me back to the question, raised in the introductions to this book and chapter, of the relationship between spatial practice and conceptualization. In Adam’s reconceptualization of the Indies, one shaped both by his experience as a travelling missionary and the specific goals of his treatise, the Indian Ocean has displaced the mainland Indies as a unit of analysis. The mainland Indies border this unit, both separated and connected by it. Hormuz on the Persian Gulf, for example, a potential base on which a Christian force could build boats for a blockade of Aden, is placed in ‘India Prima’, both separated and connected by the sea from Cambay, Thane, and Kollam in ‘Ultima India’ (De modo, p. 552). Indeed, texts repeatedly provide evidence that the maritime perspective of the ocean-going traveller, whose attention is drawn to navigational and mercantile connections, problematizes and disrupts land-based divisions, borders, and metageographical categories. Perhaps the most striking example of this disruption is found in the humanist papal secretary Poggio Bracciolini’s mid-fifteenth-century attempt to map the practised maritime space of mercantile traveller Niccolò Conti onto a Ptolemaic image of the world. At the opening of the second book of his India, which is concerned with the customs of India’s inhabitants, Poggio attempts to contextualize the information he is about to provide: Indiam omnem in tres diusam partes: unam a Persis ad Indum flumen; ab eo ad Gangem alteram; tertium ulteriorem, quae reliquis est opibus, humanitate, lautitia, longe praestantior, uita et ciuili consuetudine nobis æqualis. (DVF, iv, 134) All India is divided into three parts. One stretches from Persia to the river Indus, another from the Indus to the Ganges. The third, beyond [the Ganges], which far excels the others in wealth, culture, and splendour, is equal to us in way of life and civil governance.

The land-based distinction between three continental Indies separated by the Indus and Ganges rivers is clearly a modified version of the division between 50 

Marino Sanudo’s early fourteenth-century Liber secretorum fidelium crucis makes a similar case for disrupting Indian Ocean trade to harm Egypt, but based on much less specific detail about the Ocean, its lands and islands: Sanudo Torsello, The Book of the Secrets, trans. by Lock, in particular pp. 49–50.

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India ‘infra’ and ‘citra’ Gangem found in the second-century Geography of the Alexandrian Claudius Ptolemy, a text translated in 1406 as the Cosmographia and subsequently highly influential upon humanists such as Poggio.51 As a system of regional divisions it seems clear enough: India is a land mass divided into three by two rivers, the third of which regions is characterized as the most admirable and is thus, elsewhere in the text, associatively named ‘India Superior’.52 The problem is the disruption caused by the messy, disorienting, spatial practice of maritime travel. As Poggio relates Niccolò’s journeys by sea and land, he hardly ever refers back to his Ptolemaic division. Instead, without explanation, he describes aspects of ‘Interior India’, ‘Anterior India’, ‘Media India’ and ‘Prior India’, conceptual spaces that simply cannot be mapped onto a Ptolemaic map of Asia.53 In the works of other maritime travellers, however, produced without the intervention of a Ptolemaically influenced Poggio, it is possible to see how ways of dividing up and categorizing the regions through which they travelled relate rather more closely to their spatial experiences. As I have said, William Adam considered Hormuz, a key port of exchange in Indian Ocean trade and port of departure for many travellers on the Indian Ocean, to belong to ‘India Prima’. He describes it as connected to and yet distinct from the western Indian mainland, which Adam refers to as ‘India Ultima’ (‘Further India’). Odorico da Pordenone, one of those travellers for whom Hormuz was a port of departure, also considered the region around the Persian Gulf one of his Indies: ‘India quae est infra terram’ (‘Inland’, or perhaps ‘Continental’ India; SF, i, 422 and n. 1). The only other region that Odorico explicitly names is ‘India Superior’, which he identifies with the province of Mançi (southern China, reached following a sea voyage of many days to the east (SF, i, 457). For Giovanni de’ Marignolli, the last Franciscan to leave an account of a journey via the sea route from China to India, sea journeys mark out regional divisions between places, even when these locations may be linked by land. Because he travelled by sea between the east and west coasts of India, Giovanni divides the two conceptually. East India is ‘Inferior India’, and the subcontinent’s west coast is ‘India Columbina’, so 51 

The fifteenth-century influence of Ptolemy’s Geography on the geography and cartography of the Indies is discussed in more detail in Chapter 6. For its influence among the humanists, see Gautier Dalché, La Géographie de Ptolémée en Occident, pp. 143–88. 52  DVF, iv, 154. As becomes clear below, Poggio is also following the tradition of certain Franciscans in making this identification. 53  DVF, iv, 138–40, 150, 154, 158, 162, 112.

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named after Kollam, which, as we shall see in the next section, is represented in his account as an important Latin Christian centre (SF, i, 537, 531). However, the traveller’s account that offers the most detailed account of the Indian Ocean world as a practised maritime space also presents the most detailed, precise, and practice-based reconceptualization of its regions and borders. The Divisament dou monde’s ‘Livre de Indie’ — the ‘Book of India’ — contains Marco’s descriptions of Japan, Indochina, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Sri Lanka, Mogadishu (conflated with Madagascar), Zanzibar, Abyssinia, Aden, Dufar, and Hormuz. Given that almost all the locations discussed in the ‘Book of India’ are coastal and most also ports, this particular section of the Divisament is perhaps best described as an account of the maritime and littoral lands of the Indian Ocean world. 54 Indeed, the book’s narrator at times openly admits this focus; in his description of Greater India he points out that ‘car de celz que sunt en fraterres ne vos avonz pas contés, por ce que trop seroit longaine matiere a mentovoir’ (‘we have not told you about those [provinces and cities] inland, because this would be too long a subject to cover’).55 Disregarding land-based categorical distinctions (Asia, Africa, Arabia, India as we understand the term), the Divisament’s very structure recognizes what is now considered almost axiomatic amongst economic and cultural historians of the Indian Ocean world, that ‘[d]ue to natural obstacles and the poor state of the land routes, these maritime cities [of East Africa, India, the Indo-Malay world] often had closer links with each other than with the centres of power in the states of which they formed a part’.56 Indeed, even the smaller regional divisions that the Divisament delineates between ‘l’Endie greignor’ (Greater India), ‘la menor Indie’ (Lesser India), and ‘la meçaine Yndie’ or Abascia (Middle India or Abyssinia) make most sense when considered principally as divisions between maritime zones.57 Take, for instance, the division between ‘Middle India’ — located in Africa by the Divisament — and Greater India, a metageographical construct which, we shall see, includes the western Indian coast. The following passage closes the Divisament’s description of what it calls 54 

This is very well illustrated by Henry Yule’s map of places in mainland India mentioned by Marco: Polo, The Book […] Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, ed. and trans. by Yule, ii, 313. 55  Polo, Le Divisament dou monde, ed. by Ronchi, p. 589; Ronchi’s textual emendations are silently incorporated here. 56  Bouchon and Lombard, ‘The Indian Ocean in the Fifteenth Century’, pp. 48–49. 57  This argument is set out in greater detail in O’Doherty, ‘A Peripheral Matter? Oceans in the East’, pp. 38–41.

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‘auquans ysles, que encore sunt de Indie’ (‘certain islands, which also belong to India’), islands that include not only Socotra in the western Indian Ocean but also Mogdasio (Mogadishu/Madagascar) and Çanghibar (Zanzibar, but partially conflated with the East African mainland):58 Or noç lairon atant de l’Endie greignor, que est da Maabar jusque a Kesmacora, que hi a XIII roiames grandismes des quelz voç en avon conte des X. La menor Yndie est da Cianba jusque a Mutfili que hi a VIII grant roiames, e toutes foies entendés que je ne voç parle que des roiames qui sunt de la terre ferme sanz celz de l’isle que sunt grandismes quantités de roiames. (Div., pp. 598–99) We now leave aside for the present Greater India, which stretches from Maabar [Coromandel] to Kesmacora [coastal region west of the Indus], which has thirteen great kingdoms, ten of which I have described. Lesser India stretches from Cianba [southern Vietnam] to Mutfili [Motupalle, north of Chennai on the east coast of India] and has eight great kingdoms, and yet you must always understand that I am only speaking of mainland kingdoms, not counting those of the islands, where there are great numbers of kingdoms.

Viewed on a modern map, such as Map 1, the Divisament’s Greater India stretches from the Coromandel Coast of southern India (Maabar) to the coastal region approximately around modern Pakistan (Kesmacora), taking in the western Indian coastal regions he describes (Kerala, Gujarat). Yet it also, as the narrator has already made clear, includes the islands in between, even those that would seem to us to logically belong to the East African coast and thus, perhaps, his ‘Middle India’. In linking up these distant regions, the Divisament disregards the continental metageographical distinctions between Africa and Asia that a modern reader might be tempted to consider natural, but shows considerable awareness of the trading links based on the seasonal shift of the monsoon that, as Chaudhuri has shown, prior to 1500 united African, Arabian, and northwesterly and southwesterly Indian ports into a single trading circuit.59 A similar observation can be made concerning the maritime regions and islands that make up the Divisament’s Lesser India. The ‘Book of India’ identifies this region as stretching from Mutfili (Motupalle, north of Chennai) to the kingdom of Champa (roughly corresponding with southern Vietnam), incorporating the ‘grandismes quantités de roiames’ (‘large quantities of kingdoms’) on the islands in between. In the second leg of what Chaudhuri has called the ‘triple 58  Quotation from Polo, Le Divisament dou monde, ed. by Ronchi, p. 589.The description continues until p. 599. 59  See the map in Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean, p. 102, and the map on p. 104.

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segmentation’ of Indian Ocean trade between East Africa and southern China, merchandise could be carried in a single journey at most between a port of southern India (e.g., Calicut) and an Indonesian port (e.g., Pasé, Sumatra). The Divisament’s Lesser India therefore disregards religious, cultural, and political distinctions, somatic and linguistic differences, and even the apparently natural border that some might consider formed by the sea. Instead, it recognizes the unity of economic and social activity brought about by monsoon-based trade, within a coastal and maritime region that stretched between south India, across the eastern Indian Ocean as far as parts of Indonesia and Indochina.60 The texts discussed in this section reveal a complex, multi-directional relationship between the practice of travel, the contexts of production of travellers’ texts, and their description and metageographical categorization of Indian space. Certainly, the reports of oceanic travellers in the Indies discussed here reconfigure the region as an oceanic space. But travellers’ texts and the spaces they represent were, of course, conditioned by other factors too: the traveller’s formation and cultural context; his social roles and goals; the textual contexts and political, religious, or cultural aims of their reconstructed journeys. The following section therefore considers some of the ways in which those roles and aims contributed to visions of Indies characterized more by their Christian associations than by commerce. The Conversion of Indian Space and the Spaces of Conversion Chapter 1 outlined the contours of certain myths that enabled late antique and medieval readers to imagine the Indies as a Christian space and to write that space into the unfolding history of humanity’s salvation. In Christian history and hagiography, each of the tripartite Indies became the province of a named evangelist. In the various texts of the Prester John tradition, the Indies, with all their marvellous wealth, peoples, and plant and animal life, along with the tomb and church of St Thomas the Apostle, were safely placed under the custodianship of a great Christian potentate. At the same time, other texts imaginatively explored the effects of the proximity of the Indies to the Terrestrial Paradise, endowing the region with liminal locations and spaces heavy with Christian symbolism. In the writings of travellers and their amanuenses, particularly missionaries, this process of reconceptualization of the Indies as a Christian space continued through the fourteenth century and into the fifteenth. Part of the next section explores the importance in travellers’ accounts 60 

Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean, p. 104.

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of markers of Christian sacred space that would have been familiar to many Latin Christian travellers: locations associated with St Thomas the Apostle and the Terrestrial Paradise. Yet travellers and amanuenses did not simply reuse spatial markers handed down to them by the cold, dead hand of tradition. I also show how, through narrative, travellers created new, specifically Latin Christian varieties of sacred space, endowed with significant locations and local histories that gave these meaning. In so doing, they participated in a process that narratively mimics what John M. Howe has called ‘the conversion of the physical world’.61 According to Howe, through this process, non-Christian sacred sites were converted in the early Christian era to resonate with Christian meaning and new sacred geographies are mapped out through the creation of ‘awesome landscapes’. In much the same way, the works of Latin Christian travellers in the Indies and their amanuenses mapped out a geography of Christian activities past, present, and future, while there emerged a reconfigured religious topography that featured paradisiacal and accursed loci and new sacred centres: transcendent places ‘where heaven and earth meet’.62 The life and miracles of St Thomas, discussed in Chapter 1, had identified India Superior as the site of St Thomas’s martyrdom long before the travellers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries set foot on the subcontinent. Although legends of St Thomas recorded that the saint’s relics had been translated to Edessa, then via Chios to Ortona, texts such as the twelfth-century De adventu patriarchae Indorum and its derivatives in the Prester John tradition (discussed in Chapter 1) located his tomb in India, its authenticity guaranteed by continuing miracles.63 Miracle stories such as that of the miraculous dispensation of the Eucharist or perfect justice by the hand of the miraculously preserved saint reassured their Latin Christian readers of the continued power and influence of a Christian God in far-flung parts of the world.64 The tomb of St Thomas 61  See Howe, ‘The Conversion of the Physical World’, p. 63. Howe’s argument in this article is further nuanced and developed throughout Howe, ‘Creating Symbolic Landscapes’. I am indebted to Dr Leonie Hicks for calling my attention to Howe’s work in this field. 62  The vocabulary here is drawn from Howe, ‘Creating Symbolic Landscapes’, p.  210. For the notion of the sacred centre, Howe draws on Eliade, ‘Sacred Places’, trans. by Sheed, pp. 367–87. 63  Farmer, ‘Thomas’. 64  The story of the miraculous dispensation of communion occurs in the De adventu patri­ archae Indorum, in Der Priester Johannes, ed. by Zarncke, p. 842. In later texts the same idea is developed into the miraculous dispensation of perfect legal judgements from the saint’s hand. See Mandeville, Le livre des merveilles du monde, ed. by Deluz, pp. 325–26.

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remained a significant sacred centre and religious coordinate in many medieval travellers’ accounts of mainland India. The surviving accounts often discuss the traditions and holy sites of the Indian communities of St Thomas Christians: Eastern Christians, sometimes termed Nestorians, who trace their communities back to the missionary activities of St Thomas.65 Marco Polo’s Divisament places the body of St Thomas in Maabar, in a sparsely populated town with little merchandise. Not only Christians but also Saracens make pilgrimages to the place, the sacredness of which is confirmed by the fact that the red earth on which the saint died cures fevers and other ailments (Div., p. 564). The closely contemporary account of Giovanni da Montecorvino (1292–1293) does not mention the tomb or church of the apostle but identifies Maabar, the place from which Giovanni writes his letter, as part of ‘India superiore’ and the ‘chontrada di santo Tomeo’ (‘country of St Thomas’; SF, i, 341). Around half a century later, papal legate Giovanni de’ Marignolli identified miracles of St Thomas taking place in ‘Mirapolis’ (Mylapore) in Maabar. His account stresses that drinking a solution of the earth from the saint’s tomb cures the ailments of Christians, Tartars, and pagans (SF, i, 545). As Ryan has pointed out, though, the prominence that Giovanni accords to the communities of St Thomas Christians is unusual among missionaries. 66 Poggio Bracciolini, in his account of Niccolò Conti’s journeys, placed the Apostle’s body in Malpuria (Mylapore), where ‘corpus sancti Thomæ honorifice sepultum in amplissima ornatissimaque basilica colitur ab hæreticis (ii Nestoritæ appellantur), qui ad mille hominum in ea urbe habitant’ (‘the body of St Thomas, honourably buried in a great, highly ornate basilica, is venerated by heretics, called Nestorians. Approximately a thousand of these inhabit the town’; DVF, iv, 90). Whereas Poggio’s India proffers no miraculous proofs of the site’s sanctity, Pero Tafur’s account of Niccolò’s story contains a version of the now-familiar legend about the powers of its earth. Pellets of earth taken from his burial site are, according to Tafur, carried by Indian Christians at all times, and may even be taken in place of the host at the approach of death.67 For the Franciscan missionary Odorico da Pordenone, travelling in the 1320s, however, the association of 65 

A detailed account of the Indian traditions of St Thomas and those reported by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century appears in Mundadan, A History of Christianity in India, pp. 29–49. Briefer and more general is the account by Neil, A History of Christianity in India, pp. 28–33, 38. 66  Ryan, ‘European Travelers before Columbus’, p. 661. 67  Tafur, Travels and Adventures, trans. by Letts, pp. 94–95.

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Thomas’s tomb with Eastern, rather than Latin, Christianity undermined its sanctity. Odorico’s Itinerarium mentions neither miracles associated with the site nor the healing properties of its earth. The church is ‘plena ydolis multis’ (‘full of many idols’) and under the care of only a few Nestorian Christians (‘nestorinorum christianorum’) who ‘nequissimi sunt heretici’ (‘are the worst kind of heretics’; SF, i, 442). It is also the location to which Odorico appends an account of extravagant pagan piety. A great idol held in the church there is, on one day each year, wheeled around the town in a chariot, under the wheels of which devotees throw themselves, whilst others, in a ritual also described in Marco’s Divisament, slice themselves to pieces before the idol.68 Dominican missionary Jordan Catala, later to become Bishop of Columbum (Kollam), mentions neither the tomb nor the church of St Thomas, whether in his correspondence of 1321 or his c. 1329 Mirabilia descripta, even though he does mention ‘Molepor’ (Mylapore), where local traditions placed the tomb. But Jordan’s priority was clearly to emphasize the error of the Eastern Christians whom he finds in India, whom his Mirabilia descripta accuses of believing ‘sanctum Thomam majorem esse Christo’ (‘that St Thomas is greater than Christ’).69 The different treatments of St Thomas’s tomb in these texts highlight sharply contrasting attitudes between travellers and amanuenses to Indian Christianity and its spatial markers. While some writers willingly accepted the notion 68 

Odorico may refer here to the festival of Jagannātha at Puri (Orissa). Jagannātha was worshipped as a state deity particularly devoutly under the rule of King Bhānudeva II (1306–1328): Kulke, ‘Jagannātha as State Deity under the Gajapatis of Orissa’, p. 203. Sinica franciscana, ed. by van den Wyngaert and others, i (1929), 444; Polo, Le Divisament dou monde, ed. by Ronchi, pp. 556–57. 69  Jordan Catala, Mirabilia descripta, ed. and trans. by Gadrat, p. 251. Translations from this text are my own. Ryan has argued that Odorico and Jordan knew very little about the St Thomas Christians, particularly in Kerala (around Kollam), and for that reason (i.e., not ideologically motivated disparagement or understatement of a perceived heresy, as I suggest here) did not report their existence or the size and social status of that community in their texts: Ryan, ‘European Travelers before Columbus’, pp. 659–67. This argument is particularly untenable for Jordan, who clearly mentions St Thomas Christians and his own stay in Columbum in Jordan Catala, Mirabilia descripta, ed. and trans. by Gadrat (p. 254), and whose text resulted in a papal letter sent specifically to that particular group. Ryan argues that this must have resulted from information reaching Avignon from other sources (p. 667). Given that the bull elevating Jordan to his see refers to him as ‘conditiones et qualitates illarum partium presentialiter et palpabiliter expertus’ (‘having found out in person and by experience the situation and character of those regions’), additional oral information from Jordan himself is surely the more likely explanation. The Bulls, dated, 9 August 1329 and 21 August 1329, are printed in Jordan Catala, Mirabilia descripta, ed. by Cordier, pp. 32–37 (quotation at p. 36).

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that the tomb and church of St Thomas may mark the survival of apostolic Christianity in the Indies, others, particularly among the missionary orders, resisted attributing miracles — with the sacred status and connections with the divine that these imply — to a non-Latin Christian site. Given the problematic, contested status for some Latin Christians of Eastern Christian holy sites, it is not without significance that, in a group of texts associated with the Dominican and Franciscan missions in India of the early fourteenth century, a distinct set of Latin Christian religious spatial markers begins to emerge. In the works of the missionaries Jordan Catala, Odorico da Pordenone, and Giovanni de’ Marignolli we see the physical space of the Indies converted into a network of sites of Latin Christian activities past, present, and future. The earliest documents in which it is possible to detect the mapping out of a new, Latin Christian sacred geography are those associated with the mission of Jordan Catala in the 1320s. In a letter sent to fellow Franciscan and Dominican missionaries in Persia in October 1321, the Dominican presents himself as ‘in India pauperculum peregrinum’ (‘a poor little pilgrim in India’), working ‘solum […] sine socio’ (‘alone … without companions’) on the missionary front line.70 The letter delivers the news that four Franciscan friars with whom he had been travelling, Thomas of Tolentino, James of Padua, Peter of Siena, and Demetrius of Armenia have been martyred ‘in Tana civitate Indie’ (Thane, near Mumbai), a story swiftly disseminated among Dominican and Franciscan mission stations across Asia as well as back in Europe (‘Letter’, p. 310).71 With no reference, unusually, to established Latin geographical traditions, Jordan’s letter marks out the Indian space with named locations of past, present and potential future missionary activity. As well as mentioning Tana, India’s newest martyr70  A version of Jordan’s letter is edited in Jordan Catala, Mirabilia descripta, ed. and trans. by Gadrat, Annexe i, pp. 310–11 (p. 310). Future references to the ‘Letter’ will, where possible, be given with my own translations, in the text. 71  Three manuscripts containing versions of Jordan’s letter are detailed in Jordan Catala, Mirabilia descripta, ed. and trans. by Gadrat, pp.  321–25; two from manuscripts by the Franciscan chronicler Johannes Elemoysina. Gadrat also edits an altered version of the letter (sometimes erroneously thought a second letter) from the Franciscan Chronicon XXVI gener­ alium at Annexe ii, pp. 312–13, as well as a detailed processus of the martyrdom, written by the custos of the Dominican house in Tabriz in 1331, from an English Franciscan manuscript of the fourteenth century: Annexe iii, pp. 314–15. Versions of the story, sometimes varying in detail, also appear in the Franciscan Paulinus’s Chronologia magna (compiled in the 1320s) and the chronicle (c. 1340) of Johannes von Winterthur: Golubovich, Biblioteca bio-bibliografica, ii (1913), 88–89, 103–13. A passing reference to the event also occurs in a letter written in 1326 by Andrew of Perugia, Bishop of Zaiton: Dawson, Mission to Asia, pp. 235–37.

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dom site, the letter lists Supera (Surat) and Parocto (Broach) as locations in which the Friar has preached and baptized, and identifies possible locations for future mission stations at Parocto, Supera, and Columbum (Kollam). The letter then states that, according to merchants of his acquaintance, for missions ‘via Ethyopie est aperta’ (‘the way to Ethiopia is open’; ‘Letter’, p. 311). In his later Mirabilia descripta (c. 1329), however, almost certainly written at Avignon as part of the preacher’s campaign to achieve greater support for the cause of his mission, we see Jordan sketch out a vivid religious geography, in which his own persecution and the martyrdom of his companions are crucial elements. Woven through the Mirabilia descripta, a work that principally occupies itself with the fruits and animals of the Indies and the region’s religions and rulers, are observations and statements that present these lands as a spiritual battleground. For Jordan, the Indies truly were a space of conversion. In Lesser India, by which name Jordan refers to the northern part of the subcontinent under the steadily extending authority of the Delhi Sultanate, he claims to have baptized three hundred souls, including ‘idolaters’ and ‘saracens’. 72 But Lesser India is also presented as a battleground that bears the physical traces of recent spiritual defeats. Turkish Muslims, who ‘exierunt de Multan et acquisiverunt et usurpaverunt sibi dominium’ (‘came down from Multan and gained, indeed usurped, lordship to themselves’) have destroyed ‘quasi infinita templa ydolorum et eciam ecclesias quamplurimas, de quibus fecerunt mosquetas pro Machometo, et recipiunt rura earum atque possessiones’ (‘an almost infinite number of temples of idols and even many churches, which they have turned into mosques in the name of Muhammad, and have taken their lands and goods’; MD, p. 251). Jordan’s Indies are not the distant location of battles in the ancient past between Alexander and Porus or between Macedonians and wild creatures outlined in Chapter 1, nor are they lands that still benefit from the salvific influence of apostolic Christianity. Instead, as the site of a battle between belief-systems in the missionary’s own here and now, the Indies present an urgent, radically contemporary challenge. In his own lifetime, and while the readers of his letters and treatise sit in Avignon, the ruling Saracens ‘nos accusant, nos percuciunt, nos in carcere poni faciunt et lapidant, sicut de facto probavi’ (‘accuse us, beat us, throw us in prison and stone us, just as I have proved by experience’; MD, p. 266). In no doubt intentionally provoca72 

Jordan Catala, Mirabilia descripta, ed. and trans. by Gadrat, p. 251; subsequent references in text refer to this edition. On the expansion of the Delhi Sultanate in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries under ‘Alā’ al-Dīn Khaljī, Qutb al-Dīn and Ghiyāth al-Dīn, founder of the Tughluk dynasty, see Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate, pp. 193–216.

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tive language, Jordan’s treatise presents Indian lands in the process of being marked out, piece by piece, in his own recent experience, by the blood of Latin Christian martyrs: Quinque eciam Predicatores et quatuor Minores fuerunt illuc, meo tempore, pro fide catholica crudeliter trucidati. (MD, p. 266) Indeed, five Friars Preachers and four Friars Minor have in my time been cruelly slaughtered for the Catholic faith in this place.

Moreover, the series of military campaigns through which the Delhi Sultanate, early in the fourteenth century, steadily extended its powers over Hindu kingdoms to its south is also represented as an eschatological battle in which Latin Christian missionaries and Muslims vie for unconverted souls: Et quia non poteramus pauci multas regiones tenere, nec eciam visitare, multe anime, pro dolor! perierunt et in excessu multe pereunt propter defectum predicancium verbum Dei. Sed et dolorosum est et penosum audire quod per Sarracenorum perfidissimorum atque maledictorum predicatores, pervertuntur tota die secte infidelium ille qui discurrunt sicut nos hic inde, et plus per totum Orientem, ut possint omnes reducere ad perfidiam suam. (MD, p. 266) And because we few were not able to take — nor even visit — many regions, many souls (oh the sorrow!) have been lost, and many more still perish on account of the lack of preachers of the word of God. But it is also sorrowful and painful to hear that they are converted every day to that infidel sect through the preachers of the most faithless and accursed Saracens, who roam about like us here, and, further, through the whole of the Orient, so that they may convert everyone to their faithlessness.

The Mirabilia puts forward two alternative solutions to this woeful situation. Through two or three hundred good friars ‘qui fideliter et ferventer vellent fidem catholicam predicare’ (‘who wished faithfully and fervently to preach the catholic faith’) the mission would be able to convert ten thousand souls per year to the faith (MD, p. 265). Alternatively, there remains crusade; the king of France ‘posset totum mundum sibi subicere, et fidei christiane, sine aliquo eum juvante’ (‘could, without aid, subject the whole world to his own domination and that of the Christian faith’; MD, p. 266). The radical, improbable nature of the solutions proposed indicates something of the urgency of the problem in the preacher’s mind. Jordan’s letter and Mirabilia both convert the political and religious landscape of the Indies into the timeless and ubiquitous eschatological landscape of mission, where preachers, in imitation of Christ, face persecution and even

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death in their ardour to save unconverted souls. Even the Mirabilia’s metageography is influenced by the preacher’s experience. ‘India Major’ (‘Greater India’) is presented in the text as largely similar to ‘India Minor’ (‘Lesser India’): Greater India’s peoples are similar in colour to those of ‘Lesser India’, the landscape is similar, and the animals are the same, except that the former has more elephants. Neither region is located in what we would consider a clear geographical sense (MD, pp. 253, 264).73 In fact, the key difference between Greater and Lesser India emerges as a political one. Whereas there are many idolatrous kings in Greater India, in Lesser India ‘major pars populi adorat ydola, licet magna pars dominii sit Turcorum Sarracenorum’ (‘the greater part of the people worship idols, but the majority of the lords are Turkish Saracens’; MD, p. 251). Given that elsewhere in the Mirabilia Jordan reports that one can preach and baptize freely amongst the idolaters, but in Saracen-controlled areas preachers are accused, beaten, stoned, and imprisoned, the religious affiliation of the ruling class is, in context, the most appropriate and potentially useful way of dividing and categorizing the land (MD, pp. 266, 252). The sacred and profane geographies set out in Jordan’s works had a remarkably concrete, if short-lived, impact upon the ecclesiastical geography of the papal curia at Avignon. While Jordan was in Avignon, Pope John XXII created the bishopric of Columbum (Kollam) ‘in Maiori India’, elevating the Dominican as its first incumbent.74 No doubt influenced by Jordan’s presentation of Christians who consider St Thomas greater than Christ, John also wrote to the Christians of the new episcopal city expressing the hope ‘eos ad salutem adduceret’ (‘that he might lead them to salvation’) and recommending Jordan as their new bishop. 75 Whether Jordan ever completed his return journey to his new see is not known, but the curia certainly sought through documentary practice to establish spiritual jurisdiction over the Indian space and peoples revealed by the Mirabilia. The registers of John XXII also include papal letters that recommend the new bishop ‘Regi Deli Indie Minoris’ (‘to the Sultan of Delhi of Lesser India’), ‘Regi Columbi Indiæ Maioris’ (‘to the 73 

Jordan does not locate these regions through cardinal directions or proximity to other regions or cities. The only information on their extent he provides is that Lesser India is a sixty-day journey across and Greater India a 170-day journey, excluding islands: Jordan Catala, Mirabilia descripta, ed. and trans. by Gadrat, p. 264. 74  In bulls dated 9 and 21 August 1329. See Jordan Catala, Mirabilia descripta, ed. by Cordier, pp. 32–37. 75  On 9 April 1330. Printed in Jordan Catala, Mirabilia descripta, ed. by Cordier, pp. 40–41 (p. 40).

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King of Columbum of Greater India’), to the emperors of Cathay and Ethiopia, and various Christian communities including those of ‘Gozarat’ (Gujarat), ‘Cuncatana’ (perhaps an error for ‘ciuitate Tana’), and Molephatam, an Indian place name otherwise only found in Jordan’s own Mirabilia.76 From these letters it also emerges that Jordan’s politically and religiously based geographical distinctions between ‘maior’ and ‘minor’ India became, briefly, those of the papal curia. The documents place the cities and regions to the north, under Islamic rule at the time, in Lesser India, and those to the south that were not, in its Greater counterpart. As had been the the case in the early Christian Latin West, sites of martyrdom, relics, miracles, and their narratives proved central to the process of mapping out and laying claim to a specifically Latin Christian geography of the Indies.77 Robert Markus argues that, in late antique Christianity, the cult of martyrs ‘provided a means for turning the spatial world into a network of holy places’, a process that helped Christians to take ‘imaginative possession’ of the space of the Roman Empire and to ‘impose [on it] their own religious topography’.78 Stories of the martyrdom of four Franciscans at Tana (Thane) in 1321 and their post-mortem miracles proved similarly important elements in the reconceptualization of the Indies as a space marked out by Roman Catholic Christian acts and history. The Itinerarium of the Franciscan Odorico da Pordenone, recorded shortly after the Mirabilia descripta, shows how the Tana martyrdom narrative could be used to create the spiritual coordinates — sacred centres that link heaven and earth — of a new, specifically Franciscan Christian geography. In the Itinerarium, the city of Tana is singled out as previously defined with reference to Alexander’s conquest but now defined anew by the martyrdoms: [I]n viginti octo dietis me transivi usque ad Tanam, in qua pro fide Christi gloriosum martyrium passi fuerunt IIIIor nostri fratres Minores. […] Hec terra antiq76 

The list of intended recipients of papal letters, written between August and December 1329, is given in Jordan Catala, Mirabilia descripta, ed. by Cordier, p. 39. Gadrat identifies Molephatam with a town (Mosulipatam) in modern Andhra Pradesh: Jordan Catala, Mirabilia descripta, ed. and trans. by Gadrat (p. 286, n. 74). ‘Cuncatana’ is plausibly explained as a copyist’s error for ‘ciuitate Tana’, but it should also be noted that the Catalan Atlas of c. 1375, discussed further in Chapter 6, gives ‘Cocintaya’ in the position of Thane (south of Cambay): Abraham, Mapamundi, ed. by Grosjean, p. 84, no. 39. In either case, Thane seems to be indicated. 77  The creation around the Mediterranean of a Christian topography, ‘dotted with clearly indicated loci where Heaven and Earth Meet’, through the shrines and relics of saints, is discussed in Brown, The Cult of Saints, p. 10. 78  Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity, pp. 139–55 (p. 142).

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uitus fuit valde magna, nam ipsa fuit terra Regis Pori, qui cum Alexandro Rege prelium magnum iam commisit. (SF, i, 422–23) In twenty-eight days I crossed over to Tana, in which place four of our Friars Minor suffered glorious martyrdom for the faith of Christ […] This land was formerly very great, for it was the land of King Porus, who fought a great battle with King Alexander.

The Itinerarium characterizes the Indies as a space where a once-great pagan past has been written over. Tana has become, according to Odorico, a region largely inhabited by pagans, with a small community of Nestorian Christian ‘heretics’, all under ‘Saracen’ rule. But the region’s principal characteristic in the Itinerarium is its consecration by four Franciscan martyrdoms. The narrative that ensues identifies the places where the significant acts and events of the martyrdom processus took place. The friars sailed first from Hormuz seeking Polumbum (Kollam). An ill wind blew them to Tana instead, where they were martyred and where attested miracles occurred both before and after their deaths (SF, i, 424). Odorico then narrates that he collected the martyrs’ bones to take them to a Franciscan house at Zaiton in India Superior, where they were buried ‘cum honore et maxima reverencia’ (‘with honour and the greatest reverence’; SF, i, 438). The commercial port and eventual episcopal see of Polumbum ( Jordan’s Columbum) is also recast as the location of two post-mortem miracles effected through the friars’ relics while these were in Odorico’s possession (SF, i, 437–38). Finally, Odorico ends this piece of hagiography with evidence that the Tana martyrs’ deaths have created a new location of demonstrably great and lasting sanctity in India, a site where the presence of the divine manifests itself on, and indeed through, earth: Et sic multa alia operatur omnipotens Deus per istos sanctos fratres; cum adhuc habeantur apud ydolatras et saracenos. Nam cum ipsi morbo aliquo detinentur vadunt ad accipiendum de terra illa, in qua fuerunt interfecti, illam abluentes. Que cum sit lota, ipsam bibunt et statim ab infirmitatibus suis totaliter liberantur firmissime. (SF, i, 438–39) And thus all-powerful God performs many works through these holy friars, albeit until now amongst idolaters and saracens. For when they are afflicted with any sickness they go and take some of the earth on which they were killed, dissolving it in water. When it is dissolved, they drink it, and are immediately freed completely and most durably from their illnesses.

Odorico’s reuse of the topos of the healing earth, associated in the Divisament dou monde and subsequent occidental texts with the tomb of St Thomas the

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Apostle, is particularly striking. The Itinerarium appears here to attempt to displace the Indian Christian holy site of Thomas’s tomb from its position as the Indies’ most important Christian spatial marker and to replace it with a Roman Catholic, specifically Franciscan alternative. Tana, alongside other locations in which miracles took place and alongside Zaiton (Quanzhou), the location of the Franciscan house in southern China that holds the martyrs’ relics, becomes a coordinate in a new, Franciscan, Christian geography of the Indies. Moreover, it is a Christian geography that runs in parallel with and in contradiction to the religious and political geography described in the self-same text. While the narrative recognizes that Tana is contemporaneously inhabited by pagans and under the political control of Muslims, the transcendent power of a Christian God is shown through the miraculous powers of its earth. Even though in Polumbum ‘[o]mnes […] adorant bovem pro deo suo’ (‘everyone worships the ox as their God’; SF, i, 440) and in Mobar (the Coromandel Coast) the church of St Thomas is now full of idols, the miracle sites identified by Odorico mark out the Indies as a fundamentally Christian space, subject to a Christian God whose timeless power transcends all. Of all the attempts by fourteenth-century missionaries to overwrite preexisting geographies of India, that found in Giovanni de’ Marignolli’s digest of Bohemian chronicles (c. 1354) is perhaps the strangest.79 Like Odorico and Jordan before him, Giovanni rewrites the Indies as a Latin Christian space. However, he does so by conceptualizing his own spatial experience in biblical terms and, at the same time, situating biblical locations, events, and phenomena in the Indies through which he travelled. In his chapter on the Creation, after noting that God planted Eden in the east ‘ultra Indiam’ (‘beyond India’), Giovanni anchors the Indies of his own experience to the biblical Garden of Eden by geographically and narratively collocating these two places: one transcendental, biblical location and one in practised space (SF, i, 525; 531). But, more than this, as he digresses from what should be the matter of Bohemia into his own travels, Giovanni shows a recurrent concern to situate his experiences of Indian space within the framework of Christian history, geography, and eschatology. Although idiosyncratic both in form and content, Giovanni’s chronicle nonetheless builds in certain important ways on existing Christian topographies of the Indies. The Chronicon tells how the papal legate stopped at Columbum 79 

From internal evidence Yule dates the work between May 1354 and September 1362 but argues that it was probably composed during the friar’s visit to Prague in 1354–55: Cathay and the Way Thither, ed. by Yule and Cordier, iii (1915), 203.

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on his return from Cathay. The city, the Indies’ only episcopal see and thus its most important location in ecclesiastical geography, forms both a spatial and narrative focal point in the chronicle’s account; at Columbum, Giovanni locates several important acts of spatial and narrative appropriation. Giovanni relates how he found there the Latin church of St George — presumably a missionary church, but unrecorded elsewhere — which he redecorated with paintings in his own hand. But a still greater physical intervention in the landscape follows. After teaching the holy law among the region’s population, the Franciscan claims to have set up a durable sign of his activity in the landscape: Tandem transiens gloriam maximi Alexandri qui erexit columpnam, ego in cono mundi contra paradisum erexi lapidem in titulum, fundens oleum desuper scilicet columpnam marmoream, desuper crucem lapideam usque ad finem mundi duraturam. (SF, i, 531)80 At last, surpassing the glory of the great Alexander, who set up a column, at the tip of the world opposite paradise I set up ‘a stone as a monument, pouring oil on top’ [Gen. 28. 18], that is to say, a marble column, topped with a stone cross, to last until the end of the world.

Of course, this action may well be more of a textual appropriation than a physical act in the landscape; whether the rather self-important friar ever set up such a marker hardly matters. Much more important are the fact that Giovanni’s chronicle represents ‘India Columbensis’ as a territory marked out by an act of appropriation by a Latin Christian representative of the pope and the literary and biblical resonances of this represented spatial act. Whereas in many of the texts discussed in Chapter 1, Alexander the Great erected altars or other markers to signify the limit of his territorial conquests, Giovanni claims to erect one to commemorate conquests of a spiritual kind. The stone, with column and cross, that bears his own arms and those of the Roman Catholic pontiff, is to last unto the end of the world. And yet, having explicitly compared his own act favourably with that of the pagan conqueror Alexander, Giovanni’s text swiftly changes the terms of reference by incorporating a clear allusion to the account of Jacob’s dream in Genesis 28, one that adds yet a further layer of meaning to his act of spatial appropriation. In the source passage, Jacob rests his head on a stone and is visited by a dream in which the Lord makes a promise: 80 

Biblical quotations throughout are taken from the Biblia sacra iuxta vulgatam versionen, ed. by Weber and others. English translations are from the Douay-Rheims Bible (Challoner Revision): The Holy Bible: Douay Version, with capitalization and punctuation occasionally modernized.

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[E]ritque germen tuum quasi pulvis terrae dilataberis ad occidentem et orientem septentrionem et meridiem et benedicentur in te et in semine tuo cunctae tribus terrae. (Gen. 28. 14) And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth: thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south. And in thee and thy seed all the tribes of the earth shall be blessed.

Giovanni’s anecdote calls to mind Jacob’s spatial act of setting up the stone on which he had rested as a marker of the sacred place in which God’s revelation was made. Through this reference, Giovanni gives a new set of connotations to the motif, familiar from the Alexander traditions, of setting up a physical, commemorative marker of progress through the Indies. Giovanni aligns his own stone’s meaning not only with the physical marker of Alexander’s progress but also with that of Jacob’s stone, which both marks a point where heaven and earth meet and signifies that the spot belongs to God (Gen. 28. 16). As Jacob’s stone marks the Lord’s promise that Jacob’s people will spread abroad from the place marked, so Giovanni’s stone also forms a physical reminder in the narrative and physical landscape that the word of God will spread from its location in Columbum to peoples and places throughout the Indies. Later in the chronicle, Giovanni returns elliptically to the theme of Columbum’s centrality in his reconfigured Christian topography of the Indies. Embedded in a chapter ostensibly concerned with developments in religion after the flood is an exemplary anecdote. Outside the church in Columbum, Giovanni explains, he was visited by a pagan who was ‘sacerdos tocius insule sue que sita est in ultimis finibus Yndorum’ (‘priest of an entire island situated in the furthest reaches of the Indians’), a man of virtuous life but who ‘colebat dyabolum in ydolo suo purissima devocione’ (‘worshipped the devil in his idol with the purest devotion’; SF, i, 547). Seeing the man’s purity, God had obliged a demon to tell him through the mouth of his idol that he should ‘Columbum itinere per mare annorum duorum, ibi invenies nuncium Dei qui docebit te viam salutis’ (‘travel for two years by sea to Columbum, where you will find the messenger of the Lord who will teach you the way of salvation’; SF, i, 547). Through this miracle, the chronicle intimates both God’s acknowledgement of the significance of Columbum and his foreknowledge of Giovanni’s own divinely preordained activities there. Through such anecdotes, Giovanni creates a triumphant narrative of the conversion of Indian space, though one unsupported, it must be admitted, by any other evidence. The anecdotes ratify miraculously and narratively the documentary activity undertaken in the papal curia in 1329 and 1330. Through the

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intervention of God, Giovanni intimates, Columbum, the bishopric created under John XXII, has become a place of pilgrimage and a holy site through which Latin Christianity may reach the faithful or potentially faithful even in the furthest islands of the Indies. Thus far, I have talked about the role of tombs of saints and markers of martyrdom in the Indian Christian landscape and the creation, through travellers’ letters and descriptions, of distinctively Latin Christian geographies of the Indies. But the accounts of travellers and amanuenses also reveal the operation of a further process in the conversion, through narrative and description, of the Indian physical environment: the description and resignification of what Howe and others have called awesome landscapes. Howe identifies the locus amoenus, ‘the pleasant, lovely place’, a type of Eden, and its opposite, the locus horribilis, ‘a blighted landscape, a place of horror, vast solitude, and impassability, abounding in savage beasts and demons’ as tropes in medieval accounts of the creation of Christian landscapes.81 Traces of these tropes appear in several of the accounts under discussion here. Sometimes, they participate in the process of spatially locating the lands described; regions sharing paradisiacal characteristics must be, logic insists, physically closer to Paradise. But sometimes, particularly in the accounts of Franciscan and Dominican missionaries, the appearances of such tropes herald moments in the accounts when a particular Indian space or spatial experience takes on a special spiritual, theological, or eschatological significance. Under the twin influences of scholastic debates on the physical location of the Terrestrial Paradise and Arab legends concerning Sri Lanka, notions of the proximity of the Terrestrial Paradise were particularly influential on travellers’ accounts of this great island’s ‘awesome landscapes’. 82 In a passage that calls to mind the many liminal encounters at the summits of high mountains in the Alexander romances discussed in Chapter 1, Marco Polo’s Divisament dou 81 

Howe, ‘Creating Symbolic Landscapes’, pp. 210, 212. His discussion of the locus amoenus draws on Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. by Trask, pp. 195–200. 82  On scholastic debates concerning the physical location of the Terrestrial Paradise in the thirteenth century, see Scafi, Mapping Paradise, pp. 179–82. Ibn Battuta in the 1350s attests to the circulation of Arab legends that Sri Lanka was the home of Adam and Eve on their expulsion from Eden: Ibn Battuta, Travels, trans. by H. A. R. Gibb, iv (1994), 847. In other Arab legends, Sri Lanka (Sarandīb) is an idyllic location below the equinoctial line. In the sixth voyage of Sindbad the sailor, the island’s interior only becomes accessible to the shipwrecked sailor once he has given up on life and placed himself in God’s hands. See the sixth and seventh voyages of Sindbad in The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, ed. by Mack, pp. 168–78.

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monde relates how on Seillan (Sri Lanka), at the very summit of a mountain so high that it can only be ascended with the aid of chains, one finds a tomb: [E] les saracinz, que en grandismes moutitude hi vient ausint en pelerinajes, dient que ce est le muniment de Adan nostre primer pere et que les dens e les chevoilz e la scuele fu ausi de Adan. Or avés entandu comant les ydres dient qu’il est le filz au roi que fu lor primer ydres e lor primiere dieu, e les saraçinz dient qu’il est Adan, nostre primer piere; mes Dieu set qui est et quel fu, car nos ne creon pas que en celui leu soit Adan, car nostre Escriture de Sainte Eglise dit qu’el est en autre partie dou monde.83 And the Saracens, who come here in great numbers, come here too on pilgrimage, saying that it is the tomb of Adam, our first father, and that the teeth, hair and dish there also belonged to Adam. Now, you have already heard how the idolaters say that it is the king’s son who was the first idolater and their first god, and the Saracens say that it is Adam, our first father. But God alone knows who it is or was, because we do not believe that Adam was in this place, because the writings of Holy Church tell us that that is in another part of the world.

As is characteristic, the Divisament here does not permit any one religion a monopoly on Indian holy sites. Just as St Thomas is revered by Muslims and Christians alike in Maabar, so Adam’s Peak is sacred to Muslims, Buddhists, and potentially to Christians too: a shared sacred locus that transcends religious difference. Although the Divisament stops well short of linking Seillan and Paradise, it nevertheless evokes through association the possibility of a link, knowable only to God. Like the Divisament, Odorico’s Itinerarium relates a story that links Sri Lanka to Paradise, but as hearsay rather than fact: In hac contrata est unus maximus mons, de quo dicunt quod Adam super illo planxit filium suum centum annis. In medio montis huius habetur quedam pulcerima planicies, in qua est aqua magna quam dicunt gentes esse lacrimas quas Adam et Eva effuderunt. Quod tamen non creditur esse verum cum ibi intus nascatur aqua illa. (SF, i, 454) In this country there is a high mountain, and they say that on it Adam mourned his son for a hundred years. In the middle of the mountain there is a certain plain of great beauty. On it, there is a great lake, which the locals say is formed of the tears that Adam and Eve shed. This, however, is not to be believed, because the water rises there within [the lake].

83 

Polo, Le Divisament dou monde, ed. by Ronchi, pp. 575–76; Ronchi’s textual emendations are silently incorporated here.

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Both Odorico and Marco raise the tantalizing possibility that Sri Lanka, set apart by its awesome landscape, is a place that transcends the changes wrought by time. Physically close to the Terrestrial Paradise, Sri Lanka also retains in its landscape the material traces of Adam and Eve’s activity on earth. But both texts at the same time carefully distance themselves from any firm assertion that this is the case. For Giovanni de’ Marignolli, however, Sri Lanka’s proximity to Paradise was never in question.84 Giovanni’s chronicle states flatly, as a matter of fact, that, breaking his homeward journey, the friar arrived ‘ad portum Seyllani nomine Pervily ex opposito paradisi’ (‘a port of Seyllan named Pervily, opposite Paradise’; SF, i, 537). Rather prosaically, he then tells of being swindled out of his possessions by a local official. Giovanni professes to doubt the reports he has heard that Paradise is actually situated at the top of a very high mountain on Sri Lanka; he argues on the contrary that this place, named ‘Zindanbaba’, is the place to which Adam was expelled from Paradise and should, in fact, be translated as ‘infernus patris’ (‘the hell of our father’; SF, i, 538). Nonetheless, the friar locates Paradise close by — close enough for it to appear in his text as a physical coordinate — and allows the possibility that it may be physically linked to the island: In eodem monte versus paradisum est fons maximus, bene decem milliarum ytalicorum, aquis optimis perspicuis, quem dicunt derivari de fonte paradisi et ibi erumpere; quod probant, quia aliquando erumpunt de fundo quedam folia ignota et in magna copia et lignum aloes et lapides preciosi sicut carbunculus et saphirus et poma quedam ad sanitatem. Dicunt eciam lapillos illos cavatos de lacrimis Ade, quod falsum omnino videtur. (SF, i, 539) On the same mountain, a good ten Italian miles in the direction of paradise, there is a great fountain of the best, clear water, which they say derives from the fountain of paradise and springs forth there. They prove this thus: sometimes, there rise from the depths certain unknown leaves in large quantities, and aloe wood, and precious stones such as carbuncles and sapphires, and certain healing fruits. And they say that those gems are formed from the tears of Adam, which can be seen by everyone to be false.

While in this passage Giovanni explicitly contradicts the claims of the locals (which he relates) that the gems found in the fountain close to Paradise are the tears of Adam, all other markers of the site’s status as a locus amoenus — the 84 

For a detailed discussion of Giovanni’s visit to and paradisiacal impressions of Sri Lanka, see Abeydeera, ‘Jean de Marignolli’.

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fountain, the gems, the aromatic wood, and healing fruits — are reported without challenge. Indeed, every characteristic of the island’s high mountain marks it out as a location both liminal and transcendent. At a summit almost permanently wreathed in mists is the first footprint of Adam, a certain statue (clearly a Buddha, from the description), and a dwelling that Adam made with his own hands (SF, i, 538). Still on the island but away from the mountain, Giovanni also suggests that the city founded by Cain following his murder of his brother, Abel, is one he has visited, by the name of Kota (Kotte, near Colombo). 85 Physical objects and material traces, then, constitute links through which, in Sri Lanka, the present is anchored to the biblical past and humanity to its beginnings. Giovanni even raises the possibility that Adam’s Peak, connected to Paradise in space and time, stands outside history. The inhabitants claim, he says, that the waters of the flood never reached the heights of the mountain. An antediluvian people, they keep to the laws of Adam, holding good morals, going naked, and avoiding meat. Indeed, they confirm their antediluvian origins by arguing that they descend neither from Seth nor from Cain but ‘de aliis filiis Ade, qui genuit filios alios et filias’ (‘from other children of Adam, who had other sons and daughters’; SF, i, 538–39). Moreover, they point to the continued existence in the east of the island of ‘profugi, vagi multi’ (‘many wandering vagrants’) who ‘dicunt se filios Caym’ (‘call themselves the sons of Cain’).86 But, in a technique familiar from Marco’s Divisament and Odorico’s Itinerarium, Giovanni raises these ideas without final affirmation or denial, his only comments being that he passes over the locals’ claims of descent from other sons of Adam ‘[q]uia tamen est contra sacram Scripturam’ (‘because it is nonetheless against Holy Scripture’; SF, i, 539) and that Augustine and other doctors consider it ‘frivolum’ (‘foolish’) to believe that any could have survived the flood outside the Ark.87 In Giovanni’s chronicle, as in the accounts of Odorico and Marco, the awesome landscape of Sri Lanka marks a transcendent locus where lived, present reality and humanity’s historical, biblical origins touch. Echoes of the paradisiacal also resonate through Jordan Catala’s fourteenthcentury Mirabilia. Jordan, however, uses elements of the locus amoenus topos 85  Passage absent from Sinica franciscana, ed. by van den Wyngaert and others; see Giovanni de’ Marignolli, Kronika Marignolova, ed. by Emler, pp. 503–04; and Cathay and the Way Thither, ed. by Yule and Cordier, iii (1915), 244 and n. 2. 86  Passage absent from Sinica franciscana, ed. by van den Wyngaert and others; see Giovanni de’ Marignolli, Kronika Marignolova, ed. by Emler, p. 505. 87  Absent from Sinica franciscana, ed. by van den Wyngaert and others; see Giovanni de’ Marignolli, Kronika Marignolova, ed. by Emler, p. 505.

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in a very different way. In the Mirabilia we see the Indian landscape and environment act on the missionary, bringing him closer both to Paradise and to hell. The physical environment of Lesser India, in Jordan’s Mirabilia descripta, enjoys many idyllic characteristics reminiscent of both encyclopaedic accounts of India and the locus amoenus. Lesser India is fertile even though it never rains; a marvellous fruit grows there so large that it can feed five people, and the trees never lose their leaves (MD, pp. 247, 249). ‘Tertia India’, which Jordan makes no claim to have visited, borders upon the Ethiopian kingdom of Prester John and is, paradoxically, also near the Terrestrial Paradise towards the east, where great rivers abound in gold and precious stones (MD, pp. 259–60). Yet other Indian locations are endowed with the quasi-infernal qualities reminiscent of the locus horribilis. The peoples of Lesser and Greater India ‘longe a mari, habitantes infra terram et in locis nemorosis, totaliter videntur infernales, non edentes, non bibentes, nec se cooperientes sicut alii qui habitant juxta mare’ (‘living far from the sea, in the interior and in forested places, seem utterly infernal, neither eating, drinking, nor clothing themselves as do those who live by the sea’; MD, pp. 256–57). A space where paradisiacal and infernal qualities coexist in unnerving proximity, Jordan’s Indies have metamorphosed into a spiritual landscape in which one’s personal faith is tested not only by the physical and political realities of religious persecution but also by unexplained, seemingly supernatural torments. In Greater India [e]st eciam alia avis magna, non sicut milvus, que solum de nocte volat et vocem emittit nocturnis temporibus, ad modum vocis hominis plangentis quasi de profundo. Quid dicam? Dyabolus ibi eciam loquitur sepe et sepius hominibus nocturnis temporibus, sicut ego audivi. Mirabilia sunt omnia in ista Yndia, est enim vere unus alter mundus. (MD, p. 257) There is also a type of large bird, not like a kite, which only flies by night and emits a cry in the night-time, just like the voice of a man crying out as though from the abyss. What should I say? In that place even the Devil speaks more and more often to men in the night-time, just as I heard. There are all sorts of wonders in this India; indeed, it is truly another world.

The Mirabilia suggests that, as his faith is tested, Jordan experiences the Indies as an ‘alter mundus’: a world in which the nature of reality is different. It is an earthly space with a liminal quality, where the barriers are thin between the mundane on the one hand, and the paradisiacal and the infernal on the other. Nor is Jordan the only medieval missionary to leave the impression that the Indies are a liminal space, where Paradise and hell feel close at hand. In an episode that echoes Alexander’s experience in an Indian ‘valley of shad-

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ows’ in the twelfth-century Roman d’Alexandre of Alexander de Paris (see Chapter 1), Odorico da Pordenone’s Itinerarium narrates an overtly allegorical journey through the friar’s own valley of perils. The Itinerarium tells readers only that Odorico, at an indeterminate point in his eastern travels, comes across a valley situated on a ‘flumen deliciarum’ (‘river of delights’; SF, i, 491). No name for valley or river is given, nor is it located within a named country or region. Nonetheless, its clear echoes of the ‘valley of shadows’ encountered by Alexander situate it within Europe’s imaginative geography of the Indies. In the Itinerarium’s rendering, as in the Roman d’Alexandre, none who enter the valley may leave, and indeed, on entering, Odorico soon sees that it is full of the bodies of the dead. Terrified by the sight of a fearsome face carved into the rock before him, the friar repeats the central tenet of his creed, ‘verbum caro factum est’ (‘the word was made flesh’; John 1. 14). Turning to the other end of the valley, the traveller climbs a mountain of sand, where he finds gold and silver ‘quasi squame piscium congregatum’ (‘piled up like the scales of fish’). Tempted, but eventually rejecting these as the illusions of demons, the friar is finally able to leave the valley unharmed (SF, i, 491–92). Location in any sense in which we understand the term is clearly of no importance in this vividly imagined moral test. What is significant is that, at this point in Odorico’s narrative, spatial experience merges seamlessly with spiritual experience, and an earthly itinerary doubles as a spiritual journey through the valley of death and temptation. Yet, at the same time, this episode also functions as an act of Christian imaginative domination over the Indian space constructed, as we saw in Chapter 1, through literature and legend. Just as Giovanni de’ Marignolli overwrites Alexander the Great’s temporal and military achievements in India with his own transcendent missionary achievements, so Odorico’s Itinerarium here remakes the pagan conqueror’s allegorical experience in the valley of shadows as an overtly Christian, Franciscan mystical experience.

Conclusion To suggest that the texts of the medieval travellers discussed in this chapter are stifled by convention in their ways of perceiving and describing the Indies is to misread them. If we attempt to translate the spatialities of such travellers into a mode of representation governed by the desire to locate points in abstract space and the principles of mathematical cartography, we will almost inevitably find them defective or overwrite them with our own representational priorities. But if we explore medieval ways of plotting and relationally locating places, and if

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we elucidate the kinds of coordinates that mattered to travellers, writers, and their audiences, we uncover ways of understanding and representing the world that are deeply engaged in and conditioned by all sorts of practices: navigation, trade, evangelization, and others not touched upon here. To locate an India in any of the texts discussed here means much more than to plot it on a physical or mental map. It may mean to connect it with history, with legend, with biblical or literary tradition, with eschatology or ecclesiastical geography, or to situate it dynamically in the economic machine of the world. Sometimes, travellers’ texts reveal the desire to anchor a place to an absolute — to the divine — by marking it out as an invariable point that transcends the vicissitudes of political, social, and even religious earthly life. 88 Thus we find that sites such as a physically located and connected Terrestrial Paradise, physical traces on the earth associated with Adam and Eve, and earthly places where a divine presence is confirmed through continuing miracles, held a particular importance in the configuration of a specifically Christian Indian space. The medieval travellers and amanuenses discussed here often wrestled with the metageographical categories that they inherited, attempting to create meaningful geographical frameworks adequate to the description of the world as they experienced it. These frameworks needed to be appropriate to the situated traveller — journeying by land or sea, trading, engaged in politics, diplomacy, or evangelization — as well as meaningful to audiences at home. Indeed, the significance of the interventions in which these texts were engaged should not be understated. They participated in the creation of a conception of Indian space characterized by mercantile and navigational practice, just as they reinvented the Indies as sites of Christian activity past, present, and future. Medieval travellers’ Indies were the product of a complex interaction between practice, representation, thought, and desire. But it is also important to stress the unnervingly multiple and inconsistent nature of these invented and represented spaces. In Poggio’s Indies, one can shop for spices at the very edge of the navigable, known, inhabited world, while Giovanni de’ Marignolli apparently sees nothing particularly odd about being defrauded of one’s possessions at the gates of Paradise.

88 

Henri Lefebvre considers such points to be locations in ‘absolute space’, a category that he considers both ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ at the same time and that he describes as manifesting itself at certain points on the earth as if emerging from below. See Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. by Nicholson-Smith, pp. 229–91, in particular pp. 251, 254–55.

Part II Embodied Encounters: Travellers’ Texts and their Readers

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he last chapter’s discussion of the spatialities of Western European travellers’ descriptions of the Indies relied, as is always necessary in such broad overviews, on modern critical or diplomatic editions. But I want to turn now to the reciprocal relationships between those accounts of the Indies that circulated relatively widely and the audiences that read and interacted with them. To explore these relationships, and to understand the social and cultural work that travellers’ descriptions performed, it is necessary to leave behind the useful but sometimes misleading homogeneity of the modern edition and to explore the Indies as most fourteenth- and fifteenth-century readers encountered them: in their unruly material, manuscript variety.1 In so doing, it is also necessary to consider readers not in the abstract but in the particular. The accounts of medieval travellers and the readers who encountered them were always embodied: subject to particular political, cultural, and social circumstances. Such circumstances affected the reading, interpretation, and functions of these descriptions. The question of readers’ approaches to travellers and their accounts of journeys in the East has raised critical interest before now. Consuelo Wager Dutschke’s influential doctoral thesis, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, describes every manuscript of the Book known at the time of writing and, based on these, draws inferences concerning readership and, in particular, the question of whether medieval readers believed or disbelieved Marco’s text.2 Rosemary Tzanaki and Suzanne Röhl have also produced 1 

Print does not have an impact on the circulation of the texts discussed here until very late in the fifteenth century. The earliest Italian vernacular printed edition of Marco Polo’s Book is the Venetian imprint Marco Polo da Veniesia de le meravegliose cose del Mondo (Venice: Sessa, 1496). A German translation, Buch des edlen Ritters und Landfahrers Marco Polo, appeared in 1477 (Nuremburg: Creussner, 1477). On the earliest Latin edition of Marco Polo’s Book (1485), see Hellinga, ‘Marco Polo’s Description of the Far East’. On the earliest print of Odorico’s Relatio (1513), see Romana-Camarota, ‘Dalla “relatio” di Odorico da Pordenone’. Poggio’s India (Bk iv of the De varietate fortunae) was printed as India recognita in 1492 (Milan: Scinzenzeler, 1492). The reception of early printed editions of these texts would require a separate study. 2  Dutschke observes that the four main groups of text type are ‘the scholarly Latin, the noble Venetian, the merchant Tuscan and the Courtly French’: Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and

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monographs touching on the circumstances of circulation and reading of perhaps the best-known traveller’s tale of the period, the fictionalized and probably pseudonymous Book of Sir John Mandeville (see Chapter 5).3 Other scholars have worked on aspects of the readership or reception of particular manuscripts or versions of particular texts in specific geographical areas.4 Taken together, these studies have already begun to point towards a conclusion that the following two chapters will reinforce: that is, the destabilizing textual, material, and functional variety of these works across different linguistic and social groups. This destabilizing material variety calls into question certain assumptions about genre that have characterized some recent and not-so-recent scholarly discussions of travel narratives in general and in the particular. Jacques Heers put forward an argument in 1984 that the genre of Marco Polo’s Book is of ‘une simple description des pays’ (‘a simple description of countries’), that is, a ‘traité didactique’ (‘didactic treatise’). This didactic work of descriptive geography was, he argued, misunderstood by humanist and other scholars of the fifteenth century as a ‘“récit” du voyage réel’ (‘account of a real journey’).5 Paul Zumthor in 1994 made the rather sweeping but nonetheless influential statement that Marco’s Book’s medieval popularity was due to a ‘misunderstanding’; its audience read it because they thought it was a ‘fantastic tale’.6 Much more recently, Antonio García Espada has argued that works such as Marco’s Book, Odorico’s Itinerarium, Jordan’s Mirabilia descripta, and The Book of Sir John Mandeville form a misunderstood genre in their own right, one that Espada terms the ‘description of the Indies’.7 Underlying all these very different positions is a shared assumption: that a work (considered in the abstract) belongs to a given genre and that a reader, medieval or modern, who fails correctly to identify that genre on some level misreads the text. Such arguments aim to disthe Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, p. 42. Dutschke’s investigation of believing and sceptical attitudes to the Book is at pp. 43–99. 3  Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences; Röhl, Der ‘Livre de Mandeville’. 4  On Odorico’s reception in Italian, see Andreose, ‘Tra ricezione e riscrittura’, pp. 5–21. On the probable production and first reception contexts of the Marco Polo and Odorico da Pordenone texts in BL, MS Royal 19 D.i, see Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers, i, 244–55. The circulation of Marco Polo in England is compared with that of Mandeville in Yeager, ‘The World Translated’. 5  Heers, ‘De Marco Polo à Christophe Colomb’, pp. 142, 135. 6  Zumthor, ‘The Medieval Travel Narrative’, p. 810. 7  García Espada, ‘Marco Polo, Odorico of Pordenone, the Crusades, and the Role of the Vernacular’, pp. 201–22.

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tinguish the ‘real’ (i.e., authorial) genre, function, or meaning of a work from later, inauthentic, interpretations. But work in textual theory and criticism has revealed many of the textual assumptions that underlie this thinking to be problematic, particularly — but not exclusively — where medieval vernacular literary production is concerned.8 Indeed, in many arenas of medieval textual production, as Bella Millett has pointed out in connection with the Ancrene Wisse, ‘continuing functionality was sometimes seen as more important than […] textual integrity’, or indeed authorial intention. 9 As witnesses to a text’s anticipated or actual ‘functionality’ within a particular reading community or historical context, one manuscript may be as authentic any other: a repository of data about the cultural, social, or political work that a text could perform.10 The exploration in the following two chapters shows how the generic characteristics of the travellers’ descriptions of the Indies discussed here were not perceived as stable even in the Middle Ages to the commissioners, producers, and users of their manuscripts, who often modified these to ensure the ‘continued functionality’ of the texts in the face of the diverse and changing needs and desires of readers. Factors such as size, manuscript context, language, miseen-page, illumination, illustration, and scribal paratexts adapted texts to the tastes of particular reading groups just as they rendered them inaccessible on economic grounds to others.11 They also directed readers to view and inter8 

Work in this field is too extensive to permit complete citation. For a discussion of the implications for medieval vernacular textuality of Paul Zumthor’s theory of ‘mouvance’, in which the work is not a ‘single, completed entity, but […] something more fluid and openended, constantly adapted as it travelled through space and time’, see Millett, ‘Mouvance and the Medieval Author’, quotation at p. 12. On the essential variability of the medieval literary work, see also Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant, trans. by Wing, esp. p. 33. Theoretical approaches to authorial intention in determining the meaning or genre of a work are surveyed and critiqued in Greetham, Theories of the Text, pp. 157–205. 9  See the ‘Textual Introduction’, in Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Millett, i (2005), xi–lxvi (p. xlv). 10  There is much work available on the methodology and theory of the material text (also variously termed ‘text-object’ and ‘physical text’). I indicate here only a few scholarly works whose methods I have found useful. See Dagenais, ‘That Bothersome Residue: Towards a Theory of the Physical Text’. A manifesto for ways of working with material texts is put forward in Darnton, ‘History of Reading’. On a ‘whole page’ approach to manuscript study, see Baswell, ‘Talking Back to the Text: Marginal Voices in Medieval Secular Literature’. The habit of marginal annotation is discussed in Sherman, Used Books. On working with material texts (‘text objects’) towards a particular work’s reception, see Daniels, Boccaccio and the Book, esp. pp. 14–15. 11  On the divergent fortunes of larger and smaller, expensive and less expensive books in the Middle Ages, see Greenia, ‘The Bigger the Book: On Oversize Medieval Manuscripts’.

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pret texts in surprisingly diverse ways, often revealing much concerning the geographical assumptions and horizons of their producers and consumers. Sometimes — particularly among the Latin manuscripts — traces of reading also survive, witnessing the interpretations and approaches of some individual readers. Attention to the material texts of travellers’ accounts therefore permits us to discern patterns in their functionality over time, but also enables us to make nuanced distinctions between the uses made of such reports by different social and cultural groups in different periods. The texts under consideration in the following two chapters are vernacular and Latin manuscript versions of Marco Polo’s Book and Odorico da Pordenone’s Itinerarium and Poggio Bracciolini’s Latin account of Niccolò Conti’s travels in India. Both Odorico’s and Marco’s accounts were read in European vernaculars as diverse as Gaelic and Bohemian.12 Niccolò Conti’s account, in Poggio Bracciolini’s De India, did not circulate widely in any European vernacular before 1500 but was well diffused, as we shall see in Chapter 4, in Latin.13 The texts in focus all occur in a relatively large number of manuscripts copied throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I have examined a proportion of these in person, on microfilm, or in digital copies and include summary information concerning selected aspects of their codicology and presentation that are important to the following discussion in Appendices 1 and 2.14 Limitations of space have obliged me, however, to concentrate in the following chapters on three distinct groupings of readers that may be broadly defined as ‘communities’. These are communities not, as I see it, defined by physical location or any kind of overt affiliation but, rather, linked by a shared social or cultural environment, formation, or set of influences that shape, at a deep level, their reading, responses, and interpretive practices. 15 The first of these group12 

See Reichert, Incontri con la Cina, trans. by Sberveglieri, pp. 166–86. Merisalo identifies two manuscripts in Tuscan, one probably from the circle of Jacopo di Poggio (Poggio’s son and literary executor) and one in Venetian from the fifteenth century, but points out that the vernacular reception of Bk iv begins in earnest in the sixteenth century: see the ‘Introduction’, in Bracciolini, De varietate fortunae, ed. by Merisalo, p. 22. 14  When quoting directly from manuscript sources in Chapters 3 and 4, my primary focus has been readability. I have therefore silently expanded abbreviations and, where necessary, modernized punctuation without signal. Elements supplied from context that are unreadable or cropped in the original are signalled . 15  My terminology is influenced here by the methodological work of Roger Chartier and the theoretical work of Stanley Fish. See, in particular, Chartier, ‘Communities of Readers’, trans. by Cochrane, pp. 1–23; and Fish, ‘Interpreting the Variorum’. 13 

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ings comprises readers of Marco’s and Odorico’s texts in varieties of French, a language that was, in a number of European countries for much of the later Middle Ages, ‘the language of princely courts and the courts of law, of high culture (secular and religious), and of bourgeois aspiration and trade’.16 Chosen in part for its marked contrast to the principally noble, courtly, or wealthy readers of French is the more mixed socio-economic and cultural group of readers of Italian vernaculars over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.17 As studies such as those of Christian Bec and Armando Petrucci have shown of the northern Italian states, developments such the increasing use of paper instead of the more expensive parchment and growing vernacular literacy levels brought the ownership and reading of vernacular Italian books economically and intellectually within reach of artisan, mercantile, and administrative classes.18 Finally, in Chapter 4, I turn to readers of manuscripts in Latin, the supranational Western European language of the Church and scholarship. For the sake of coherence and ease of comparison between Latin and vernacular traditions, I focus principally on a geographical area roughly similar to that in focus in Chapter 3. Again, this grouping of texts and readers has distinctive characteristics. The training necessary to read works of any complexity in Latin was largely religious in its basics and often (though not always) limited to those whose likely future careers would call for it, such as clerics, professed religious, secular and ecclesiastical administrators, lawyers, and heirs of the propertied classes. 19 As we will see from the following two chapters, however, apparent similarities in readership, in material and paratextual characteristics, and in the types of traces left by readers may conceal divergences in the perceived and actual functions of these texts in different places, specific cultural contexts, and periods. These divergences can be indicative of changes both in spatial thinking and in the cultural roles of geographical knowledge amongst different communities during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. 16 

See Putter and Busby, ‘Introduction: Medieval Francophonia’, p. 3. Hasenhor notes that only ‘une infime partie’ (‘a tiny proportion’) of the wills of bourgeois, merchants, and artisans in late medieval France allude to books: Hasenohr, ‘L’Essor des bibliothèques privées aux xive et xve siècles’, p. 242. 18  See Petrucci, Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy, ed. and trans. by Radding; and the study of later Florentine inventories and wills in Bec, Les Livres des florentins. On schools and the creation of the ‘remarkably literate society’ of medieval Tuscany, see Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany, quotation at p. 42; pp. 43–60. 19  On northern Italy, see Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany; on varieties of English schools, see Orme, Medieval Schools, pp. 53–85. 17 

Chapter 3

Changing Places: The Unstable Indies of Vernacular Readers

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his chapter investigates evidence for the circulation, reading, and interpretation of travellers’ accounts of the Indies amongst two very different vernacular reading communities. Part i draws a picture of the wealthy, principally noble and courtly, international Francophone and Frenchreading audiences who enjoyed access to accounts of travellers’ peregrinations in manuscripts that were often of very high quality. It considers how paratextual features such as mise-en-page (page layout), intertitles (to use Genette’s term), manuscript context, and the rich illustrations that were a regular feature of this group of texts may have influenced readers’ approaches to them and, in particular, to the Indian Ocean world that they represent.1 Part ii then explores the circulation of the same accounts amongst vernacular readers in Italy. These two very different groups of material texts offer insights into some of the wide range of cultural functions that descriptions of the Indies performed for their vernacular readers between 1300 and 1500. It is often assumed that lay readers of these texts were principally interested in mirabilia (wonderful things) that would confirm their fantastical preconceptions concerning the Indies, such as the accounts’ descriptions of monstrous peoples, exotic animals, and fabulous wealth. Yet the variety of surviving material texts does not bear this out. Instead, it underscores the surviving manuscripts’ multifunctional, multi-generic status. Whilst some manuscripts do indeed draw their readers’ 1 

On intertitles, see Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. by Lewin, p. 294.

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attention to mirabilia, others work to make the Indies geographically intelligible, to encourage audiences to consider the region as a locus of Crusade or trade, or to encourage readers to form very different relationships with religious and cultural others.

From Crusading Places to Trading Places: The Indies of Francophone Courtly Élites Audiences As discussed in Chapter 2, the earliest surviving version of Marco Polo’s Book is the Franco-Italian Divisament dou monde, datable to around 1300, found in BnF, MS fr. 1116 and attributed in its prologue to a collaboration between the Venetian traveller and the Italian writer of romances, Rustichello da Pisa. The text begins with an address to ‘Seignors enparor et rois, dux et marquois, cuens, chevaliers et b[o]rgio[i]s, et toutes gens que volés savoir les deverses jenerasions des homes et les deversités des deverses region dou monde’ (‘Lords, emperor and kings, dukes and marquesses, counts, knights and townsfolk [or barons], and all people who wish to know the different races of men and the distinctive features of different parts of the world’).2 However, whether the Divisament dou monde initially circulated in Italy amongst audiences of such elevated social and economic status is far from clear. Although Rustichello’s Arthurian romances and other French-language epics were read by courtly audiences in northern Italy, the sole full copy and single fragment of the Divisament that survive do not point to this conclusion; both the complete surviving copy and recently discovered Franco-Italian fragment exhibit only middling production values.3 Much more can be said, however, of the audiences of the versions of the text that circulated in the French of northern France over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Of the twenty-three known manuscripts and fragments in varieties of French, seventeen are ascribed by Dutschke, author of the most extensive survey of manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Book yet produced, to an 2 

Polo, Le Divisament dou monde, ed. by Ronchi, p. 305. Ronchi emends ‘bargions’ to ‘borgiois’ (signalled here), probably by analogy with Rustichello’s opening to his compendium of Arthurian romances, though confusion with ‘baron’ may well underlie this term. 3  See Appendix 1a. On the fragment, see Concina, ‘Prime indagini su un nuovo frammento Franco-Veneto del Milione’, p. 369. On the courtly readership of Rustichello’s compendium of Arthurian romances and links between these and the Divisament, see Goodwin, Chivalry and Exploration, pp. 83–87.

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‘umbrella family’ that she terms the ‘Court French’ version — Le Devisement du monde — which took shape in the first decade of the fourteenth century.4 A prologue attached to certain Court French manuscripts links the textual family to the highest social circles, attributing its origins to a copy of the book given in Venice, in 1307, by Marco to Thibaut de Cepoy, to be passed on to his lord Charles, Count of Valois. 5 Dutschke points out that copies of the Court French version were considered ‘expensive luxuries’ by their medieval readers.6 Certainly, this statement is borne out by the codicological features of the sample of French-language manuscripts tabulated in Appendix 1a. All feature some form of decoration, twelve (of fifteen) feature expensive illumination, and seven have been illustrated. Only one, a copy without contemporary illustrations, Stockholm, Kungliga Bibl., MS Cod. Holm. M. 304, shows signs of scholarly use in the reader’s annotations added to its pages, and even these were added when the manuscript was no longer new, in the century following its production. Amongst the known owners of manuscripts of the Court French version between the beginning of the fourteenth century and end of the fifteenth are Charles, Duke of Orléans, Charles V of France (who seems at one stage to have owned no fewer than five copies of Marco’s Book), Philippe le Bon of Burgundy, Jean sans Peur of Burgundy, who had a copy made and gifted it to his uncle Jean, Duc de Berry in 1413, François Louis de Bourbon, and Richard Woodville, father-in-law of Edward IV.7 Philippe VI of France, his wife, or an unknown member of their circle probably commissioned BL, MS Royal 19 D.i, whilst Mahaut, Countess of Artois paid to have a copy of Le romant du grant kan made as early as 1312, though the book itself no longer survives.8 4  The term ‘Court French’ and title Devisement du monde are used here to distinguish this textual family from other French versions, including the Franco-Italian. See Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, p. 35. On the relationship between this version and the surviving Franco-Italian witness, see Ménard, ‘Le Prétendu “Remaniement” du Devisement du Monde’. 5  Polo, Le Devisement du monde, ed. by Ménard and others, i (2001), 115. See Gadrat, ‘Le Role de Venise dans la diffusion du livre de Marco Polo’, pp. 64–66. A possible chronology of events is set out in Ménard, ‘Le Prétendu “Remaniement” du Devisement du Monde’, pp. 345–48. 6  Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, pp. 33, 35. 7  On the multiple copies of Marco Polo’s Book owned by Charles V and Charles VI, see Delisle, Recherches sur la librairie de Charles V, i, 274, and ii, nos 872–76. On other owners see Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, p. 35. 8  Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers, i,  245–46. Polo, Il Milione, ed. by Benedetto, p. xlv.

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Indirect evidence also suggests that the Court French version of Marco’s Book was available in English noble circles during the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. BL, MS Royal 19 D.i, although probably commissioned, as Mary and Richard Rouse have argued, in the circle of Philippe VI of France, may have been in English royal ownership by the early fifteenth century, at which time it was made available to the English scribes and illuminators of Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Bodley 264, another manuscript that has been linked to the royal court.9 Two short extracts of a version almost identical to that in BL, MS Royal 19 D.i were also copied in the 1370s into a paper miscellany linked to the circle of the de Bohun family, Earls of Hereford with close familial connections to Edward III.10 Although the Court French version of the Book is the most widely circulating of the French versions, there is evidence that rarer French-language versions enjoyed similar circumstances of diffusion. A unique French version in Città del Vaticano, BAV, MS Ottoboniani latini 2207 is marked with the name of ‘Loys de Luxembourg’ (fol. 26r), which places this fourteenth-century manuscript probably in the hands of the Count of St Pol before his death in 1475. Two beautifully written and elegantly decorated manuscripts of a mid-fifteenth-century French reworking of Francesco Pipino’s Latin translation of Marco’s Book also both show evidence of connection with the French royal household.11 9 

There is no inventory evidence, but circumstantial evidence is compelling. The Flemishproduced opening section of Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Bodley 264, whose Court French text of Marco’s Book (added in the early fifteenth century) have been demonstrated beyond doubt by Dutschke to have been copied from BL, MS Royal 19 D.i, is recorded in the possession of Edward III’s son Thomas, Duke of Gloucester at the time of his execution as a traitor in 1397. As a traitor, Thomas’s possessions were legally forfeit to the crown. Some of Thomas’s books were sold, but the fate of this volume is not recorded. The first identifiable mention of BL, MS Royal 19 D.i is in the Royal Library inventory of 1535. On the relationship between the two manuscripts, see Dutschke, ‘The Truth in the Book’. On Gloucester’s library, its dispersal, and the books of Edward III and Richard II, see Stratford and Webber, ‘Bishops and Kings: Private Book Collections’, pp. 201–09. Cruse suggests that the early fifteenth-century owner of Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Bodley 264 belonged to the court of Henry IV of England: Cruse, Illuminating the Roman d’Alexandre. 10  The fragment is described but not well transcribed by Meyer, ‘Notice du MS Bodley 761 de la Bibliothèque Bodléienne’. 11  BL, MS Egerton 2176 (mid-fifteenth-century) features a shield painted over with the arms of France at fol. 1r. Stockholm, Kungliga Bibl., MS Cod. Holm. M. 305 ends with a note that attributes it to Jehan Gilbert, ‘sieur de la chambre des comptes du Roy nostre sire en son palais a paris’, though Dutschke notes that it could have been copied from the manuscript’s exemplar: Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, p. 450.

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Although Odorico da Pordenone’s Itinerarium was initially produced in Latin, two French translations of the work were produced in the fourteenth century. Around 1332, Jean de Vignay, a Hospitaller working in the service of Philippe VI of France and his queen Jeanne de Bourgogne, produced a rather literal rendering, possibly as a companion piece to his closely contemporary translation of the crusading tract, the Directorium ad passagium faciendum.12 A more fluid reworking by Jean le Long, monk — later to become abbot — of St Bertin, followed in 1351. The latter invariably appears in manuscript context as part of a larger compendium of translations by Jean le Long relating to the Holy Land and the Mongols: Hayton of Armenia’s Fleur des estoires d’Orient, a history of the Mongols and crusading treatise combined; itineraries through the Holy Land by Riccoldo da Montecroce and William of Boldensele; letters between Benedict XII and the Great Khan; the account of Cathay in the Estat et gou­ vernance du Grant Caan.13 Only eight fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts and fragments of these two French translations survive. Nonetheless, as data from seven of these in Appendix 1c show, these were nearly always large or medium-sized parchment codices, fully ruled and written in high-status gothic or bâtarde book hands, with decoration, often including illumination and illustration. Although we know less of their owners than we do of those of Marco’s Book, the expense lavished on these items suggests that they too probably circulated principally amongst wealthy audiences of high social status. The little that we know of actual or probable owners, largely on the Francophone continent, confirms this. Philippe VI or a member of his circle is thought to have commissioned BL, MS Royal 19 D.i, a manuscript that contains Marco’s Book as well as Jean de Vignay’s translation. The version of the same text in Paris, BnF, MS Rothschild 3085 is generally identified as belonging to Charles V.14 The splendid early fifteenth-century copy of Jean le Long’s translation of the text in BnF, 12 

On Jean de Vignay’s translation, see Trotter, ‘“En ensivant la pure verité de la letre”’. On the translation, see the ‘Introduction’, in Odorico da Pordenone, Le voyage, ed. by Andreose and Ménard, pp. vii–ccv (pp. ci–cxxxii). For the collection of translations, see L’Extrême Orient au Moyen-Âge, ed. by de Backer. These are numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, and 8 in Appendix 1c. 14  Notes in the volume by a later owner, the bibliophile Joseph Barrois, attribute it to Charles V’s library. It contains the sole copy of Jean de Vignay’s translation of Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia imperialia, Les Oisivetez des emperierres, a copy of which appears in the inventories of the libraries of Charles V and VI: see the ‘Introduction’, in Odorico da Pordenone, Les Merveilles de la terre d’Outremer, ed. by Trotter, p. xviii; Delisle, Recherches sur la librairie de Charles V, ii, no. 776. However, the script of the identified copy is identified as ‘menue lettre bastarde’, whereas BnF, MS Rothschild 3085 is written in gothic. 13 

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MS fr. 2810, also accompanying Marco Polo, belonged, as outlined above, to Jean sans Peur before it was gifted to the Duc de Berry. The translations travelled beyond the Francophone continent among similarly high-status French-reading audiences. Jean de Vignay’s translation had, of course, reached England by the early fifteenth century alongside the copy of Marco Polo’s Book in London, BL, MS Royal 19 D.i, whilst a version of Jean le Long’s translation, almost destroyed by the Cotton fire in 1731, once featured the ownership inscription of Jacquetta of Luxembourg, Duchess of Bedford. This places the book in her hands during her brief marriage to the duke (1433–35), and very probably also during her subsequent marriage to Richard Woodville, father-in-law to Edward IV.15 Courtly Readers and the Indies The prologue that opens the Franco-Italian redaction of Marco Polo’s Book is remarkable for the clarity of its vision concerning not only who should read the text but also what they ought to find in it. This early piece of paratextual guidance establishes the Book as essential reading or listening for those who ‘volés savoir les deverses jenerasions des homes et les deversités des deverses region dou monde’ (‘want to know the different races of men and the distinctive features of different parts of the world’) and ‘les grandismes mervoilles et les grant diversités de la grande Harminie et de Persie et des Tartars et Indie, et de maintes autres provinces’ (‘the greatest marvels and distinctive features of Greater Armenia, Persia, the Mongols, India, and many other provinces’; Div., p. 305). In addition to stressing the coverage of the work to follow, the opening prologue also stresses its travelling co-author’s reliability and authority; the book will contain not one lie, and no man of any nation since Adam has seen as many of the world’s regions as Marco, who spent twenty-six years in the regions he describes (Div., pp. 305–06). This opening paratext, then, sets out the Divisament’s envisaged function as informative, truthful, and yet at the same time a repository of marvels and diversities. This influential prologue is, moreover, not unique to the surviving Franco-Italian witness but is adopted almost entirely unchanged in the Court French manuscripts of the text, providing each time a clear signal to readers of the Book’s coverage and purpose.16 15 

Hicks, ‘Woodville, Richard, first Earl Rivers’. The only substantive change that the Court French reviser makes is to remove the direct address to high-status readers at its start and its specific claim to consider national or racial 16 

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But the clarity and singularity of purpose for a traveller’s account of the eastern regions of the world implied by this prologue is at odds with the diverse variety of functions that are anticipated and made possible for texts of this kind through their presentation, adaptation with rubrics and customization with illustrations. Paratexts such as these, as Rouse and Rouse have pointed out, can be remarkably variable between and even within vernacular manuscripts and may represent the interpretations, intentions, or priorities of authors, translators, scribes, bookmakers (libraires), patrons, or their agents.17 In what follows, I look first at certain tensions that are played out across the intertitles — in this instance rubrics — that adapt the descriptions of the Indies in these texts to their readers’ perceived needs and interests. In particular, these rubrics witness a tension between the desire to highlight the world’s marvellous diversity and the need to clarify its terrestrial geography. I then show how, in a few instances, factors such as manuscript context, mise-en-page, and rubrication entirely resignify these works as crusading literature. A final subsection discusses the varied and sometimes unforeseeable ways in which the rich, inventive, and sometimes very plentiful miniatures that accompany copies of Marco’s and Odorico’s texts in French more than in any other language manipulate responses to the Indian lands and peoples these texts describe. Shaping Readers’ Journeys through the Indies: Intertitles and mise-en-page Scholars have pointed out before now that the rubricated textual divisions of the Court French Devisement du monde split the text into itineraries through different regions, each of which is distinctly characterized. As Laurence HarfLancner has noted, the first main rubricated textual division introduces readers to the ‘diversitez’ found on the route to China, the second to the ‘great deeds’ of the Great Khan and his court and how he governs his people, whilst the third, introducing ‘le livre d’Ynde’ (‘the Book of India’), promises to describe ‘toutes les merveilles qui y sont et les manieres des gens’ (‘all the wonders that are there and the customs of the peoples’).18 It is important to stress at this difference. It opens instead with: ‘Pour savoir la pure verité des diverses regions du monde, si prenez cest livre’ (‘To know the real truth of the different regions of the world, take this book’): Polo, Le Devisement du monde, ed. by Ménard and others, i (2001), 117. 17  Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers, i, 248–49. 18  Polo, Le Devisement du monde, ed. by Ménard and others, vi (2009), 1. This volume edits, with corrections, the ‘Livre d’Indie’ in a very early text (c. 1333) in BL, MS Royal 19 D.i.

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point that, for many readers, the section of the Devisement concerning the domains of the Great Khan was its defining feature; the Devisement is explicitly termed the ‘livre’ or ‘rommans’ of the ‘Grant Kaan’ in a number of French copies.19 The Devisement’s tripartite structure, however, has the interesting effect of characterizing the Indies as a marvellous and separate space as well as creating, Harf-Lancner suggests, an opposition between ‘a “civilized” China and a “marvellous” India’.20 Within the wider ‘Book of India’, in the Court French version as in the earlier Franco-Italian Divisament, the narrative is subdivided along the lines of place. Each new island or region, on the whole, receives its own dedicated chapter, named in the chapter heading.21 However, in certain manuscripts of the Court French Devisement, the text’s rubricators also adapt the rubrics so as better to draw out Marco’s metageographical categories, discussed in Chapter 2, and use these to frame the text. For instance, some time prior to the 1330s, an alert French rubricator, agent, or overseer revised the rubric that introduced the Franco-Italian Divisament’s chapter on Ciamba (southern Vietnam). In the surviving Franco-Italian copy, this rubric reads simply ‘Ci devise de la contree de Cianba’ (‘This describes the Country of Cianba’; Div., p. 538). The French reviser’s rubric, however, mines information buried deep in the text of a later chapter concerning the extent of Greater and Lesser India in an attempt to clarify the relationship between the unknown region of Cyamba and the Indies as a broader geographical unit: Cy commence encore a deviser de la Mendre Ynde jusques a Motyfy et devise premierement de la province de Cyamba et est la terre ferme.22 Harf-Lancner, ‘From Alexander to Marco Polo, from Text to Image’, p. 244. The India rubric is adapted from the Franco-Italian Polo, Le Divisament dou monde, ed. by Ronchi, p. 529. 19  Four manuscripts featuring variants of this are given in Polo, Le Devisement du monde, ed. by Ménard and others, vi (2009), 77, 327. 20  Harf-Lancner, ‘From Alexander to Marco Polo, from Text to Image’, p. 244. For the rubric as it appears in most Court French versions, see Polo, Le Devisement du monde, ed. by Ménard and others, vi (2009), 1. 21  The Court French version occasionally also tidies up geographical inconsistencies in the Franco-Italian version. For example, where the Franco-Italian version has two chapters on Seilan (Sri Lanka) at different points in the book, the latter of which narrates details that were ‘forgotten’ in the first, the Court French has one larger chapter: Polo, Le Divisament dou monde, ed. by Ronchi, p. 530; p. 572; Polo, Le Devisement du monde, ed. by Ménard and others, vi (2009), 23. 22  I cite the rubric as it appears, according to the editors, in two later manuscript variants (B4; B5): Polo, Le Devisement du monde, ed. by Ménard and others, vi (2009), 225 (the source of the geographical information is at p. 58).

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Here it begins further to describe Lesser India as far as Motyfy [Mutfili, Motupalle] and first it describes the province of Cyamba, and it is dry land.

It has been suggested that these revised rubrics may have been born out of the need to instruct illustrators quickly on what to draw.23 However, the geographical clarifications they contain, which would be of no use to an illustrator, may rather testify to a perceived need to clarify the text’s ordering principles. Malcolm Parkes has pointed out that the book trade in Paris in particular — where the earliest surviving manuscript that features these rubrics was produced for an atelier that also supplied the University — was quickly influenced by ‘academic notions’ such as ordinatio: the clarification of a text’s structure and themes through division, subdivision, and rubrication.24 The rubrics that highlight the Devisement du monde’s regional geography and transitions may suggest, then, that these were envisaged by certain patrons’ agents and manuscript producers as important elements of its structure and necessary for clear comprehension of the text. Indeed, in the only Court French manuscript that has been annotated by a later reader, the fourteenth-century Stockholm, Kungliga Bibl., MS Cod. Holm. M. 304, rubrics deficient in this kind of information are supplemented by the Latin clarifications of a fifteenth-century annotator.25 Nonetheless, although one aim of such rubrics may have been to help readers to recognize transitions between islands and mainland and to follow the text’s movements between the three Indies, their incomprehensibly corrupt rendering in some manuscripts throws into question how well understood they actually were.26 23 

See Dutschke, ‘The Truth in the Book’, pp. 288–92. The opinion is shared by Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers, i, 248. 24  The role of rubrication in clarifying the ordinatio of texts is discussed in Parkes, ‘The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book’, p. 68. On the Montbaston workshop that produced BL, MS Royal 19 D.i as suppliers to the university, see Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers, i, 236–37. 25  The fifteenth-century annotator, who writes in a humanist-influenced minuscule noting hand, notes details such as, among other facts about the ocean, the text’s transition from Manzi to the Ocean Sea and the last province of India towards the North West: Stockholm, Kungliga Bibl., MS Cod. Holm. M. 304, fol. 68r, fol. 86v. The same annotator adds a sketch of a double-hemisphere mappamundi and outline description of the world, drawn from Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini’s Asia, at the end of the Devisement (fol. 100v): Piccolomini, Descripción de Asia, ed. by Sanz, p. 104. 26  The base manuscript (and its comparator) that Ménard’s edition employs gives a bad reading of the toponym at this point (‘Amoursi’), which the edition only partially corrects (to ‘a Mourisi’): BL, MS Royal 19 D.i, fol. 121v; Polo, Le Devisement du monde, ed. by Ménard and others, vi (2009), 11.

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Some Court French rubrics, however, also direct attention towards very different aspects of the Devisement’s content. The rubrics of the ‘Book of India’ in two fifteenth-century manuscripts, one of which was produced for Charles d’Orléans in 1460, considerably expand the geographical details found in certain earlier manuscripts, as we can see in the example of Maabar (the Coromandel Coast): Cy nous devise de la province de Maabar que l’en apelle l’Ynde greigneur et des grans merveilles qui y sont et comment les gens qui se meurent sont ars et comment les fames se gettent ou feu avecques leurs maris.27 This tells us of the province of Maabar which one calls Greater India and of the great marvels that are there and how the dead are cremated and how women throw themselves into the fire with their husbands.

In this instance, the rubric not only helps readers to navigate the text’s geographical ordinatio but also functions as a headline summary of what are perceived to be the chapter’s key themes. And, in accordance with the priorities indicated in the work’s prologue (whether Franco-Italian or Court French), these prove to be the text’s reports of great wonders and alien customs. A similar tension between the need to clarify geographically a confusing itinerary and the requirement to characterize a given place in some meaningful and memorable way emerges from the rubrics of manuscripts of Jean le Long’s translation of Odorico’s Itinerarium. The rubrics of the translation’s earliest surviving manuscript, Besançon, BM, MS 667 G, written in 1368, attempt to provide greater geographical specificity sometimes by imposing a new metageographical framework on it, and sometimes by marking movements between regions and linking each location to a signature product, feature, or custom. Thus we find that, in defiance of the geographical framework occasionally alluded to in Odorico’s text, ‘la haulte Inde’ (‘Upper India’) begins, according to the rubric, in the region of Hormuz and stretches eastwards across the ocean, whilst any reference to Odorico’s identification of ‘Mangi’ (southern China) as India Superior (‘la haulte Inde’) is removed from the rubric of the chapter that introduces that region. 28 Given that so many hagiographical texts identified India Superior as the land where St Thomas preached and martyred, this change 27  In Bern, Burgerbibl., MS 125, and BnF, MS fr. 5649. See Polo, Le Devisement du monde, ed. by Ménard and others, vi (2009), 243. 28  The rubrics appear in the main text of Odorico da Pordenone, Le voyage, ed. by Andreose and Ménard, with variants in the footnotes: p. 8, p. 238 (Hormuz); on ‘Mangy’, see p. 36.

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may result from an attempt to correct the traveller’s text; Odorico’s text places the saint’s tomb in Mobar (the Coromandel Coast), not in Mangy (southern China), so the revised rubric brings Odorico’s text into agreement with legend.29 In the same manuscript, however, different cities and islands within the Indies are also linked through their rubrics with a distinguishing feature. Tana (Thane) is the site of Franciscan martyrdoms; Miniber (Alminiber in the manuscript; the Malabar Coast) is linked to pepper production; Mobar, in the redefined ‘haulte Inde’, is home to the tomb of St Thomas, and so on.30 The concerns of these rubrics, whether in clarifying the metageographical framework of the friar’s itinerary or characterizing Indian space through mirabilia and nota­ bilia (wonderful and remarkable things), are broadly geographical. However, these concerns are not replicated in the rubrics of later manuscripts of the same translation. In fact, later manuscripts both witness and create geographical confusion by introducing, at different points in the narrative, two Upper Indies: that of St Thomas and that identified by Odorico himself, Mangi (southern China).31 The process of characterizing places through features also receives less attention in the paratexts of later manuscripts. Casualties of this change are the rubric identifying Tana as a Franciscan Christian holy site, the reference to the tomb of St Thomas, and the rubric signalling the location where pepper is grown.32 The importance both of the location and characterization of Indian space seems, then, to diminish in the later manuscripts. There is one small but nevertheless important group of manuscripts of Marco’s and Odorico’s texts whose mise-en-page, manuscript context, rubrication, and, in one instance, illustration direct readers to envisage and approach Indian space entirely differently: as a space characterized through its relationship to the Holy Land, and the activities of crusaders.33 Rouse and Rouse have persuasively argued that BL, MS Royal 19 D.i, a Parisian manuscript containing a Court French Devisement and Jean de Vignay’s translation of Odorico, was produced in the 1330s as part of Philip VI’s mental preparations for a crusading project that never came to pass.34 The texts in BL, MS Royal 19 D.i 29 

Odorico da Pordenone, Le voyage, ed. by Andreose and Ménard, p. 24. Odorico da Pordenone, Le voyage, ed. by Andreose and Ménard, pp. 9, 21, 24. 31  Odorico da Pordenone, Le voyage, ed. by Andreose and Ménard, pp. 36, 262. 32  Odorico da Pordenone, Le voyage, ed. by Andreose and Ménard, pp. 239, 251, 249. 33  The importance of this context in the circulation of early vernacular accounts of the Indies is argued for in García Espada, ‘Marco Polo, Odorico of Pordenone, the Crusades, and the Role of the Vernacular’; and García Espada, Marco Polo y la cruzada. 34  Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers, i, 245–46. On the proposed crusade 30 

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are diverse, ranging from Alexander-books through an itinerary to the Holy Land and the translated crusading manual, the Directoire a faire le passage de la Terre Sainte, to Giovanni da Pian del Carpine’s description of the Mongols (in excerpts from Vincent de Beauvais’s Speculum historiale) and chapters from the Bible historiale.35 Yet Rouse and Rouse have argued that, ‘[g]iven the proper surroundings’, both codicological and cultural-historical, texts as diverse as the Bible historiale and Marco Polo can become crusading literature.36 While I certainly do not disagree with the Rouses’ assessment of BL, MS Royal 19 D.i, it is important to look beyond simple manuscript context — the compilation of items with which a work was bound — when attempting to determine the kinds of effects a book might have on readers; such a criterion would potentially make every copy of Jean le Long’s translation of Odorico’s Itinerarium, a work always found copied with Hayton’s Fleur des estoires, into crusading literature. As the next section’s analysis of images in one of these manuscripts (BnF, MS fr. 2810) will show, this would be far from the truth. However, features such as mise-en-page and paratexts link travellers’ accounts of Cathay and the Indies to crusading projects in several manuscripts in focus here, including, of course, BL, MS Royal 19 D.i. In the Court French Devisement du monde in BL, MS Royal 19 D.i, the feature perhaps most influential in forging this link is its programme of illustrations, which will be discussed in the next section. However, Jean de Vignay’s translation of Odorico’s Itinerarium in the same manuscript features a rubric that is, in its own way, equally suggestive: Ci commencent les Merveilles de la Terre d’Outremer selonc ce que Frere Odoriq du Marchié Julien de l’Ordre des Freres Meneurs tesmoigne, translatees en françois par Frere Jehen de Vygnai, Hospitalier de l’Ordre de Haut Pas.37 Here begin the marvels of the land of Outremer according to the witnessing of Friar Odoric of Friuli of the Minorite Order, translated into French by Friar Jean de Vignay, Hospitaller of the Order of Haut Pas.

and its failure, see Tyerman, ‘Philip VI and the Recovery of the Holy Land’. 35  A full description is available via the British Library Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, under BL, MS Royal 19 D.i . 36  Rouse and Rouse, ‘Context and Reception: A Crusading Collection’, p. 107; p. 137. 37  Odorico da Pordenone, Les Merveilles de la terre d’Outremer, ed. by Trotter, p. 3, n.

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Through the use of the term Outremer, a term that more usually implies the Eastern Mediterranean and the Crusader states, this rubric insinuates a link between Odorico’s work, the crusade-focused Directoire, and other accounts of outremer in the same volume. In the closely contemporary manuscript of Jean de Vignay’s translation in BnF, MS Rothschild 3085, which may have belonged to Charles V, a different, yet equally misleading rubric promises ‘[l]a division frere Odoric des merveilles de la terre sainte’ (‘the description of Friar Odoric of the wonders of the Holy Land’).38 These rubrics’ focus on outremer not only reinforces scholars’ arguments for the probable crusading production contexts both of BL, MS Royal 19 D.i and Jean de Vignay’s translation of the Itinerarium but also suggests a projected readership of crusade enthusiasts who weigh all geographical information at their disposal according to its helpfulness to them in the recapture of the Holy Land.39 A final material reminder of the importance of the ideology of crusade for the way such texts were read in some contexts is witnessed by the sole surviving, badly damaged Anglo-French epitome of Marco Polo’s Book in BL, MS Cotton Otho D.v. Whilst the script and decoration of this manuscript suggest a late fourteenth-century date for the manuscript, the collection of thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century texts it contains and the Anglo-French in which they are written together raise the possibility that the volume may be a complete copy of an early fourteenth-century compendium that is no longer extant.40 The 38 

Odorico da Pordenone, Les Merveilles de la terre d’Outremer, ed. by Trotter, p. 3. Trotter suggests that Jean de Vignay’s translation of the Itinerarium was produced as a companion piece for his translation of the crusading manual, the Directorium ad passagium faciendum: Trotter, ‘“En ensivant la pure verité de la letre”’, p. 34. On the crusading context of BL, MS Royal 19 D.i, see Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers, i, 245–46. 40  BL, MS Cotton Otho D.v has been the subject of a certain amount of palaeographic and linguistic confusion over the years. Benedetto in 1928 identified the manuscript as produced in northern Italy, but Dutschke places its production in England in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century: Polo, Il Milione, ed. by Benedetto, p. xxxii; Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, p. 34 and description at pp. 335–36. Ménard has now conclusively established that the fragment is of an apparently unique Anglo-Norman version, in some ways very close to the earliest surviving Franco-Italian text, and of English production: Ménard, ‘Marco Polo en Angleterre’, opening folio reproduced at p. 193. The other texts in the compendium were all produced between the twelfth and early fourteenth centuries, the principal of which are: William of Tyre; extracts from John of Plano Carpini, Historia mongolorum; and Hayton of Corycus’s early fourteenth-century Flor des Estoires. A full manuscript description can be retrieved from the British Library Online Manuscripts Catalogue at . Anglo-French had suffered a decline in prestige and was rarely the target language of translations by the late fourteenth century when BL, MS Cotton Otho 39 

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book opens with another unique manuscript witness: Roger of Stanegrave’s Li Charboclois d’armes du conquest precious de la terre sainte de promission, a crusading treatise, composed in Anglo-French and advocating alliance between European powers and the Mongol Khans against the Mamlūks of Egypt.41 Presented by its author to Edward III in 1332, whilst the latter was considering committing to Philippe VI’s proposed crusade, it is copied in BL, MS Cotton Otho D.v complete with a preface dedicating it to the king.42 What is striking, however, is not so much the fact of this treatise’s appearance in the volume as the paratextual relationship between it and other texts in the volume that is implied by its presentation. No formal presentational distinction is made between the Charboclois that opens the volume and the collection of texts on the Holy Land and Indies that follow, including the Anglo-French epitome of Marco’s Book. Whereas the opening page of the Charboclois is endowed with a three-sided decorative border of the type that indicates the opening of a work, other texts in the volume, including Marco’s Book, are signalled through decoration as subordinate to the opening work. Thus Marco’s Book begins in the second column of a verso page with an illuminated letter and partial spray border (fol. 82v). This form of decoration indicates a lower level of textual division, such as books within a work, rather than separating out distinct works in larger volumes, as do the more elaborate three-sided borders.43 The surviving fragment then contains no further major textual divisions.44 The ordinatio and mise-en-page combine to signal the ancillary role of all the volume’s accounts of travels to its most important matter: the recovery of the Holy Land for Latin Christendom. And indeed, the volume’s presentation in this respect forms part of an international trend in the presentation and reading of descriptions of the East and the Indian Ocean world. In fourteenth-century Iberia, both Latin and vernacular texts of Marco Polo’s Book and Odorico da Pordenone’s Itinerarium

D.v was produced. An overview with references is given in the Short, Manual of Anglo-Norman, pp. 26–31. 41  Roger de Stanegrave, Li Charboclois d’armes, ed. by Paviot. 42  On Philippe’s crusade and Edward III, see Tyerman, ‘Philip VI and the Recovery of the Holy Land’, pp. 31–32, 47–48. 43  On the hierarchy of border styles, see Scott, Dated and Datable English Manuscript Borders, p. 7. 44  Ménard divides his edition into numbered chapters based on the occasional placement of two-line decorated initials in the manuscript (not numbered). Over the two folios these are few (four): Ménard, ‘Marco Polo en Angleterre’, pp. 197–201.

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appear in manuscript contexts where they are subordinated, in exactly the same way, to works advocating a new crusade.45 Illustrators’ Imagined Indies: Landscape, Environment, Peoples Among the most influential paratexts found in French manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Book and Odorico da Pordenone’s Itinerarium are the distinctive figurative illustrations that have now become familiar from the covers of scholarly editions and critical works.46 Of course, the time and expensive materials necessary for the production of illustrations, particularly those involving the use of many colours and gold leaf, would have limited these to the wealthiest of patrons and book owners. In spite of these limitations, however, the proportion of French manuscripts of Marco’s Devisement du monde that feature illustration is high; of the seventeen surviving Court French versions of the Devisement, eight feature either programmes of miniatures or historiated initials.47 At the same time, even in otherwise well-illustrated French manuscripts, Odorico’s Itinerarium seems not to have merited extensive attention. Amongst the surviving French manuscripts, only the egregiously splendid BnF, MS fr. 2810 contains an extended programme of images.48 The manuscripts on which I focus 45  The Libro llamada Ultramarino is a translation of Jacques de Vitry’s Historia orientis, surviving in one fifteenth-century manuscript, into which Odorico’s Itinerarium is interpolated without paratextual signal: Madrid, Bibl. nac. de España, MS 3013. See Popeanga, ‘El Relato de viajes de Odorico de Pordenone’. In the manuscript of the Grand Master of the Hospitallers and crusader Juan Fernández de Heredia’s Aragonese version of the Devisament, in royal ownership by the sixteenth century, the Marco Polo text is, through the volume’s mise-en-page and the table of contents, subordinated to crusade-focused history of Hayton of Corycus that opens the volume: Polo, Aragonese Version of the Libro, ed. by Nitti, p. xxviii. The Latin abbreviated Itinerarium in Barcelona, Bibl. de Catalunya, MS 490, fols 76r–80r, follows the same format. 46  See, for example, the opening illumination of the Polos leaving Venice from Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Bodley 264 that now graces the cover of the most widely read English translation of Marco’s Book: Polo, Travels, trans. by Latham. 47  See Appendix 1a, nos 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 16. Two other well-illustrated copies, Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MSS 3511 and 5219, were both probably produced in the early sixteenth century so are not discussed here. 48  BL, MS Royal 19 D.i features a four-part opening image at fol. 136r. BnF, MS Rothschild 3085 has a two-part opening image of a friar departing a city and a traveller adjacent to a tree: fol. 207r. In the fifteenth-century text in BnF, MS fr. 1380, spaces for uncompleted illustrations remain. BL, MS Cotton Otho D.ii, a manuscript of Jacquetta of Luxembourg, is well illuminated, but too fire-damaged for consideration here: Smith, Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Cottonian Library, 1696, ed. by Tite, pp. 74–75.

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here are four of the most extensively illustrated manuscripts of these texts that survive from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. BL, MS Royal 19 D.i, as outlined earlier, was probably produced in Paris for Philippe VI or a member of his circle, whilst the identity of the probably English patron of the early fifteenth-century Devisement copied from the Royal manuscript into Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Bodley 264 is not known. The Devisement du monde, copied with a French text of Hayton’s Flor des Estoires, in New York, Pierpont Morgan Libr., MS M. 723 is thought to have been illustrated in Paris around 1400. 49 The texts of Marco and Odorico in BnF, MS fr. 2810, given by Jean sans Peur to the Duc de Berry in 1413, were produced in France in the early years of the fifteenth century, making this manuscript a near-contemporary of the Devisement du monde in Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Bodley 264. These richly illustrated manuscripts of travellers’ accounts have naturally drawn the attention of scholars before now. But scholarship has tended to cluster in a number of areas. Art and book historians have focused intensively on matters such as the identity of the painter or workshop that produced the images or the manuscript as a whole and their production processes.50 Art historians and textual scholars alike have found much to say about the relationship or lack thereof between text and image, and the relationship of illustrations to the pictorial evocations of the Indies found in the Marvels of the East tradition.51 Two particular problems, however, recur across the existing scholar49 

The dating of New York, Pierpont Morgan Libr., MS M. 723 is problematic. The script and some elements of the miniatures’ iconography point to a late fourteenth-century date, whereas the composition and style of the miniatures, in particular their ‘conception de la mise en place spatiale’, suggest the early fifteenth century. For a summary of the arguments, see KostaThéfaine, ‘Du récit de voyage et de sa mise en image’, pp. 38–40 (quotation from François Avril at p. 40). 50  For example, Dutschke, ‘The Truth in the Book’; and Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers, already discussed, on the Montbaston workshop and BL, MS Royal 19 D.i. Work on workshops and artists cited here includes Sterling, La Peinture médiévale à Paris; and Meiss, The Limbourgs and their Contemporaries. 51  The relationship between text and image in New York, Pierpont Morgan Libr., MS M. 723 has been closely studied in Kosta-Théfaine, ‘Du récit de voyage et de sa mise en image’. The dissonance between text and image in Marco Polo illustrations has been studied in HarfLancner, ‘Divergences du text et de l’image’; and Harf-Lancner, ‘From Alexander to Marco Polo, from Text to Image’. See also in this vein Ménard, ‘L’Illustration du Devisement du Monde de Marco Polo’; and Strickland, ‘Artists, Audience, and Ambivalence’. On the illustrations and iconographical tradition, the classic treatment is Wittkower, ‘Marco Polo and the Pictorial Tradition of the Marvels of the East’. Art-historical and manuscript scholarship has not been as attentive to the fewer illustrated manuscripts of Odorico da Pordenone’s Itinerarium.

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ship. In the art-historical work, the effort spent on determining the sources, artist, or workshop that underlie a particular image is not always matched by consideration of that image’s effects, in context, upon its audiences. Moreover, in otherwise laudable work relating text, image, and audience, a tendency can sometimes be detected to collapse all regions represented in text and image into a singular, monolithic, and generic East. When this happens, the basic question of the conceptual, geographical, or imaginative unity of this entity for medieval audiences can be elided.52 My specific focus in this section is the question of whether and how the illustrations characterize the Indies as a distinctive space. However, mindful of Debra Strickland’s observation that ‘[t]he responsibility for conceiving and executing these relationships [between text and image] in a given manuscript lay with medieval authors, artists, patrons, patrons’ agents, or some combination of these’, I consider these manuscripts and the miniatures within them as workshop-based, collaborative productions in which final artistic responsibility does not lie with an individual ‘master’.53 Thus the content of illustrations was influenced by factors such as the expectations of patrons or their agents and the availability or otherwise of appropriate models. But the composition of scenes and the nature of the models to which a workshop, illustrator, or even patron’s agent might turn to help them to comprehend and convey the unfamiliar world that travellers’ texts described were highly variable; I have found no evidence for the circulation of models or pattern books specific to these texts. Thus the models to which workshops sometimes turned for inspiration and the means miniaturists employed to convey human and environmental difference are revealing not just of patrons’ expectations but also of wider shared cultural assumptions about Indian space and peoples. Moreover, such representational decisions not only reflect but also help to create particular kinds of relationships between European audiences and these reported and imagined spaces. In what follows, I show that such shared cultural assumptions and imagined and projected relationships changed markedly between manuscripts produced in different historical and cultural contexts. Indeed, I show how images are crucial to the refashioning of such assumptions and relationships. Where, in the crusading fervour of the earlier fourteenth-century French Court, images bear wit52 

For example, ‘the Divisament text and its accompanying imagery together present a vision of the East at once admirable and atrocious. Such ambivalence lies at the core of medieval Orientalism, understood as the systematic process by which the West set itself off against the East as dominant and culturally superior’: Strickland, ‘Artists, Audience, and Ambivalence’, p. 495. 53  Strickland, ‘Text, Image and Contradiction’, p. 23.

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ness to the difficulty of envisaging any activities in the East that are not military in nature, the illustrations to the latest texts in focus here, particularly those associated with the great royal and ducal courts of Francophone Europe, invite their audiences to consider a world bound together by a common interest in the trade in luxury goods. The earliest surviving illustrations both of Marco’s Devisement and Odorico’s Itinerarium are those that were produced in Richard de Montbaston’s Parisian workshop for BL, MS Royal 19 D.i, a great compendium of texts concerned with the past, present, and future of the East. Although the book has convincingly been termed a crusading miscellany, it is worth reiterating that it features literary and visual engagements with the Indies of very different kinds.54 As well as Marco’s Book and Odorico’s Itinerarium, it contains La vraie ystoire dou bon roi Alixandre (fols 1–46). This prose translation of the Historia de Proelis (discussed in Chapter 1) features illustrated encounters between Alexander and Porus, as well as miniatures of the monstrous and marvellous peoples and creatures so characteristic of the Indies in the Alexander Romance tradition. Given the clear availability, within the same workshop, of models for the illustration of the Indies based on the Alexander tradition, it comes as a surprise to find quite how thoroughly crusading iconography permeates the copy of the Devisement du monde in this volume. Indeed, the volume seems to invite its readers to consider not just the Holy Land but also the Indies as a locus of crusade. Miniature coloured and illuminated illustrations accompany the opening of every chapter of the Devisement du monde in BL, MS Royal 19 D.i. These represent stylized action in a generic, equally stylized landscape of flat land and sea, marked out by occasional trees and bulky fortifications in Norman style (e.g., Ciamba, southern Vietnam, fol. 120v; fig. 2; Quinsai, Hangzhou, fol. 113r, fig. 3; figs 2–23 appear between p. 136 and p. 146.). All the Devisement’s landscapes are interpreted in a similar way by the illustrations. Indeed — if we put the human figures to one side for an instant — there is nothing to distinguish the Indies of the ‘livre d’Ynde’ in this volume from Cathay, Manzi, the Holy Land, or indeed any Western European region. This is perhaps best exemplified through a comparison with a scene of crusaders arriving in the Holy Land from the volume’s crusading manual, the Directoire (fol. 187v; fig. 4). Here, just as in the manuscript’s illustrations of Ciamba and Quinsay (figs 2 and 3), the background to the human action that forms the focus of the scene is a simple 54 

Rouse and Rouse argue that the volume’s principal illuminator was Richard’s wife Jeanne, described in later documents as ‘illuminatrix’: Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers, i, 244.

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composition of sea, land, and fortified edifices. In fact, the overriding characteristic of all landscapes — if they can even be so termed — in BL, MS Royal 19 D.i’s Devisement is militarization.55 Even Quinsai, southern China’s elegant and wealthy principal city whose beautiful palaces, gardens, lakes, and canals are treated in detail in the illustration’s corresponding chapter, is represented by a crenelated tower surrounded by water. This illustrator’s interpretation of the ‘noble cité […] toute avironnee de granz yaues’ (‘noble city […] surrounded everywhere by great waterways’) that the chapter’s rubric describes is topped with soldiers helmeted in European style (fol. 113r; fig. 3).56 The illuminations throughout the ‘Livre d’Ynde’ in BL, MS Royal 19 D.i show a similarly militarized landscape. And, like the landscape of the Holy Land in the copy of the Directoire in the same volume, it is one characterized by conflict between European knights and Saracens, the latter clearly identifiable by their dark skin, crescent-bearing shields, and distinctive knotted turbans.57 The miniature that opens the chapter that introduces ‘la mendre ynde’ (‘Lesser India’) and ‘la contree de cianda’ (‘the country of Ciamba’) features two crenelated towers, one occupied by fully armed European knights and the other by turbaned, dark-skinned, crossbow-wielding Saracens (fol. 120v; fig. 2), visually identical to those in the miniatures accompanying the Directoire (fol. 187v; fol. 189v; see figs 4 and 5). Likewise, the chapter concerning ‘la province de Manabar’ (the Coromandel Coast) opens with generic crusader and Saracen armies crossing the foreground, with a fortification behind (fol. 125r; fig. 6). Rouse and Rouse have attributed the peculiarly bland and generic iconography in BL, MS Royal 19 D.i to the pressures of commercial production. Workshop conditions would not, they stress, have permitted illuminators, whose literacy levels may have been low, detailed perusal of the text. Illuminators such as Jeanne de Montbaston, who may be the artist responsible for many of the images in BL, MS Royal 19 D.i, relied on rough marginal sketches and even the rubrics to guide their work, and nonetheless sometimes made comically inappropriate misinterpretations.58 But, even allowing for such conditions, the 55 

Quigley, ‘Romantic Geography and the Crusades’, p. 54. Polo, Le Devisement du monde, ed. by Ménard and others, v (2006), 151. 57  The headgear appears to be the workshop or illuminator’s version of the tortil or knotted cloth that conventionally identifies ‘Saracens’ in illustrations of crusading literature in the period. On this and other characteristics of Saracens in the period’s art, see Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews, pp. 161, 180–81. 58  Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers, i, 250–55, listing various illustrations that misinterpret the text. At fol. 59v, for example, where Niccolò and Maffeo Polo are given a 56 

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choice of models and compositions to which illuminators turned under such constraints is significant. Maureen Quigley rightly argues that the illustrators of BL, MS Royal 19 D.i ‘conformed to a definition of place that relied on human experience and action more strongly than on topographic distinction’.59 This being the case, it matters that the kinds of human action and experience drawn upon to characterize the spaces of the ‘livre d’Ynde’ are consistently military, and that the visual language employed is that of Christian-Muslim conflict. After all, the miniatures of Alexander’s battle with Porus and his army’s encounters with wild beasts and monsters between fols 22v–35v in the same volume show that other models for illustrations of the Indies were readily available in the same workshop. But the miniatures in the Devisement allude to this iconography only once; the miniature that opens the ‘livre d’Ynde’ (fol. 118r) features a bearded European in the company of a man with the head of a beast, walking in front of a populated fortification. The miniatures of BL, MS Royal 19 D.i, then, distinguish between the Indies of the past, characterized by the chivalric conflict between Alexander and Porus and by encounters with the monstrous and strange, and those of the illustrator’s present, reimagined as a locus of actual or potential crusading activity. The militaristic iconography that distinguishes the Devisament du monde in BL, MS Royal 19 D.i is unique amongst the surviving manuscripts of Marco’s and Odorico’s Itinerarium. Certainly, generic landscapes appear in other manuscript witnesses of both texts, but these are urbanized, commercialized, or wild landscapes and built environments that frame different kinds of human activity, with correspondingly different effects on readers’ interpretations and conceptualizations of space. A pertinent comparator here is Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Bodley 264, a collection of illustrated Alexander texts of the earlier fourteenth century to which was added, in the early fifteenth, a text of the Devisement that Dutschke has conclusively shown to be intentionally matched to the Alexandercollection and copied directly from BL, MS Royal 19 D.i.60 Nothing is known for certain of the ownership of this manuscript at the time the Devisement was added to it, yet its quality, as well as its earlier and later royal connections, suggest an English royal or member of the higher nobility. ‘table d’or’ (‘golden tablets’ or ‘passports’) in the text and rubric, the miniature pictures a ruler giving a gold-topped trestle table to two tonsured, habited friars. 59  Quigley, ‘Romantic Geography and the Crusades’, p. 54. 60  Dutschke, ‘The Truth in the Book’, passim. On the manuscript, see Cruse, Illuminating the Roman d’Alexandre, which unfortunately was published after the present chapter was written.

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Although the Devisement in Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Bodley 264 was copied from BL, MS Royal 19 D.i in the early fifteenth century, its iconography, the work of four English artists of the early fifteenth century, rarely relies on its exemplar.61 Moreover, the iconographic scheme at times indicates close attention not just to rubrics but also to the text. Eschewing the crusading iconography that permeates BL, MS Royal 19 D.i, Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Bodley 264 uses miniatures to underscore the distinction that the Court French Devisement’s rubrics create, discussed in the last section, between the Great Khan Kublai’s urbanized dominions of Cathay and Manzi and the ‘marvellous’ and strange Indies.62 Just as Marco’s text stresses the wealth, splendour, and civility of Cathay and Manzi, so do the illuminations. A chapter describing the great city of Quinsai (Hangzhou) is illustrated with a miniature showing the magnificent royal palace and garden described in the text. The miniature shows two crowned figures, one young and one old, playing chess (fol. 258 v; fig. 7) in an enclosed garden, whilst in a nearby garden an old man prunes a tree. A little later, the illumination that accompanies the chapter on the city of Sarchan, which describes the port of Zaiton (Quanzhou), ‘ou toutes les nes d’Ynde viennent aveuques leurs espiceries et leurs autres marchandises’ (‘where all the Indian ships come with their spices and other merchandise’; Devisement, v, 129), shows a great fortified port city built in Western European architectural style and surrounded by shipping, with travellers in the foreground (fol. 259v; fig. 8). Whilst a certain sense of the outlandish is conveyed by the hexagonal or octagonal red temple in the background of the image of Quinsai, on the whole, these miniatures locate and underscore many affinities between the domains of the Great Khan and Latin Christendom.63 With the opening of the ‘livre d’Ynde’ in the same volume, however, a fundamental iconographic shift occurs. This third and final section of the Devisement 61 

Dutschke, ‘The Truth in the Book’, pp. 281–86; on these volumes’ occasional shared iconography, see pp. 294–97. On the division of labour between the English section of this composite manuscript’s illuminators, see Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, i, 70–72. 62  Harf-Lancner, ‘From Alexander to Marco Polo, from Text to Image’, p. 244. Strickland argues that the iconography of Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Bodley 264 distinguishes between the central dominions of the Great Khan and his outlying empire: Strickland, ‘Artists, Audience, and Ambivalence’, p. 516. For a discussion and the dating of the illuminations in the latter part of this composite manuscript, see Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, i, 68–73. 63  This temple may be intended to evoke the East generally through reference to contemporary or recent copies of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, some of which were octagonal. See Morris, The Sepulchre of Christ and the Medieval West, pp. 230–36.

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begins with a miniature that shows three islands (fol. 260r; fig. 9). The islands are dotted with trees but, in contrast to the elaborate cities of previous images, lack any evidence of human building activity. The extreme wildness of this insular world is emphasized by the peoples represented. All are unclothed and covered in hair. One is a blemmya, his head in his chest, shown threatening a gryphon with a club. Another is a cynocephalus. In the foreground, a cyclops apparently makes conversation with a club-wielding sciopod.64 Whilst the ‘Livre d’Ynde’ does indeed begin with an account of travels around a maritime and insular Indian Ocean world, the only traditionally Indian monstrous race that features in the Devisement is the cynocephalus, attributed to the island of Angamanam (Andaman; Devisement, vi, 22). A little later in this manuscript, prefacing the Devisement’s chapter on ‘Cianba’, we find a further image of wild men, but in this instance one that recalls militarized Indies of the manuscript’s model, BL, MS Royal 19 D.i. Here, Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Bodley 264 shows a group of European knights in an elaborate, stone-built, fortification, observing while hairy wild men, two horned, one tusked and one hoofed, eat disarticulated human limbs and attempt to pull the hind leg off a deer (fol. 262r; fig. 10). The inspiration for this image is far from clear. Strickland thinks it may refer to the preceding chapter, in which the eating of unransomed captives is described. 65 But it may equally be either a reworking of the image that opens the ‘Livre d’Ynde’ in its Royal model (fol. 118r, described above), or a generic image that responds simply to the rubric’s reference to ‘la mendre Ynde’. Whatever the case, the wild men pictured form an important and allusive element in these images. The workshop has taken the decision to characterize the insular Indies as a wild and monstrous region, and then to convey a sense of wildness by drawing on illustrations of Alexander’s military activities in the Indies, found earlier in the same volume. In Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Bodley 264’s illustrations to Alexandre de Paris’s Li Romans du bon roy Alixandre, a copy illuminated in Flanders in the 1330s and early 1340s to which the Devisement under discussion has been visually matched, we see, for example, the conqueror’s army, in European armour, charging similarly hairy, horned wild men who are armed only with stones (fol. 66v; fig. 11). Looking back at the Devisement’s illustrations of wild men (figs 9 and 10), we can see how, through allusion to earlier images of Alexander’s conquest, they evoke an environment characterized both 64  On these monsters, see Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought, pp. 5–25. 65  Strickland, ‘Artists, Audience, and Ambivalence’, p. 505.

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by the wildness of its semi-human inhabitants and by its past conquest at the hands of Alexander’s forces. The images of wild, insular and monstrous Indies that open the first images of the ‘Livre d’Ynde’ in Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Bodley 264 are not typical of all fifteenth-century manuscripts. Indeed, they are not even wholly typical of the manuscript’s own Indies; a later image, accompanying Lesser Java (Sumatra), shows richly dressed, dark-skinned men engaged in practices such as idol worship (fol. 262v). The image at the head of the Book’s chapter on the tomb of St Thomas in Maabar (the Coromandel Coast) even shows turbaned Muslims, European travellers, and Indian pilgrims united with a Western European female figure who may represent a patron, in prayer at the saint’s tomb (fol. 266 v). Whilst the two opening images clearly demonstrate associations between Indian insularity, wildness, and monstrosity, the manuscript’s later illustrations undercut these. In different ways, in fact, we find this tension between the familiar and the strange played out across the miniatures in two other manuscripts, both French, produced almost contemporaneously with Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Bodley 264: New York, Pierpont Morgan Libr., MS M. 723 and the Duc de Berry’s celebrated Livre des merveilles, BnF, MS fr. 2810. Both manuscripts, in fact, witness an emerging tension between visions of the Indies as a civilized and mercantile world and a distant region both wild and strange. The artists involved in the production of New York, Pierpont Morgan Libr., MS M. 723, like those of the section of Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Bodley 264 just discussed, visualize the Indian environment as a wild space, whose lack of urbanization distinguishes it from other regions that appear in the manuscript’s Devisement.66 Once the Polos — dressed, no doubt due to a misunderstanding of the word ‘frères’, as Franciscan friars — leave Manzi to cross the Indian Ocean (fol. 213v), urban environments cease to appear in the miniatures that regularly accompany the text. The majority of the scenes illustrating the ‘Livre d’Ynde’ in this volume take place against a generic wild background of rocks and trees. Where the text or rubric describes an island, such as the islands of 66 

The images in New York, Pierpont Morgan Libr., MS M. 723 have been attributed by Meiss to a closely contemporary artist: the master of the Berry Apocalypse, active between around 1404 and 1418: Meiss, The Limbourgs and their Contemporaries, i, 252–56 and 369. The artist of New York, Pierpont Morgan Libr., MS M. 723 certainly seems close to the Berry Apocalypse artist’s distinctive style of composition and deployment of landscape and figures. Compare, for example New York, Pierpont Morgan Libr., MS M. 723, fol. 237r, with the Berry Apocalypse (New York, Pierpont Morgan Libr., MS M. 133), fol. 10v, at Corsair, the Online Research Portal of the Pierpont Morgan Library [accessed 30 October 2011].

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Men and Women (fol. 245r; fig. 12) or Seillan (Sri Lanka, fol. 225v; fig. 13), the illustrations underscore this insularity by showing water encircling the small parcels of land on which the inhabitants stand. Unlike the images in Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Bodley 264 and BL, MS Royal 19 D.i, however, the producers of New York, Pierpont Morgan Libr., MS M. 723 present the peoples of the Indies as physically similar both to those of Cathay and Manzi and those of contemporary Europe.67 Images such as that of the Brahmans, described in the Devisement as the most honest of merchants (Devisement, vi, 40; fol. 237r; fig. 14), the presentation of pearls to the king of Maabar (fol. 228v), and the islands of Men and Women (fol. 245r; fig. 12) all show pale-skinned, fully clothed people. Only occasionally do forked beards or outlandish headgear, as Kosta-Théfaine has pointed out, mark particular individuals out as oriental.68 Indeed, the ladies who inhabit the island of women that Marco situates in the western Indian Ocean appear to be strikingly fashionably attired in well-fitting, high-waisted, and low-cut gowns, with elegantly styled hair (fig. 12). Only in the illustration of Seillan (Sri Lanka; fig. 13) do we see islanders who ‘vont tous nus, fors tant que il cuevrent leur nature’ (‘go completely naked, except that they cover their sex’; Devisement, vi, 23). Cynocephali, wild men, and horned men are wholly absent from New York, Pierpont Morgan Libr., MS M. 723; as Kosta-Théfaine has rightly noted, the manuscript’s images are largely devoid of exoticism.69 Instead, the images sometimes witness an incongruous and unsettling negotiation between the familiar and the strange. The Devisement’s impeccably honest Brahman merchants, pale-skinned and dressed in European-style robes with elaborate hats, are set not in a city but in a wild landscape, negotiating with buyers from behind a wooden bench in the open air (fig. 14). Like the images of New York, Pierpont Morgan Libr., MS M. 723, the many and splendid illustrations found in the Duc de Berry’s Livre des merveilles (BnF, MS fr. 2810) bear witness to a reconfiguration of the relationships between the foreign and the familiar and between Western European audiences and their imagined Indies.70 The images of the Duc de Berry’s Livre des merveilles have 67 

Examples of the ‘Europeanization’ of the Mongols in this manuscript are many, but the illustration of Chinggiz Khan’s coronation is a particularly striking example. The illuminator uses a standard coronation image, but set against an open-air background; a mitred bishop places a European-style coronet on a red-robed, enthroned king’s head: fol. 115r. 68  Kosta-Théfaine, ‘Du récit de voyage et de sa mise en image’, pp. 57–58. 69  Kosta-Théfaine, ‘Du récit de voyage et de sa mise en image’, p. 58. 70  The illustrations in the Livre des Merveilles have been attributed to the workshops of the Boucicaut and Bedford Masters. See Sterling, La Peinture médiévale à Paris, i, 371–75.

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received more scholarly attention than those of any other manuscript of these travelogues. And yet, when it comes to the representation of the Indies in this material text’s travel accounts, two images in particular have perhaps exerted an undue influence on scholarship.71 The first of these is an image, positioned to fill up the foot of a folio at the end of the book’s discussion of ‘ces provinces vers tramontane jusques a la grant mer’ (‘the provinces towards the north as far as the ocean’), that shows a grouping of three classic representatives of the monstrous races: a blemmya, a sciopod, and a wild man (fol. 29v; fig. 15).72 The second is an image of wild beasts that precedes the Devisement’s account of the Indian kingdom of Ely, Greater India, at the centre of which is an elegant, white, prancing unicorn (fol. 85r; fig. 16). Drawing on these images, art and cultural historians since Rudolph Wittkower have argued that the traditional ‘marvels of the East’ distorted Western Europeans’ perceptions of the Indies through the fifteenth century and beyond.73 But these are two images amongst more than eighty that illuminate the Livre des merveilles’s Marco Polo text alone, and, whilst the image of the monstrous races in fig. 15 may be traditional, its position — not in the ‘Book of India’ but at the end of the text’s discussion of the far northern reaches of the earth — is not. Indeed, when these images are considered in context, they bear witness to a changed understanding of the world and the place of the Indies within it. To see how the images that accompany the Devisement and Itinerarium in BnF, MS fr. 2810 reshape their audiences’ conceptualizations of the Indies and Europe’s relationship to this space, it is first necessary to place these well-known images in context. A comparison between the celebrated image of the prancing unicorn (fig. 16) with other illustrations of wildlife in Cathay and the Indies However, the images are attributed to the Mazarine master and Egerton masters and collaborators in Mandragore, the online illuminated manuscripts catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France: [accessed 30 October 2011]. Attribution issues remain unresolved. Sterling, for example, attributes the Mazarine Hours, after which the Master is so named, to the Boucicaut Master. 71  I refer here to the Devisement and Odorico’s Itinerarium, not the copy of Mandeville’s Travels in the same volume, which falls beyond the scope of this chapter. 72  Polo, Le Devisement du monde, ed. by Ménard and others, ii (2003), 37. 73  For example: ‘[a]lthough the Paris codex 2810 does not contain an Alexander text, the overall character of the illustrations is similar to those of the Alexander manuscripts’: Wittkower, ‘Marco Polo and the Pictorial Tradition of the Marvels of the East’, pp. 91–92. Much more recently, Harf-Lancner bases an assertion that BnF, MS fr. 2810 ‘emphasises marvels and monsters’ overly on these images: Harf-Lancner, ‘From Alexander to Marco Polo, from Text to Image’, p. 207.

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reveals certain implicit cultural assumptions about the relationship between humans and Indian environments. The scene presented in the Ely miniature is noticeably free of human influence. A unicorn that is not, as scholars have consistently pointed out, mentioned in the accompanying text (though a rhinoceros, termed a unicorn, is very well described at Devisement, vi, 17) prances gracefully at the centre of the image, whilst the creatures that one might expect to prey upon it — a lion, a bear, and a wild dog — lie or stand placidly, facing away from one another in a composition that emphasizes the scene’s peacefulness and diffuses any sense of threat. In an image attributed to the same artist that accompanies Odorico’s chapter on Sillan (Sri Lanka), in contrast, the wild beasts and environment of the Indies appear in a very different light (fol. 106v; fig. 17).74 The artist has again drawn a landscape free of urbanization or cultivation, carefully rendering Odorico’s ‘grantde montagne’ (‘great mountain’) and ‘grande eaue’ (‘large lake’), which the inhabitants believe to be formed of Adam and Eve’s tears and where they fish for precious jewels.75 The illustrator has rendered white, naked islanders absorbed in this activity, apparently untroubled by the island’s ‘grant planté de bestes sauvaiges’ (‘abundance of wild beasts’).76 These animals look on, in postures signifying attack, around the edges of the water. The visual effects of the image are twofold. The scene of jewel-fishing invites viewers to contemplate an idyll; the nakedness of the jewel-fishers is a visual reference to the Eden that is never far from the surface in travellers’ descriptions of Sri Lanka (see Chapter 2). The dangerous wild animals, in contrast, appear to contemplate their next meal and act as a visual reminder that, tempting though this environment may look, it is not Paradise. Nor is the Seillan miniature the only one in which an otherwise idyllic scene is troubled by the menace of the wild. At the head of Odorico’s short chapter on the Indonesian island of ‘Naten, alias Panthen’, a miniature shows the process, described in the chapter, of harvesting flour, honey, and poison directly from trees. But, since it is not Paradise, a labour-free life is not possible without some negative consequences, as the birds of prey and dragon that move menacingly in the right of the frame remind us (fol. 105 r; fig. 18).77 These miniatures represent the Indies as a space tinged by the menace of wild beasts, living 74  Mandragore: Base des manuscrits enluminés de la Bibliothèque nationale de France attributes both images to the Mazarine master. 75  Odorico da Pordenone, Le voyage, ed. by Andreose and Ménard, p. 34. 76  Odorico da Pordenone, Le voyage, ed. by Andreose and Ménard, p. 34. 77  Odorico da Pordenone, Le voyage, ed. by Andreose and Ménard, p. 30.

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alongside but beyond the control of Indian peoples. The troubling strangeness of the relationship the images imagine between humans and the natural environment in the Indies perhaps emerges most clearly when it is contrasted with that found in Cathay, under its great and powerful ruler, Kublai Khan. Earlier in the manuscript’s copy of the Devisement is a miniature of the Great Khan hunting (fol. 31v; fig. 19). Accompanied by a tame leopard and hawk, the Khan pursues his quarry across a landscape of rocks, streams, and woods. The human control over the natural environment represented here sits in marked contrast to the hostile and menacing relationship between humans and their wild environment represented across the Livre’s Indies. Strickland has suggested that the miniatures in manuscripts such as Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Bodley 264 and BnF, MS fr. 2810 worked with the manuscripts’ texts to evince in audiences ambivalent responses to an East represented as both ‘admirable and atrocious’.78 Such ambivalence is certainly characteristic of the images of Indian natural environments discussed above, and it also characterizes well the sharply contrasting illustrations of wild Indian islands and pilgrimage in Maabar in Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Bodley 264. But I think that certain manuscripts produced in the early fifteenth century do rather more than to depict ‘the sophisticated and the savage […] in nearly equal measure to provoke responses at once mesmerizing and repellent’.79 In both the Devisement and the Itinerarium in BnF, MS fr. 2810, and in the Devisement in New York, Pierpont Morgan Libr., MS M. 723, certain miniatures work, sometimes with and sometimes against the texts they accompany, to temper indications of human diversity with signifiers of human similarity, and to represent distance as bridged by trade. In New York, Pierpont Morgan Libr., MS M. 723, as noted above, the illustrator tempers the human diversity that Marco describes quite simply by not representing much of it. Conspicuous by their absence in this manuscript are representations of the more physically or morally monstrous peoples the Devisement describes, such as cynocephali, cannibals, or men with tails. Instead, the manuscript appears to have a slight bias towards scenes showing the familiar, and often the mercantile, within the strange. Pearl-fishers present their catches to an immaculately dressed Indian king at fol. 228v; the Polos embark on their Indian Ocean voyage in a boat laden with barrels at fol. 213v; and welldressed Brahman merchants go about their business in Greater India (fig. 14). 78  79 

Strickland, ‘Artists, Audience, and Ambivalence’, p. 495. Strickland, ‘Artists, Audience, and Ambivalence’, p. 515.

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But the illustrations of BnF, MS fr. 2810 go further still both in tempering the trade with references to the commonplace, and in representing a diverse but common humanity, united economically through trade. Miniatures in the texts of the Devisement and the Itinerarium in BnF, MS fr. 2810 assert the importance of trade throughout the Indies, not only where the texts demand it but also where they do not. As well as picturing details mentioned in the text, such as the virtuous Brahman merchants (fol. 83 r; fig. 20) and the great quantity of merchant shipping at Cambay (fol. 86v), the miniatures interpolate visual references to trade into other contexts. Alongside the manuscript’s chapter on Angamanam (Andaman; Devisement, vi, 22), whose text describes cruel people who kill and eat all those they capture, the miniature shows fully clothed, dogheaded men in negotiations over sacks of produce (fol. 76v; fig. 21). Alongside Odorico’s chapter on Necuveram (Nicobar Islands), the proud, beautifully robed, dog-headed king and his people wear an image of the ox on their heads just as Odorico’s text describes (fol. 106r; fig. 22). Yet the semi-naked labourers filling sacks in the background under the direction of an overseer bear no relation to the accompanying description of battle-hardened islanders who eat their unransomed captives.80 In this manuscript, the seemingly great physical differences between wealthy European readers and these strange objects of their attention are undermined by repeated visual references to the common economic interest and trading practices that bind them together. In fact, the miniaturists of BnF, MS fr. 2810, quite possibly in the knowledge that the volume would be presented to the Duc de Berry, Francophone Europe’s foremost collector of living and represented exotica, took good care throughout to delineate and hypothesize about the movement across the world of Western Europe’s luxury imports. 81 Whereas the iconography of the wild man influenced readers’ preconceptions in Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Bodley 264, the iconography of production and trade — the sack and the barrel — works to influence readers’ responses to the Devisement and the Itinerarium in BnF, MS fr. 2810. The miniature accompanying the text’s account of pepper harvesting in Coilun (Kollam, fol. 84r; fig. 23) shows black, semi-naked workers harvest80 

Odorico da Pordenone, Le voyage, ed. by Andreose and Ménard, p. 33. On the duke’s menagerie and other collections, see Camille, ‘“For Our Devotion and Pleasure”’. For his travel literature interests, also manifested his six tapestries showing scenes of the Great Khan, see Strickland, ‘Text, Image and Contradiction’, p. 25. But it must be noted that BnF, MS fr. 2810 was commissioned by Jean sans Peur, not by the Duc de Berry himself, and, though it was gifted to him, it is not known with certainty that it was commissioned with Jean de Berry in mind. 81 

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ing the crop while a large and prominent merchant, dressed in European style, checks the quality of goods in a barrel. Sacks and barrels are filled by all manner of peoples across the mainland and insular Indies (76v, 83r, 84r, 106r), and are loaded and unloaded at the port of Cambay while merchants in European dress apparently negotiate in the foreground (fol. 86v). No matter how physically or morally strange the spaces represented in these books may be, none are beyond the network of trade that brings exotica to Europe’s wealthy nobility. The illustrations to the Devisement du monde and Odorico’s Itinerarium in BnF, MS fr. 2810 certainly reshape their readers’ relationships with Indian space and peoples. While they do not wholly lose their connotations of environmental and human alterity and menace, the Indies are nonetheless reimagined as a space connected economically and ideologically to Europe through shared economic networks and practices. Yet there is something unsettling about the model of global trade that the illustrations in the Livre des merveilles envisage. In several images, skin colour emerges as a signifier of status, importance, and position in a hierarchically conceived order of world trade. In two illustrations of western India, the artists, unprompted by the text and not in accordance with any harvest image that I have seen, represent people harvesting produce as black and semi-naked, whilst those ruling and trading throughout the region are pale-skinned, larger, and fully clothed, often in European style (e.g., fol. 83r; fol. 84r, figs 22 and 23). Strickland has suggested that, in images such as that of the pepper harvesters of Coilun (Kollam), skin colour functions as a physical sign of moral depravity and size as an indicator of worth.82 Irrespective of the source of inspiration for the representational choice, its visual effects are considerable. Through these particular images, the Indies are not only connected to Europe through trade but also are transformed into a space whose produce and labour are open to European exploitation. The Indies and Francophone Readers: Some Conclusions From the evidence of intertitles, mise-en-page, and illustrations across the surviving French-language manuscripts, the oft-repeated generalization that manuscripts of Marco’s and Odorico’s accounts were valued primarily for their exotica and mirabilia does not ring true.83 Whilst paratexts exist that assist 82 

Strickland, ‘Artists, Audience, and Ambivalence’, pp. 510–11. See Zumthor, ‘The Medieval Travel Narrative’; and Wittkower, ‘Marco Polo and the Pictorial Tradition of the Marvels of the East’, p. 92. 83 

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readers to locate the exotic, marvellous, and strange within texts, so too do intertitles that attempt to render explicit, comprehensible, or memorable the texts’ Indian geographies. From rubrics, mise-en-page, and illustrations, crusading also emerges as an important influence on the reading and interpretation of these texts. Like William Adam’s description of an Indian Ocean world feeding the wealth and power of the Mamlūk sultans (Chapter 2), Marco’s and Odorico’s accounts of China and India could offer an important, but ultimately subordinate, context for literature whose main purpose is to urge Christians to work towards the recovery of the Holy Land.84 The material texts discussed here also destabilize any notions we might be tempted to hold about the shared cultural geographies of seemingly similar groups of readers. Where the miniaturists of the early fifteenth-century Devisement in Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Bodley 264, almost certainly working for a wealthy royal or noble patron, look to the conflicts represented in Alexander-books of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to help them guide readers’ responses to Marco Polo’s Indies, those of New York, Pierpont Morgan Libr., MS M. 723 and, in particular, the Duc de Berry’s Livre des merveilles (BnF, MS fr. 2810), produced for similar readerships on the Francophone continent, turn to an iconography of production and exchange that highlights the exotic sources of European luxury goods. But BnF, MS fr. 2810 and New York, Pierpont Morgan Libr., MS M. 723 are by no means the last fifteenth-century examples of French manuscripts that paratextually reframe, reinterpret, and update Marco’s and Odorico’s accounts for new audiences. Such processes continue through the century and beyond.85 For now I leave the last word on the matter to the Devisement du monde from the library of Philippe le Bon of Burgundy. Copied, according to Dutschke, in the second quarter of the fifteenth century, Philippe’s manuscript dates to a period in which, as Paviot has shown, the Prester John of the Indies looms large in Burgundian diplomatics.86 After 1432, Bertrandon de La Broquière reported to the duke on Prester John’s kingdom; in 1438, Pero Tafur reached the 84 

See García Espada, ‘Marco Polo, Odorico of Pordenone, the Crusades, and the Role of the Vernacular’, pp. 214–17. 85  On the reinterpretation found in a mid-century French translation of Francesco Pipino’s version, see O’Doherty, ‘“They are like beasts, for they have no law”’. 86  All following examples are taken from Paviot, who provides full details and references in Paviot, ‘Le Grand Duc de Ponant et le Prêtre Jean’, pp. 952–56. Bertrandon de La Brocquière’s account of his journey was not written down until 1455, but, as is the case with Pero Tafur, it is likely that an oral report was delivered shortly after his journey.

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Burgundian court, bringing fantastical tales from Niccolò Conti concerning the priest-king. In 1439, a priest arrived at court from ‘la terre de Prestre Jean’, and in 1440 the duke granted finance to a squire wishing to journey to the same land. The Devisement in the duke’s copy, Bruxelles, BRB/KBB, MS 9309, indicates something of the influence of this environment on Marco Polo’s readers. Following the Devisement’s final chapter and a very small and squashed explicit, an additional chapter has been added in the same hand and numbered, following the sequence of those of Marco’s Book, ‘CC.I’. The chapter’s rubric promises ‘la teneur dunes letrez enuoyes par presbiter Jehan A lempereur Phedric de Romme’ (‘the gist of a letter sent by Prester John to Emperor Frederick [Barbarossa]’; fol. 76r). Just a few decades on from the diverse visions of the Indies of the courtly manuscripts Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Bodley 264, BnF, MS fr. 2810, and New York, Pierpont Morgan Libr., MS M. 723, Marco Polo’s Indies were subject, at the court of Philippe le Bon, to yet another paratextual reframing. In a period when the distant figure of an imprecisely located Prester John appeared to offer the chance of alliance between Christian potentates in the East and West, the Devisement du monde — a text that bluntly reports the death of the priest-king at the hands of Chinggiz Khan (Devisement, ii, 29) — was reframed so as to better reflect the diplomatic and cultural priorities of its new context.

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Figure 2. Miniature accompanying the Devisement du monde’s chapter on ‘la contree de Cianda’ (southern Vietnam). Paris, 1330s. London, British Library, MS Royal 19 D.i, fol. 120v. © The British Library Board.

Figure 3. Miniature showing Quinsai (Hangzhou) surrounded by water, Devisement. London, British Library, MS Royal 19 D.i, fol. 113r. © The British Library Board.

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Figure 4. Crusaders arrive in the Holy Land in Jean de Vignay’s Directoire a faire le passage de la Terre Sainte. London, British Library, MS Royal 19 D.i, fol. 187v. © The British Library Board.

Figure 5. Crusaders and Saracens in battle in Jean de Vignay’s Directoire. London, British Library, MS Royal 19 D.i, fol. 189v. © The British Library Board.

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Chapter 3 Figure 6. Illustration accompanying the chapter on ‘la province de Manabar’ (the Coromandel Coast), Devisement. London, British Library, MS Royal 19 D.i, fol. 125r. © The British Library Board.

Figure 7. City of Quinsai (Hangzhou), Devisement. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264, fol. 258v. Courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

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Figure 8. Port of Zaiton (Quanzhou), Devisement. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264, fol. 259v. Courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

Figure 9. The islands of India: illustration accom­ panying the opening chapter of the ‘Livre de Inde’, Devisement. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264, fol. 260r. Courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

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Chapter 3 Figure 10. Monstrous races in the illustration accompanying the chapter on Cianba (southern Vietnam), Devisement. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264, fol. 262r. Courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

Figure 11. Alexander’s army defeats the wild men, Alexandre de Paris’s Li Romans du bon roy Alixandre. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264, fol. 66v. Courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

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Figure 12. The Islands of Men and Women, Devisement. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M. 723, fol. 245r. Courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

Figure 13. The island of Seillan, Devisement. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M. 723, fol. 225v. Courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

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Chapter 3 Figure 14. Brahman merchants in India, Devisement. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M. 723, fol. 237r. Courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

Figure 15. Monstrous races, Devisement. The illustration is positioned at the end of the Devisement’s discussion of the far north. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds français 2810, fol. 29v. Reproduced with permission.

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Figure 16. Animals of Ely, Greater India, Devisement. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds français 2810, fol. 85r. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 17. Fishing for jewels in Sillan (Sri Lanka), Odorico, Itinerarium. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds français 2810, fol. 106v. Reproduced with permission.

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Figure 18. Collecting flour, honey, and poison from the trees in Naten, Itinerarium. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds français 2810, fol. 105r. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 19. Kublai Khan hunting, Ciandu (Shangdu), Devisement. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds français 2810, fol. 31v. Reproduced with permission.

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Figure 20. Brahman merchants bring jewels to the king of Lar, with labourers in the background, Devisement. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds français 2810, fol. 83r. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 21. Cynocephali, attributed to Angamanan (Andaman), Devisement. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds français 2810, fol. 76v. Reproduced with permission.

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Figure 22. Cynocephali, attributed to Nicuveram (Nicobar), Itinerarium. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds français 2810, fol. 106r. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 23. Pepper harvesting at Coilun (Kollam), Devisement. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds français 2810, fol. 84r. Reproduced with permission.

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Mirabilia and Morality: The Indies and Vernacular Readers in Italy The final section of this chapter focuses on the circulation, readership, and projected and actual functions of vernacular copies of Marco’s and Odorico’s accounts of the Indies in Italy. An overview of the circumstances of circulation of these works underscores significant differences when compared with the French and English ownership patterns discussed in the last section. The paratextual evidence yet again shows a range of projected and actual functions for these texts amongst their readers. The producers and annotators of vernacular manuscripts produced in Italy not only envisaged geographical and ethnographic uses for these texts. Sometimes, they adapted them for use as moral mirrors, whose examples of wrong-headed, non-Christian beliefs and behaviours helped to forge, in reaction, a condemnatory Christian communal identity. Volgare Texts and their Readers Though produced in Italy, the early Franco-Italian redaction of Marco’s Divisament dou monde discussed in the last section appears, on the basis of its very limited survival, not to have circulated widely there. But, from the early years of the fourteenth century, multiple Venetian and Tuscan translations of the book, sometimes known as the Milione, proliferated.87 Odorico’s Itinerarium, too, circulated in Italy in multiple Latin and volgare versions.88 Amongst the volgare versions, two in particular dominate numerically. The earliest and most widely diffused of these, probably completed around the middle of the fourteenth century, is a translation of Guglielmo da Solagna’s Latin text (see Chapter 4). Presumably with an eye to the attraction of the marvellous, its incipit introduces the work as the Libro delle nuove e strane e meravigliose cose.89 The next most common redaction of Odorico’s text, termed in criticism 87 

Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, pp. 29, 31–32. The Latin versions will be discussed in the next chapter. The vernacular manuscript tradition of the Itinerarium is complex. Andreose individuates six volgare translations, not counting the Memoriale toscano (see below): Andreose, ‘“Lo libro dele nove e strane e meravioxe cose”’, p. 55. 89  See Odorico da Pordenone, Libro delle nuove e strane e meravigliose cose, ed. by Andreose. On its date, see Andreose, ‘Introduzione’, pp. 49, 95–97; and Andreose, ‘Tra ricezione e riscrittura’, pp. 6–13. For a description of its eight surviving manuscripts, see Odorico da Pordenone, Libro delle nuove e strane e meravigliose cose, ed. by Andreose, pp. 72–79. 88 

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the Memoriale toscano, began to circulate in Tuscany around 1400. 90 On the grounds that its hagiographic material is abridged and its ethnographic and exotic novitadi (novelties) are enriched, the version’s editor, Lucio Monaco, has speculated that this reworking was intended for a lay reading public.91 The material characteristics of many of the surviving Italian vernacular manuscripts of Marco’s Devisement and Odorico’s Itinerarium strongly suggest that, unlike the French copies discussed above, neither work was considered a prestige artifact. The sample of manuscripts detailed in Appendices 1b and 1d suggests that, over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the manuscripts of these texts in volgare were often executed in scripts that ranked considerably lower than formal gothic, or humanistic book hands in the Italian hierarchy of scripts. These lower-status scripts include mercantesca, termed by Dutschke a ‘hybrid noting-cum-book hand’, whose name says something of the regularity of its appearance in the books and registers of merchants.92 We also find cancel­ laresca represented, a hand that, like its English equivalent and contemporary, Anglicana, emerges from the environment of record-keeping and metamorphoses into a lower-status book hand of relatively quick execution. 93 Alongside these, as the tables show, we sometimes find irregular, mixed, or poorly exe90 

Odorico da Pordenone, Memoriale Toscano, ed. by Monaco. The four surviving manuscripts are described in the introduction to the volume and also in Monaco, ‘I volgarizzamenti italiani della relazione di Odorico da Pordenone’. 91  Monaco, ‘I volgarizzamenti italiani della relazione di Odorico da Pordenone’, p. 219. Some additions appear to draw on eyewitness detail, such as fuller information on Franciscan and Dominican convents in Tabriz and Soltaniyeh and an account of marriage customs at Tana. Many tend noticeably towards the marvellous, exotic, and ethnographic: see the ‘Introduzione’, in Odorico da Pordenone, Memoriale Toscano, ed. by Monaco, pp. 75–79. No firm, evidencebased, explanation has yet been advanced for the additional detail in these manuscripts. See the ‘Introduzione’, in Odorico da Pordenone, Memoriale Toscano, ed. by Monaco, p. 34; and Andreose, ‘Introduzione’, p. 46 n. 92  Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, p. 29. For the development and spread of mercantesca script, with examples, see Cecchi, ‘Nota di paleografia commerciale’, in particular pp. 565–67 for the earliest contexts of the script. But note that an elaborate, formal book hand version of the script develops and is taught over the quattrocento: see Orlandelli, ‘Osservazioni sulla scrittura mercantesca nei secoli xiv e xv’, p. 456. 93  Federici notes of cancellaresca that ‘non possiamo identificare un tipo di scrittura cancelleresca unico, con caratteri peculiari costanti’ (‘we cannot identify a single type of cancellaresca, with consistent, specific characteristics’). But it is a useful umbrella term indicating a formal script, with hooked ascenders, a generally spiky or angular appearance, and cursive characteristics such as the looped ‘d’: Federici, La scrittura delle cancellerie italiane, i, 33–58, 75–81 (quotation at p. 80).

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cuted hands that resist categorization. This fact, along with the miscellaneous and highly personal character of some of the manuscripts and occasional ownership data discussed below, suggests that manuscripts of both texts were sometimes copied amongst literate readers for their own use.94 Producers of volgare manuscripts of the texts primarily use paper, a more economical, less prestigious, and less durable alternative to parchment, and the books are rarely large. In fact, a preponderance of the manuscripts listed in Appendices 1b and 1c lack signs of expense in the production process; pages are rarely fully ruled to ensure regularity of appearance, and features such as illumination, decoration, and illustration are, with a few significant exceptions, absent. Indeed, across the sample of copies of both texts examined here, it would not be unreasonable to describe a large minority as small, scruffy, nondescript books. Just as the codicological evidence indicates that the volgare translations of Marco’s and Odorico’s books were not prestige objects, it also places these relatively inexpensively produced objects within the reach of a broader bourgeois, mercantile, administrative, and lay reading public. That such readers did indeed access these texts, sometimes copying them as well as owning and reading them, is confirmed by the occasional survival of colophons and ownership marks.95 Amelio Bonaguisi, podestà of Cerreto Guidi, near Florence, copied a Tuscan 94 

Where the texts retain some evidence of their original manuscript context and are not the sole item in a volume, they often appear in vernacular miscellanies. For example, the fourteenthcentury volgare Itinerarium in Firenze, BNCF, MS II.II.15 is accompanied by a table of alphabets similar to those found in texts of Mandeville, a vernacular treatise on the body and soul, a collection of vernacular legends and rhymed proverbs, creeds and prayers, and a novella. On this and other similar examples, see Monaco, ‘I volgarizzamenti italiani della relazione di Odorico da Pordenone’, p. 184. Amelio Bonagiusi’s copy of the Milione (Firenze, BNCF, MS II.II.61) was copied with a tract on virtues, lives of the philosophers, calendrical notes, a Tuscan translation of the Heroides, and some of the owner-copyist’s own drawings, while the early fifteenth-century copy in Firenze, BNCF, MS Magliabechiano XIII, 73 appears alongside prophecies, accounts of a pilgrimage and a consistory meeting, and an oration: Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, pp. 316–18, 322–24. On the characteristics of ownercopied books, see the chapter on ‘Reading and Writing volgare in Medieval Italy’, in Petrucci, Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy, ed. and trans. by Radding, pp. 169–235 (p. 183). 95  The potential of inventories to provide reliable data on the ownership of books such as these is not as great as it first would seem, because vernacular books were often not detailed individually in such inventories. Thus the early fifteenth-century inventories of middle and artisan classes in Florence analysed by Bec yield just one mention of Marco Polo: in 1414 Filippo di Piero Rinieri left a Marco Polo, on paper and probably in the vernacular, amongst his five vernacular secular and pious books: Bec, Les Livres des florentins, p. 130. On vernacular books in inventories, see p. 14.

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Marco Polo in 1392 ‘per passare tempo e malinconia’ (‘to make the time and melancholy pass’).96 A colophon in the Tuscan Milione in Firenze, BNCF, MS Magliabechiano XIII, 73 suggests that it was copied in 1425 by the podestà of Montaione, Valdelsa, before belonging to a member of the Florentine Bardi family, whilst other manuscripts belonged to unidentified individuals of probable lower status.97 Meo Ceffoni, the owner-copyist of a very scruffy and partial version of the text appended to a copy of the Divina commedia and dated 1425, even confesses apologetically that he does not know how to write very well.98 A similar pattern emerges from surviving data on Odorico’s Itinerarium in volgare. Several manuscripts are marked as the possessions of otherwise unknown laypeople. ‘Andrea di Lorenzo di Cieffo di Masino Ceffi del popolo di San Simone di Firenze’ may have both copied and owned the varied miscellany of pious and secular material in the late fifteenth-century BAV, MS Barberiniani latini 4047, whose ownership mark appears in a mercantesca-influenced cursive very similar to that of the text (fol. 140v). An otherwise unknown member of the Gonfalone del Vaio in San Giovanni, Florence, owned, probably in the fifteenth century, a bookseller-produced copy made the century before.99 In BAV, MS Urbinati latini 1013, a manuscript containing legends, articles of faith, prayers, magic formulas, and a medical tract copied in a professional cancelleresca that is identified by Monaco as a bookseller’s hand, we find several scruffy and shaky notes that reference one Jacopo Dalbo, probably of Verona and the owner of the manuscript at least between 1368 and 1383.100 Since one note concerns the birth and baptism of a daughter, Jacopo is clearly a layman. The trend for volgare manuscripts of Marco’s and Odorico’s texts to circulate in rather workmanlike, sometimes owner-copied manuscripts is bucked in a few instances over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Tuscan translation of Marco’s Book in BnF, MS it. 434 was owned in the fifteenth 96 

Firenze, BNCF, MS II.II.61, fol. 40v. 97  Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, pp. 322–24. See Appendix 1b, nos 3, 6, 10, 12. 98  Firenze, Bibl. Riccardiana, MS 1036. Transcribed in Benedetto, La tradizione mano­ scritta, pp. ccx–ccxii. 99  Venezia, Bibl. Naz. Marciana, MS It. VI, 102 (=5726). The volume is described as a bookseller-produced volume in Monaco, ‘I volgarizzamenti italiani della relazione di Odorico da Pordenone’, pp. 193–94, but the number is erroneously given as 5276. 100  Odorico da Pordenone, Libro delle nuove e strane e meravigliose cose, ed. by Andreose, p. 73. On the manuscript’s contents see Monaco, ‘I volgarizzamenti italiani della relazione di Odorico da Pordenone’, pp. 190–91. The notes are at fol. 32v.

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century by a member of the lower nobility in the Abruzzi and, as can be seen in Appendix 1b, is one of only three volgare manuscripts of the text to benefit from more than minimal levels of decoration.101 Dutschke also identifies Padova, Bibl. Civica, MS 211, copied in 1445, as an owner-copied manuscript of the Vetturi family of Treviso.102 Although inventories place copies, now unidentifiable, of Marco’s Book in some of the major noble libraries of northern Italy, the languages of these are rarely discernible with any certainty.103 In the case of Odorico’s Itinerarium, it has not been possible to find instances of its ownership by high-status lay readers. Two copies of the vernacular Libro delle nuove e strane e meravigliose cose, however, can be shown to have belonged to religious foundations in the fifteenth century. These manuscripts share uncharacteristically high production values. Firenze, BNCF, MS Conventi Soppressi, C.7.1170, copied in the late fourteenth century on parchment in a rounded gothic book hand alongside an illuminated copy of Marco Polo’s Book in the Dominican Francesco Pipino’s Latin translation, belonged to the Dominicans of Santa Maria Novella by the late fifteenth century.104 BAV, MS Barberiniani latini 4048, copied a neat semi-cursive showing humanistic influence alongside a beautifully illustrated copy of the later fourteenth-century cosmographical poem the Sfera, belonged to a female religious order.105 Whilst BAV, MS Barberiniani latini 4048 is the only volgare manuscript of Odorico’s Itinerarium copied in a script showing humanistic influence, the hands in six fifteenth-century volgare Marco Polo manuscripts in my sample show the influence of humanist scripts to a greater or lesser degree.106 This shift 101 

It was owned in the mid-fifteenth century by a Pietro de Celano: Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, p. 425. On the owner and his other books see Bloch, ‘Quelques manuscrits de Pietro de Celano à la Bibliothèque nationale de Paris’. 102  Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, p. 390. 103  Fifteenth-century inventories place one vernacular and one Latin copy of the Book in the library of the d’Este of Ferrara and copies of undetermined language in the libraries of the Sforza in Milan (by 1459), and the Malatesta of Rimini (by 1468): Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, pp. 1076–80. 104  Firenze, BNCF, MS Conventi Soppressi, C.7.1170 first appears in the inventory of Santa Maria Novella in 1489: Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, pp. 569–70. 105  This is suggested by Andreose on the basis of the owner’s device, found at fol. 1r: Odorico da Pordenone, Libro delle nuove e strane e meravigliose cose, ed. by Andreose, p. 72. 106  See Appendix 1b. But it must be noted that the humanist-influenced hands we see in these manuscripts tend to be cursives, often mixed, rather than the higher-status book hand.

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may reflect the more widespread use of humanistic cursive and its evolution into ‘a script for general purposes’ as the fifteenth century progresses, as much as an increasing interest in the vernacular Book amongst humanist circles who were much more likely, as Chapter 4 will show, to access it in Latin.107 The Indies in volgare: Narrative, Geography, Marvel, and Morality In 1392 Amelio Bonaguisi, podestà of Cerreto Guidi, made a copy of Marco Polo’s ‘Melione’ to pass away the time. He recorded the fact, and his responses to the book he copied, in a long and confused colophon at the end of his workmanlike, unadorned copy: mi paiano cose incredibili epaionomi il suo dire non bugie anzi piu che miracholi ebene potrebbe essere vero quello di che ragiona ma io non ho credo tutta uia perlo mondo li truovano assai isvariate cose duno paese aunaltro ma questo mi pare come chiolo rasen prasse a mio diletto cose dano credere nedi darui fede io dico quanto a me.108 these seem to me incredible things, and what he says seems to me not lies but rather more than miracles and therefore this [book] could be true by this reasoning. But I didn’t believe it. However, throughout the world very diverse things are found from one country to another, but this seemed to me, as I copied it for my pleasure, to be things not to believe or to have faith in, I say, according to me.

On reaching the end of the text he has copied, Amelio has realized that he has an interpretive problem. He does not know how to approach the text he has copied. Should he treat it as outright lies, or should he approach it in the spirit of miracle accounts, a variety of text that clearly requires a different set of reading practices and to which a different standard of truth applies? He does not know. Eventually, apparently swayed by the fact that he experienced ‘diletto’ (‘pleasure’) in copying it, he makes the personal judgement, in a tone that is far from assured, that he does not think it right to hold what he has copied as articles of faith. The Milione, in Amelio’s estimation, is potentially capable of performing a range of very different functions for its vernacular readers. But Mixed, humanist-influenced cursives may indicate aspiration to replicate the script rather than training. 107  Wardrop, The Script of Humanism, p. 36. 108  Firenze, BNCF, MS II.II.61, fol. 40v. Transcribed in Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, p. 318.

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this multi-functionality may be a problem; when confronted by such a potentially multi-functional text, how does a reader work out how to approach it? In what follows, I look at the kinds of guidance available to readers of the Milione and Odorico’s Itinerarium in volgare, the kinds of expectations paratexts raised in readers, and the tools provided to help them make sense of these tales of adventure and encounter in unfamiliar lands. But first of all, it is important to recognize quite how many readers might well have found themselves, like Amelio, in a state of interpretive confusion when faced with Marco’s and Odorico’s texts. More than half the manuscripts sampled in Appendices 1b and 1d feature either no guiding rubrics or intertitles of any kind or incomplete or minimal ones. 109 Equally, few manuscripts are marked with written scribal or medieval readers’ marginalia that could aid textual navigation or interpretation.110 These presentational decisions say something in themselves about the envisaged and actual functions of these texts for their readers. Without paratextual aids such as rubrics and chapter lists, marginal text-finders or symbols, running headers at the top of each page, or, at the very least, prominent decorated letters indicating the start of a new chapter, such manuscripts would be all but impossible to use as works of reference, whether for geographical and ethnographic information or mirabilia. Such material texts invited their readers to approach them as narratives, reading in a linear manner from beginning to end. No ready help would have been available to enable readers to make geographical sense of travellers’ narratives, nor could paratexts direct readers to approach them in particular ways or highlight particular content. Readers might well have found themselves, like Amelio, unsure of how to react to what was before their eyes. This section, then, deals only with the manuscripts of each text that feature some form of paratextual guidance, whether added by a scribe or rubricator as part of the production process or later readers.111 Of course, we cannot know what effects such paratextual guidance would have had on readers; Amelio’s 109 

See Appendices 1b and 1d. Ten of the nineteen volgare manuscripts of the Milione where data are available lack intertitles, as do seven of the eleven volgare manuscripts of the Itinerarium. 110  See Appendices 1b and 1d. Of the manuscripts of the Milione for which data are available, five of fourteen have more than a few marginal signa. No volgare manuscripts of the Itinerarium concerning which I have information have significant written marginalia, and only two of the ten where data are available have more than a few marginal signa. 111  See Appendices 1b and 1d. Of the sample for which information is available, thirteen of the Milione texts and seven of the Itinerarium in volgare feature some form of paratextual guidance, though in some instances this may be no more than a few marginal manicules.

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text of the Milione was furnished with intertitles, written in the black ink of the text, that divided up the text geographically, yet these still left him in some bewilderment. Sometimes, however, we find intertitles and marginalia that direct attention to particular aspects of texts and invite their readers to use them in a variety of ways, presumably in the expectation that the anticipated functions will be those wanted by readers. Several of the sets of intertitles that are sometimes copied with Marco’s and Odorico’s accounts facilitate a geographical reading of these texts, with each chapter introducing a new town or city and transitions between regions occasionally noted.112 But some scribal paratexts, while testifying to a desire on the part of the paratext-authors to clarify the geography of the world the accounts describe, bear witness, like French rubrics discussed in the last section, to the difficulty of the task of situating travellers’ experiences in a broader geographical framework. An early fifteenth-century manuscript of the most widespread Venetian translation of Marco’s Book, for example, features, amongst assorted marginalia in red, rubricated page headers that attempt to clarify the text’s transitions between geographical regions. Thus the rubric that heads the page on which the ‘Book of India’ begins, marking the transition from ‘Manzi’ (southern China) to the Indian Ocean, reads ‘India mazore. non conta plu deqele contrate Ma vol contar dele meraveye dindia mayore’ (‘Greater India. He says no more concerning these countries. But he wishes to speak concerning the marvels of Greater India’; Firenze, Bibl. Riccardiana, MS 1924, fol. 37r). But this attempted clarification would in fact be very confusing for an attentive reader. In the Book’s terminology, the text section being introduced is not Greater but Lesser India. The ‘contrate’ that the text leaves behind also remain unhelpfully nameless. Later on in the same manuscript, the rubricator reveals himself to be entirely defeated by the text’s implicit metageography. As Marco’s Book moves from discussion of Greater India to Abyssinia and Middle India, the rubric simply notes ineffectually, ‘non plu vol dire di quele contratte’ (‘he no longer wishes to speak of these regions’, fol. 44v). Certainly, the complexity and unfamiliarity of the Milione’s metageographical terminology frustrates this reader’s attempts to comprehend and use it. A similar attempt to link the traveller’s experience to a broader geographical framework appears in the rubrics copied with certain manuscripts of Odorico’s Libro delle nuove e strane e meravigliose cose. As well as breaking the text down 112 

For example, Padova, Bibl. Civica, MS 211, a late text of the Venetian version of the Devisement from which Francesco Pipino’s Latin was translated, and certain manuscripts of Odorico’s Libro delle nuove e strane e meravigliose cose.

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place by place, these rubrics also provide geographical clarification, though the nature of this varies from manuscript to manuscript. In BAV, MS Urbinati latini 1013, Odorico’s journey from Chaldea to the Persian Gulf and from thence to India is introduced through a careful and informative rubric that reads ‘De india e del mar ocian chi circonda latera’ (‘Concerning India and concerning the Ocean Sea that encircles the land’; fol. 7v). Here the rubric informs the text’s readers explicitly, as Odorico’s text at this point does not, that the sea across which Odorico travels is the same Ocean Sea that surrounds the oik­ oumene in medieval cosmological thought (see Chapter 1).113 Indeed, it both shows and presumes a basic level of cosmological knowledge on the part of its readers. Later on, the same set of rubrics identifies the islands on Odorico’s route between the Indian mainland and Manzi (India Superior in Odorico’s terminology) as belonging to ‘la segonda India’, a term that, although it appears in some medieval texts and maps, figures neither in the text of the Libro nor in the surviving Latin versions of the Itinerarium.114 Through his use of the term, the compiler of these rubrics attempts not only to give form to perceived differences between the regions the traveller describes but also to reclassify the places discussed in the Libro using a terminology that he presumably expects will be recognizable to his audience. And yet, as so often proves to be the case across the manuscript traditions, the desire to extract a clear and consistent geographical framework from a text falls victim to the bewildering variability that so often characterizes medieval terminology for the Indian Ocean world. In the chapter list of BAV, MS Urbinati latini 1013, the same region is inexplicably renamed ‘lagrande india’ (Greater India; fol. 3r). In view of paratext-authors’ lack of success in making geographical use of Odorico’s and Marco’s descriptions of the Indies, it is perhaps fortunate that regional geography rarely emerges as a priority among the surviving scribal and readerly paratexts. Other paratexts direct readers towards the marvels and exotica of the Indies and sometimes seek to shape readers’ responses to the peoples and customs described. And indeed in one instance, as we shall see, a set of illustrations invites attention to the hagiographical dimension of Odorico’s Itinerarium. Amongst the volgare manuscripts that encourage their readers to 113 

Similar rubrics appear in Firenze, BNCF, MS Conventi Soppressi, C.7.1170, BAV, MS Urbinati latini 1013, and Venezia, Bibl. Naz. Marciana, MS It. XI, 32 (=6672). They are edited from Firenze, BNCF, MS Conventi Soppressi, C.7.1170 in Odorico da Pordenone, Libro delle nuove e strane e meravigliose cose, ed. by Andreose, pp. 139–41. 114  Odorico da Pordenone, Libro delle nuove e strane e meravigliose cose, ed. by Andreose, p. 161.

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approach the Indies as a space defined by its mirabilia and notabilia are the late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century Marco Polo texts in Firenze, Bibl. Med. Laur., MS Ashburnham 534 and Firenze, BNCF, MS Magliabechiano XIII, 73. These manuscripts, which transmit a later Tuscan version of Marco’s Book, feature rubricated chapter headings that largely highlight the marvels and the exotic customs of the peoples described in the chapter to follow. The rubric for the island of Seilan (Sri Lanka) is a choice example. Geographically unspecific, it neglects even to identify the island that the following chapter describes. Rather, it informs its readers, in a single, breathlessly paratactic sentence, of the island king’s legendary ruby, of the nudity of the islanders, their use of wine from trees and certain of their products, and throws in at the end the wholly unfounded interpolation that they eat human flesh.115 In practice, many of the features to which the rubrics draw attention are ethnographic in nature. That which introduces Marco’s chapter on Maabar does not introduce the place by name but, rather, summarizes the chapter’s contents: Come quando sarde il corpo del re assai nardono collui duomini vivi e pescarisi le perle ed altre marauigliose cose.116 How when one burns the body of the king they also burn with him a goodly number of living men and [how] they fish for pearls and of other marvellous things.

In fact, the rubrics of these Tuscan manuscripts direct readers’ attention away from geography and towards ethnography to such an extent that certain of its chapters are advertised to their readers as little more than litanies of unlocalized marvels. Whilst none of the paratexts I have seen go so far as to turn Odorico’s Itinerarium into a litany of marvels, the rubrics found in some copies of the Libro delle nuove e strane e meravigliose cose not only direct readers’ attention towards ethnographic details but also seek to induce particular responses to these. The Libro’s rubric to the chapter concerning the city of Polumbo (Kollam), for example, directs readers to pay attention to Indians’ reverence for cattle and to the practice among widows of sharing their spouses’ funeral pyres, 115 

‘Dunbello Rubino chea il re e vanno tucti ingnudi e mangiano charne umana e fano vino dalberi e acci Rubini e zaffiri e topazi’ (‘Concerning a beautiful ruby that the king has and they all go naked and they eat human flesh and they make wine from the trees and in this place there are rubies, sapphires and topaz’): Firenze, BNCF, MS Magliabechiano XIII, 73, fol. 27r. See also Firenze, Bibl. Med. Laur., MS Ashburnham 534, at fol. 22v. 116  Firenze, Bibl. Med. Laur., MS Ashburnham 534, fol. 23 r. See also Firenze, BNCF, MS Magliabechiano XIII, 73, fol. 27v.

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but labels these customs ‘stolte cose’ (‘foolish things’). 117 Likewise, readers of the chapter on Lamen (Lamori; Sumatra) are forewarned by the rubric not only that one loses sight of the pole star there but also that the islanders go naked, eat human flesh, and ‘fanno molt’altre stolte e incredibili cose e crudeli’ (‘do many other foolish and unbelievable and inhuman things’).118 These multifunctional rubrics thus introduce places by name, link toponyms to highlights — principally ethnographic — of the following chapter, and guide their readers’ moral responses to any customs described. A final important and unique set of paratexts appears in a probably bookseller-produced copy of Odorico’s Libro delle nuove e strane e meravigliose cose. Jacopo Dalbo’s fourteenth-century manuscript, BAV, MS Urbinati latini 1013, features a series of large and well-executed line drawings that appear to have been designed following close examination of the text. Thirteen of these illustrate aspects of the societies Odorico’s narrative describes, including idol worship in India, the cooking of human flesh attributed to Dondin, and dogheaded men and women in conversation. Indeed, in this respect the manuscript resembles a bourgeois Italian counterpart to the richly illuminated French manuscripts discussed earlier in this chapter. Yet there is one crucial distinction between BAV, MS Urbinati latini 1013 and its French counterparts. Four of its illustrations relate to different stages in Odorico’s narrative of the martyrdom and miracles of the Franciscan friars martyred at Tana (Thane; fols 8v, 9r, 10r, 10v).119 The richly illuminated French Itinerarium in BnF, MS fr. 2810, in contrast, devotes only one image to the translation of the martyrs’ relics to the Franciscan house at Zaiton (fol. 102r). In contrast to the late fourteenthcentury reworking in the Memoriale toscano, a version from which the hagiographic element of Odorico’s text is neatly excised, the makers of BAV, MS Urbinati latini 1013 clearly considered the story of the Tana martyrdoms an integral part of the Libro, worthy of illustrations that encourage readers to approach it slowly, and with contemplation. The practice of furnishing manuscripts with marginalia has its roots in scholastic practices of compilation and glossing. This fact no doubt contrib117 

p. 153. 118 

p. 155. 119 

Odorico da Pordenone, Libro delle nuove e strane e meravigliose cose, ed. by Andreose, Odorico da Pordenone, Libro delle nuove e strane e meravigliose cose, ed. by Andreose,

Some of the illustrations are reproduced in Odorico da Pordenone, Memoriale Toscano, ed. by Monaco, figs 2–16.

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utes to the later and rarer appearance of scribes’ and readers’ marginalia in vernacular contexts, when compared with the Latin manuscripts (see Chapter 4). Nonetheless, as Clanchy and Minnis have pointed out, the tools of compilation and glossing filter through to lay audiences in the later Middle Ages, if in variable degrees.120 Marginal signa such as lines, squiggles, crosses, brackets, or manicules, though the most common annotations found among this group of manuscripts, can tell us little about readers’ practices or responses and so are not discussed here. Very exceptionally, however, we find more detailed marginal notes and commentaries written by a scribe, reader, or an individual, such as an owner-copyist, who inhabits both roles.121 Two that do so are the annotator of the fifteenth-century Marco Polo in Firenze, Bibl. Riccardiana, MS 1924, whose paratexts are a cross between rubrication and annotation, and the scribe of the marginal summaries added to the later fourteenth-century Tuscan Milione in Firenze, BNCF, MS II.IV.136, summaries that function in some ways like some of the ethnographic rubrics discussed earlier. Like many intertitles, these marginalia often mark textual and regional transitions, making the traveller’s itinerary and the text’s geography easier to follow. The note ‘qui comincia tutte le marauiglose cose delindia’ (‘here begin the marvels of India’; Firenze, BNCF, MS II.IV.136, fol. 45v) marks out the ‘Book of India’, while transitions between Marco’s Greater and Middle Indies are also marked (fols 48 v, 57v). However, approximately one-third of this scribe’s often verbose, expressive, and judgemental notes relate to the text’s ethnographic information. The annotator takes particular exception, for instance, to the Milione’s account of the use of augury amongst the ‘Bregomanni’: the virtuous Brahmans of pagan and Christian tradition. The annotations to this section, in fact, consistently direct attention away from the virtues, such as honesty and continence, of which Marco’s text approves. Instead, they direct focus onto their dependence on augury in business and their ‘spravita’ (‘depravity’) in using quicksilver to extend their lives.122 120 

See Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 179–80; and Minnis, ‘Absent Glosses’. For a more detailed discussion of these categories and of the questions and problems raised by marginalia as a category of evidence, see the section ‘Guided Voyages: The Indies of Latin Readers’ in Chapter 4 below. 122  Firenze, BNCF, MS II.IV.136, fol.  50 r; fol.  52 r; Polo, Il Milione, ed. by Ronchi, pp. 1–302. In both cases the notes are damaged by repeated cropping, but enough remains to work out the sense. Alongside the main text’s reference to the use of divination in business practice appears the following, with illegible sections surmised: ‘di choloro che u et fanno le mertie adaghere’. The words ‘de la spravita’ and the fragment ‘brego’ can clearly be made out in the remnants of a note alongside Marco’s account of the diet of the ‘bregomanni’: fol. 52r. 121 

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The mise-en-page and paratexts of the vernacular Italian manuscripts of Marco’s and Odorico’s texts anticipate several types of approach, sometimes overlapping, to their accounts of the Indies. Whilst many manuscripts would prove difficult to read as anything other than a simple narrative, some are marked up, whether by intertitles or marginal annotation, to allow readers to easily locate ‘the marvellous things in India’ and to follow a given text’s geography. Often, however, the attempts by rubricators and annotators to draw out the geographical ordinatio of the travellers’ texts flounder in confusion. In this respect, they act as unwitting, indirect witnesses to the paucity of alternative sources of regional geography available to scribes, rubricators, annotators, and readers. Many paratexts instead anticipate that travellers’ texts will be valuable to their readers as repositories of anecdotes of marvellous, largely human, diversity. Indeed, some go beyond the clarification of their texts’ structure and themes, so far as to direct readers’ responses explicitly to their content. These moralizing paratexts turn accounts of Indian non-Christian customs and practices — even of the virtuous Brahmans of legend — into exempla in malo: narratives of pagan follies that serve to confirm readers’ senses of their cultural superiority.

Conclusion The diversity of ways of contextualizing, rubricating, annotating, and responding to vernacular texts of Marco’s and Odorico’s accounts, along with the kind of generic uncertainty to which Amelio Bonaguisi testifies, underscores the fundamental role of materiality in shaping the reception of travellers’ texts and the information they contain. While paratexts show that geography is often considered a key ordering principle in Marco’s Book in particular, they also show, it is fair to say, a mixed fortune for Marco’s and Odorico’s works as purveyors of detailed information on the regional geography of the Indies. But they nonetheless suggest some important, context-dependent shifts in cultural assumptions about Indian space and peoples as well as the kinds of relationships Western Europeans could envisage with these. Material features of manuscripts such as mise-en-page, manuscript context, rubrication, and illustration work together to influence contemporary readers’ perception of these texts’ genres. Similar texts come to be treated as simple narratives, geography, accounts of exotica and mirabilia, devotional works, and sources of moral education. As Rouse and Rouse argued of BL, MS Royal 19 D.i, the Devisement du monde becomes crusading literature when it is treated

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and packaged as such. However, an almost precisely similar text in Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Bodley 264, produced seventy years later, has a changed function and set of connotations. Even the apparently self-evident category of mirabilia orientis, which one might reasonably think exemplified by the Duc de Berry’s Livre des merveilles, is problematized by the material texts of the Devisement and French Itinerarium that the manuscript contains. In the Duc’s Livre des merveilles, the East’s traditional mirabilia are displaced, making way for the new marvel that is a diverse yet economically and ideologically united world. In their material forms, then, the vernacular narratives in focus here trouble any firm conclusions we might wish to draw concerning the ‘real’ genres of the texts they instantiate. It turns out that these texts can be roman, crusading literature, mirabilia, hagiography, commercial intelligence, and more by turns, always depending in some degree on their context, language, and material form. And, through these material and generic variations, these texts participate in the generation and reproduction of equally multiple and varied imagined Indian geographies.

Chapter 4

A Moral and Geographical Education: Latin Accounts of the Indies and their Readers

Introduction Marco Polo’s Book, Odorico da Pordenone’s Itinerarium, and Poggio Bracciolini’s account of Niccolò Conti’s travels in India all circulated over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Latin versions that enabled their influence to permeate Latin-literate communities across Europe without the need for translation. A shared knowledge of Latin, the supranational Western European language of scholarship and the Church, implies a certain common level of linguistic and cultural formation among readers within these communities. Nonetheless, the term ‘Latin-literate’ groups together readers of diverse socioeconomic status in ecclesiastical, monastic, and secular roles. Known owners of the material texts discussed here range from an otherwise-unknown Paduan priest, to a fellow of an English college, to a future pope.1 This chapter delves into the evidence for readership of these three texts, identifies shared and distinctive approaches to accounts amongst different groups of readers, and traces shifts in the projected and actual functions of texts over time. The investigation shows that, even amongst religious orders, the material texts of these travellers’ accounts were rarely well adapted to provide direct or indirect support for missionary activity or crusading plans. Yet we find them in manuscript versions 1 

Sevilla, Bibl. Capitular y Colombina, MS 7.5.8; Cambridge, Corpus Christi Coll., MS 275; and BAV, MS Vaticani latini 1785 (owned by Pietro Barbo, later Paul II). On this last, see the ‘Introduction’ to Bracciolini, De l’Inde, ed. and trans. by Guéret-Laferté, p. 62.

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adapted for monastic reading; employed as repositories of anecdotal data on human diversity; and reframed to strengthen faith and improve behaviour. But we also see changes in the demands readers make of their Latin travellers’ tales over time. From around the middle of the fifteenth century we begin to see — in humanist and scholarly circles in particular — descriptions of the Indies remoulded as aids to the correct identification, location, and naming of places.

The Genesis and Early Diffusion of Latin Accounts of the Indies The Dominican and Franciscan missionary orders, which had shared responsibility from the early fourteenth century for the evangelization of Mongol lands, Persia, and the Indies, also played important roles in the early diffusion of Marco and Odorico’s accounts of travels through their areas of jurisdiction. Marco’s Divisament dou monde was translated into Latin sometime before 1324 by Francesco Pipino da Bologna, a Dominican friar and member of the order’s Societas fratrum peregrinantium propter Christum inter gentes (the Dominican congregation to which friars about to engage in missionary activity ‘among the heathen’ were attached).2 This version, known as the Liber de consuetudinibus et conditionibus orientalium regionum (henceforth Pipino’s Liber), did more than ensure the text’s availability in Western Europe’s international language of scholarship. Pipino also provided the Book with a prologue that underscored the reliability and piety of Marco, traveller and tale-teller, and introduced his report both as pious reading matter and an inspiration to future endeavours for the missionary orders. The resulting translation was immensely influential. Copies, abbreviations, and translations of it account for approaching half the Book’s surviving pre-1500 manuscripts.3 The extraordinary success of this translation tends to overshadow the other anonymous Latin versions of Marco’s Book that circulated contemporaneously, but in smaller numbers.4 2 

I rely here on the dating of Dutschke, who reasons that the work must have been produced between the composition of the bulk of Pipino’s other major work, the Chronicon (which ends in 1322) and the death of Marco Polo in 1324: Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, p. 219. Dutschke cites a document proving Pipino’s attachment to the Societas by 1325, p. 132. On the Societas, see Loenertz, La Société des frères pérégrinants. 3  For an overview of the influence of the translation, see the census of manuscript versions in Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, pp. 276–82. 4  An early Latin compendium (L in Benedetto’s sigla), close to Rustichello’s Franco-Italian version, appears in Italy and Flanders in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. An abbreviated translation of the main Venetian vernacular version appears to have achieved some popularity in

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First put in writing, according to an early subscript, by a Franciscan amanuensis by the name of Guglielmo da Solagna, Odorico da Pordenone’s Itinerarium circulated in the ecclesiastical and scholarly lingua franca of Latin from its earliest days. The testimony of a Bohemian Franciscan, Henry of Glatz, allows us a glimpse of its early circumstances of diffusion. At the papal court in Avignon, sometime before 1341, when he made his own copy, Henry encountered some Franciscan confrères of Odorico in possession of a copy, probably while they were lobbying for the Friar’s canonization following reports of miracles at his tomb.5 Unlike Pipino’s Liber de consuetudinibus, no single Latin version of Odorico’s Itinerarium appears to have dominated within the textual tradition of the work. Much work remains to be done on the Itinerarium’s textual tradition, but in an initial study Paolo Chiesa has divided the surviving manuscripts of the texts into six main groups. In addition to Henry of Glatz’s recen­ sio, Chiesa identifies the Recensio Guillelmi, a ‘vasto e intricato’ (‘extensive and tangled’) textual tradition united by various textual inclusions and exclusions, including the subscript, dated 1330, of Guglielmo da Solagna.6 The Recensio Marchesini, so called after its compiler, Marchesino de Bassiano, supplements Odorico’s narrative with an account of the friar’s death and other details. 7 After the friar’s death, but nevertheless early in the text’s transmission history, a notary, charged by a Udinese official, compiled what might be called a certified copy of the text known as the Recensio Guecelli.8 Finally, Chiesa also identifies a recensio Germanica, so defined by its geographical area of influence, and a diverse group of abbreviated Recensiones breviores.9 The third and final narrative of travels around the Indies discussed in this chapter is Poggio Bracciolini’s India, the humanist papal secretary’s account, taken down around 1441, of the Chioggian Niccolò Conti’s travels as a merchant around the Indian subcontinental mainland and ocean. Poggio’s India (as German-speaking regions as well as in Italy (LA). Other Latin translations of different vernacular versions also existed in Italy (LB; LT). See the handlist at Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, pp. 276–82. 5  Cathay and the Way Thither, ed. by Yule and Cordier, ii (1914), 16; Chiesa, ‘Per un riordino della tradizione manoscritta della Relatio di Odorico’, p. 347. 6  Chiesa, ‘Una forma redazionale sconosciuta della “Relatio” latina di Odorico di Pordenone’, p. 138. 7  Chiesa, ‘Per un riordino della tradizione manoscritta della Relatio di Odorico’, p. 318. 8  Chiesa, ‘Per un riordino della tradizione manoscritta della Relatio di Odorico’, p. 330. 9  Chiesa, ‘Per un riordino della tradizione manoscritta della Relatio di Odorico’, pp. 320–22.

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I will, for convenience, term it here) appears in two main forms. The humanist appears to have made an early redaction, in which the account of Niccolò’s travels circulates alone. By the end of the 1440s, however, revised versions of the same account appear in manuscripts of Poggio’s De varietate fortunae, where Niccolò’s account makes up most of Book iv.10 Poggio evidently attempted to exercise a high degree of editorial control over the text’s integrity; earlier versions are corrected in Poggio’s own hand, corrections which are incorporated into later textual versions. However, manuscripts of these different early and revised editions, as we might term them, circulated simultaneously.11

Audiences Only a minority of the manuscripts discussed in this chapter feature medieval marks that provide information about owners and readers. But where it exists, such evidence, taken together with other codicological evidence (scripts, production methods, presentation, companion pieces) and information from inventories, suggests that these accounts circulated amongst the houses of different monastic orders, scholars, and ecclesiastical and secular administrators. Yet each text’s individual circulation pattern emerges as slightly different and varies over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In view of the part played by the mendicant orders in the production of Latin versions of Marco’s and Odorico’s texts, it is not a surprise to find owners and readers of these texts amongst the Dominicans and Franciscans. However, indications of mendicant readers are not as many as we might expect. In one instance (Firenze, BNCF, MS Conventi Soppressi, C.7.1170), decoration and inventory evidence combine to argue for early Domincan ownership of a version of Pipino’s Liber along with a vernacular Itinerarium; the manuscript, first documented in a 1489 inventory of the Dominican Convent of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, features a large portrait of Marco’s Dominican translator on the opening folio.12 A fourteenth-century Italian manuscript of Odorico’s 10  Merisalo finds three phases of revision between the earliest and latest versions: see the ‘Introduzione’, in Bracciolini, De varietate fortunae, ed. by Merisalo, p. 18. See also the ‘Introduction’, in Bracciolini, De l’Inde, ed. and trans. by Guéret-Laferté, pp. 60–70. 11  See Guéret-Laferté’s discussion of Milano, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS F 45 sup.: in her ‘Introduction’, in Bracciolini, De l’Inde, ed. and trans. by Guéret-Laferté, p. 68. 12  Firenze, BNCF, MS Conventi Soppressi, C.7.1170, decoration at fol. 1r. See Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, pp. 564–71.

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Itinerarium in Latin, whose contents suggest a mendicant origin, is BnF, MS lat. 2584, a compilation that includes sermons and a preaching aid by the Dominican Master General, Humbert of Romans. Dutschke also places an incomplete fourteenth-century copy of Pipino’s Liber de consuetudinibus in the ownership of the Dominicans of Paris by 1529. 13 Of the surviving Latin manuscripts of Odorico’s Itinerarium, one has been speculatively ascribed, on the basis of its contents and place of production, to the Franciscans of Udine and another is attributed by Cesare Cenci to the Franciscan convent of San Bernadino at L’Aquila.14 Inventory evidence and colophons of now-lost manuscripts also place another five copies of Marco Polo’s Book and a further two of Odorico’s Itinerarium in the libraries of Dominican and Franciscan friars in Italy.15 In England, a text of Odorico da Pordenone’s Itinerarium reached the hands of the Oxford Franciscans in the fourteenth or early fifteenth century.16 Inventory evidence adds little to the picture, but references to Marco Polo in the works of the Dominican scholar Thomas Waleys suggest access to Pipino’s Liber amongst the Dominicans of Oxford.17 Beyond the two mendicant orders, who, by reason of their missionary activities in Tartary and the Indies might reasonably be expected to have an interest in the contents of Odorico’s and Marco’s texts, there is also evidence for their cir13 

BnF, MS n.a.l. 1768. See Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, pp. 854–59. 14  Assisi, Bibl. Comunale, MS 343 contains a very early text supplemented by details of more than seventy miracles ascribed to Odorico and compiled by his confrères. Domenichelli ascribed it to the convent in Udine: Domenichelli, Sopra la vita e i viaggi del Beato Odorico da Pordenone, p.  361. Napoli, Bibl. Naz., MS VIII.D.68 is ascribed to the convent of San Bernardino de L’Aquila (but without dates) in the description in Cenci, Manoscritti Francescani della Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, ii, no. 470, 836–37. 15  Latin manuscripts of Marco’s Book were bequeathed to the Dominicans of St Nicholas in Treviso in 1347 and owned by the Franciscans of Gubbio in the early fourteenth century. A copy of both texts made by the Franciscans of Ferrara is now lost. Copies were in the libraries of the Franciscans and Dominicans of Bologna by the end of the fifteenth century: Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, pp. 1076–80, 486–87. 16  Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Digby 11: Hunt, Macray, and Watson, Bodleian Library Quarto Catalogues, ix: Digby Manuscripts, Part 2, p. 10. 17  Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century, p. 85. Marco is also amongst the authors listed in Henry of Kirkestede’s mid-fourteenth-century union catalogue of books found in English monastic libraries, but in this instance the catalogue does not specify in which libraries it was available: Henry of Kirkestede, Catalogus de libris autenticis et apocrifis, ed. by Rouse and Rouse, no. 392, p. 363.

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culation amongst other communities of religious, including Benedictines and Augustinians. However, there are surprising variations in circulation amongst these communities across Europe. It has not, thus far, been possible to locate firmly any copies in the libraries of Italian non-mendicant religious orders. At the same time, manuscripts of both texts are found in the possession of nonmissionary religious in other parts of Western Europe. A study by Christine Gadrat has revealed that the principal arena of circulation of one Latin version of the Devisement (LA, a Latin translation from Tuscan) was among great Austrian and German religious centres, in particular Benedictine foundations.18 A Latin text of Odorico’s Itinerarium was in the Benedictine library of St Bertin in the fifteenth century.19 In England, copies of Marco’s Book and Odorico’s Itinerarium were in the library of Norwich Cathedral Priory by the mid-fourteenth century, and possibly in that of the Augustinians of Breamore Priory by the start of the fifteenth.20 Embedded in the Historia aurea of John of Tynemouth, the Book of Marco Polo was available to the Benedictines of Durham Cathedral Priory and St Albans Abbey by the early fifteenth century.21 Amongst the sample of manuscripts I have examined, a further four copies of Marco’s Book and Odorico’s Itinerarium were probably produced in English and French monastic environments.22 18 

Gadrat identifies eight surviving manuscripts meeting these criteria: Gadrat, ‘Le Livre de Marco Polo et les géographes de l’Europe du nord’, p. 148. 19  Saint-Omer, BM, MS 737. See Testa, ‘Bozza per un censimento dei manoscritti Odoricioni’, p. 125. 20  BL, MS Royal 14 C.xiii (Odorico and Marco) and Cambridge, Corpus Christi Coll., MS 407 (Odorico) belonged to Norwich Cathedral Priory. København, Kongelige Bibl., MS Acc. 2011/5 has production characteristics typical of a monastic scriptorium and was identified by its most recent sale catalogue as ‘probably produced by a member of the Augustinian canons of the priory of Breamore in Hampshire from manuscripts in the library of Glastonbury Abbey’. No surviving manuscripts of either Odorico’s Itinerarium or Pipino’s Liber have been securely attributed to Glastonbury Abbey , sale L08241, lot 31 [accessed 21 March 2011]. 21  The copy in fourteenth-century London, Lambeth Pal., MSS 10–12 came from Durham Cathedral Priory, and that in fifteenth-century Cambridge, Corpus Christi Coll., MSS 5–6 from St Albans Abbey. Galbraith, ‘The Historia aurea of John, Vicar of Tynemouth and the Sources of the St. Albans Chronicle’, p.  385; Taylor, English Historical Literature in the Fourteenth Century, pp. 103–05. 22  For example, BnF, MS lat. 17800, a medium-format well-produced manuscript of Marco Polo, laid out in two columns, rubricated and featuring scribal correction and annotation, is a likely French monastic production. The Marco Polo texts in Cambridge, CUL, MS Dd.1.17

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In contrast with Marco’s Book and Odorico’s Itinerarium, there is less evidence for the ownership of Latin versions of Poggio’s India in religious houses, and little for its circulation in such contexts beyond Italy. In Italy, a manuscript was either made for or donated to the Italian Abbey of Casamari (Lazio), and another, made by a Lombard Franciscan in the fifteenth century, was owned by several confrères in the sixteenth. 23 Of course, religious orders did not always acquire texts intentionally; the Venetian physician and humanist scholar Giovanni Marcanova, donated his manuscripts, containing copies of both Marco’s Book and Poggio’s India, to the Augustinian Canons of Padua in the later 1460s.24 Given the importance of missionary ideology to the papal curia in the period during which Latin versions of Marco’s Book and Odorico’s Itinerarium were produced, it is surprising to find no firm evidence of ownership or reading of these texts at the papal court during the fourteenth century. A copy of Pipino’s Liber is first recorded in the papal library under Benedict XIII in 1407, whilst Odorico’s Itinerarium is not to be found in the records at all.25 Yet indirect evidence suggests that both texts were in the vicinity of the papal curia at Avignon. Henry of Glatz’s acquisition of a copy of Odorico’s Itinerarium at Avignon has already been discussed. With regard to Francesco Pipino’s Liber, Christine and Cambridge, CUL, MS Dd.8.7, 44 × 30 cm and 40 × 29 cm respectively, with multiple Latin texts, in gothic book hands, laid out in two columns and carefully corrected and equipped with reading direction, are clearly designed for reading at benches and thus unlikely to have been used outside well-equipped institutional libraries. Cambridge, CUL, MS Dd.8.7 contains the Polychronicon and a continuation of the Benedictine John of Tynemouth’s Chronicon. Comparison of its rubrics and samples of the text also shows that it is the same textual version as is found in the Benedictine manuscripts London, Lambeth Pal., MSS 10–12 and Cambridge, Corpus Christi Coll., MSS 5–6, suggesting that Cambridge, CUL, MS Dd.8.7 too may have been produced in a Benedictine context. 23  Gotha, Forschungsbibl., MS Chart. B 239. See the ‘Introduzione’, in Bracciolini, De varietate fortunae, ed. by Merisalo, pp. 60–63. 24  Venezia, Bibl. Naz. Marciana, MS Lat. VI, 141 (=2560) (Conti); Venezia, Bibl. Naz. Marciana, MS Lat. X, 73 (=3445) (Polo). On Marcanova, from a mercantile family and nephew to a celebrated merchant of the same name, see Barile, ‘La Famiglia Marcanova attraverso sette generazioni’, pp. 177–214. 25  De Pommerol and Monfrin, ‘La Bibliothèque pontificale à Avignon’, p. 160. It is not possible to find evidence for either Odorico’s or Marco’s texts in earlier inventories. However, the many entries in the inventories for items specified only as ‘unus liber de diversis materiis’, ‘quidam liber’, ‘codex’, or similar, qualified only with secundo folio, would now be difficult or impossible to identify with surviving manuscripts. The fourteenth-century catalogues are edited with indices by Ehrle, Historia bibliotecae romanorum pontificum.

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Gadrat has recently suggested that BL, MS Addit. 19513, a volume that includes the translation, may have been put together in Avignon in the 1330s.26 The manuscript also contains Jacques de Vitry’s Historia Hierosolymitana, Marino Sanudo Torsello’s Liber secretorum fidelium crucis (discussed in Chapters 2 and 6), the unique surviving copy of Jordan Catala’s Mirabilia descripta, written in Avignon during John XXII’s papacy, and Dominican Philip of Slane’s abridgement of Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hibernica, also dedicated to John XII. The manuscript thus unites the twin early fourteenth-century papal concerns of mission and renewal of the crusade in the Holy Land and contains several texts closely associated with John XXII. Beyond the fourteenth-century papal curia, many readers of Latin texts of Marco’s Book, Odorico’s Itinerarium, and, later, Poggio Bracciolini’s India occupied administrative positions in the ecclesiastical or secular hierarchies. At the lowest levels of the ecclesiastical hierarchy we find a nondescript Latin text of Odorico’s Itinerarium, copied in 1469 alongside a Venetian Milione and a highly unusual text of Poggio’s India in volgare, which bears the ownership mark of a priest named Donatus of San Clemente in Padua.27 In England, a copy of Pipino’s Liber also containing Odorico’s Itinerarium belonged to John Stafford, Bishop of Bath and Wells and Chancellor of England in the mid-fifteenth century, while a second volume containing both texts features an inscription that attributes it to a clerk of the English bishop Thomas Bradwardine, briefly Archbishop of Canterbury before his death from the plague in 1349.28 A fourteenth-century Latin manuscript of Marco Polo belonged to a servant of Borso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, and copies belonged to an aide to Pope Eugenius IV

26 

See Jordan Catala, Mirabilia descripta, ed. and trans. by Gadrat, manuscript description at pp. 316–21 (p. 320). Gadrat speculates that the Domincans of Avignon, active in manuscript production in the service of the pope in the period, may have produced the volume at the time of Jordan’s residence there in the 1330s, but she is not able to make a firm attribution: Jordan Catala, Mirabilia descripta, ed. and trans. by Gadrat, p. 75. The Marco Polo text in the volume is now incomplete, but its fourteenth- and fifteenth-century annotations suggest that this was not the case in the Middle Ages; a reference alongside the Mirabilia descripta at fol. 7r directs the reader to Marco’s Chapter xxii (on Sri Lanka), now missing from the volume. 27  Sevilla, Bibl. Capitular y Colombina, MS 7.5.8. See Chiesa, ‘Una forma redazionale sconosciuta della “Relatio” latina di Odorico di Pordenone’, p. 140. 28  Glasgow, GUL, MS Hunter 84 (T.4.1) belonged to Stafford according to an erased inscription. See the Hunterian manuscripts catalogue at [accessed 12 December 2011]. An inscription at the top of fol. 1 r in Oxford, Merton Coll., MS 312 identifies the manuscript as belonging to a clerk of Thomas Bradwardine.

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and to a treasurer of the city of Metz.29 Pipino’s Liber also appears alongside Poggio’s India in a composite volume bound together in the later fifteenth century that belonged to Poggio’s friend, Cardinal Domenico Capranica.30 Indeed, Poggio’s India, whether as part of the De varietate fortunae or as a stand-alone item, circulated in the mid- and late fifteenth century at the very pinnacle of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. A copy was held in the library of Pope Nicholas V, and another was owned by Cardinal Pietro Barbo, later to become Paul II.31 Facilitated by contacts between great churchmen and their learned administrators, the De varietate fortunae enjoyed a limited reach beyond Italy in exclusive, often aspiring humanist circles. The polymath Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa owned and annotated a copy of Poggio’s India, along with Pipino’s Liber, in the mid-fifteenth century.32 Poggio also wrote in 1448 to Richard Petworth, a secretary in the household of Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, with a complete copy of the De varietate fortunae, though no manuscript identifiable with Petworth’s survives and the text does not appear to have ever been copied in England.33 Councils of the Church, attended by delegates from all quarters of the Latin Christian world and some from beyond, naturally constituted important facilitating occasions for the diffusion of texts of international interest. The importance of the Council of Constance of 1414–18 as an occasion for geographical exchange, in particular for the second-century Geography of Claudius Ptolemy 29 

On Ferrara, Bibl. Comunale Ariostea, MS Cl.II.336, see Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, pp. 311–12. BnF, MS lat. 6244A has Eugenius’s servant’s ownership note on the opening flyleaf, and the scribe identifies both himself (Helias de Bosco) and the manuscript’s commissioner ( Jacobus Finaris of Toulon) in a colophon at fol. 122r. BnF, MS lat. 1616 features the ownership mark of Nicholas Dex, who identifies himself as ‘tesaurius metensis’ at fol. 1r. 30  The copy of Pipino’s Liber in BAV, MS Vaticani latini 7317 has a colophon identifying it as copied for cardinal ‘domenico’ at fol. 373v. For the attribution to Domenico Capranica, see the ‘Introduction’, in Bracciolini, De l’Inde, ed. and trans. by Guéret-Laferté, p. 62. 31  Guéret-Laferté thinks that Nicholas’s copy (BAV, MS Vaticani latini 1784) is Poggio’s dedication copy to the pontiff: see the ‘Introduction’, in Bracciolini, De l’Inde, ed. and trans. by Guéret-Laferté, p. 61. Pietro Barbo’s copy (BAV, MS Vaticani latini 1785) is discussed in the chapter introduction. 32  BL, MS Addit. 19952 is Nicholas’s copy of Marco Polo. Nicholas’s copy of Poggio’s India survives in Bernkastel-Kues, Bibl. des St. Nikolaus-Hospitals, MS 157: Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, pp. 674–90; see the ‘Introduzione’, in Bracciolini, De varietate fortunae, ed. by Merisalo, pp. 30–31. 33  Weiss, Humanism in England during the Fifteenth Century, Instalment i, p. 37.

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— then recently translated into Latin — is well established. 34 At least one monk in attendance, Thorirus Andreae, a monk of the Bridgettine foundation at Vadstena in Sweden, took the opportunity to take home a rather more recent account of the Indies, making a copy of Odorico da Pordenone’s Itinerarium while at the Council.35 There is also considerable evidence for the impact of the Council of Florence, several decades later (1439–45), on the reception of travel and geographical literature, and on the Book of Marco Polo and Poggio’s redaction of Niccolò Conti’s travels in particular. The Council of Florence brought together senior ecclesiastical figures and their clerks from across Christendom in an environment highly conducive to the exchange of knowledge and the copying of books. Given that a central aim of this council was the unification of Latin and Eastern Christian churches, participants’ and auxiliaries’ attentions were, furthermore, more than usually focused upon the beliefs and practices of non-Latin Christian communities.36 A small cluster of manuscripts directly or indirectly linked to the Council bears witness to the fact that, within this context, Marco Polo’s account of pagan and Christian communities across Central Asia, Mongolia, China, and the Indies achieved a new relevance. München, Bayerische Staatsbibl., MS Clm 5339 and Wien, ÖNB, MS 3497, though copied in Germany, were both copied from exemplars produced, according to colophons, in Florence in 1442 and 1443 respectively.37 BnF, MS lat. 6244A, a manuscript that also contains a draft decree of union between Greek and Roman churches produced for the Council in 1439, was copied for the master doorkeeper of Pope Eugenius IV in 1439–40. In 1458 it formed the exemplar for Cardinal Capranica’s copy in BAV, MS Vaticani latini 7317. 38 The council, more­over, did more than boost the circulation of Francesco Pipino’s translation of Marco’s Book. It also had an impact on the text’s reception. From the midfifteenth century, Latin versions of Marco’s Book begin to appear in manu34 

On the Council of Constance as a venue for geographical exchange, see Marcotte, Huma­ nisme et culture géographique. 35  Uppsala, Universitetsbibl., MS C 26, written by ‘Thorirus Andreae’, was copied in a miscellany alongside speeches delivered at the Council. Andersson-Schmitt and Hedlund, Mittelalterliche Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek Uppsala, i, 247. 36  Larner, ‘The Church and the Quattrocento Renaissance in Geography’, pp. 33–35. 37  Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, pp. 765–72, 975–78. 38  BAV, MS Vaticani latini 7317 retains the attestation of Jacomo Barbarigo (BnF, MS lat. 6244A, fol. 122v, see below) at fol. 375r, but in the same hand as the rest of the text.

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scripts alongside Poggio’s India.39 Even when the two accounts are not copied together, there is evidence that the circulation of the later text, of impeccable humanist credentials, conferred a certain new authority on the earlier. Jacomo Barbarigo, a mid-fifteenth-century Venetian reader who may be identified with a provveditore of the Morea of the same name, added an endorsement of accuracy, based on comparison with Niccolò Conti’s narrative, to the final page of the copy of Pipino’s Liber in BnF, MS lat. 6244A, whilst a commentator from the vicinity of the Prince-Bishopric of Liège added confirmatory details taken from Poggio’s text to the margins of copies of Pipino’s Liber and Odorico’s Itinerarium in Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August Bibl., Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg.40 In the case of all three texts, not only the occasional fortuitous survival of ownership data but also the contents of the volumes themselves suggest that they were also read by scholars by inclination or profession. The copies in the circles of well-known scholar-churchmen such as Thomas Bradwardine and Nicholas of Cusa have been discussed above, as has the library, containing Latin texts of Marco’s Book and Poggio’s India, of the humanist and physician Giovanni Marcanova. Several English manuscripts of Odorico da Pordenone’s Itinerarium in England are associated directly or indirectly with the Franciscans of Oxford, a Benedictine Hall at Oxford, and a Cambridge college.41 In Italy, for Odorico’s Itinerarium to be bound with texts of an academic character is 39 

See Sevilla, Bibl. Capitular y Colombina, MS 7.5.8; and BAV, MS Vaticani latini 7317. The latter is a composite manuscript, but a table of contents, marginal finding tools, and foliation were added to the full volume in the fifteenth century, showing that it was put together at that time. 40  Barbarigo claims to have ‘leto questo presento libro di marco paulo et trouato molte cose di quele el dice essere uere e questo retifico per relatione da Ser nicolo di conti venitiano’ (‘read this Book of Marco Polo and found many things of which he speaks true, and I have verified by comparison with Ser Niccòlo di Conti the Venetian’: BnF, MS lat. 6244A, fol. 122v). On Jacomo Barbarigo, provveditore of the Morea, see Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, ii (1978), 253–57. Cross-references to ‘Nicolaus de Comitibus’ in the Liber in Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August Bibl., Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg occur, for example, at fols 46v and 59r. The annotations in this fascinating manuscript will be discussed in more detail towards the end of this chapter. 41  Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Digby 11 is a manuscript attributed with reasonable certainty to the Oxford Franciscans. Cambridge, Corpus Christi Coll., MS 275 was donated by fellow Thomas Markaunt to the college, by which it was loaned out to fellows on a yearly basis: Cheney, ‘A Register of MSS Borrowed from a College Library’, p. 116. Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Digby 166, whose contents ‘suggest a university provenance’, may have come from the Benedictine college Gloucester Hall: Rigg, ‘Medieval Latin Poetic Anthologies (iii)’, pp. 469, 474 n.

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rare, but in Napoli, Bibl. Naz., MS VIII.D.68, attributed to the convent of San Bernadino d’Aquila, it is bound (though in a composite volume) with texts including a commentary on Al-Mansur and translations of several of Aristotle’s scientific texts. In France, Latin copies of Marco and Odorico appear together with Petrus Alphonsus’s Disciplina clericalis, but without an indication of the stage at which the composite manuscript was assembled.42 Poggio’s India was particularly well read in the scholarly circles to which the humanist belonged. This popularity is attested not just by the humanist content, scripts, and use of Greek paratexts in many of the codices in which it appears but also by details of its known owners. 43 As well as the scholaradministrators and scholar-prelates discussed above, these include humanist friends of Poggio, and bibliophiles such as the priest and humanist Guarnerio d’Artegna, who donated a copy, along with the rest of his humanist book collection, to the library at San Daniele del Friuli that bears his name.44 Finally, Latin copies of these travellers’ texts are occasionally found in the hands of royal and noble readers and wealthy readers with scholarly aspirations. Although Marco Polo’s Book and Odorico da Pordenone’s Itinerarium principally circulated, as we have seen, in French amongst readers of high social status, some such individuals owned copies in Latin. This is particularly the case in the humanist bibliophilic culture of the fifteenth-century northern Italian courts. The library of the dukes d’Este owned a copy of Pipino’s Liber de condi­ cionibus from as early as 1436, while the splendid copy of Poggio’s De varietate fortunae in BAV, MS Urbinati latini 224, produced by a scribe in the employ of humanist bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci, bears the device of Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino.45 42 

BnF, MS lat. 3195. Dutschke suggests on palaeographic grounds that the text of Odorico in this manuscript may have been copied in southern France but the rest in Italy: Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, pp. 428–30. 43  Codices containing Poggio’s India tend to contain other works by Poggio, works by or dedicated to other humanists (Lorenzo Valla, Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni), or classical works such as Ciceronian orations or Pomponius Mela’s De chorographia: see the ‘Introduzione’, in Bracciolini, De varietate fortunae, ed. by Merisalo, pp. 25–72. An example of a text with Greek explicit is Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Canon. Misc. 280 (fol. 62r). 44  For example, Bartolomeo Ghiselardi, a friend of Poggio who owned BAV, MS Ottoboniani latini 2134: see the ‘Introduction’ to Bracciolini, De l’Inde, ed. and trans. by Guéret-Laferté, p. 61. On Guarnerio d’Artegna’s library, see Kristeller, Iter Italicum, ii (1998), p. 565. The humanist miscellany that contains the DVF (Udine, Bibl. Guarneriana, MS 121) is catalogued at p. 568. 45  Modena, Bibl. Estense, MS lat. 131 was probably in the Estense library by 1436 accord-

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Guided Voyages: The Indies of Latin Readers Identification of the communities of readers that had access to particular texts does not, of course, answer the question of the kinds of functions that the producers of these material texts intended them to perform. Nor does it help tell us whether such texts always and only performed the functions expected of them. Hypotheses have, of course, been put forward by various scholars about the roles of certain of the travellers’ accounts in focus here. It has been suggested that texts with an obvious connection to a missionary order, like the Dominican Pipino’s Liber and the Franciscan Odorico’s Itinerarium, were intended for use as inspirations or aids to future missionary activity.46 The direct opening to Poggio Bracciolini’s India in the De varietate fortunae (henceforth DVF) leaves less room for hypothesis. Niccolò’s story serves as a final illustration of the overwhelming ‘vim fortunae’ (‘power of fortune’), but also to correct the many things that are said ‘tum a ueteribus scriptoribus, tum communi fama de Indis’ (‘whether by the ancient writers or by common report concerning the Indies’), which, sometimes ‘fabulis quam uero esse similiora’ (‘seem closer to fables than truth’; DVF, IV, p. 76). Poggio mentions no names, but, given the extensive fifteenth-century circulation of Marco’s and Odorico’s accounts in volgare, these are the most obvious candidates for the ‘communi fama’ that he references in such an accusatory tone. But to move beyond both the professed intentions of redactors and translators and scholarly hypotheses about these and to consider — to reuse Bella Millett’s phrase, cited in the section introduction — the ‘continued functionality’ of these texts amongst changing audiences, it is necessary, once again, to turn to the surviving material texts. Just as with the vernacular manuscripts examined in the last chapter, book divisions, chapter headings, and other forms of intertitle can be useful indicators of a text’s perceived ordinatio and function as projected and shaped by those who produced its manuscript copies. Unlike the French-language manuscripts, however, the Latin material texts are rarely ing to inventory evidence; Ferrara, Bibl. Comunale Ariostea, MS Cl.II.336 belonged in the mid-fifteenth century to an administrator in the employ of Borso d’Este: Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, pp. 727–28, 312; see the ‘Introduzione’, in Bracciolini, De varietate fortunae, ed. by Merisalo, p. 41. 46  Critchley points out that, whilst some of the information in the Liber would have been useful to missionaries, Pipino’s purpose was ‘rather to inspire men to become missionaries, not to help them find their way around Asia once they had set off ’: Critchley, Marco Polo’s Book, p. 150.

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endowed with illustrations that shape their readers’ approaches.47 But, across the body of surviving Latin manuscripts of all three works, marginal annotation emerges as an important source of evidence for continued functionality. Annotation, as I mentioned briefly in Chapter 3, is a practice that derives from scholastic reading habits and is therefore more common in Latin than vernacular manuscripts. Marginalia can be part of the manuscript production process, in which case texts are marked up by scribes, rubricators, editors, or authors in ways intended to elicit particular reading processes or interpretations. Equally, they can be added by readers, generally those schooled in or influenced by scholastic reading processes.48 Yet the distinction between these two forms of marginalia is not as clear cut as the two categories of ‘reader’ and ‘scribe’ would indicate. Unless copying marginalia wholesale from an exemplar, the authors of scribal marginalia must first read in order to direct the attention of future readers. Equally, even annotators who might appear to be writing for themselves are providing direction for an imagined future reading process, as well as, quite possibly, directing the attention of other future readers. Rather than attempting to put in place a strict ontological separation between ‘scribe’ and ‘reader’, then, I treat marginalia as the product of a range of practices in which the roles of scribe and reader are not separate, but overlapping; one person may inhabit both roles, sometimes simultaneously. The marginalia that result from and direct these processes can take the form not only of written words but also, more commonly, of signs: notabilia (nota symbols), manicules (also called manicula or fists), underlining, squiggles (pattes-de-mouche), and symbols, all of which can direct readers’ attention to particular passages within a text.49 Such signa range from marks that, in the metaphor of Francis Petrarch, would act ‘velut uncis’ (‘in the manner of hooks’), by means of which one may pin down escaping thoughts, or which may facilitate speedy mental or physical access to a particular passage, through to a complex range of symbols that could act as a key in the production of a scholarly index, as in works copied or indexed by Robert Grosseteste.50 More detailed and expressive than signa, some 47 

Representations of Marco Polo and the Dominican translator Francesco Pipino appear in Firenze, BNCF, MS Conventi Soppressi, C.7.1170, fol. 1r. Standard images of presentation to a monarch with no clear referent in either text open the copies of the Liber and the Itinerarium in Glasgow, GUL, MS Hunter 458 (V.6.8), fols 1r and 107r. 48  See Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 178–80. 49  Within the category of marginalia, Jackson distinguishes notes, upon which she focuses, from underlining, vertical marginal lines, asterisks, and fists: Jackson, Marginalia, p. 28. 50  On Grosseteste’s symbols, see Parkes, ‘Books and Aids to Scholarship of the Oxford

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manuscripts also contain detailed finding notes — sometimes with an index — or an argumentative commentary. The varieties of paratextual evidence discussed here do not, of course, provide a complete guide to readers’ encounters with Latin travellers’ tales of the Indies. Methodological and theoretical problems in dealing with marginalia as evidence of reading and response have been well rehearsed by many scholars. Marginalia, it has been argued, as a semi-public form, cannot be used to reconstruct a reading experience or taken as a guide to the innermost responses of the individual to the text.51 Marginal signa, unless plainly in the ink of the text, can be impossible to date without accompanying written notes that can provide palaeographical evidence. Moreover, when dealing with paratextual evidence of all kinds, the maxim that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence is particularly critical; that we have no trace of a given reading process or interpretation does not mean that it did not happen. Yet it is equally important to bear in mind, as scholars of literature and language ordinarily do, that such problems are hardly unique to marginalia; no textual product ever offers full and unmediated access to its author’s thoughts. Marginalia, ‘mediated forms of expression, governed by convention and conditioned by historical circumstance as the written word always is’, are no more or less inherently problematic than any other category of textual evidence as guides to the cultural work that these travellers’ accounts performed within the reading communities that made use of them.52 Shaping Readers’ Expectations: Paratextual Guidance As we saw in Chapter 3, it is possible for material texts that are in many ways very similar to be framed by paratexts that work to bring about quite different readings and patterns of usage among their audiences. Two versions of Marco Polo’s Book, Pipino’s Liber de consuetidinibus and an abbreviated version of the Dominican’s translation that circulated among English monastic houses, show this process of adaptation by paratext in operation. A text adapted through its paratexts for Friars’. For Petrarch on marginalia, see his imagined discussion with Augustine, the Secretum, in Petrarca, Prose, ed. by Martellotti and others, p. 126. 51  This and other objections are raised and countered in Jackson, ‘Marginal Frivolities: Readers’ Notes as Evidence for the History of Reading’. 52  Jackson, ‘Marginal Frivolities: Readers’ Notes as Evidence for the History of Reading’, pp. 145–46.

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reading as a descriptive geography — if of a particularly morally aware variety — is seemingly intentionally reshaped for Benedictine audiences, certain of whom in turn add paratexts that indicate their own, quite different priorities. The Dominican Francesco Pipino’s original prologue to the Liber de con­ suetudinibus, through which he adapts Marco’s Book to his purposes, presents its readers with a set of interpretive options. The prologue expresses the hope that, upon reading the Liber, devoted Christians may be affected in a number of possible ways: consideravi, ex huius libri inspectione, fideles viros posse multiplicis gracie meritum a domino promereri: siue quia in varietate et decore et magnitudine creaturarum mirabilia dei opera aspicientes ipsius poterint uirtutem et sapienciam uenerabilius admirari, aut, videntes gentiles populos tanta cecitatis tenebrositate tantisque sordibus inuolutos gracias deo agant, qui fideles suos luce veritatis illustrans, de tam periculosis tenebris uocare dignatus est in admirabile lumen suum. seu illorum ignorancie condolentes pro illuminacione cordium ipsorum dominum precabuntur vel in deuotorum christianorum desideria confundentur, quod infideles populi promptiores sunt ad veneranda simulacra quam ad veri dei cultum prompti sunt plurimi ex hiis qui Christi sunt caractere insigniti. siue eciam religiosorum aliquorum corda peruocari poterunt pro ampliacione fidei christiane, ut nomen domini nostri Jesu Christi, in tanta multitudine populorum oblivioni traditum, deferant, spiritu favente diuino, ad occecatas infidelium naciones, ubi messis quidem multa, operarii vero pauci.53 I have observed that, through inspection of this book, faithful men can be moved by the lord to merit grace in many ways: whether because, seeing the wonderful works of God in the variety, beauty, and greatness of his creatures, they will be able to admire more reverently his strength and wisdom, or, seeing heathen peoples enveloped in the darkness of such blindness and such squalor, they may give thanks to God, who, illuminating his faithful with the light of truth, deigned to call them out of such dangerous darkness into his wonderful light. Or, sorrowing for the ignorance of these people, they will pray to the Lord for the illumination of their hearts, or, the longings of devoted Christians will be stirred up, because infidel peoples are more eager to venerate simulacra than are many of those who are marked with the sign of Christ to worship the true God. Or, indeed, the hearts of certain ordained religious will be called, for the benefit of the diffusion of the Christian faith, to carry — with the help of the divine spirit — the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, betrayed into oblivion amongst such a multitude of peoples, to the blinded nations of the infidels, where, though the harvest is great, the reapers are but few. 53 

In-text references to Milion cite, emending punctuation where necessary, the only modern edition of Francesco Pipino’s translation: Polo, Liber de consuetudinibus et conditionibus, trans. by Pipino, here p. 1.

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Pipino’s prologue advertises Marco’s Book as a multi-functional text. As well as inspiring Christians to marvel at God’s powers, it may, he suggests, stimulate gratitude to God and prayer for spiritually lost infidels, motivate Christians to better conduct, or inspire missionary activity. Nonetheless, Pipino’s way of organizing and presenting the text proper does not necessarily facilitate all these uses, which leaves audiences with some work to do if the text is to achieve any of these proposed results. In almost all manuscripts of Pipino’s translation, the work is divided into three books, sections that correspond with the sections Harf-Lancner identifies in the main Court French text (discussed in Chapter 3): the route to China; the deeds and government of the Great Khan; the Indies, taking a generally westward trajectory across the Indian Ocean.54 Within these books, individual chapters are invariably introduced with lowerlevel intertitles in the form of chapter headers. In Book iii, the ‘Book of India’, these intertitles frame their text clearly as a detailed descriptive geography. Each chapter heading indicates the category of place discussed (island, city, or mainland kingdom), and its name. Chapters thus normally take forms such as ‘De insulis Çypanga’ (‘Concerning the islands of Çypanga’; Japan) or ‘De insula magna Seylam’ (‘Concerning the great island of Seillan’; Sri Lanka: Milion, pp. 153, 165). Sometimes, Pipino’s rubrics also direct readers’ responses to what they will find. In Var (mainland India), readers are given the category of place (‘regno’) and forewarned of the ‘errores et ydolatria incolarum eius’ (‘errors and idolatry of its inhabitants’).55 A few places are defined in rubrics by their singular characteristics as opposed to their name; the rubric for the city ‘ubi corpus Beati Thome apostoli requiescit’ (‘where the body of the Blessed Thomas the Apostle rests’) does not identify Mutfili but specifies that the chapter will tell ‘de miraculis, que ibi fiunt ob merita ipsius’ (‘of the miracles performed in that place by his merit’; Milion, p. 173). Overall, the work’s ‘Book of India’ is presented, place by place, as a detailed, occasionally moralizing, descriptive geography. 54  Harf-Lancner, ‘From Alexander to Marco Polo, from Text to Image’, p. 244. Bk  iii is introduced with ‘Pars tercia nostri libri descripcionem yndie continet’: Polo, Liber de consuetu­ dinibus et conditionibus, trans. by Pipino, p. 152. The introductions to Books i and ii are at p. 6 and p. 73. 55  The variant ‘moribus’ is sometimes found instead of ‘erroribus’: Polo, Liber de consue­ tudinibus et conditionibus, trans. by Pipino, p. 169. ‘Var’ appears to be a place invented in the translation process. No kingdom called ‘Var’ appears in the Franco-Italian version, but a king called ‘Sender Bandi Devar’ is identified as ruling in Maabar: Polo, Le Divisament dou monde, ed. by Ronchi, p. 552.

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The regularity with which Pipino’s text is formatted in manuscripts as a place-by-place descriptive geography might mislead us into thinking that this is the obvious, natural structure, at least of Book iii if not of the whole text. But manuscripts of an abbreviated version of Pipino’s translation specific to England tell a different story. This version of the text is found incorporated into Benedictine-owned copies of John of Tynemouth’s universal history, the Historia aurea (London, Lambeth Pal., MSS 10–12 and Cambridge, Corpus Christi Coll., MSS 5–6, belonging to Durham Cathedral Priory and St Albans Abbey, respectively), as well as in the fourteenth-century monastic manuscript Cambridge, CUL, MS Dd.8.7 and the mid-fifteenth-century miscellany of Norfolk origin that is now Dublin, Trinity Coll., MS 632.56 In Cambridge, Corpus Christi Coll., MSS 5–6, Marco’s Book is incorporated into the descriptive geography of the world that opens John of Tynemouth’s chronicle. This in effect subordinates the Liber to the volume’s description of Asia (fols 2r–12r), implicitly recognizing it as a descriptive geography. But, in manuscripts of this version, Pipino’s detailed and often very frequent chorographic chapter headings are replaced by less frequent and broader divisions. Indeed, seven of the first eight chapters of this text, which take traveller and reader from Armenia to Khanbalik (Beijing), bear such generic titles as ‘De provincis orientis’ and ‘Iterum de regionibus orientis’ (‘Concerning the provinces of the orient’; ‘Further concerning the regions of the orient’; fol. 2v). In the section that corresponds with the ‘Book of India’, intertitles follow the same homogenizing pattern. The opening chapter of the ‘Book of India’, ‘De navibus insulis indie’ (‘Concerning the ships [and?] the islands of India’; fol. 9v) is followed, at regular intervals, by two chapters entitled ‘Iterum de insulis indie’ (‘More concerning the islands of India’; fols 10r, 10v), one entitled ‘Iterum de regnis indie’ (‘More concerning the kingdoms of India’; fol. 10v), and two entitled ‘Iterum de regionibus indie’ (‘More concerning the regions of India’; fol. 11 r-v). These generically titled chapters take their readers several thousand miles from the southern Chinese port of Zaiton (Hangzhou), via the East African coast, to the Arabian port of Aden. Marco’s Book’s paratextual presentation in this version is surely indicative of the Book’s anticipated function amongst English monastic audiences by whom this version was read. Readers were clearly not expected to use the rubrics and 56 

This abbreviated version of Pipino’s translation has not been edited, so references here are, unless otherwise specified, to Cambridge, Corpus Christi Coll., MSS 5–6. My thanks are due to Christine Gadrat, who drew my attention to the similarity between the Tynemouth Chronicle and Cambridge versions and that in Dublin, Trinity Coll., MS 632.

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chapter list to locate individual places or their characteristics. Instead, intertitles simply break down the text into chapters of similar length for short bouts of reading of predictable duration. However, a paratextual aid, in the form of a subject index added to the two manuscripts of the Historia aurea that contain this abbreviated Book, gives a further indication of the text’s function as a repository of worldly diversity. Although occasional index terms point to references to exotic produce and jewels, Marco’s Book is principally indexed according to the varieties of men (‘homines’) found in its various regions: tailed men, dog-headed men, men who sacrifice themselves for love of their God, virtous pagans, and many more.57 The rubrics and indexes facilitate the use of this abbreviated version not as a descriptive geography but either for controlled, time-limited bouts of monastic reading or as a repository of information on human diversity. Latin manuscripts of Odorico’s Itinerarium were expected, to judge from their paratexts, to perform an equally diverse range of functions. Of the sample of sixteen Latin manuscripts of this text for which data are available (see Appendix 2b), only ten direct readers’ approaches through intertitles. The intended function of physical texts not furnished with intertitles is as difficult to ascertain for the Latin manuscripts discussed here as with the vernacular copies discussed in the last chapter. We can with confidence say that they would have been very difficult to use as works of reference, but only occasionally do other clues as to possible cultural uses come to light. One fifteenth-century manuscript of possible Venetian origin suggests functions for Odorico’s Itinerarium akin to two of those proposed by Francesco Pipino for Marco’s Book. The anonymous prologue added to Sevilla, Bibl. Capitular y Colombina, MS 7.5.8 directs readers to use the text to induce — and perhaps to incite — feelings of gratitude towards God, in order to inspire better divine service: Cristicolis universis presens opusculum de moribus infidelium inspecturis patet evidenter quod sumus artifex Deus celi septuaginta duo linguarum statuit in hoc orbe. Inter quas solum sunt sex que adorant dominum Iesum Christum crucifixum […] Relique vero lingue a celesti gloria sunt excluxe. Quapropter advertentes vitam, 57 

Index terms in Cambridge, Corpus Christi Coll., MSS 5–6 point to the harvesting of flour from trees in Farfur (fol. iv r); the multitude and size of islands in the Indian Ocean (fol. vv); the collection of pepper in Coilon (Kollam, fol. vii v); tailed men in the mountains of Lambri; men with the heads of dogs in the island of Angama (Andaman); men in Var (not identifiable) who kill themselves out of love for their God; men who make themselves black artificially in Maabar (Coromandel Coast); and men of Lar (probably vicinity of Gujarat) who hate lies and live chastely (all fol. ivv).

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mores et proditionem eorum, lingua nostra non sufficeret Dominum conlaudare, qui specialiter fecit nos in hoc seculo filios adoptivos, ut valeamus cum eodem in celesti regno perfrui summo bono.58 To all worshippers of Christ about to inspect the present little work concerning the habits of the infidels, it appears clearly that the highest craftsman God of heaven instituted seventy-two [people of different] languages in this world. Among them there are only six who worship the lord Jesus, crucified Christ […] And indeed the rest of the languages are excluded from celestial glory. For which reason, when we observe the life, mores, and treason of those peoples, let our language not suffice to commend the lord, who made us specifically his adoptive children in this world, that we may be worthy to enjoy the highest good with him in the celestial kingdom.

This text’s fifteenth-century readers are not exhorted to consider a missionary vocation, or even to pray, as Pipino’s prologue to Marco’s Book suggests, for the illumination of unenlightened souls. Instead, the prologue suggests, the Itinerarium proves the exclusion of the peoples it describes from salvation and urges readers to show through conduct their gratitude that they are chosen as God’s ‘adoptive children’. The missionary ideology of the Franciscan Odorico who, the Itinerarium insists, travelled to the Indies so that he might ‘fructus aliquos lucrifacere […] animarum’ (‘gather a harvest of … souls’; SF, i, 413), is wholly absent from the anonymous prologue. But this text has in fact been successfully adapted to function usefully in its new context. Long after the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century missions to the Indies and Cathay had ended, the work provided its priest owner with a motivational tool to improve personal piety and behaviour, but without the necessity of action in the wider world. Where Latin manuscripts of Odorico’s Itinerarium have been endowed with intertitles, we find that these shape the text into a variety of genres, among them descriptive geography, personal itinerary, and Solinan catalogue of mirabilia. The Itinerarium found in a scholarly compilation of texts pertaining to Eastern travel in the mid-fifteenth-century Wolfenbüttel, HerzogAugust Bibl., Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg, produced in the Low Countries, uses rubrics occasionally to supply geographical precision where it is lacking in the text. Where Odorico’s Itinerarium mentions a rather confusing regional division, ‘India quae est infra terram’ (‘Inland or Continental India’), prior to its discussion of Hormuz, an added rubric helpfully elaborates ‘De india minore prope meridiem persie’ (‘Concerning Lesser India, near to the South of 58 

Sevilla, Bibl. Capitular y Colombina, MS 7.5.8, fol. 44r, quoted in Chiesa, ‘Una forma redazionale sconosciuta della “Relatio” latina di Odorico di Pordenone’, p. 140.

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Persia’; fol. 58v). At the same time, the rubrics of the fifteenth-century English scholar’s manuscript, Cambridge, Corpus Christi Coll., MS 275, underscore the Itinerarium’s status as a personal itinerary. Conjugated verbs and participles stress the narrator’s personal movement: ‘ivi’; ‘recessi’; ‘transiens’; ‘itur’.59 However, this emphasis on personal movement and witnessing, though it highlights the text’s eyewitness authority, correlates with a reduced emphasis on the specifics of regional geography. A very different form of generic manipulation is visible in the rubrics of Roma, Bibl. Casanatense, MS 276, a scruffily written Italian Itinerarium manuscript of the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. The rubrics of this manuscript also link locations to characteristics. But those characteristics favoured by the paratext author are the exotic, the grotesque, and the marvellous. The forest of Minibar (Malabar) is ‘ubi nascitur piper’ (‘where pepper is grown’; fol. 90r), and, in the chapter concerning Pabulo (Kollam) readers can look forward to learning of a form of worship of the ox that is certain to shock the text’s readers: De ciuitate pabulo ubi bos pro deo adoratur. de cuius orina rex et regina illius terre omni mane cum exit de stabulo lauant facies suas et de eius stercore sibi pectus ungentes. (fol. 90r) Concerning the city of Palubo where the ox is worshipped in place of God, and the urine of which the king and queen of this land use to wash their faces every morning when he leaves his stall, while anointing their breasts with its excrement.

These rubrics are often long and very detailed, particularly concerning moral and physical ethnographic exotica. Yet they are routinely careless about the specifics of the text’s itinerary and geography, sometimes passing in silence over important toponyms and geographical transitions.60 In two related fourteenth-century English manuscripts, both from Norwich Cathedral Priory, we find a further set of rubrics that treat Odorico’s Itinerarium as a litany of marvels and miracles, the locations of which seem almost irrelevant. Simon Bozoun 59  Sample rubrics include ‘Inde iui ad Caldeam Regnum maximum’ (‘From there I went to the great kingdom of Chaldea’; fol. 150r); ‘Inde transiens ad terram vocatam lamori’ (‘From there passing to a land called Lamori’; fol. 155r); and ‘Inde ad aliud regnum recessi nomine Campa’ (‘From there I went back to another kingdom by the name of Champa’; fol. 156r). 60  See, for example, the rubric to Chapter 11, which introduces a marvellous idol ‘quod in predictis partibus adoratur que in maxima reuerentia habetur apud illos’ (‘which is worshipped in the aforementioned parts and which is held in great reverence among them’; fol. 90r). In fact, the text has moved on from the ‘predictis partibus’ (Palubo; Kollam) to a new location (Maabar; the Coromandel Coast).

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(d. 1352), the prior whose ownership mark appears in both manuscripts, seems to have had BL, MS Royal 14 C.xiii made using Cambridge, Corpus Christi Coll., MS 407 as an exemplar. The opening rubric of both exemplar and copy identifies Odorico’s text as the ‘Itinerarium fratris Odorici ordinis fratrum minorum de mirabilibus orientalium tartarorum’ (‘The Itinerary of Friar Odoric of the Minorite order concerning the wonders of the Tartars of the East’; Cambridge, Corpus Christi Coll., MS 407, fol. 69r; BL, MS Royal 14 C.xiii, fol. 216r). Meeting these expectations in part, the rubrics focus attention firstly on the text’s narrative of the martyrdom of Odorico’s four Franciscan brethren at Tana (Thane) and on their post mortem miracles (Cambridge, Corpus Christi Coll., MS 407, fols 71r; 73v), and then on an unlocalized litany of marvellous phenomena and alien customs: ‘De quodam ydolo mirabili et de quibusdam ritibus eorum’ (‘Concerning a certain marvellous idol and certain of their rituals’; fol. 75v); ‘De arboribus dantibus farinam et mel et venenum’ (‘Concerning the trees that give flour and honey and poison’; fol. 77r). Overwhelmingly, it seems, where intertitles exist in copies of Odorico’s Itinerarium, they adapt it for use as a repository of information on the world’s marvellous human and environmental diversity. Customizing Travellers’ Indies: Marginalia As the tables in Appendix 2 show, many Latin manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Book, Odorico’s Itinerarium, and Poggio’s India were also furnished with marginal direction or commentary in the hand either of a participant in the manuscript’s production process or a medieval reader. But although the proportion of Latin manuscripts that feature some form of marginal annotation is high, the proportion that feature the kind of sustained programme of written marginalia that could have a significant impact upon interpretation is smaller.61 The most common varieties of marginalia found in Latin manuscripts of all three texts are written finding notes, notabilia, and manicules. All these varieties of marginalia may be categorized as indicative, in that they simply draw attention, without commentary, to a particular passage or feature in the text. In many cases, such 61  See Appendix 2 for details. Where data are available, twenty-nine of thirty-nine manuscripts feature some form of marginalia; sixteen of twenty-one Itinerarium manuscripts, and fourteen of sixteen manuscripts of Poggio’s India. But only twenty-one Marco Polo manuscripts, thirteen Itinerarium manuscripts, and eleven of Poggio’s India feature significant amounts of written marginalia (i.e., more than a few notes).

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indicative notes simply take the form of symbols — manicules or bracketing — or keywords that draw attention to religions, customs, produce, mirabilia, or natural phenomena. A type of marginalia that is frequent in manuscripts of Poggio’s India, appearing in nine of the fifteen manuscripts for which information is available in Appendix 2c, is the toponymic gloss, where the annotator writes the names of places through which the text travels at appropriate points in the manuscript’s margins. A relatively representative example of indicative marginalia working alongside a traveller’s description of the Indies is to be found in the programme of rubricator’s marginalia in Prior Simon Bozoun’s copy of Odorico’s Itinerarium in Cambridge, Corpus Christi Coll., MS 407. Working around the middle of the fourteenth century and supplementing the rather sensationalist rubricated intertitles discussed in the last section, the annotator marks, in red ink, the letters ‘ci’ in the margin alongside mentions of cities in the text (e.g., fol. 74v). But the same annotator accentuates the marvellous as well as the urbanized nature of Indian space. In addition to making a number of short notes alongside the text’s narrative of the martyrdom of four Franciscans at Tana (Thane), the rubricator also brackets in red and writes ‘ritus’ (‘rite’) alongside Odorico’s description of self-sacrifice in Mobar (the Coromandel Coast, fol. 76r) and notes exotic creatures and plants (crocodiles, trees providing flour and long canes, precious stones: fols 74v, 77r, 78v). Two further English manuscripts of the Itinerarium of the later fourteenth century, Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Digby 11 and Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Digby 166, also both feature programmes of marginalia that draw out places and their associations.62 Scribal marginalia in Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Digby 166 identify ‘Ciuitas polumbi’ as a location ‘in qua habetur optimum zinziber’ (‘the City of Polumbum in which the best ginger is to be found’; fol. 39r), before moving on to note, next to the text’s account of Mobar, that ‘hic iacet corpus sancti thome apostoli, scilicet in regno mobar’ (‘the body of St Thomas the Apostle lies in this place, that is in the kingdom of Mobar’; fol. 39r). The author of these marginalia also methodically picks out the names of each island and kingdom that Odorico visits in the Eastern Indian Ocean (fol. 40r). The marginalia in Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Digby 11 and Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Digby 166 are unusual, however, in that they show a particular concern to associate the activities of Franciscan friars with specific locations in the Indies. Alongside Odorico’s translation of the relics of the Franciscan martyrs of Tana to a Franciscan con62 

Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Digby 166 was left incomplete by a fourteenth-century scribe but later completed in a fifteenth-century hand.

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vent in Zaiton (Hangzhou), the annotator of Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Digby 11, a manuscript that once belonged to the Oxford Franciscans, notes ‘Quod Fratres nores sunt in Indya superior’ (‘that there are Franciscans in India Superior’; fol. 48r). The annotator of Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Digby 166 is equally interested in the spread of preachers through the world, noting alongside the same passage that ‘in caychon sunt 2 loca fratrum’ (‘in Zaiton there are two houses of the friars’; fol. 38v). Indicative marginalia treat the texts they accompany as repositories of localizable phenomena and are found across Europe throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as the tables in Appendix 2 show. Two examples, however, show quite how different their impact can be. BL, MS Arundel 13, a fourteenthcentury manuscript containing both Pipino’s Liber and Odorico’s Itinerarium, and BAV, MS Ottoboniani latini 1641 both feature extensive indicative marginalia. The annotations, in two hands, in BL, MS Arundel 13 note not only conventionally noted subjects such as exotica, customs, the location of St Thomas tomb, and his miracles but also more unusual details: peoples who have their own languages; where the pole star disappears over the horizon and where it reappears; and the unusual Indian method of building ships. As a result, its leaves are visually crowded (fig. 24). The annotator of BAV, MS Ottoboniani latini 1641, in contrast, probably working around the end of the fifteenth century, provides a meticulous toponymic gloss in a humanistic cursive, often in the top margin of the page, accompanied with finding notes alongside the text’s chief notabilia. On fol. 94r, for example, a note in the top margin identifies the region discussed as ‘moabar’ (the Coromandel Coast), whilst the word ‘abraiamin’ further down the page in the uncluttered right-hand margin directs attention to Marco’s account of the role of Brahmans in the region’s pearl fishing industry (Milion, pp. 167–68). The kind of marginal paratext that attempts to turn itineraries into works of geographical reference to the exclusion of other potential functions is rare in the case of Marco’s Liber and Odorico’s Itinerarium. Indeed, only one further clear example came to light in my sample: a Latin text of Odorico’s Itinerarium in BAV, MS Vaticani latini 5256b (fols 59r–78v), probably annotated around the end of the fifteenth century. Odorico’s hagiographic account of the Tana martyrdoms has been excised from the textual version found in the manuscript, which contains no rubrics or other intertitles. The process of turning this multi-functional text into a work of geographical reference has been completed through the addition, in a humanistic cursive probably of around the end of the fifteenth century, of finding notes in the form of place names in the otherwise clear margins. The Latin Itinerarium found in this manuscript is thus

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Figure 24. Annotated leaf from a fourteenth-century English copy of Odorico da Pordenone, Itinerarium. British Library, MS Arundel 13, fol. 30v. © The British Library Board.

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both functionally and visually transformed. Functionally it has become a kind of gazetteer, whilst visually it comes to resemble the manuscripts of Poggio’s India that, as I show below, circulate without rubrics or other forms of intertitles but, instead, with a marginal, largely toponymic, gloss. The toponym-focused, chorographic gloss is, as Appendix 2c shows, the most common form of paratext found in the mid- and late fifteenth-century manuscripts of Poggio’s India. Such glosses appear both in manuscripts of the full De varietate fortunae and in copies where India appears alone, though slightly more frequently in the latter case. Sometimes written at the moment of production but sometimes added or supplemented by readers, these finding aids tend to take the form of a skeleton of place names extracted from the text, interspersed with minimal keyword finding notes that draw attention to certain notabilia, mirabilia, and unusual customs.63 The late fifteenth-century manuscript partially written and annotated by Gianfrancesco Cataldini di Cagli (in the region of Pesaro e Urbino), now Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Canon. Misc. 280, provides an indication of the significance of this changed presentation for the kind of functions that Poggio’s India could perform for its readers. This manuscript contains a professionally written copy of Poggio’s India, Pomponius Mela’s Chorographia, and, in Gianfrancesco Cataldini’s distinctive, unprofessional hand, Cristoforo Buondelmonti’s early fifteenth-century illustrated descriptive geography of the Greek islands, De insulis, letters and a copy of a drawing of Hermes by the humanist antiquarian Cyriaco d’Ancona, and an index.64 The marginalia in the manuscript’s text of India are in two distinguishable hands: that of the professional scribe, and Cataldini’s own. Just as is the case in the fifteenth-century copy of Pipino’s Liber in BAV, MS Ottoboniani latini 1641, the gloss in Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Canon. Misc. 280 links locations to notable characteristics and cultural practices. Alongside Niccolò’s account of Sri Lanka, for example, we find ‘Saillana Insula’, followed by one63 

The marginalia are similar but not identical across the manuscript tradition; scribes and readers did not simply copy marginalia from one manuscript to another without thought. Marginalia appear both in manuscripts of the whole DVF and manuscripts of the separate tradition in which Bk iv circulates alone. 64  In a colophon at the end of Buondelmonti’s De insulis on fol. 62r, Gianfrancesco refers to ‘liber iste’ (‘this book’) as ‘scriptus et designatus’ (‘written and designed’) by himself and calls himself ‘Canchiani ludi tunc preceptorem’ (‘at the time preceptor of the Cancian games’). It is transcribed in the ‘Introduzione’, in Bracciolini, De varietate fortunae, ed. by Merisalo, p. 54. It has been suggested on circumstantial evidence that the full manuscript (less Cataldini’s index and glosses) was copied from an exemplar one remove away from a manuscript compilation that belonged to the humanist antiquarian Cyriaco d’Ancona: Mitchell, ‘Ex libris Kiriaci Anconitani’.

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Figure 25. Annotated leaf from a late fifteenth-century Italian copy of Poggio Bracciolini’s India. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Canon. Misc. 280, fol. 71v. Courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

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word indicators of the island’s chief characteristics: its jewels, cinnamon, and great lake. To this list, Cataldini’s scruffier hand adds ‘Bragino’ (‘Brahman’; fol. 71v; fig. 25). Like the majority of annotations in manuscripts of all three accounts of travels in India, the gloss also draws attention to the city in which St Thomas is said to rest (Malpuria; Mylapore, fol. 71 v) and, in Poggio’s section on the mores Indorum, notable exotic customs such as modes of burial, the burning of widows with dead husbands, and geomancy (fol. 75 r). Finally, the professional gloss also attempts to render explicit the geographical framework within which Niccolò’s peregrinations take place. Alongside Poggio’s attempted explanation of limits of the three Indies (discussed in Chapter 2) we find ‘De Interiori India’, ‘Anterior India’, and ‘Media India’ (fol. 74). In many ways, this manuscript’s professional and reader’s marginalia are typical among annotated copies of Poggio’s India. Where Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Canon. Misc. 280 departs from other manuscripts is in Cataldini’s use of the volume’s marginal gloss to produce a cumulative alphabetical index, largely of places mentioned but also occasionally of notable peoples or customs both in Pomponius Mela’s Chorographia and Poggio’s India (fols 103–105). The index is not fully integrated; its compiler clearly moved through Mela’s Chorographia and Poggio’s India in chunks, writing down such index terms as he came across in each section of the work as he tackled them. Nonetheless, Cataldini here uses Poggio’s India to complete and update Mela’s Chorographia. In so doing, he both attempts to assimilate the India into Mela’s late classical world vision and to create a new, up-to-date, geographical work of reference. Indicative marginalia of the kind discussed here suggest a deferential approach to the texts that they gloss. The main text indicates that a particular custom, animal, or plant belongs to a particular location. The annotator accepts the fact and uses a note in the margin to indicate that this particular detail is worthy of remark. The traveller’s text is treated as an object from which it is possible to glean factual data, and the marginal annotation is a servant of this process. Yet a small proportion of manuscripts bear, often alongside indicative marginalia, readers’ or scribes’ comments that suggest that these texts were sometimes approached with attitudes less deferential and more critical. Paratexts of this type fall into two broad categories. Judgemental marginalia treat the accounts of the Indies they frame as transparent windows onto the geography, natural environment, and peoples of the Indies through which the traveller (and, vicariously, the reader) moves and about which the annotator may form judgements. Critical marginalia, in contrast, treat narratives as potentially fallible or incomplete, questioning their authority and requiring corroboration. Although judgemental and critical marginalia are often found alongside

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the more common indicative notes discussed above, and sometimes even in the same hands, they testify to very different forms of interaction among reader, text, and represented Indian space and peoples. Critical and judgemental paratexts enact a separation between reader and text. Through these tools and using the text as a foil, an annotator can construct a distinct identity, whether as a moralist, an orthodox Christian, a textual critic, or a geographer. Amongst the sample of manuscripts of Marco’s Book and Odorico’s Itinerarium (Appendices 2a and 2b), eight — including three of monastic, university, or ecclesiastical provenance — can be identified as featuring judgemental marginalia. Six manuscripts of these texts feature critical marginalia.65 Moral marginalia are less common in manuscripts of Poggio’s India. With the exception of a single, condemnatory ‘[m]or ridiculum’ (‘ludicrous custom’) alongside a sexual custom attributed to Ava in Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Canon. Misc. 280 (fol. 72r) and a couple of sharp criticisms of the ‘stultitia’ (‘foolishness’) and ‘crudelitas’ (‘barbarity’) of Indian self-sacrifice in Federico da Montefeltro’s copy of the De varietate fortunae (BAV, MS Urbinati latini 224, fols 49r, 50r), such marginalia are eloquently absent from the manuscripts in my sample (Appendix 2c), where they have given way to the toponymic glosses discussed above. Of the judgemental notes, whether added to Marco’s Book, Odorico’s Itinerarium, or, occasionally, Poggio’s India, most condemn pagan religious customs. Fifteenth-century marginalia in the Latin version of Marco’s Book of Italian origin in BnF, MS lat. 3195 suggest a commentator particularly moved by reports of funerary customs in Maabar (the Coromandel Coast) that require the living to burn along with the dead. Such customs are described as firstly as ‘detestabilem’ (‘hateful’), then ‘iterum inanis glorie vana consuetudo’ (‘another vacuous, vainglorious custom’; fol. 55v). Roughly contemporary annotations to Odorico’s Itinerarium in Glasgow, GUL, MS Hunter 458 (V.6.8) remark with disgust on the ‘stulticiam eorum que se cidunt dicens que pro deo 65  Marginal judgements appear in: Leiden, Universiteitsbibl., MS Voss. lat. F 75 (English; Marco Polo); BnF, MS lat. 3195 (Italian and French; Marco and Odorico); BL, MS Arundel 13 (English; Marco and Odorico); Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August Bibl., Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg (Liège/Flanders area; Marco and Odorico); København, Kongelige Bibl., MS Acc. 2011/5 (England; Marco and Odorico); and in the Odorico texts in Glasgow, GUL, MS Hunter 458 (V.6.8) (French) and Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Digby 166 (English). Critical marginal annotations appear in Latin Marco Polo texts BAV, MS Ottoboniani latini 1641, BnF, MS lat. 6244A (both Italian), in the texts containing both Marco and Odorico in Latin in BL, MS Arundel 13 (English) and Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August Bibl., Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg (Liège/Flanders area).

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incidunt’ (‘the stupidity of those who kill themselves, saying that they cut themselves for the sake of God’; fol. 116v) and judge defective the ‘falsam rationem’ (‘spurious reasoning’; fol. 121r) of those who, according to Odorico’s report, prefer to eat their dead relatives than to allow their flesh to produce worms. The notes, written in a secretary hand characteristic of the fifteenth century in an English copy of Pipino’s Liber, Leiden, Universiteitsbibl., MS Voss. lat. F 75, are equally forthright. Alongside Marco’s description of girls dedicated to temples in India the annotator writes ‘ota fatuitatem magnam’ (‘note this great foolishness’; fol. 44r). Condemnation can extend to customs without religious connotations. Alongside Marco’s explanation that the people of Maabar consider black skin more beautiful than white, and so rub themselves with sesame oil to darken it, the same annotator exclaims ‘cce quam stulta opinio’ (‘behold, what a stupid idea!’; fol. 45r). Such judgemental annotations turn the Indies into a space in which examples of pagan stultitia and fatuitas paradoxically prove the rightness of Latin Christian mores. One of the most detailed programmes of marginalia that witnesses readers using texts to form judgements on Indian peoples appears in BL, MS Arundel 13, the English manuscript discussed earlier, in which Pipino’s Liber and Odorico’s Itinerarium are annotated in two hands. Both commentators draw attention to and pass judgement upon non-Christian peoples and their religious practices. The earlier of the two annotators glosses Marco’s description of people in Lesser Java who, Marco reports, worship the first thing they see in the morning, as ‘mirabile et terrible’ (‘wonderful and terrible’) and accuses those of the same island who, Marco explains, kill and eat their ailing relatives of ‘error pessimus’ (‘grave error’; fols 30r, 30v). The manuscript’s later annotator takes up the same vocabulary when he glosses Marco’s description of the dedication of young girls to idols, calling it an ‘error nepharius’ (‘abominable error’; fol. 31v). And so he continues, writing judgemental notes in the margin not just of Pipino’s Liber but also in the copy of Odorico da Pordenone’s Itinerarium in the same volume. Once again, most such comments are negative. Alongside Odorico’s account of pilgrims at a festival in Maabar who choose to die under the chariot that carries their idol, the annotator adds the moral gloss that the ‘stultus populus ponit se sub curro in quo ducitur istud ydolum et sic fatue gratis moritur’ (‘the foolish people throw themselves under the cart in which this idol is carried and thus die lacking in grace’; fol. 43r). The moral marginalia found across manuscripts of the three travellers’ accounts of the Indies are overwhelmingly negative in tone. Vocabulary is often scornful, speaking of stultitia or fatuitas, but sometimes theologically analytical, speaking of error. In either case, the effect is the same. The people or custom

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judged is placed at a distance from (and hierarchically below) the people and customs of the note-maker. Through overt condemnation, the annotator distinguishes his own opinions from the traveller’s descriptive text. At the same time, he enacts a separation between his own culture and those judged incomprehensibly other: foolish, stupid, steeped in theological error. Yet a small number of marginal annotations in a few manuscripts seem tacitly or explicitly to invite comparison between Christian and pagan practices in a way that positions these in disturbing proximity to one another and enables readers to learn alternative moral lessons from the texts. Alongside Odorico’s account of Indian pilgrimage practices in Mobar (the Coromandel Coast), the normally judgemental fifteenth-century annotator of BL, MS Arundel 13 directs readers to examine ‘quomodo peregrinantur ad istud ydolum et quam penam sustinent in peregrinacione’ (‘how they [pilgrims] make a pilgrimage to this idol and what pain they suffer in pilgrimage’; fol. 43r). His neutral and transferable vocabulary of pilgrimage, free of any mention of stultitia or fatuitas, invites an ambivalent response. The annotator perhaps shares the hope expressed by Francesco Pipino in his prologue that evidence of such eagerness among ‘infidel peoples’ to ‘venerate simulacra’ will found longings in the hearts of ‘devoted Christians’ to better serve their true lord. Two other notes in English manuscripts also invite their readers to make similarly discomfiting comparisons between Latin Christian and Indian pagan religious and secular practices. The often judgemental fifteenth-century annotator of Leiden, Universiteitsbibl., MS Voss. lat. F 75 glosses Marco’s Brahmans of Lar approvingly: ‘Abraiani non Christiani sed ydolatre, tamen odiunt mendacium, adulterium, furtum et nullum animal ocidunt’ (‘not Christians but idolaters. Nonetheless, they hate falsehood, adultery, robbery, and kill no living thing’; fol. 45v). The explicit comparison between Christians and idolaters works to destabilize the feelings of cultural superiority elicited by the annotator’s more condemnatory notes. A note, in a fourteenthcentury English scholar’s manuscript of the Itinerarium, directing attention to the ‘benevolentia regis’ (‘kindness of the king’) who allows his people to dive for precious stones in Sri Lanka’s great lake, allows for an approving response (Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Digby 166, fol. 40v). Marginalia such as these invite readers to find in the reported customs of Indian peoples a moral education that includes exempla both in bono and in malo. I have already mentioned that moralizing marginalia are few and far between in manuscripts of Poggio’s India. However, over the course of the fifteenth century, a lessening of the regularity of morally educative marginalia in later Italian manuscripts of Marco’s and Odorico’s texts is also noticeable. Even the generously annotated Italian manuscripts BAV, MS Ottoboniani latini 1641 and

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BAV, MS Vaticani latini 5256b, both probably annotated, as discussed earlier, around the end of the fifteenth century, do not feature marginal moral judgements. A shift emerges, then, in the functions performed by these travellers’ texts over the course of the fifteenth century, particularly among humanist audiences. The role of these texts in the moral education of their readers diminishes, as they come to be more regularly used as repositories of factual information concerning particular places. The marginalia discussed so far treat travellers’ texts as transparent windows onto the regions they describe. Very infrequently, however, we find evidence of different forms of critical interaction between readers and travellers’ texts. In these interactions, the text is not a transparent window but requires commentary or interpretation. The veracity and reliability of text and traveller often become the focus of attention. Such critical marginalia, as I term them here, are often inspired by annotators having the opportunity to compare more than one traveller’s description of the same region. The verbose fifteenth-century English annotator of BL, MS Arundel 13, for example, exploits his opportunity to compare Odorico’s Itinerarium with the copy of Pipino’s Liber de con­ suetudinibus in the same volume. Alongside the friar’s account of Dondin, the island to the far south whose name means ‘unclean’ and whose people kill and eat their sick relatives, the annotator notes that ‘concordat marcus p.’ (‘Marco p. agrees’) and provides a book and chapter reference to a near-identical custom that the Venetian locates in Lesser Java (fol. 45r). These cross-references stress the ways in which descriptions agree and ignore the points where they do not, such as — in this instance — the name of the island to which the custom belongs. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century notes in the possibly Avignonese copy of Pipino’s Liber in BL, MS Addit. 19513, bound alongside the unique surviving copy of Jordan’s Mirabilia descripta but now unfortunately lacking most of Book iii, suggest that those texts had a similar mutually authorizing relationship. Alongside Jordan’s account of Sri Lanka, an annotator, probably of the fifteenth century, has directed the reader to ‘vide nfra in libro domini marchi pauli de Venecia in tertia parte c. xxii’ (‘see above in the book of Marco Polo of Venice, Part iii, Chapter 22’; fol. 7r). The fourteenth- and fifteenth-century annotators of BL, MS Arundel 13 and BL, MS Addit. 19513 seek out concordances between the accounts to which they have access, to the advantage of each traveller’s reputation as an authority. Less frequently, however, commentators leave behind such respectful attitudes to probe perceived or real inaccuracies or inconsistencies in the texts. In BAV, MS Ottoboniani latini 1641, a note alongside Marco Polo’s assertion that tailed men inhabit the Kingdom of Lambri in Lesser Java (Sumatra)

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bluntly contradicts the text: ‘non est verum’ (‘this is not true’; fol. 93 r). The status and reliability of the eyewitness is the focus of much of the critical marginalia in Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August Bibl., Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg, a compendium of travellers’ texts written and extensively annotated by a single scribe in the 1460s.66 The engagements of this scholarly reader with Marco’s and Odorico’s accounts are particularly remarkable, in that his annotations show extensive and deep knowledge of a broad range of personal itineraries and geographical writings, including the then-recent India of Poggio and the recently rediscovered world geography of Claudius Ptolemy.67 Moreover, according to Christine Gadrat, who has studied the manuscripts in detail, the same annotator appears also to have read and added marginalia to an earlier copy of Pipino’s Liber in BL, MS Addit. 19952, a copy also owned at different times by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa and a member of his circle, Theodore (Dietrich) of Xanten, a Canon of Liège and rector of the Cardinal’s student hostel at Deventer. 68 This anonymous reader’s approach to the descriptions he reads is extremely unusual, particularly in Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August Bibl., Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg. The marginalia added to Marco’s and Odorico’s texts in this manuscript show the reader’s sustained and deeply critical investigation of the texts, as well as an attempt to reconcile these with some firmly held geographical preconceptions. Indeed, this annotator’s focus on chorography, location, direction, and distance combine with neglect of a number of traditional mirabilia (cyno­ cephali, tailed men, anthropophages) that is exceptional in its period. 66  The manuscript has been discussed by Christine Gadrat, who edits its annotations in an appendix. Her analysis of script and watermarks place its production in the 1460s and script (identified as a ‘Netherlandish semi-hybrida libraria’) and contents places its production in Flanders: Gadrat, ‘Les Conceptions d’un géographe’, pp. 202, 230; Annexe at pp. 233–49. I am particularly endebted to Dr Gadrat for her personal correspondence concerning Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August Bibl., Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg and BL, MS Addit. 19952 and for kindly providing me with copies of her articles on these two manuscripts. 67  On the annotator’s range of reference, see Gadrat, ‘Les Conceptions d’un géographe’, p. 204. 68  On the unknown scribe, including identification difficulties (he is apparently not Theodore of Xanten but seems to have had access to more than one of Nicholas of Cusa’s books) and connections between the paratexts in the two manuscripts, see Gadrat, ‘Les Conceptions d’un géographe’. Another connection between the two manuscripts is the city of Liège. As Gadrat notes (p. 230), the annotator points out in Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August Bibl., Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg that Teobaldo Visconti was archdeacon there. As well as belonging to Theodore of Xanten, a canon in the city of Liège, BL, MS Addit. 19952 contains a tract dedicated ‘domino Leodicensis ecclesiæ archidiacono’ (‘to the lord archdeacon of the church of Liège’, fol. 85r) and a marginal note to the effect that China produces coal ‘sicud Leodii’ (‘just as in Liège’): fol. 46r.

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Many of the critical marginalia in Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August Bibl., Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg supply details that make it possible to read Marco’s and Odorico’s texts as geographies rather than itineraries. Notes often anchor points on Marco’s and Odorico’s itineraries to a broader overarching metageographical conception of the region; as Marco’s narrative moves towards Manzi (southern China), the annotator glosses the region as ‘India Superior’, a term not used in Marco’s Book but familiar from Odorico’s Itinerarium, in which it is used to denote Manzi.69 As well as being identifiable with India Superior, Manzi is also ‘pars Indie orientalioris extra Gangem fluvium’ (‘the most easterly part of Eastern India beyond the Ganges river’).70 This spatial translation makes it possible for a fifteenth-century reader acquainted with Ptolemy’s Geography to equate the region discussed by Marco Polo with the ‘India ultra Gangem’ marked in the furthest east on Ptolemaic maps (fig. 26). Elsewhere, the annotator catalogues every transition between broader geographical units with unique precision. Moving from the Eastern Indian Ocean to Moabar (variant of Maabar; the Coromandel Coast), he writes that ‘Hic incipit dicere de majori India per capitula 14 sequentia’ (‘here he [Marco] begins to speak concerning Greater India for the fourteen following chapters’).71 Sometimes, the annotator’s attempts to harmonize the geographies of the travellers’ accounts of the Indies to which he has access with one another and with Claudius Ptolemy, his favoured geographical authority, go relatively smoothly. Marco’s account of ‘Cyamba’ (Champa) is neatly corroborated by a marginal reference to the fact that ‘Odoricus dicit quod fuit eciam ibi’ (‘Odorico says that he too was there’), while his account of Lesser Java (Sumatra) is buttressed by the confirmation that ‘[h]ec Iana [sic] est insula in qua Nicolaus de Comitibus fuit commoratus novem mensibus’ (‘this Jaua is the island on which Niccolò Conti remained for nine months’).72 Elsewhere, the reader explains the suspicious similarity between Odorico’s and Mandeville’s Itineraria through some close reading; a marginal gloss to the Franciscan’s use of the first-person 69 

The marginalia to the Marco Polo portion of the volume have been edited by Christine Gadrat. I refer therefore both to folios and Gadrat’s edition: Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August Bibl., Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg, fol. 30v; Gadrat, ‘Les Conceptions d’un géographe’, p. 241. 70  Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August Bibl., Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg, fol. 38v; Gadrat, ‘Les Conceptions d’un géographe’, p. 243. 71  Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August Bibl., Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg, fol. 48v; Gadrat, ‘Les Conceptions d’un géographe’, p. 247. 72  Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August Bibl., Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg, fol. 46v; Gadrat, ‘Les Conceptions d’un géographe’, p. 246.

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plural pronoun explains that the friar had a ‘socius’, the English knight Sir John Mandeville (fol. 62r). However, when travellers’ observations appear to contradict Claudius Ptolemy’s geographical vision of an enclosed Indian Ocean containing a limited number of normally small islands, marginalia supplement, explain, amend, or directly contradict travellers’ statements. Indeed, at the very start of the volume, on the opening folio of Marco’s Book, the annotator paves the way for such interventions, noting: Marcus iste est fidedignus in hiis que refert se vidisse aut a videntibus fidedignis audisse. Verumtamen eciam in aliquibus que non ex experimento sed ex fama didicerat est deceptus utque maxime in numero et quantitate insularum Indici maris que non possunt esse tot et tante ut scribit.73 This Marco is trustworthy in those things that he relates he saw himself or that he heard from trustworthy eyewitnesses. However, in certain other things that he learned not through experience but through rumour he is deceived, and most particularly in the number and size of the islands of the Indian sea, which cannot be as many and as large as he writes.

Indeed, Marco’s unreliability on the subject of the vast and populous Indian Ocean and its islands is a subject to which a somewhat obsessed annotator repeatedly returns. On the subject of the number of inhabited islands in the Indian seas, he suggests, Marco must be unreliable, because they would be too close to the burning heat of the Torrid Zone for habitation: ‘Multe ex insulis maris Indici sunt deserte vel propter parvitatem vel propter sterilitatem fundi et propter caloris solaris adustionem’ (‘Many of the islands of this sea of India are deserted either on account of their littleness or because of the barrenness of their earth and because of the burning of the sun’s heat’).74 Similarly, he contradicts Marco’s insistence that the Sea of Cin (the South China Sea) forms part of the ocean that encircles the oikoumene. Overruling Marco with Ptolemy, the commentator forcefully counters ‘quod mare Indicum nullum habet ingressum in magnum mare occeanum sed circumquaque ambitur a terra usque ad Egiptum et Arabiam etc’ (‘that the Indian sea has no outlet into the great ocean sea but is encircled all round by land as far as Egypt and Arabia and so on’).75 73 

Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August Bibl., Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg, fol. 1r; Gadrat, ‘Les Conceptions d’un géographe’, p. 233. 74  Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August Bibl., Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg, fol. 46r; Gadrat, ‘Les Conceptions d’un géographe’, p. 245. 75  Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August Bibl., Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg, fol. 44v; Gadrat, ‘Les

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The annotator’s ample commentary not only explicates the text but also manipulates its meaning and, occasionally, corrects it. The marginalia in Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August Bibl., Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg are evidence of one reader’s rigorous comparative investigation into the geography of the Indian Ocean, in which eyewitness sources are treated with the respect due to serious authorities. The marginalia amount, in places, to a scholarly geographical commentary, and indeed Gadrat has argued that their author produced an extended geographical work, now destroyed, that drew and commented on these texts.76 But the annotator’s reading of these sources and thus his own commentary upon them are thoroughly conditioned by his pre-existing geographical framework, one that, as we have seen, contains traces of classical zonal geography as exemplified in the works of Martianus Capella and Macrobius but is dominated by Ptolemy’s Geography. Indeed, the range and ingenuity of arguments that the annotator produces to counter aspects of travellers’ reports — in particular, Marco’s Book — that do not support Ptolemy’s vision are remarkable. The Indian Ocean is simply not large enough, he says, to contain the number and size of islands Marco ascribes to it; many of the islands must in fact be tiny and uninhabited. Marco’s navigations through the ocean were incessantly meandering, so his journeys are longer than the real distances between places. When Marco says it is not possible to see the Pole Star at certain locations it must be hidden by mist, because mainland India does not stretch beyond the equinoctial circle.77 Taken together, the annotator’s repeated attempts to force the Indies described by travellers such as Marco and Odorico into conformity with Ptolemy’s geographical vision begin to resemble a concerted campaign to render the new, strange, large, varied, and complex Indian Ocean world smaller, more contained, and less extraordinary. Indeed, when presented with a conflict between the Franciscan Odorico’s assertion that there are two thousand cities in Manzi (India Superior) and Marco Polo’s figure of twelve hundred, the commentator yet again yields to the urge to minimize the extent, magnificence, and populousness of these regions. ‘De numero ciuitatum mangi’, he notes alongside Odorico’s figure, ‘marcus melius et certius Conceptions d’un géographe’, p. 245. 76  Gadrat identified a geographical work by the same author in a manuscript destroyed in the collapse of the Cologne archive building in 2009 (personal communication, 19 August 2010). She discusses the connection between the three manuscripts in her doctoral thesis, Gadrat, ‘Traduction, diffusion et réception du livre de Marco Polo’. 77  Gadrat, ‘Les Conceptions d’un géographe’, pp. 233, 245, 246, 247; Wolfenbüttel, HerzogAugust Bibl., Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg, fols 1r, 46r, 52r.

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dicit 1200’ (‘Concerning the number of cities in Manzi Marco gives the better and more certain figure of 1200’; fol. 66r).

Conclusion The travellers’ accounts of the Indies examined here above all show a flexible capacity for adaptation to meet the needs of changed audiences and circumstances. Through paratexts and annotations, text producers and readers engage in a process of continuous re-creation of texts appropriate for changed contexts and needs. Early fourteenth-century Latin copies of Marco’s and Odorico’s descriptions might well have been intended both to stimulate missionary effort amongst the Friars and, as García Espada has argued, to act as supporting documentation for plans for the recovery of the Holy Land. Certainly, Marco’s and Odorico’s accounts both appear in volumes alongside crusading histories and treatises. But the evidence that such texts were read and used in this way is thin on the ground. In BL, MS Addit. 19513, the manuscript of Jordan’s Mirabilia descripta and Pipino’s Liber that Gadrat tentatively associates with Avignon, readers’ annotations direct attention to Jordan’s assessment of Indians’ military capacities, the prophecy he reports that Latins will one day dominate India, his opinion of the erroneous religious beliefs of the St Thomas Christians, and his assurance that it is possible for a Latin Christian to preach safely amongst idolaters.78 But it is not clear that the now-incomplete copy of Pipino’s Liber in the same volume was treated as the same kind of resource. Other trends in the treatment of these travellers’ accounts emerge more clearly, however. Many material texts of Pipino’s Liber and Odorico’s Itinerarium are well adapted, whether through rubrics, prologues, or scribal or readerly annotations, to reinforce their readers’ sense of the rightness of their own faith and to construct a response of gratitude for their good fortune. The apparent non-sequiturs in the mid-fifteenth-century prologue to Odorico’s Itinerarium in Sevilla, Bibl. Capitular y Colombina, MS 7.5.8 express the logic behind this response per78 

A manicule pointing to the word ‘subiugare’ in Jordan’s reportedly Indian prophecy that Latins will dominate the whole world and, in a different hand, the note that ‘in illa patria inter ydolatras potest quis publice proponere secure verbum dei’ (‘in this country one may publicly preach the word of God safely amongst the idolaters’) occur at the end of Jordan’s account of Lesser India, at fol. 6r. Christine Gadrat distinguishes four annotating hands in the manuscript and transcribes their written notes. She attributes the comment on the prophecy to reader C, annotating in the fourteenth century: Jordan Catala, Mirabilia descripta, ed. and trans. by Gadrat, Annexe v, pp. 326–27 (p. 327).

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fectly. On seeing the many peoples of the world ‘excluded from celestial glory’, and on perusal of the ‘life, habits, and perfidy of these peoples’, the prologue author exhorts his readers not to work for their conversion but, rather, to thank and praise their lord through language and improved Christian behaviour. Much fourteenth- and fifteenth-century marginalia, lamenting the ‘stultitia’, ‘crudelitas’, or ‘fatuitas’ of various pagan behaviours or the diabolical inspiration of certain Indian religious rites, performs a similar cultural function for readers. Over the fifteenth century, however, the manuscripts in focus here bear witness to a gradual change in the perceived function of travellers’ descriptions of the Indies among certain groups of readers. After around 1450, toponymic and geographic glosses routinely appear with Poggio’s India. But they also begin to appear in some Latin texts of Marco Polo’s Book and Odorico’s Itinerarium. In these contexts, we also see a reduced focus on moralization, judgemental marginalia, and traditional mirabilia. With a change in the visual appearance of the page comes a change in functionality. The visual clutter on the page of BL, MS Arundel 13, an extensively annotated English manuscript of the fourteenth century, both advertises the text’s multifunctional nature and makes it harder to read (fig. 24). Geographical information, ethnographic descriptions, corroborative cross-references, and moral judgements all jostle for the reader’s attention. The pages of manuscripts made or annotated under the influence of humanism, such as the Liber of Francesco Pipino in BAV, MS Ottoboniani latini 1641, the Itinerarium in BAV, MS Vaticani latini 5256b, or manuscripts of Poggio’s India, like Gianfrancesco Cataldini’s copy in Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Canon. Misc. 280, gain in clarity and orderliness but at the expense of their multifunctionality (fig. 25). At the same time, the habit of making moral marginal judgements — ‘this is not right’ — begins to give way to the habit of marginal critique: ‘this is not true’. Across the temporal and geographical spectrum surveyed here one can discern a further, linked change. The early fifteenth-century English indices in copies of John of Tynemouth’s chronicle enable readers to find information about human diversity: people with tails; people of different physical appearance; people with dogs’ heads. Their geography is, as Gautier Dalché has observed of the early and High Middle Ages, ‘avant tout une géographie humaine’ (‘above all a human geography’).79 The primary focus of Gianfrancesco Cataldini’s later fifteenth-century index to his manuscript of Poggio’s India and Pomponius Mela’s Chorographia (Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Canon. Misc. 280) is, in contrast, location. At roughly the same time, location and geographical precision 79 

Gautier Dalché, ‘Comment penser l’Océan?’, p. 219.

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displace human diversity as the overriding concern of the widely read Liègeor Flanders-based commentator of Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August Bibl., Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg. Often passing in silence over reports of men with dogs’ heads, men with tails, the cremation of the living along with the dead, and all manner of other ethnographic details, this annotator appears less anxious to judge and learn from human diversity than he is to distinguish correctly between mainland and island locations, to locate unknown places by their proximity to known ones, and to moderate what are, in his view, the exaggerations and distortions of credulous and meandering eyewitness travellers. The travellers’ narratives in focus here change little in content and focus over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and yet the cultural uses to which they are put are, in some instances, transformed. The commentary in Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August Bibl., Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg highlights a further cultural shift. A number of manuscripts, across Europe, suggest a change in the phenomena reported by travellers through the Indies that may be considered notabile or mirabile. Just as the annotator of Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August Bibl., Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg seems, to judge from his annotations, more perturbed at reports of the size of the Indian Ocean than at descriptions of cynocephali, so the nature of mirabilia and notabilia in other fifteenth-century annotations are often equally surprising. Many annotators remark, like the commentator of Wolfenbüttel, HerzogAugust Bibl., Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg, on the number of cities or islands in different regions of the Indies. One English annotator of BL, MS Arundel 13 appears struck by the number of different languages in the Indies, which he marks up one by one, whilst the other takes an inordinate interest in Marco Polo’s technical account of Indian shipping.80 The probably Italian annotator of the Latin Book of Marco Polo in BnF, MS lat. 3195 finds the number of Indian island peoples paying tribute to no one remarkable, marking up Lesser Java (Sumatra), Locac (Thailand), and Seillan (Sri Lanka) as ‘libera’ (fols 53v– 54v) . These material texts do much more than simply reinforce conceptions of the Indies as a space of monstrous and marvellous extremes. Like the fifteenthcentury illustrated vernacular manuscripts discussed in Chapter 3, the Latin manuscripts participate in a more complex and longer-term process: a gradual redefinition of the marvellous. 80 

For example, the earlier annotator repeatedly notes the individual languages of Indo­ nesian nations at fols 29v–30r, whilst the later annotator makes several notes on the subject of Indian ships at fol. 28r, calling the method of maintaining these that Marco describes ‘mirabile’.

Part iii Geographical and Cartographic Reorientations

Chapter 5

Debating Diversity in an Interconnected World: The Indies in the Book of Sir John Mandeville

Introduction The single most influential ‘traveller’s account’ of the Indies to circulate across Europe in the later Middle Ages is not Marco Polo’s Book, Odorico da Pordenone’s Itinerarium, or Poggio Bracciolini’s account of Niccolò Conti’s journeys in India. It is, instead, the Book of Sir John Mandeville, a probably pseudonymous confection that claims to narrate the adventures of a travelling English knight.1 The Book (BSJM) survives in well over 250 manuscripts, in vernaculars and Latin, and in poorly written, rough copies belonging to individuals of modest means as well as in large, splendidly decorated copies belonging to dukes and princes. 2 It is not only on account of its wide circulation, however, that the BSJM is worthy of detailed attention. The Book is formally innovative, combining features of itinerary, geography, cosmography, theology, and regional history into what has been variously termed the work of a 1 

The work’s authorship is a matter of speculation, but probably unresolvable. For (wildly divergent) current hypotheses on the matter, see Seymour, ‘More Thoughts on Mandeville’; Bennett, ‘Mandeville’s Travels and the Anglo-French Moment’; and the ‘Introduction’, in Mandeville, La Version liégeoise du ‘Livre’, ed. by Tyssens and Raelet, pp. xiii–lv. 2  The most recent full census of manuscripts in all languages is that provided in Deluz, Le Livre de Jehan de Mandeville, pp. 370–82.

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liar and plagiarist; ‘a romance of travel’; a work of crusading propaganda; ‘at least in part […] a […] pilgrim’s devotional manual’; a satire; a work of human geography; and a piece of ‘realistic prose fiction’.3 More recently and persuasively, however, scholars have insisted on the work’s multi-generic status. In an influential 1997 monograph, Iain Macleod Higgins termed it a medieval multitext, ‘[o]riginally and generically several books at once […] characterized both by its typically medieval intertextuality and by its own distinctive intratextual multiplicity’.4 Tamara Kohanski, taking her cue from Hans Robert Jauss’s theory of generic expectation, argues that the work is shaped by ‘a multiplicity not only of dependent but of dominant genres’, amongst which the most significant are ‘Romance, History, Geography, Chronicle, Guidebook, and Itinerary’.5 Although the standard language of literary scholarship requires us to call this a work in the singular, then, it is both one book and many. It exists in many versions, which are themselves in turn characterized by generic multiplicity. The focus of this chapter is not the multiplicity of the book per se but the effects of its generic and textual multiplicity on the spatial representations of the Indies found in some of its most influential versions. Beginning with what is thought to be the book’s earliest incarnation, an Anglo-French text of around 1356, the chapter first explores how the Book assembles a multi-perspective, layered image of the world. Within a creative collage of itineraries, histories, anecdotes, legends, geography, and cosmology, the Book places the Indies both geographically and figuratively. By ‘placing’, I mean that it seeks both to represent them and to understand their position in the world. Placing touches not only on location but also on relationships with other lands as far apart as the narrator’s own British Isles and the antoecumenical antipodes.6 The 3 

For a summary of views of the work as plagiarized or a hoax, see Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage, p. 186 (n. 7); and Kohanski, ‘“What is a ‘travel book’, anyway?”’, p. 117 and p. 128, n. 1. On the ‘romance of travel’ label, see Bennett, The Rediscovery of Sir John Mandeville, p. 53. On the Book as crusade propaganda, see Atiya, The Crusade in the Later Middle Ages, p. 163. On the Book as a devotional manual, see the ‘Introduction’, in Mandeville, The Travels, ed. and trans. by Moseley, pp. 15–16. Butturff has suggested that satire is the Book’s dominant mode: Butturff, ‘Satire in Mandeville’s Travels’. Its status as human geography is argued for in Deluz, Le Livre de Jehan de Mandeville (passim). On the case for the Book as a work of prose fiction, see Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, p. 122. 4  Higgins, Writing East, p. 19. 5  Kohanski, ‘“What is a ‘travel book’, anyway?”’, pp. 122–23. 6  I borrow the term ‘antoecumenical spaces’ from Hiatt, Terra Incognita, p. 4 and passim. I use it purely as a convenient label for spaces positioned in some sort of oppositional relationship to the oikoumene, whether in the same or an alternative hemisphere.

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perspectives that influence this placing are diverse. The missionary ideology of the papacy and mendicant orders in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the commercial activities of traders like Marco Polo, and the science of desk-bound cosmographers all have roles to play in creating an image of a theologically, economically, and cosmologically integrated globe, but one in which the perceived diversity of the Indies has a vital role. Nonetheless, in a multiperspective geography — a work that Higgins, following Mikhail Bakhtin has perceptively termed ‘dialogic’ — no single perspective can stand wholly unchallenged.7 Like other ‘intentional stylistic hybrid’ forms that Bakhtin characterizes as dialogic, the BSJM in its earliest versions is in part ‘an argument between styles of language […], a dialogue between points of view’. 8 This dialogue, the chapter shows, opens up faultlines between the Book’s multiple perspectives on the Indian Ocean world that highlight its artificiality and limitations as a form of spatial representation. Yet the BSJM’s ‘multi-textual’ status has further ramifications for the literal and figurative placing of the Indies in the late medieval world. The final section of this chapter explores the substantially rewritten late fourteenth-century version of the BSJM known as the Vulgate Latin translation. Like the Insular (Anglo-French) version from which it probably ultimately derives, the Vulgate seeks to address the challenge posed by Indian diversity. However, its singleminded translator does so by producing a work that opposes the Insular version’s dialogic, multi-perspective form and its globalizing and integrationist tendencies. A Word on Textual Versions The base text for this investigation is the Insular version of the BSJM. Christiane Deluz has argued that this version, written in Anglo-French around 1356 but circulating in Continental as well as Insular dialectal versions, is the ultimate source of all other known redactions.9 The Insular Book enjoyed a relatively 7 

Higgins, Writing East, p. 12. Bakhtin, ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, ed. by Holquist, p. 76. 9  The information that follows is summarized from the ‘Introduction’ to the best edition of the Insular text, Mandeville, Le livre des merveilles du monde, ed. by Deluz, pp. 28–32. For a diplomatic edition of the earliest surviving Continental French manuscript, which used to be widely thought the earliest version, see Mandeville, Travels, ed. by Letts, ii. A good summary of the long-running argument over the origins of this text (in England, France, or Liège) is offered 8 

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wide diffusion in England and continental Europe and now survives in approximately twenty-five manuscripts. Around thirty manuscripts survive of the so-called Continental version, which, if it is, as Deluz suggests, a continental French reworking of the Insular version, must have been composed within only a few years of its Insular counterpart. Having said this, arguments over the priority of Insular over Continental version or vice-versa are of limited relevance here; the versions are broadly similar. Leaving aside errors, misreadings, corrections, and differences in expression, major divergences between the two are limited to one chapter: the so-called ‘perilous valley’ episode in which the Book, drawing on a similar episode in Odorico’s Itinerarium (see Chapter 2), tells of the narrator Sir John’s experiences crossing a valley of terrors.10 The Insular version is therefore used here on the grounds that not only is it a better edition than exists for the Continental version but also, with one noted exception, it is broadly representative in content of approximately one-fifth of the Book’s surviving manuscript tradition. As translations, I provide quotations from the Cotton version of around 1400, a Middle English version that we might justifiably call an early critical edition, in that it is the result of a process of collation and translation from two earlier versions of the text, one of which is the Insular version.11 The Vulgate Latin translation, to which I turn in the last section of this chapter, was probably, in the late Middle Ages, the most widely read version of the BSJM in the geographical sense of the word. Produced in the third quarter of the fourteenth century and based on a reworking of a Continental French text known as the Liège or Ogier version, it survives in thirty-seven manuscripts from all over Europe and was printed as the Itinerarius domini Mandeville militis in the 1480s.12 Because a modern edition of this text has not in Bennett, ‘Mandeville’s Travels and the Anglo-French Moment’. As Susanne Röhl has pointed out, however, Letts’s choice of an early but faulty manuscript for his edition of the Continental text has hampered research on this matter, and the question of the geographical and linguistic origins of the text cannot be productively discussed further without a critical edition of the Continental version: Röhl, Der ‘Livre de Mandeville’, p. 19. 10  Mandeville, Le livre des merveilles du monde, ed. by Deluz, pp. 445–48. Deluz also edits the variant passage from the Continental version at pp. 485–86. 11  Mandeville, Travels, ed. by Seymour. On the sources of this version, see the ‘Introduction’, in Mandeville, Travels, ed. by Seymour, p. xx. 12  The ‘Introduction’, in Mandeville, Le livre des merveilles du monde, ed. by Deluz, pp. 31–32, dates the Vulgate version to 1375. Tzanaki, however, suggest a date of after 1396: Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences, p. 15. The Itinerarius domini Iohannis de Mandeville militis was printed in Cologne around 1485; a version opening with Liber presens cuius auctor fertur iohannes de mandeuille was printed in Gouda between 1483 and 1484.

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yet been attempted, I have used Richard Hakluyt’s edition from the Principall Navigations of 1589, an edition that at least has the benefit of wide availability in modern and electronic editions.13

The World, the Itinerary, and the Book Before discussing in detail the spatial representation of the Indies in the earliest vernacular versions of the BSJM, it is important to outline a few features of this complex text’s unusual structure and form. The form of writing about the world that we find in the BSJM is very different to the varieties of geographical writing — in encyclopaedias, in universal histories, in imagines mundi — discussed in Chapter 2. Christiane Deluz has argued that the BSJM should be considered a work of geography on the grounds of its concern to ‘sketch out a cartography of the whole earth’ (‘ébaucher une cartographie d’ensemble de la terre’), its use of ‘discours débrayé’ (‘disengaged discourse’), a third-person style characteristic of scientific writing that situates its meaning in the ‘permanent et non dans l’anecdotique’ (‘permanent, and not the anecdotal’), and the use it makes of varieties of geographical vocabulary.14 However, the defining characteristic of the text is its combination of different modes of spatial representation; cosmography, ecumenical geography, and itinerary are combined in the Book to create a new, multidimensional form. The structure of this complex and formally innovative work is also uniquely deceptive amongst works with geographical content produced in the late Middle Ages. Whilst it is presented in its prologue principally as an account 13  Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, i, 24–77 (henceforth PN); reprinted in facsimile as Quinn and Skelton, Principall Navigations. In Quinn’s ‘Introduction’ to that facsimile (p. xxvii), Hakluyt used the Gouda edition of c. 1483 or a textually very similar version as his base text. Both versions contain, normally at the ends of chapters, clearly signalled cross-referencing notes, including to Odorico’s Itinerarium, apparently absent from most manuscripts (see the late fifteenth-century copies in BL, MS Addit. 37512 and BL, MS Harley 3589). Bennett notes that Hakluyt is likely to have taken the threepart structure of his text from an edition attributed to Peter Van Os (Zwolle, 1483), an edition that also contains cross-referencing notes: Bennett, The Rediscovery of Sir John Mandeville, Appendix ii, no. 5, pp. 363–64. Because it is not clear at what point the three-part division and notes enter the textual tradition of this version, these are not considered in this discussion. In quotations from Hakluyt’s edition I have expanded ‘&’, and modernized punctuation. Translations from this text are my own. 14  Deluz, Le Livre de Jehan de Mandeville, pp. 33, 34–35, 137–46.

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of the Holy Land written for the benefit of those not able to make a journey of pilgrimage for themselves, only about half the subsequent text actually concerns itself with the Eastern Mediterranean. The remainder roams, with no clearly stated rationale, across Tartary, North Africa, South Asia, and the Indian Ocean, using itineraries such as Odorico’s Itinerarium, regional histories including Hayton’s Flor des Estoires, and encyclopaedic texts from Isidore’s seventh-century Etymologiarum to thirteenth-century works of reference like Bartolomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum and Brunetto Latini’s Tresor.15 Itineraries provide the Book’s underlying structure, but, rather as though its writer-traveller were intermittently pausing on his imagined route to examine and explain a map or set of cosmological diagrams, these itineraries are punctuated periodically by short bursts of descriptive geography, cosmography, historical narrative, and even theology.16 The Book’s structure seeks to reflect its understanding of the structure of the world, an understanding explicitly set out in one of its cosmographical asides. The itineraries from which it is composed are split into two clear groups, a division that appears to have been recognized amongst its earliest editors and translators.17 First comes a set of itineraries that treat ‘la Terre Seinte et del païs enviroun et des plusours chemins pur aler en celle terre’ (‘the holy lond and of that contree abouten and of many weyes for to go to that lond’). Attention is then turned to ways through the lands ‘beyond’ Jerusalem: the ‘marches des isles et diverses bestes et diverses gentz en outre ces marches’ (‘the marches and iles and dyuerse bestes and […] dyuerse folk beyond theise marches’; Merveilles, p. 286; Mandeville’s Travels (hereafter MT), p. 105). As Higgins has pointed out, this structural division replicates a cosmological one that is explicitly articulated by the Mandeville-author during a cosmographical digression from his description of the island of ‘Ynde’, Lamori (Sumatra).18 The digression sketches out a cosmological model that places Jerusalem ‘en my lieu de mounde’ (‘in the myddes of the world’; Merveilles, pp. 332–33; MT, p. 132): 15 

The Mandeville-author used Jean le Long’s collection of translations of texts concerning the Holy Land, manuscripts of which are discussed briefly in Chapter 3. The notes to Mandeville, Le livre des merveilles du monde, ed. by Deluz identify sources passage by passage. 16  Kohanski writes that the ‘guidebook and the itinerary are largely responsible for its structure’: Kohanski, ‘“What is a ‘travel book’, anyway?”’, p. 124. 17  It appears to be an original or at least very early feature of the Vulgate Latin tradition. See the Cologne edition, Mandeville, Itinerarius at d. viiv (no foliation), BL, MS Addit. 37512 at fol. 30r, and BL, MS Harley 3589 at fol. 102r. 18  Higgins, Writing East, p. 137.

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cils qe se partent de celles parties d’occident pur aler vers Jerusalem, atant des jorneies come ils mettent a mounter pur aler jusques la, en atant des jorneies poent aler de Jerusalem jusques as autres confins de la superficie de la terre par dela. (Merveilles, pp. 336–37) Thanne thei that parten fro tho parties of the west for to go toward Ierusalem, als many iorneyes as thei gon vpward for to go thider, in als many iourneyes may thei gon fro Ierusalem vnto other confynes of the superficialtee of the erthe beyonde. (MT, pp. 134–35)

In this explanation, the earth is imagined as a ball, the upper portion of which is occupied by a land mass that stretches from ‘these regions of the west’ to ‘the other ends of the surface of the earth over there’. The midpoint that distinguishes ‘par decea’ (‘over here’) from ‘par dela’ (‘beyond’) is Jerusalem. From any part of the surface of the oikoumene, the direction of travel towards Jerusalem is upward. In the context of this cosmological structure, then, the BSJM first takes its readers ‘upward’ to Jerusalem and its surrounding lands, before leading them downwards, towards ‘la basse partie de la terre vers orient’ (‘the lowe partie of the erthe toward the Est’), where are located ‘les terres Prestre Johan’ (‘the londes of Prestre Iohn’), the great Emperor of India, directly ‘dessouz nous’ (‘under us’), and still more ‘isles foraches’ (‘foreyn yles’) beyond (Merveilles, pp. 336–37; MT, pp. 134–35). It is the Book’s itineraries ‘par dela’ that form this chapter’s concern. These begin in Armenia and take readers on a not always logical journey via northern Africa and Hormuz (‘Crues’, an island of India according to the Mandevilleauthor), across the ocean to Manzi (southern China) and Cathay. With glances towards the lands to Cathay’s west and north, including a second visit to Persia and a survey of Media, eastern Christian lands, and North Africa, the BSJM then resumes its itinerary. It explains how ‘l’em passe’ (‘men passen’) through various regions ‘par dela’ (‘beyonde the contrees that I haue spoken of ’) through various strange kingdoms including the land of the lost tribes of Israel, from which lands ‘vait homme’ (‘gon men’) to Pentoxoyre, the realm of Prester John, an empire of ‘mult de bones citez et de bonez villes […] et mult de diverses isles grandes et large’ (‘many fulle noble cytees and gode townes […] and many grete dyuerse yles and large’; Merveilles, pp. 427, 431–32; MT, pp. 191, 194). The Mandeville-author stops for a while to describe many strange and wonderful places: the Old Man of the Mountain’s false paradise; the Perilous Valley; islands of marvellous and terrible beasts and peoples; the land of the Trees of the Sun and Moon; and Taprobane. There then follows a digression on the location and condition of an inaccessible Terrestrial Paradise that the narrating

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Sir John makes no claim to have visited. A final change of direction follows. Although onward passage would take the traveller back to his land of departure, the passage is too difficult, so ‘l’em retourne de les isles dessusdites par autres isles costeanz de la terre Prestre Johan’ (‘men returnen from tho yles aboueseyd be other yles costynge for the lond of Prestre John’) via Quinsai, Tibet, and the unnamed lands of an immensely rich man, reaching eventually the land of the Great Khan (Merveilles, pp. 472, 477; MT, pp. 223, 227). Through both cosmology and the movements of people, then, the lands on the far side of the known world are situated in the Book in relation both to one another and to the Mandeville-author’s own country. The Book’s combination of geography, cosmography, and itinerary bears not only the traces of the sources that contribute to its production but also traces of their multiple perspectives. We have seen how the cosmology of the oikoumene is imagined in the Book using the figure of the traveller going upwards to the centre of the world and downwards towards its edges.19 Such slips between itinerant and omniscient perspectives also occur in the Book’s occasional excursions into regional geography, such as the ‘short mappamundi-like geographical overview’, as Higgins terms it, in which the Mandeville-author sketches out the relationship between the Indies and neighbouring lands:20 En outre celle partie [Moretane] vers mydi, a passer par la mer Occeane, y ad grant terre et grant païs. Mes homme ne porroit habiter pur la grant ardour du solail […]. De Ethiope l’em va en Ynde par mointes diverses païs et appelle homme la haute Ynde Evilat [Havilah, Gen. 2. 10–12]. Et est Ynde divisé principalment en troiz parties, en Ynde la Majour q’est très chaud païs, et Ynde e Menour qe est attempree païs, que se tient a la terre de Mède, et la tierce partie vers septentrioun, qe est très froide. (Merveilles, pp. 302–05) And beyonde that partie [Mauritania] toward the south to passe by the See Occean is a gret lond and a gret contrey, but men may not duelle there for the feruent brennynge of the sonne […]. Fro Ethiope men gon into Ynde be manye diuerse contreyes. And men clepen the High Ynde Emlak. And Ynde is devyded in iii. princypalle parties; that is [Ynde] the More that is a fulle hoot contree and Ynde the Less that is a fulle atempree contrey that streccheth to the londe of Mede. And the iii. part toward the Septentrion is fulle cold. (MT, pp. 114–15)

On the one hand, using his characteristic ‘disengaged discourse’, the narrator places lands within the oikoumene and in relation to one another, and to the 19  20 

See Hiatt, Terra Incognita, p. 103. Higgins, Writing East, p. 124.

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Indies of textual tradition. Mauritania is towards the south, close to the encircling ocean and the Torrid Zone, whilst the northern Indies are exceptionally cold. ‘High Ynde’ is identified with biblical Havilah, just as it is in Bartolomaeus Anglicus’s encyclopaedia.21 On the other hand, and with sudden directional vagueness, the Mandeville-author switches between geographical and itinerant perspectives as he moves towards the Indies. To reach them ‘one travels’, he can only say, ‘through many different countries’. The shift in perspective here, between geographical and itinerant ways of knowing the world, opens up a seam in the Book’s attempt to represent an image of the world that harmonizes the perspectives of traveller and geographer. The Book shows itself to be concerned, then, not just with representing the world but also with the appropriateness of form to the nature of the space it attempts to represent. The Mandeville-author structures the Book to mirror the world it seeks to represent, confects a single spatial representation out of multiple perspectives, imagines cosmology through the experience of the traveller, embeds the experiences of the individual traveller within a geographical and cosmological framework, and, occasionally, shows signs of the difficulty of his compositional task.

Insular Indies: Human Diversity and Spatial Interconnectedness The BSJM’s representation of the Indies has been the subject of much scholarly attention before now, and two approaches have been particularly influential. On the one hand, Mandeville’s East has sometimes been interpreted as ‘a convenient screen for imaginative projection’, that is, an arena in which Western European preoccupations, dreams, and fantasies are played out, rather like Le Goff ’s ‘oneiric horizon’ discussed in the Introduction.22 On the other hand, several scholars have commented on a perceived ‘specular’ relationship of intentional parallelism, whether set up between East and West, infidel and Christian, or monster and normative, in which the former term facilitates critical reflection upon the latter.23 In both cases, focus on ‘par dela’ is redirected, 21 

Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Le Livre des regions, ed. by Pitts, p. 21. I quote here from Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, p. 148; Le Goff, ‘The Medieval West and the Indian Ocean’, p. 20. 23  On the specular and critically reflective relationship, see in particular Higgins, Writing East, p. 137, but also Salih, ‘Idols and Simulacra’, p. 127; and Akbari, ‘The Diversity of Mankind in the Book of John Mandeville’, p. 170, where it is argued that Mandeville creates an India that is 22 

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attention reverting, in different ways and for different reason, on the lands and peoples ‘par decea’. It is undoubtedly the case that a major concern of the Book is to imagine a culturally useful relationship between the writer’s world and the world beyond that can encompass critical reflection and self-examination. Nonetheless, it is important to ensure that focus on the image of the self in the mirror or the self ’s fantasy in the projection does not preclude investigation of the book as a spatial representation of lands, peoples, and cultures believed to exist beyond itself. While some parts may be fantastical and others reflective, the Book, it must be stressed, nonetheless makes a wholehearted attempt to represent the wider world and to create meaningful, contemporary, spatial relationships between that world and its own. With this in mind, the following sections explore how the Insular Book places the Indies within that wide world, a world experienced and understood through missionary activity, trade, economics, cosmology, and eschatology. Indies of Eschatology and Mission Given that the ‘Christocentric’ and pious nature BSJM’s vision of the world is widely recognized, it is surprising, perhaps, that the role of missionary activity and conversion ideology in the work has not received more attention.24 It is true that, as Salih points out, the Book contains no explicit calls for missionary endeavour to bring about reforms in the pagan societies it depicts. 25 Yet missions still recent in the 1350s, when the Book was composed, affect both its geographical content and, at an ideological level, its interpretations of spatial and human diversity. The influence of recent missionary experience on the content of the latter part of the Book comes principally through its extensive reuse of Odorico da Pordenone’s Itinerarium, largely through the medium of the Benedictine Jean le Long’s mid-fourteenth-century French translation (discussed in Chapter 3). Odorico’s description of a long, island-hopping journey across the western and eastern Indian Oceans is the likely inspiration for part of the Mandeville-author’s opening description of the Indies, characterized as a ‘counter-image’ or ‘contrarie’ of England specifically. 24  Quoting Salih, ‘Idols and Simulacra’, p. 128. See Housley, ‘Perceptions of Crusading in the Mid-Fourteenth Century’, pp. 429–31; and, very fleetingly, Fleck, ‘Here, There, and In Between’, pp. 391–92. 25  Salih, ‘Idols and Simulacra’, p. 120.

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a vast maritime and insular region full of great cities and numerous peoples. In and around India there are plus de Vmil isles habitables bons et grandes sanz celles que sont inhabitabitables et sanz autres petites. Et en chescune isle y ad grant foisoun des citez, et des villes et des gentz sanz nombre. mo than v.m iles gode and grete that men duellen in, withouten tho that ben inhabitable and withouten othere smale iles. In euery ile is gret plentee of cytees and of townes and of folk withouten nombre.26

Odorico’s Itinerarium is also the direct source of several of Mandeville’s itineraries in the latter part of the Book, as well as providing the nuclei of his expanded descriptions of the ‘diverse’ religions of the peoples encountered along the way. Just as in Odorico’s Itinerarium, the people of Chana (Odorico’s Tana; Thane) ‘adorent le solail et ascuns le feu, ascuns arbres, ascuns serpentz, ou la primere chose q’ils encountrent la matinee’ (‘worschipe the sonne, summe the mone, summe the fuyr, summe trees, summe serpentes or the firste thing that thei meeten at morwen’). To this nucleus of observation the Mandeville-author adds that ‘ascuns adorent simulacres, et ascuns idoles’ (‘summe worschipen symulacres and summe ydoles’; Merveilles, p. 315; MT, p. 121) and a discussion of the difference between idols and simulacra that draws on encyclopaedic sources.27 Also harvested from the Itinerarium is the detail that the city of Chana was once controlled by Porus but that now ‘les Sarrazins ount gaigné et la tiegnent’ (‘the Sarazines han wonnen and holden’; Merveilles, pp. 315, 318; MT, pp. 121, 123). And so he continues as the itinerary proceeds through the continental and insular Indies, drawing upon and embellishing Odorico’s details concerning reverence towards the ox in Polombe (Kollam), idol worship at the former church of the apostle Thomas (Merveilles, pp. 320–21, 326–27; MT, pp. 125, 127), and Odorico’s description of naked, communally living practitioners of free love in Lamori (Sumatra; Merveilles, pp. 331–32; MT, p. 131). The Book’s description of the king of Java’s magnificent palace, its accounts 26  Mandeville, Le livre des merveilles du monde, ed. by Deluz, p. 312; Mandeville, Travels, ed. by Seymour, p. 118. The many islands of the Indian Ocean are underscored again at p. 367 and p. 433 (Mandeville, Le livre des merveilles du monde, ed. by Deluz) and p. 135, p. 195 (Mandeville, Travels, ed. by Seymour). Jean le Long’s translation is edited in Odorico da Pordenone, Le voyage, ed. by Andreose and Ménard. 27  See Odorico da Pordenone, Le voyage, ed. by Andreose and Ménard, p. 9. The detail about worship of the first thing encountered in the morning may be borrowed from Marco Polo, Polo, Le Divisament dou monde, ed. by Ronchi, p. 543.

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of anthropophagy, of the dog-headed people of Necuveran, and Adam’s peak in Sri Lanka are all drawn from Odorico’s Itinerarium but always interleaved with embellishments, explanations, and additional lands and peoples drawn from encyclopaedias and mirabilia.28 Even the Book’s metageography at times shows the Itinerarium’s influence. The Indies are divided into ‘La Majour’, ‘le Menour’, and an unidentified ‘tierce partie’, the first of which is identified, as in the Itinerarium, with Manzi (southern China; Merveilles, p. 359; MT, p. 148). Yet the extent of the Mandeville-author’s debt of content and geography to Odorico’s Itinerarium should not obscure its debt to the broader intellectual context and ideology of mission and conversion. The Book’s treatment of its missionary sources suggests that it is the work of someone who has read and entered into the spirit of the most optimistic accounts of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century missions in Asia. Although he builds upon details found in the Itinerarium, the Mandeville-author considerably exaggerates the impact of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century missionary endeavours in the Indies. In the city of Zarchee, a short distance by boat from Tana, the BSJM conjures up a thriving Christian community served by mendicants: y demoerent moutz des christiens de bone foy, et si ad moultz des religiouns especialment des Mendiuanz. (Merveilles, p. 318) there duellen many Cristene men of gode feyth, and there ben manye religious men and namely of mendynantes. (MT, p. 123)

As we saw in Chapter 2, there is little in the Itinerarium to lead to such a conclusion.29 Odorico presents the region of Tana as inhabited principally by ‘idolastres’ but under the political control of the Delhi Sultanate. Further down the west coast of India, two towns named Flandrine and Singulun are reported by the friar to be inhabited by quarrelling Christians and Jews, but nothing is said of mendicant houses there.30 The town of Zarchee, and its community of good Christians whose needs are ministered to by mendicants, thus emerge as the Mandeville-author’s own inventions.31 The Book seems, in fact, to be engag28 

Mandeville, Le livre des merveilles du monde, ed. by Deluz, pp. 344, 352, 356, 350–51; Mandeville, Travels, ed. by Seymour, pp. 139, 146–47, 143, 144–45. 29  See Odorico da Pordenone, Le voyage, ed. by Andreose and Ménard, pp. 8–21. 30  Glossed by Wyngaert as Pandarani and Cranganore: Sinica franciscana, ed. by van den Wyngaert and others, i (1929), 439, nn. 3, 4. 31  Deluz and Seymour both gloss Zarchee as Broach, but neither provide sources: Mandeville, Le livre des merveilles du monde, ed. by Deluz, p. 324, n. 10; and Mandeville, Travels,

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ing here in the kind of exaggeration of the scale and influence of Christianity that Higgins locates in its descriptions of Cathay and Manzi, exaggeration that ‘conjures up the dream of a vastly expanded Christendom’.32 In this Christian fantasy world, the missions in the Indies and China of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were not the intermittent, reactive, and ultimately short-lived phenomenon of historical record but a far-reaching and long-lived success.33 However, the Book’s missionary vision of a Christian world is based on rather more than an exaggeration of recent mendicant activities in the East. In Mandeville’s Indies, where Catholic Christianity has not penetrated, other forms sometimes have. The lands of Prester John, located in the BSJM at the opposite end of the world from the narrator’s own England, are home to people who follow the teachings of St Thomas the Apostle. There, the Apostle’s teachings are, according to the Book, uncontaminated or uncorrected (depending on one’s point of view) by ‘addiciouns qe ly papes ount depuis faites’ (‘addiciouns that dyuerse popes han made’; Merveilles, p. 463; MT, p. 217). But, above all, a missionary vision of one world waiting to be united under one God underpins the Book’s presentation of all the ‘diverses gentz des diverses leis et des diverses facions’ (‘different peoples of different laws and shapes’) situated in the lands and islands in and around the Indies (Merveilles, p. 463; MT, p. 217). To understand fully the BSJM’s treatment of human diversity in the world, we need to turn again to the intellectual and ideological context of the missionary activities, introduced in Chapter 2, which contributed with varying degrees of directness to its composition. The missions to India and China in which Giovanni da Montecorvino, Jordan Catala, and Odorico da Pordenone participated were, of course, the product of a range of complex circumstances. But, as Felicitas Schmieder has argued, a growing belief in the ‘[e]schatological necessity’ of mission, influenced by prophecies of impending apocalypse, took ed. by Seymour, index. Since Broach is not mentioned in manuscripts of the Itinerarium, a more likely explanation is perhaps that the Mandeville-author was inspired by a reference, deep in the Tana martyrdoms narrative, to ‘quamdam civitatem Çaitum, in qua sunt duo loca nostrorum fratrum’ (‘a certain city, Çaitum, in which there are two houses of our friars’): Sinica franciscana, ed. by van den Wyngaert and others, i (1929), 438. Intentionally or unintentionally failing to identify this with the ‘Çaiton’/‘Zayton’ in India Superior later in the same text (Sinica fran­ ciscana, ed. by van den Wyngaert and others, i (1929), 460), the Mandeville-author may have embellished Odorico’s brief detail into a full, new city. 32  Higgins, Writing East, pp. 166–67, 169, and quotation at p. 160. 33  On the end of the missions and for an assessment of their reactive nature, see Muldoon, Popes, Lawyers and Infidels, pp. 92–96.

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root in the thirteenth-century Church.34 The influence of this millenarian context upon papal policy regarding mission is evident in the bull with which Gregory  IX in 1235 first dispatched Franciscan preachers to unconverted regions: Cum hora undecima [Matt. 20.  6] sit diei hominibus […] illud Apocalipsis elogium citò credatur cum Matris Ecclesiæ consolatione complendum; videlicet oportere viros spirituales vitæ munditiam, et intelligentiæ gratiam [Rev. 10.  11] cum Johanne sortitos Populis, et Gentibus, Linguis, Regibusque multis denuò prophetare; quia non sequetur reliquiarum Israel per Esayam Prophetam salvatio, nisi juxta Paulum Apostolum primò introeat Gentium plenitudo [Is. 12. 21; Rom. 11. 25].35 Since it is the last hour of mankind’s day […] the prediction of the Apocalypse may be believed, with the consolation of Mother Church, to be close to fulfilment. That is to say, it is necessary that spiritual men of pure life and endowed with intelligence should go out to the many peoples and heathens, languages and kings to prophesy anew. Because the salvation of the remnant of Israel, as prophesied by Isaiah, will not follow unless, according to the Apostle Paul, the multitude of heathens has first entered [the fold].

Franciscan and Dominican missionaries were dispatched into the field with an urgent sense of working against the clock at a task essential to the unfolding of providential history. The influence of the papal bull continued well beyond its date of composition; it was reissued six times over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, often with an expanded list of target gentes.36 In a parallel but related development, as Muldoon has shown, the traditional pastoral conceptualization of the Church, rooted in the common New Testament trope of Christ as shepherd and his followers as his flock, was extended to encompass ‘infidels’ such as the Mongols. Innocent IV, who in his capacity as pope reissued Cum hora decima and initiated the Mongol mission of 1245, commented ‘in his capacity as a canon lawyer’ that ‘Christ had spoken to his apostles of other sheep which He had which were not of this flock, a statement which the pope took to mean that those outside of the Church were also the sheep of Christ, 34 

Schmieder, ‘Cum hora undecima’, p. 260. Bullarium franciscanum, ed. by Sbaraglia, i (1759), p. 269. Translations from this bull are my own. 36  Muldoon, ‘The Avignon Papacy and the Frontiers of Christendom’, p. 143. Muldoon, Popes, Lawyers and Infidels, pp. 36–38. Schmieder, ‘Cum hora undecima’, p. 260. In a 1253 version of the bull issued to the Dominicans, the Tartars are added. Indians are first mentioned in the bull of 1245: Richard, La Papauté et les missions d’Orient, p. 139, n. 66. 35 

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for whom His vicar was responsible’.37 The thirteenth century, then, saw the development of twin legal and eschatological frameworks for mission, within which unconverted nations of non-Christians were conceived of not as peoples of different religions in their own distinct spatial and temporal situations but as lost sheep, lagging behind Latin Christians on the road to salvation. All potentially Christians, the unconverted nations became the Church’s responsibility, and therefore needed to be shepherded forwards through Christian history, towards their inevitable unification with Latin Christendom. The Book of Sir John Mandeville’s account of the lands ‘par decea’ (‘over there’) sets out to paint a detailed picture of the eastern and southern components of the plenitudo gentium that form the target of the missions launched by Cum hora undecima. Indeed, one of this account’s most striking characteristics is the rhetorical effort put into persuading readers that, irrespective of their ‘different laws and shapes’, the pagan peoples it describes fall potentially or actually within the compass of God’s love. Following his first mention of idolatrous practices on the ‘isle’ of Chana (Thane), the Mandeville-author stresses that those who worship simulacra believe nonetheless in a greater God. They ‘scievent bien q’ils ne sont mie dieux, qar il y ad le Dieu de nature qe fist touz choses’ (‘seyn wel that thei be not goddes, for thei knowen wel that there is a god of kynde that made alle thinges’; Merveilles, p. 315; MT, p. 121).38 Practice by practice, the Mandeville-author then carefully investigates worship of the sun, fire, snakes, and the first thing that one sees in the morning, repositioning these practices as rational behaviours that, while not necessarily monotheistic, are nonetheless not inconsistent with monotheism. Towards the end of his account of the ‘diverse gentz’ of the Indies, the Mandeville-author takes a similar amount of trouble to argue that it is possible for virtuous pagans to be dear to God. The Book makes the claim following a description of the virtuous Brahmans of Christian and ancient tradition, whom he locates on an outlying island of Prester John’s Indian empire. After describing the Brahman King Dindymus’s correspondence with Alexander the Great, in which the virtuous lives of the Brahmans are delineated, the Book argues that, although they do not have ‘les articles de la foy’ (‘the articles of oure feyth’), nonetheless ‘pur lour bone foy naturele et pur lour bone entencioun’ (‘for hire gode feyth naturelle and for hire gode entent’) he believes that ‘Dieu 37 

Muldoon, ‘The Avignon Papacy and the Frontiers of Christendom’, p. 138, quoted at n. 13. A detailed examination of the Book’s discussion of idolatry can be found in Salih, ‘Idols and Simulacra’, in particular pp. 118–22. 38 

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les ayme’ (‘God loueth hem’; Merveilles, pp. 459–60, MT, p. 214). The Book supports this radically inclusive statement first with the biblical story of the virtuous pagan Job, loved by God, and then with a pastoral metaphor familiar from Innocent IV’s canonical thought. The narrator points out Christ’s claim that ‘Alias oves habeo que non sunt ex hoc ovili’ (‘I have other sheep that are not of this flock’: John 10. 16). ‘[T]hat is to seyne’, in the words of the Cotton translator’s helpful vernacular interpolation, ‘that He hadde othere seruauntes than tho that ben vnder Cristene lawe’ (Merveilles, p. 460; MT, p. 214). Like Innocent IV, the narrator considers those outside the Latin Christian Church to be the other sheep of Christ, whether or not they yet recognize the fact. In a related passage at the very end of the Book, the narrator returns to the same theme. As long as they have the capacity for human reason, he argues, all peoples who hold to diverse religious laws recognize one God: il n’ya ad nul gent, pur quoy ils aient en eux resoun et entendement, qe n’aient ascuns articles de nostre foy et ascuns bons pointz de nostre creaunce, et q’ils ne croient en Dieu qy fist le mounde q’ils appelent dieu de nature, solonc le prophete qe a dit ‘Et metuent [eum] omnes fines terre.’ Et aillors: ‘Omnes gentes servient ei.’ (Merveilles, p. 477) yit is there non of hem alle but that thei han sum resoun within hem and vnderstondynge — but yif it be the fewere — and that han certeyn articles of oure feith and summe gode poyntes of oure beleeve; and that thei beleeven in God that formede alle thing and made the world and clepen Him God of Nature, after that the prophete seyth, Et metuent eum omnes fines terre [and all the ends of the earth shall fear him], and also in another place, Omnes gentes seruient ei, That is to seyne, Alle folk schul seruen him. (MT, p. 227)

However, while these diverse peoples may know something of God and hold some correct tenets of belief, they ‘ne scievent mie parfaitement parler, qar ils n’ount qe lour devise forsquez ensy q’ils entendent de lour sen naturel’ (‘But yit thei cone not speken perfytly, for there is no man to techen hem, but only that thei cone deuyse be hire naturelle wytt’; Merveilles, p. 477; MT, p. 227). On the one hand, the Book attempts, in a manner that has been termed ‘culturally relativist’, to understand and rationalize the religious diversity of the Indies, while, on the other, it is thoroughly conditioned by the orthodox religious intellectual context of conversion.39 The influence of this context is signalled not only by the Book’s use of the pastoral imagery of the universal Church to discuss the 39 

Salih notes the paradox that the text is both ‘Christocentric and culturally relativist’: Salih, ‘Idols and Simulacra’, p. 128; Higgins also suggests that the Book’s account of the dogheaded men shows a cautiously relativistic tolerance: Higgins, Writing East, pp. 146–49.

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diverse peoples of the world but also through its conceptualization of these peoples’ relationship with religious truth. In the extract cited here, the Book explains that the diverse peoples of the world’s furthest reaches, whilst having some access to religious truth, do not know how to speak ‘perfytly’ of God, because they only know what they ‘cone deuyse be hire naturelle wytt’. The language and concepts here echo the theorization of enlightenment and conversion of the great thirteenth-century Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274). The role of the Mandevilleauthor’s ‘naturelle wytt’, for instance, echoes that proposed for ‘natural reason’ (naturalis ratio) in the theory of conversion that Aquinas developed across his Summa contra gentiles and Summa Theologica. ‘Natural reason’ is, in Aquinas’s explanation, an aspect of ‘possible intellect’ (intellectum possibilis), a God-given capacity that, in Aquinas’s theology, distinguishes humans (whether Christian or not) from beasts. 40 In Aquinas’s theorization, certain religious truths, including a monotheistic belief in a single creator God, may be reached by humans through natural reason (which is in itself God-given) without the aid of further divine revelation. Man does not need, he argues, a new light added to this natural light of reason to discern the truth in all things, but only in some that are beyond the scope of natural knowledge.41 Nevertheless, the level of understanding of God that humans may reach without divine revelation is insufficient for salvation, for which the superadded divine light of grace is

40  ‘Ergo intellectus possibilis est aliqua pars hominis, et est dignissimum et formalissimum in ipso. Igitur ab eo speciem sortitur, et non ab intellectu passivo’ (‘The possible intellect is part of man. And it is the most noble and formal thing in him. Hence, man derives his specific nature from it, and not from the passive intellect’): Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, ed. by Busa and others, ii, lib. ii. Ch., 60.4; translation from Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, ii: Creation, trans. by Anderson, p. 184. For a discussion of the possible intellect, see the ‘Introduction’ in Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, i: God, trans. by Pegis, p. 29. A review of scholarship on the nature and purpose of this disputed work can be found in Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, trans. by Royal, i: The Person and His Work (1996), pp. 104–07. 41  ‘Sic igitur intellectus humanus habet aliquam formam, scilicet ipsum intelligibile lumen quod est de se sufficiens ad quædam intelligibilia cognoscenda, ad ea scilicet in quorum notitiam per sensibilia possumus devenire. […] Non autem indiget ad cognoscendam veritatem in omnibus, nova illustratione superaddita naturali illustrationi; sed in quibusdam, quae excedunt naturalem cognitionem’ (‘Thus the human intellect has a form, namely the intelligible light itself, which is sufficient of itself for the knowledge of certain intelligible realities. […] He [i.e., man] does not however need a new light, supplementing his natural light, in order to know the truth in all cases, but only in certain cases which transcend natural knowledge’): Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ: The Gospel of Grace, ed. and trans. by Ernst, Q. 109, ar. 1, 70–71.

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required.42 In the vernacular BSJM versions cited here, rational peoples incline by ‘sen naturel’ (‘naturelle wytt’), or natural reason, towards a monotheistic belief in a ‘dieu de nature’ (‘god of nature’). But, although in his discussion of the Brahmans the Mandeville-author leaves open the possibility that pagans may serve God, he is careful in this particular extract to stop short of insisting that monotheistic beliefs reached through ‘naturelle wytt’ are sufficient for salvation. At the same time as the Book asserts the common ground between all human belief systems, then, it simultaneously asserts the partial and imperfect nature of human reason and belief systems without revelation to complete these. The unconverted have, Cotton translates, only ‘summe gode poyntes’ of belief. They ‘cone not speken perfytly’, but ‘only’ as their natural reason teaches them, because they lack teachers to preach the Gospel. The BSJM’s finely balanced discussions of pagan piety carry echoes, then, of the scholastic theology of natural reason and its role in conversion, and the eschatological framework of mission developed, principally by Aquinas, in thirteenth-century Dominican contexts. The millenarian zeal and urgency that motivated Cum hora undecima may well be absent from the Book, reflecting a dissipation of proselytizing energy after its thirteenth-century high-water mark. Nonetheless, the Mandeville-author’s use of the Psalmist’s prophecies that ‘all nations shall serve him’ (Vulgate Ps. 72. 11) and ‘all the ends of the earth shall fear him’ (Vulgate Ps. 67. 7) echo Cum hora undecima’s eschatological certainty of the potential and eventual unification of the gentium pleni­ tudo under Christ. Through its insistence on deep-level commonality of beliefs, the Book aims to prove empirically what Innocent IV and later canonists and popes asserted as the legal-theological principle underlying missionary endeavours: that the unconverted pagans are ‘other sheep’ belonging to Christ but not (yet) ‘of this flock’. Such peoples’ imperfections are, strikingly, presented in the BSJM as markers not of wilful depravity but of involuntary neglect. They do not rightly understand because ‘there is no man to techen hem’. In the light of the context out of which the Book grew, such a statement could be read as a muted rebuke to a Christendom — perhaps even to a papal shepherd — that claims universal responsibilities but does not live up to these. Missionary activity and the ideology that underpinned it leave their marks upon many aspects of the BSJM’s representation of Indian space and peoples. However, it is important to recognize that the Book does not simply absorb and radiate missionary ideology but converts it in ways appropriate to its own tem42 

For a full discussion, see Quinn, ‘Aquinas, the Intellect, and Divine Enlightenment’.

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poral moment and purposes. It is no longer the eleventh hour. Instead of urgent calls to action, the BSJM offers a calm depiction of a potential and eventually Christian world, awaiting conversion through the teachers whose absence is quietly and regretfully noted. The result is a representation that presents the bodily, behavioural, and religious diversity of the Indies from two distinct temporal perspectives. The narrator repeatedly requires readers of his description of the Indies to consider not only Indians’ current spatial and religious diversity but also, at the same time, their potential and ultimate status as part of Christ’s flock in eternity. Trading Connections and Cosmological Reflections Constructions of the Indies as a site of past and future Christian missions form only one facet of the BSJM’s multidimensional spatial representation. The Book’s representation of Indian space and of the relationships between lands ‘par decea’ and ‘par dela’ also bears traces of the practices of mercantile travel and cosmological speculation. Indeed, the plurality of the Book’s world vision results from the interplay of all these ways of constructing and interacting with one’s world. Just as the Mandeville-author sets out a theological understanding of the world that unites Latin Christendom with pagan Indian diversity, so he also shows a parallel concern with the world’s cosmological and mercantile interconnectedness. Indeed, Higgins finds this concern so strong that the Book might have been written ‘in response to E. M. Forster’s injunction in Howards End: “Only connect”’. 43 However, while connection is certainly powerful amongst the Insular Book’s guiding principles, the work’s dialogic form ensures that the vision of global interconnectedness that it sketches out does not always go unchallenged. In view of the Book’s clear ‘Christocentric’ focus and theological concerns, it may seem unlikely that an understanding of the world as a commercial space could also permeate the text. Yet, sometimes drawing on specific sources and sometimes inventing, the Mandeville-author presents the world as connected by mercantile activities, often those of Western European traders. Passing references to the ubiquity across the East of Genoese merchants are found in fourteenth-century works ranging from William Adam’s De modo sarracenos extir­ pandi to Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, whilst Marco Polo’s Book secured

43 

Higgins, Writing East, p. 127.

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the reputation of Venetian merchants.44 The Mandeville-author draws on these references and adds to their number, interspersing his account of travels towards and within the Indies with references to the trade routes taken by Venetian and Genoese travellers through the regions ‘par dela’.45 Towards the very beginning of the Book’s second part, instructions are given for eastward travel, but they offer only Venice and Genoa as specific points of departure (Merveilles, p. 288; MT, p. 106). Later in the Book’s second part, the maritime and insular Indies, a region of ‘diverses gentz des diverses leis et des diverses facions’ (‘dyuerse folk and of dyuerse maneres and lawes and of dyuerse schappes of men’), is presented as criss-crossed by the well-trodden paths of travelling European merchants (Merveilles, p. 93; MT, p. 3). Hormuz may be a long journey ‘par mointes diverses contrees jusques la grant mer Occeane’ (‘by many diuerse contrees to the Grete See Occean’), but it is also a trading colony where ‘ly marchauntz de Venise de Janewe et des autres marchiez y vont souvent pur marchandises achater’ (where ‘comen marchantes of Venyse and Gene and of other marches for to byen marchandyses’; Merveilles, p. 313; MT, p. 120). Even distant Cathay is first introduced in the BSJM as a regular destination for ‘ly merchantz qe vont de Janewe, ou de Venise, ou d’autre part de Lombardie ou de Romanie’ (‘Marchaundes that comen fro Gene or fro Venyse or fro Romanye or other parties of Lombardye’), and only subsequently as the principal region of the Great Khan’s marvellously wealthy lands (Merveilles, p. 369; MT, p. 154). Overall, the potentially alienating effect of repeated references to the religious, behavioural, and environmental diversities of the lands ‘par dela’ is neutralized by the familiarizing effect of an itinerary that turns the traversal of such regions in the service of trade into a matter of routine. Perhaps the most surprising demonstration of commerce’s power not just to connect the world but also to shape it, however, comes not from one of the parts of the BSJM that draws on travellers’ itineraries or even on one of its well-informed oriental histories, such as Hayton’s Flor des Estoires. Rather, it emerges from a section that relies on a staple of late medieval legend: the Letter of Prester John. Using the formal techniques of itinerary, the Mandeville-author 44 

Boccaccio has the narrating Filostrato defer to the authority of ‘certain Genoese’ at the start a novella set in Cathay: Boccaccio, Decameron, trans. by McWilliam, 10.3, p. 743. William Adam suggests that they would be good partners in his proposed blockade of the Indian Ocean on account of their experience in the region: Adam, De modo Sarracenos extirpandi, ed. by Kohler, pp. 551, 553. 45  The index to Mandeville, Le livre des merveilles du monde, ed. by Deluz gives eleven references to Venetian travellers and eight to Genoese.

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connects the fabulous realm of Prester John, which he situates beyond Cathay, to the matrix of itineraries that structures the text: De la vait homme par mointez jornées parmy la terre Prestre Johan ly grant emperour de Ynde, et appelle homme soun roialme l’isle Pentoxoyre. (Merveilles, p. 431) From thens gon men be many iourneyes thorgh the lond of Prestre John, the grete Emperour of Ynde. And men clepen his roialme the yle of Pentexoire. (MT, p. 194)

The Book’s directions to Pentoxoyre, Prester John’s realm, are indistinguishable in language and structure from its directions to most of the islands on the itinerary that the Mandeville-author borrows from Odorico.46 Yet the powerful emperor, the sandy sea, rivers of jewels, supernatural trees, and the magnificent palace he describes in what follows are all those of the twelfth-century Letter, but woven into the Book’s practised, traversable space. The Book goes further still, indeed, as it seeks to integrate fabulous imagined landscapes of Prester John’s realm into a world known and understood in mercantile terms. When, in an original interpolation, the narrator explains why his readers may not read much about the lands of Prester John in the accounts of contemporary travellers, he does so in economic terms. This emperor’s domain is mult bon et mult riche. Mes noun pas si riches come cely de Grant Chan, qar ly marchantz ne vont mie la si comunement pur achater marchandises come ils font en la terre de Grant Chan, qar il est trop loinz, et d’autre part ils troevent en l’isle de Cathay tout ceo qe mistier lour est, et soie, et espices, et draps d’or, et toute avoir du poys. Et pur ceo, come bienq’il ussent meillour marché en la terre Prestre Johan, nientmoinz ilz doutent la longe voie et les grantz perils qe sont en mer en celles parties. (Merveilles, pp. 433–34) full gode and ryche, but not so riche as is the lond of the Grete Chane. For the marchauntes comen not thider so comounly for to bye marchaundises as thei don in the lond of the Grete Chane, for it is to fer to trauaylle to. And on that other partie, in the yle of Cathay, men fynden alle manere thing that is nede to man, clothes of gold, of silk, of spycerye and alle maner auere de poys [of goods]. And therfore, alle be it that men han gretter chep [a better bargain] in the yle of Prestre John, natheless men dreden the longe weye and the grete periles in the see in tho partyes. (MT, p. 195) 46 

Odorico also gives Prester John a place in his itinerary, placing his lands (an island named Pentexoire in Jean le Long’s translation) to the west of Cathay and identifying its greatest city as Casam. The Mandeville-author for the most part overlooks Odorico’s more understated description, in which the priest-king is minimally treated and represented as just another eastern potentate connected by marriage to the Great Khan. Instead, he draws on the Letter and other such fabulous sources: Odorico da Pordenone, Le voyage, ed. by Andreose and Ménard, p. 53.

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Having made what in the world of modern business one might call a risk-benefit analysis, balancing the good bargains available in the lands of Prester John against the length and ‘grete periles’ of the journey, European merchants prefer not to make the trip but, rather, stop at Cathay, which, at eleven or twelve months’ travel from Genoa or Venice, is considerably nearer Europe than is Prester John’s land (Merveilles, p. 434; MT, p. 196). Not only is the fantastical realm of Prester John brought into the mercantile world of travel and navigation but also the economic laws of long-distance trade are invoked to explain why it is so rarely reached and reported on by Europeans. In fact, these laws are not dissimilar to those invoked by some scholars to explain why direct trade between Western Europe and the Indies and China was less profitable than one might think — and therefore not more common — in the late Middle Ages.47 But particularly surprising in the Book’s discussion of the relative wealth of the lands of Cathay and Prester John is the chain of causality assumed, which shows a conception of a world not only connected by mercantile activity but also shaped by it. In the Insular version and Cotton translation cited here, the text does not explicitly report that merchants go to Prester John’s realm less because the opportunities for trade there are fewer. On the contrary, it underscores that ‘il ussent meillour marché en la terre Prestre Iohan’ (‘they would have a better bargain in the land of Prester John’). In the Mandeville-author’s spatial logic, the physical distance between lands and the dangers of the journeys between them influence mercantile practice. It is this mercantile practice that influences the distribution of wealth in the world. The land of Prester John is ‘not so riche as is the lond of the grete Chane’ because (‘qar’; ‘for’) merchants do not go there to trade. The legendary wealth of the Indies, a seemingly eternal characteristic of the region since the earliest Greek descriptions, is pragmatically reimagined in the BSJM as the product of human economic activity. So far, I have explored how the Book connects the diverse Indies to their Western European audiences through ethnographic explanation, theology, and mercantile practice. But the Book’s intermittent cosmological and geographical digressions also participate in its placing of the Indies. The Book digresses into 47 

Lopez’s economic analysis showed that the risks of long-distance and long-term enterprises were high, and the returns were not sufficiently high to compensate for these. Lopez works out that, in a case of a compagnia travelling to the Sultanate of Delhi in 1338, an investor’s interest rate amounted to only 15 per cent annually, compared to a usual interest rate on commercial loans in Venice of 8 per cent, even though the risk of the Delhi enterprise was far greater: Lopez, ‘Venezia e le grandi linee dell’espansione commerciale nel secolo xiii’, pp. 60–61. For a referenced discussion of recent scholarship on the profitability or otherwise of direct trade with the Indies and, in particular, China, see Jackson, The Mongols and the West, p. 299.

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discussions of ecumenical geography and cosmology at several points during its description of the lands ‘par dela’. But, in this dialogic geography, the Book’s cosmologies are not always consistent with one another. At times, in fact, the text’s account of the Indies bears the influences of competing cosmological visions: one of the known world as a bounded oikoumene, and the other a vision of global interconnectedness. From time to time, the Book shows the influence the late antique zonal cosmology set out by commentators such as Macrobius, in which the oikoumene of the northern hemisphere is bounded to the south by a zone of heat and a band of ocean. Early in the second part of the BSJM, before he advances on his journey through the Indies, the narrating Sir John describes Africa. Along the way he locates the two Ethiopias often found in classical tradition, not only in relation to their surrounding lands but also in cosmological terms: Et en outre celle partie [southern Ethiopia or Mauritania] vers mydi, a passer par la mer Occeane, y ad grant terre et grant païs. Mes homme ne porroit habiter pur la grant ardour du solail, si fait chaud en celle terre. (Merveilles, p. 304) And beyonde that partie toward the south to passe by the See Occean is a gret lond and a gret contrey, but men may not duelle there for the feruent brennynge of the sonne, so is it passynge hoot in that contrey. (MT, p. 114)

Southern Ethiopia (or Mauritania) is, in the cosmology implied here, located at edge of a habitable world imagined in terms reminiscent of Macrobius and Isidore of Seville.48 To the south of southern Ethiopia, across the sea, is a southern continent: torrid terra incognita, imagined, following Macrobius and Isidore, to exist beyond an encircling band of equatorial Ocean. The BSJM stops short of affirming that this ‘contrey’ is inaccessible (and so, by implication, unknowable) due to the heat of the sun, but states firmly that it is uninhabitable. In this cosmological schema, southern Ethiopia forms a kind of borderland: the waters there are troubled on account of the heat, ‘gentz’ (‘folk’) become ill and live short lives, but ‘diverses gentz’ (‘dyuerse folk’) flourish (Merveilles, p. 304; MT, pp. 114–15). We see representations of something similar in the monsters attributed to southern Africa on world maps such as the Hereford and Ebstorf examples discussed in Chapter 6 below (see plate 1). Southern Ethiopia is, in this schema, situated at the very edge of the part of the world that is open to human habitation. 48 

On ‘Macrobian’ cosmology, see Chapter 1 above; on Isidore’s discussion and deployment of antipodean tropes, see Hiatt, Terra Incognita, pp. 78–82.

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Whilst the Mandeville-author seems confident about placing a border of heat and uninhabitability around the southernmost part of Africa, he appears considerably less cosmologically certain in his descriptions of the islands of the Indian Ocean to the south and east. In fact, the need for a cosmological framework that can accommodate these distant inhabited islands destabilizes the sense of a bounded oikoumene found in the Book’s account of southern Africa. The part of the work in which this uncertainty comes to the fore is the well-known cosmological digression, briefly introduced towards the start of this chapter, in which the narrator argues for the centrality of Jerusalem in the world, divides the known world into the lands ‘par decea’ and ‘par dela’, and, famously, posits a theoretically circumnavigable globe. This ‘cosmographical excursus’, as Higgins aptly terms it, presents through a series of arguments a vision of the earth as a ‘symmetrical, circumnavigable, and everywhere-habitable Jerusalem-centered sphere’.49 I have already mentioned the representation in the cosmological excursus of the earth as a ball, the upper portion of which is covered in land and the highest point of which is Jerusalem. The same passage also gives us a radically different conjecture regarding the antipodes, one that does not sit well alongside the Book’s previously articulated account of the antoecumenical ‘contrey’ to the south of Ethiopia. According to the excursus, ‘toutes les parties de mer et de terre ount lour opposites habitables ou trespassables’ (‘alle the parties of see and of lond han here appositees habitables or trepassables’; Merveilles, p. 336; MT, p. 134). With this bold claim, the distinct, cut-off antoecumenical spaces of antiquity, opposite but inaccessible, are remade as a relative construct. Defined only as the lands opposite wherever one is on the globe, they are ‘simultaneously everywhere and nowhere’, in Hiatt’s formulation. 50 The Book swiftly follows this new cosmological conjecture with the logical consequence that England’s antipodes must, therefore, be Prester John’s Indies: ‘les terres Prestre Johan emperour de Ynde sont dessouz nous’ (‘the londes of Prestre Iohn, emperour of Ynde, ben vnder vs’; Merveilles, p. 336; MT, p. 134). This must be the case because, the Mandeville-author points out, a traveller takes the same number 49 

Higgins breaks the passage down and identifies all its sources, noting that the ‘theoretical excursus [is] spliced together from at least four sources: Macrobius’s Commentarium in somno Scipionis, the Directorium ad faciendum passagium transmarinum, Brunetto Latini’s Trésor, and Johannes de Sacrobosco’s De sphera’: Higgins, Writing East, pp. 132–39, at p. 133 and chapter heading at p. 132. On the Book’s discussion of circumnavigability and the understanding of the antipodes delineated in the circumnavigability excursus, see Hiatt, Terra Incognita, pp. 103–05. 50  Hiatt, Terra Incognita, p. 104.

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of days’ journey to reach Jerusalem from the West as he does to reach the other edge of the land mass from Jerusalem (Merveilles, pp. 336–37; MT, p. 134). The British Isles and the lands of Prester John are thus diametrically opposed, yet both are within the same oikoumene. Both are part of the practised space of the world, linked, as we have seen, through commerce, fundamental beliefs, and human destiny but also linked here through cosmology. Indeed, in one of the Book’s most famous passages, the narrator even suggests that it is a ‘possible chose qe homme porroit ensy envyroner tout le mounde’ (‘possible thing that men may so envyroune alle the world’; Merveilles, pp. 337–38; MT, p. 136). In support of this argument he offers a slightly comical anecdote that tells how a sailor once almost circumnavigated the world but, not realizing this, ‘turned ayen’ from his homeland to take the unnecessarily arduous and long route back the way he came.51 But the BSJM is a dialogic geography. Just as the fully elaborated model in the cosmographical excursus of a symmetrical, wholly interconnected, fully navigable, single-oikoumene globe contradicts the alternative cosmological vision set out in the narrator’s account of the two Ethiopias, so other alternative perspectives follow that disrupt its global vision. Whilst the world may be theoretically navigable, the Book goes on to say, it is not technically so, because it would be virtually impossible to find one’s way across the seas and lands from the wild isles beyond the land of Prester John to the regions ‘par decea’ (Merveilles, p. 338; MT, p. 136).52 And, although the narrator has assured his readers that it takes the same number of days to reach Jerusalem from the west as it does to reach the eastern edge of the world from Jerusalem, further qualification then disrupts this symmetry. It is possible, the narrator explains, to travel ‘outre’ (‘beyond’) this number of days’ journey, still amongst inhabited Indian islands, though these are wild and strange: Et quant homme vait outre celles jorneies vers Ynde et vers les isles foraches, tout est environnant la rondesse de la terre et de la mer par dessouz noz pays de cea. (Merveilles, pp. 336–37)

51 

A number of otherworldly tales that may be analogues or possible sources of inspiration for this story are discussed in Goldie, The Idea of the Antipodes, pp. 61–66. 52  This is also the reason given for turning back towards Cathay at the very end of the Book, following the narrator’s discussion of the isles in the dominions of Prester John: Mandeville, Le livre des merveilles du monde, ed. by Deluz, p. 472; Mandeville, Travels, ed. by Seymour, p. 223.

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And whan men gon beyonde tho iourneys toward Ynde and to the foreyn yles, alle is envyronynge the roundnesse of the erthe and of the see vnder oure contrees on this half. (MT, p. 135)

Here, Prester John’s Indies are not only diametrically opposed to the British Isles but also paradoxically stretch ‘beyonde’ (‘outre’) the ‘confins’ (‘limits’) of the earth’s surface. The difficulty of this contradictory paragraph is witnessed not only by the great hesitancy and literalness in the Cotton translator’s approach to it, cited here, but by its omission in other versions, such as the Middle English Egerton version and the Vulgate Latin.53 The passage’s contradictions are important, nonetheless, precisely because of the cosmological uncertainty they betray. The inhabited world is symmetrical, and yet it is not. It has defined borders, and yet does not, because, when one reaches these, in the furthest Indies, they turn out not to be borders after all. This cosmological uncertainty is intimately connected with uncertainty concerning the ontological status of the islands of the Indies. The islands of Prester John’s Indies are part of the known world in that they are reachable from ‘par decea’, as all parts of the world are accessible to all other parts. Yet, at the same time, these islands stretch, somehow, ‘beyond’ the ‘confines’ of the known world. The Indian islands pose other challenges to the cosmographical excursus’s argument for a single, symmetrical, circumnavigable, and interconnected global oikoumene. In the same chapter as the circumnavigability excursus, a dissenting opinion concerning the unity of the world is attributed to the inhabitants of the Indian Isle of Lamori (Sumatra), a place where people go naked, live communally, own no property, and do not recognize marriage but practise free love. One imagined exchange, amplified from the brief details found in Odorico’s account of the island, dramatizes the response of this naked community to their clothed visitors:54 [E]t se mokent quant ils veiont ascun estrange q’est vesti, et dient qe Dieu […] fist Adam […] nuz, et qe homme ne doit point avoir de hounte de ly moustrier tiel come Dieu l’ad fait […]. Et dient qe cils qe sount vestiz sont gentz d’autre siècle, ou ils sont gentz qe ne croient point Dieu.55 53 

Mandeville, The Egerton Version of the Travels, ed. by Seymour, p. 102. See Odorico da Pordenone, Le voyage, ed. by Andreose and Ménard, pp. 27–28. 55  Mandeville, Le livre des merveilles du monde, ed. by Deluz, pp. 331–32. The reading that Deluz gives here, ‘qe Dieu qe fist Adam fust nuz’ (‘the God who made Adam was naked’) is a minority reading that does not make much sense. She cites nineteen variants (out of c. twentyfive manuscripts of the version) in footnote c that give the sense that Adam and Eve (or Adam 54 

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And thei scornen when thei seen ony strange folk goynge clothed. And thei seyn that God made Adam and Eue alle naked, and that noman scholde schame him to schewen him such as god made him […]. And thei seyn that thei that ben clothed ben folk of another world or thei ben folk that trowen not in God. (MT, p. 131)

Faced with ‘strange folk goynge clothed’, the response of the islanders is to reject the notion that such diversity is possible within one world and to assume that their visitors must therefore come from another. That such an opinion should be held by this particular group of islanders simultaneously raises and critiques the notion that multiple worlds exist on the same globe and that any of the ‘foreyn’ isles, over which much of the second half of the Book roams, could form part of an alternative oikoumene. The Book’s delegation of the theory of existence of antoecumenical spaces to such a people — naked, communally living islanders who nevertheless trace themselves back to Adam and Eve — is an important distancing tactic. The situation and status of the speakers affects the status of the case for the existence of peoples from beyond the oikoumene. The idea is presented as a subjective opinion held by a remote, comically outlandish, island people, who wilfully and perversely reject any connection to the oikoumene and to others so very different from themselves. James Romm has argued that, in ancient Greek literature, the peoples ‘in the furthest ring’ away from the hearth of Mediterranean civilization, ‘at the banks of the Ocean’, had a ‘unique ethical prerogative, licensing them to mock, preach to, or simply ignore the peoples of the interior’.56 In a similar vein, Matthew Boyd Goldie has argued for the capacity of antipodeans in literature and thought throughout the ages to ‘call into question the nature of those who address them, sometimes threatening to reveal the wholly speculative nature of the discourses about them’.57 The Lamoreans, who are not, in Mandeville’s theory, antipodeans but are rather ambiguously positioned, remote, debatably Indian pretenders to that status, combine something of both functions within the Book, and yet do something more still. True, they both mock and preach to the peoples of the interior, but at the same time they lay themselves open to mockery by readers whose prior knowledge assures them that the Lamoreans’ beliefs and practices are wrong. The Lamoreans’ presence seems designed to bring the theory of antoecumenialone) were naked, not the God who made him/them. I therefore emend to her first variant here. 56  Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought, pp. 47–48. Goldie points out that this ‘critical mirror’ function begins to apply clearly to the antipodes in Cicero’s De re publica: Goldie, The Idea of the Antipodes, p. 28. 57  Goldie, The Idea of the Antipodes, pp. 8–9.

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cal spaces into the Book and explore its possibilities, whilst at the same time holding it sceptically at arm’s length. Finally, the islanders’ belief that those whose ways are fundamentally different to theirs must come from another world invites the Book’s readers to consider such ‘other worlds’ differently: as conceptual and rhetorical spaces, brought into play to contain the shock of uncomfortable encounters with radical spatial and human diversity. In its earliest vernacular versions, the BSJM constructs a representation of the world and the place of the Indies within it that is multidimensional and global. This multidimensional and global spatial representation helps the Mandeville-author to make sense of the varied perspectives that he finds in geography, history, legend, and the writings of recent travellers. Yet the unruly ‘foreyn’ isles in and around the Indies, together with the mysterious, burning land to the south of the two Ethiopias, intermittently disrupt the Book’s dominant vision of global interconnectedness. These regions assert their borderlineotherworldly diversity, difficulty of access or habitability, or the wilful distinctness of their inhabitants against the interconnecting forces of economics, cosmology, or eschatology. In the vernacular versions discussed here, then, the Book does not, as it turns out, present quite such a unified vision of the world as is sometimes claimed for it. Instead, it offers a not-quite-resolved dialogue between multiple perspectives and spatialities. Indeed, this dialogic, openended text even ends with a sly challenge to its travelling readers to disrupt it yet further with their own supplementary accounts of yet more ‘deversetez’ of the lands ‘par dela’. Sir John could write more, he says, but prefers to remain silent ‘a la fin qe cis qe vourra aler en celles parties y troeve assez a dire’ (‘to the entent and ende that whoso wil gon into tho contrees, he schalle fynde ynowe to speke of ’; Merveilles, p. 479; MT, p. 228).

Insular Degeneracy and God-Forsaken Diversity: The Indies of the Vulgate Latin Itinerarius It does not necessarily follow, of course, that all the many readers of the widely diffused BSJM accepted its complex, multidimensional, and sometimes questioning and contradictory vision of the Indies within the world. As Higgins has shown, many rémanieurs and translators made free with both the letter and spirit of the Book’s early vernacular versions. I focus here on the distinctive and contrarian reading found in the pan-European version of the late fourteenth century generally known as the Vulgate Latin translation. This reworked version’s language of composition, concern with piety and orthodoxy, and struc-

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tural qualities, such as its ‘periodic’ rather than ‘cumulative’ prose and ‘more systematically historical slant’, all suit it to more learned clerical and monastic audiences than its vernacular forebears.58 The version also reveals its translator’s deep resistance to certain aspects of its source’s spatial representation, including its experimentation with the notion of global interconnectedness and its interpretations of Indian diversity. Higgins has argued persuasively that the Vulgate translator, finding the Book overly tolerant and relativistic towards non-Christian peoples, turns the narrating Sir John into a ‘fierce advocate of Catholic orthodoxy and a sharp critic of pagan blindness’.59 This is undoubtedly true. Nonetheless, as we shall see, the motives for the Vulgate translator’s interventions sometimes seem as much spatial as theological, and, in his exposition of the cosmological situation of the furthest Indies, he makes a potentially heretical cosmological assertion of his own. Among his key concerns, however, seems to be the use of a variety of strategies to resignify negatively Indian spatial and human diversity, which then take their place in a reconfigured, hierarchically structured image of the world. Evidence of the Vulgate translator’s resistance to the Insular Book’s spatial vision is to be found at many points in the Vulgate Itinerarius, but is at its most noticeable in the way the Vulgate translator edits and reshapes the ‘cosmographical excursus’ discussed in the last section. The translator excises almost without trace the Book’s discussion of the shape of the world, the centrality of Jerusalem, the circumnavigability of the globe, and the oppositional relationship between the British Isles and the lands of Prester John. In short, he removes elements that contribute to the vision of global interconnectedness, which we might call the dominant — if challenged — cosmological framework found in the early vernacular versions. From this excision, as well as from allusions scattered throughout the Vulgate, it becomes clear that the translator rejects the sections of the BSJM that argue for a global cosmology but retains and supplements those compatible with the kind of zonal cosmology found in Macrobius and Martianus Capella. This cosmology filters through all aspects of the translation’s spatiality and fundamentally alters the Book’s representation of the oceanic southern and eastern quarter of the globe.

58 

This assessment of the work’s qualities is drawn from Higgins, Writing East, pp. 24–25; and Tzanaki (on history), p. 201. Systematic work on this version’s audiences is lacking. 59  Higgins, Writing East, p. 25. See also Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences, pp. 246–48; and the detailed discussion of the Vulgate’s representation of Mongol religion in Higgins, Writing East, pp. 174–78.

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In an important departure from the earliest Insular and Continental versions of the Book, the Vulgate translator firmly signals his belief in the existence of antoecumenical lands and peoples. Like the Insular text’s sceptical account of purportedly antoecumenical peoples, the Vulgate translator’s faith emerges from Sir John’s reported experiences in the Indies. Towards the end of the Vulgate’s Indian itineraries, the narrator argues that one can go no further east in the direction of Paradise because of the difficulty of the journey through lands where ‘nihil est habitatum vel habitabile’ (‘nothing is inhabited or inhabitable’). He nonetheless follows this with an account of Paradise and its four rivers, whose existence, watering our entire oikoumene, leads him to make a startling claim: quapropter et meriter credendum videtur, exire de eodem fonte et alia quatuor flumina irriganta terram oppositam, quæ est circa alteram dimidiam partem circuli Æquatoris, quamuis nos eorum fluminum loca, virtute, et nomina ignoramus. (PN, i (1589), 74) for which reason, it also seems right that we should believe that there also emerge from the same source another four rivers, irrigating the opposite land, which is around the other half of the equator, although we do not know their locations, virtues and names.

Not only does this ‘opposite land’ exist in the realm of the theoretical for the Vulgate translator but also, writing in the persona of the travelling Sir John, the author claims to know with certainty that ‘illic terræ faciem inhabitatam in maxima multitudine ciuitatum, vrbium, et regionum’ (‘that this face of the earth is inhabited, with a great many cities, towns and regions’; PN, i (1589), 74). But, just as in the early vernacular versions, the Indies prove both critical and troubling to the formation of the Vulgate translator’s image of the world; the translation’s certainty on this matter derives from knowledge gained in those regions, ‘quoniam et eorum institores Indiam frequentant, et nunciant sibi inuicem gentes’ (‘for their merchants frequent India, and announce that they are neighbouring peoples’; PN, i (1589), 74). At the same time, however, the Vulgate translator’s reports of visitors to the Indies who lay claim to antoecumenical status logically destabilizes the translator’s zonal cosmology precisely as it confirms it, for truly antoecumenical visitors would have needed to make a logically impossible journey across an uninhabitable and impassable torrid zone. The Vulgate translator, however, explores neither the contradictions within his cosmological position nor its potentially heretical implications: that there are eight rivers of Paradise, two Adams, two Eves, and potentially even two

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Christs. He leaves these objections to be raised by later readers of his work.60 Instead, the late antique cosmological framework familiar from Macrobius permeates the translation unchallenged and unexamined, contributing to a representation of an oikoumene whose southern and eastern maritime regions shade gradually into the intolerable heat of the equatorial Torrid Zone. Throughout his description of the Indies, the translation bears traces of the influence of thought concerning the Torrid Zone. The translator repeatedly associates the physical extremity of the southern ocean with insularity and extremities of heat and human diversity. All the Book’s morally or physically extreme peoples are relocated by the Vulgate translator towards the south and on islands. Mabron (Maabar; the Coromandel Coast), the scene of idolatrous festivals of self-sacrifice and reached by land in the Insular version, is rewritten by the Vulgate translator as an island reached by a sea voyage to the south. Lamori, land of the naked, communally living cannibals, is reached ‘procedendo in Austrum per multas et mirabiles terras’ (‘by proceeding southwards through lands many and wonderful’). Doudin, a land whose inhabitants suffocate and eat their sick relatives, is, yet again, ‘versus meridiem’ (‘towards the south’; all at PN, i (1589), 49, 50, 52). Indeed, the relationship between physical location, human behaviour, and heat is rendered explicit in the Vulgate’s account of Caua (Cana; Thane): Hi sunt infidelissimi Paganorum […]. Corpora mortuorum non sepeliuntur ibi, nec cadauera quælibet bestiarum operiuntur, quòd ad æris aestum carnes in breui tempore consumuntur, nam et tota insula constitit sub zona torrida. (PN, i (1589), 48) They [i.e., the people of Cana] are the most faithless of pagans […]. They do not bury the bodies of the dead here, nor are the bodies of any beasts buried, because flesh is consumed very quickly in the heat of the air, and so the whole island is situated below the Torrid Zone.

For the Vulgate translator, the status of these locations and peoples is debatable. On the one hand, they are ‘below the Torrid Zone’, which would seem to imply 60  Scepticism of the notion that inhabited antipodes could exist often stemmed from the problem that such peoples, if human, would not have been reachable by Christ’s teaching. Such a situation would contradict the biblical teaching that the Gospel was preached to all nations and the ends of the earth. See Hiatt, Terra Incognita, pp. 54–60; and Goldie, The Idea of the Antipodes, pp. 50–55. Hiatt also notes (p. 116) a thirteenth-century commentary on Sacrobosco’s Sphera that insists that antipodes could not be inhabited by humans on the grounds that the incarnation and crucifixion could not have happened twice. Around 1450, the Venetian physician and engineer Giovanni da Fontana (see Chapter 6) in turn resists the Vulgate translator’s arguments here on the grounds that they heretically imply the existence of two Adams and two Christs: [Giovanni da Fontana], Liber Pompilii Azali Placentini, fol. 93r.

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that zone’s traversable and habitable condition. On the other, the translator’s climate theory at the same time allows him, not unlike the designers and copyists of mappaemundi who draw a circle of monstrous races around the southern edge of Africa, to call obliquely into question the human status of these ‘most faithless’ pagans.61 That the status of the translator’s southern, insular peoples is to be considered questionable becomes clear at the end of his account of the Indian isles, when the narrator gives his reasons for turning eastward: Cvm igitur tot et talia in istis Insulis vidimus monstra […] non curauimus vlterius procedere sub polo australi, ne in maiora pericula incideremus. (PN, i (1589), 53) Since, therefore, we had seen so many and such monsters in these islands […], we did not care to proceed further under the southern pole star, lest we fall into greater danger.

Mandeville’s insular and maritime Indies are pivotal yet potentially disruptive to the Vulgate translator’s cosmological framework. In view of the extensive eyewitness evidence cited in the Book, it has become impossible to argue for the uninhabitability of the equatorial regions that Sir John claims to have visited. Instead, the translator fudges the question, allowing his insular Indians to exist in a liminal and contentious relationship with the oikoumene: on its edge, in unbearably hot regions, receiving antoecumenical visitors, but with their status as gentes or monstra undecided. Like the Lamoreans in the Insular version, these peoples remain a troublingly unresolved challenge to the Vulgate Itinerarius’s cosmology. Just as is the case of the Insular Book, the Vulgate translation’s representation of the southern and eastern reaches of the world and its cosmological framework are linked to a theological understanding of space. However, the Vulgate’s theologized geography is very far from that of the Book’s earliest versions. The Vulgate’s cosmological vision of a compartmentalized globe is bound up with a theologized geography in which physical location mirrors spiritual status. Thus locations and physical or behavioural characteristics of peoples become, in the translator’s spatial theology, readable terrestrial manifestations of spiritual proximity to God, the fixed centre of the universe. In an interpolation that the translator places at the start of the second half of the Book’s account of the lands ‘par dela’, the translator makes his understanding of the spatial order of the cosmos clear:

61 

Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought, pp. 41–43.

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Deus vnus, simplex quidem est, vt creaturæ cælestes quò Deo magis de propinquo sunt eò simpliciores existunt. Terrestres autem quòd in situ remotiori sint, idcircò magis diuersæ, magis contrariæ inter se sunt. (PN, i (1589), 45) God is indeed one and homogenous [simplex], thus heavenly beings, inasmuch as they are closer to God, are to the same degree more homogenous [simpliciores]. But terrestrial creatures, insofar as they are more remote in situation, are for the same reason more diverse and more contrary amongst themselves.

In the Vulgate translator’s understanding of the machinery of the world, cosmology and theology are closely intertwined. Unlike the Sir John of the early vernacular versions, the Vulgate translator’s travelling narrator does not find evidence of God’s hand in the beliefs of those at the ends of the earth. As Higgins and Tzanaki have pointed out, he removes all trace of his source’s sympathetic explanations for idolatrous practices and interpolates several passages deeply condemnatory of paganism.62 The translator admits that mirabilia created by God enable his creation to know and love him; this forms part of the justification for translating the Book’s account of eastern lands that he adds to the opening of its second part (PN, i (1589), 45). However, with great certainty and force, in the same passage he negatively resignifies the marvellous diversity so characteristic of the Book’s Indies and so beloved of its early versions. Physical, moral, and religious diversity become, in the Vulgate translator’s hands, manifestations of spatial and spiritual distance from a simplex God, a deity who is unchanging, homogenous, and whole.63 Within the context of the translator’s spatial logic, they become markers of the ‘more remote’ — one might say God-forsaken — reaches of the world. The Vulgate Latin translator writes against the spirit of the earliest vernacular versions of the Book’s vision of Indies and the world in almost every possible way. For him, the globe is compartmentalized, and spatial and human diversity physically enact distance from God. Moreover, where the early vernacular versions use physical and human geography as evidence to support an eschatological vision of ultimate human unity, the translator substitutes an alternative interpretation. According to the Vulgate translator’s theological geogra62 

Higgins, Writing East, pp.  176–77,  186. Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences, pp. 246–47. 63  The Vulgate translator rather ingeniously appropriates scholastic arguments concerning the simple (non-composite and invariable) nature of God for geographical purposes. See Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ: The Existence and Nature of God, ed. and trans. by McDermott, 1a Q. 3, ar. 7, 40–42.

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phy, not only does creation spiral, spiritually and spatially, away from God but the diversity of the Indies is also the result of wilful, perverse secession from an ideal state of Christian unity. In support of his revised theological geography, the Latin Vulgate translator marshals interpolations found in the socalled Ogier or Liège version of the BSJM to demonstrate that the now diverse, pagan, and self-governing far reaches of the Indies were once unified under Christian Empire. As Deluz has pointed out, the earlier Liège/Ogier version of the Book, on which the Vulgate translation draws, already incorporates a series of invented exploits in the Indies on the part of Ogier the Dane, a legendary opponent-turned-vassal of Charlemagne. These interpolations are deployed, she argues, to represent a Christian Europe ‘qui met sa marque sur les autres continents, conquérant les terres, imposant ses croyances’ (‘that makes its mark on other continents, conquering lands, imposing its beliefs’).64 The Vulgate translator capitalizes heavily on these interpolations to present the continental and insular Indies as a postcolonial world in the literal sense of the term. It is a region that has broken away from a once powerful and all-encompassing Holy Roman Empire, still marked out not only with ‘the material remains of the colonizing power’ but also its etymological traces.65 Following the Liège/Ogier version, the Vulgate translator invokes Ogier as founder of ‘plurimae Abbatiæ religiosorum […] vnde et vsque nunc dicuntur Ecclesiæ Dani’ (‘many monasteries of religious […], for which reason they are even now called churches of the Dane’) at Zarke (the Insular version’s ‘Zarchee’). He is also name-giver to the cities of Flandrina and Singland (Pandarini and Cranganore) in the region of Lombe (Kollam) and the builder of a splendid church in the city of St Thomas at Mabron (the Coromandel Coast) to house that saint’s relics (PN, i (1589), 48–49; VL, p. 98). Indeed, Ogier is lauded as the conqueror of ‘ferè omnes partes transmarinas à Ierosolymis vsque ad arbores solis et lunæ, ac propè paradisum terrestrem’ (‘almost all regions across the sea from Jerusalem as far as the trees of the Sun and Moon, and indeed right up to the Terrestrial Paradise’), his feats commemorated in a magnificent series of wall paintings in the king of Java’s palace (PN, i (1589), 50; VL, p. 109).

64 

The version, produced sometime between 1375 and 1390, has been edited as Mandeville, La Version liégeoise du ‘Livre’, ed. by Tyssens and Raelet. Excerpts in modernized French appear in Mandeville, ‘Le Livre de messire Jean de Mandeville: version liégeoise’, ed. and trans. by Deluz (quotation from the editor’s, ‘Introduction’, p. 1397). 65  See Howe’s discussion of attitudes to Roman remains in Anglo-Saxon England in Howe, ‘Anglo-Saxon England and the Postcolonial Void’, p. 35.

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Using details found in his Liégeois source, the Vulgate translator represents the Indies as former imperial possessions. Subject once and potentially again to imperial domination, these lands owe their religious allegiance to the pope. Certain of the Book’s many references to the recent activities of the mendicant orders in Indian and Mongol lands are overwritten in the translation to support this vision. The Franciscan houses of Manzi are recast as ancient relics of Charlemagne’s empire: churches and monastic foundations ‘quas instituit dux Ogerus’ (‘that Duke Ogier founded’; PN, i (1589), 57; VL, p. 117). Even Prester John, as Higgins has pointed out, is presented in the Vulgate Itinerarius not as a witness to the survival in the Indies of the apostolic Christianity of St Thomas but as a descendent of Ogier and, thus, an early product of Latin Christian imperialism.66 Out of the ‘Ogier’ interpolations that he finds in his source, the Vulgate translator constructs a vision of the Indies in which its morally and religiously diverse peoples are cast not in the roles of untaught protoor potential Christians but as degenerates who have seceded from a divinely sanctioned and legitimate Christian empire. The translator’s position is made clear in an original passage added to the beginning of the Book’s discussion of the people of Calamia, the city in which, drawing on apocryphal traditions, the Book locates the tomb of St Thomas:67 Iste populus non est multum tempus transactum, quin fuit totus in fidei relligione, sed nunc est ad pessimos gentilium ritus peruersus, nec attendit, nec veneratur relliquias sancti corporis Apostoli, ibidem contentas, quamuis iis euidens, ac vtile, et mirificum præstare solebat beneficium. (PN, i (1589), 49) These people, not so long ago, indeed, were wholly within the religion of the faith [i.e., Christianity], but now they have perversely turned towards the worst rites of the heathens. They neither pay heed to nor venerate the relics of the holy body of the Apostle, held in that place, irrespective of how evident, useful and wonderful their benefit used to be clear to them.

No longer proto-Christians open to conversion, the people of Calamia are post-Christians, culpable both of collective apostasy and of wilfully rejecting 66 

Higgins, Writing East, pp. 197–201; Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, i (1589), 65; Mandeville, La Version liégeoise du ‘Livre’, ed. by Tyssens and Raelet, pp. 162–63. 67  The passage does not appear in the corresponding section of Mandeville, La Version liégeoise du ‘Livre’, ed. by Tyssens and Raelet, pp. 100–01. The city of Calamie derives from the apocryphal Acts of Thomas (see Chapter 2) but also appears in later medieval sources such as the Ebstorf world map (see Chapter 6).

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the offer of God’s grace made to them through manifest miracles at their apostolic saint and martyr’s tomb. The Vulgate Latin translation resists many of the core characteristics of the BSJM’s early vernacular versions: its multiple perspectives; its treatment of behavioural and religious diversity; and its explorations of interconnectedness. Nonetheless, the unruly diversity of the newly discovered Indies remains critical to the translator’s understanding of the world as an orderly space. Within the Latin Vulgate, several ways of rationalizing the diversity of Indian space so that it can exist within an ordered globe collide. On the one hand, the diversity of Indian peoples and places is implied to be divinely ordained. It is an inevitable product of the region’s spatial and spiritual distance from God. On the other, such diversity is a product of wilful and culpable regression to self-governed paganism by peoples who were once Christian imperial subjects. Within both schemata, the Indian diversity admired in the Book’s early vernacular versions has been wholly overwritten with negative connotations.

Conclusion The earliest vernacular versions of the Book of Sir John Mandeville and the extensively revised Latin Vulgate translation have, in spite of their manifestly different world views, a number of fundamental features in common. From the perspectives of both works, the situation, habitability, and ontological status of the Indies pose questions whose answers affect the spatial conceptualization and representation of the entire globe. It is undoubtedly true that, at points in the early vernacular versions of the Book, the Indies are put to use by the Mandeville-author as a critical mirror, in which European readers are encouraged to recognize and reflect upon their own practices. The Lamorean use of antoecumenical theory to avoid facing up to the radical alterity of their ‘strange’ visitors is a case in point. But, in its earliest versions, the Book also experiments with a kind of dialogic geographical form. Through multiple juxtaposed perspectives, including imagined insular voices such as those of the Lamoreans, it attempts to represent unruly, plural, and diverse Indies. The Book models rather than shows the construction of these real and imagined spaces through cosmological thought, the experiences of travel, trade, and mission, and the human interactions and conceptual challenges these entail. Precisely because of its dialogic geographical form, the early vernacular Book’s cosmological vision is not consistent. But it does lean demonstrably, if sometimes with uncertainty, towards an idealistic global vision of a single interconnected

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world, in which human capacity is the only barrier to circumnavigation and lack of good teaching is the only barrier to the creation of human unity under God out of worldly diversity. When the Vulgate Latin translator — with a little help from the redactor of the earlier Liège version — reworks the Book’s theological geography, he aims both to explain, order, and contain the world’s challenging spatial diversity and to remove the Book’s implicit challenge to its readers to see unity in diversity and act, through mission and conversion, to bring that unity about. Recently, social scientists and human geographers have argued that to see and represent space as a function of time is a characteristically modern European intellectual strategy for ‘taming […] the spatial’, that is, for dealing with (or, more accurately, rejecting) radical human or spatial diversity. It is worth underlining, then, that such ‘taming’ strategies are employed in the versions of the Book discussed here.68 Both the Mandeville-author and the Vulgate translator employ temporal schemata to order unruly Indian diversity. In the early vernacular Mandevilles, the behavioural diversity of Indian pagans is explained by their lack of advancement along the only road out of town: towards universal Christendom. As yet, ‘they’ only have ‘natural reason’, whereas ‘we’ — the author’s projected audience — have teaching. Nonetheless, ‘they’, the Book implies, will eventually progress towards the necessary temporal and eschatological end that is salvation. In the Vulgate translator’s ordering principle for understanding diversity, in constrast, the ideal of pagan progress towards salvation is replaced with a vision of spatial and temporal regression away from universal Christendom. In different ways, these ideologically opposed versions of the BSJM nonetheless present Indian spatial diversity, the relations between ‘here’ and ‘there’, between Christianity and paganism, and between God and the world, through the prism of time.69

68 

Massey argues that ‘under modernity […] spatial difference was convened into temporal sequence’ and refers to this as the ‘taming of the spatial’: Massey, For Space, pp. 68–71 (in particular, pp. 68, 70). Her discussion relies in particular on Fabian, Time and the Other: the seminal study of the use of alternative temporalities in anthropological fieldwork. 69  For a different view, see Higgins, who argues that ‘time in The Book is generally a function of space’: Higgins, Writing East, pp. 233–34.

Chapter 6

Placing the Indies in Space and Time: Cartographic Representations, c. 1200–c. 1450

Context and Scope The period between the beginning of the thirteenth century and the mid-fifteenth is, to resort to an academic cliché, one of great changes in spatial representation accompanied by remarkable continuities. Several map historians have argued that ‘the transformation of the world map’ happened in this period. 1 From the fourteenth century, medieval mappaemundi, with at least some theological and historical content and often (or always, in the view of Alessandro Scafi) featuring a representation of the Terrestrial Paradise in the east, begin to show influence in form and content from other types of map, such as portolan charts.2 These navigational tools focused upon the representation of what Ramon Pujades i Bataller has evocatively termed ‘a ploughed sea’.3 These charts mapped what we might call the ‘practised’ space of European navigation at the time: a maritime region that included the Mediterranean, Black Sea, and Atlantic coasts often plied by Italian and Iberian navigators. The completion in 1406, by papal secretary Jacopo d’Angelo della Scarperia, of the Latin translation 1 

See the chapter entitled ‘The Transformation of the World Map’, in Edson, The World Map, 1300–1492, pp. 205–26. See also Woodward, ‘Medieval Mappaemundi’, pp. 298–99. 2  Scafi, ‘Defining Mappaemundi’; Woodward, ‘Medieval Mappaemundi’, pp. 298–99. 3  Pujades i Bataller, Les cartes portolanes, trans. by Rees, p.  411. See also Campbell, ‘Portolan Charts’.

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of Ptolemy’s second-century Geography also had a range of impacts on regional and world cartography.4 Translated as the Cosmographia, the geography was often accompanied in manuscript and later in print by world and regional tabu­ lae, drawn, using coordinates of latitude and longitude, according to a defined projection. An early example that circulated independently of the Cosmographia is that in navigator and map-maker Andrea Bianco’s Atlante of 1436 (fig. 26).5 Whilst, as Gautier Dalché has pointed out, Ptolemy’s work and methods were hardly unknown to the Latin West before Jacopo d’Angelo’s completion of the Cosmographia, the humanist origin and early arena of circulation of the work clearly had an impact upon its status among scholars.6 The Geography also added to the variety of imagines mundi, modes of representation, and raw geographical data available to practising cartographers, a variety that is eloquently witnessed by the pages of Bianco’s Atlante. Bianco’s 1436 collection of contemporaneous maps comprises, with no indication of preference or priority, navigational charts, a mappamundi (fig. 27), and a Ptolemaic world map (fig. 26).7 Among this diverse array of surviving examples of European cartography from throughout the later Middle Ages there survives an equally diverse range of cartographic representations of the Indies. From small, schematic zonal maps in manuscripts through to great thirteenth-century monumental wall maps, and from simplified Ptolemaic oikoumenes in images of the world to atlases, like Bianco’s, of multiple cartographic modes covering land and sea, many hundreds of individual cartographic representations of these regions survive.8 A single 4 

Larner, ‘The Church and the Quattrocento Renaissance in Geography’, pp. 27–28. The history of the translation is discussed in Gautier Dalché, La Géographie de Ptolémée en Occident, pp. 146–54. 5  The maps were not part of the initial translation into Latin. On likely exemplars of the earliest maps, see Gautier Dalché, La Géographie de Ptolémée en Occident, pp. 154–55; on later fifteenth-century developments, see, in particular, pp. 215–57. On the projections of the early Latin manuscripts and prints, see Keuning, ‘The History of Geographical Map Projections until 1600’, pp. 9–19. 6  The influence of the Geography alongside the Almagest in medieval thought is traced in Gautier Dalché, La Géographie de Ptolémée en Occident, pp. 87–142. On its status among the humanists, see also Larner, ‘The Church and the Quattrocento Renaissance in Geography’, pp. 28–31. 7  The Atlante is in Venezia, Bibl. Naz. Marciana, MS It. Z. 76 (=4783) and is discussed by Edson, The World Map, 1300–1492, pp. 1–10. It is reproduced in full on the CD-ROM that accompanies Pujades i Bataller, Les cartes portolanes, trans. by Rees. 8  There is no synthetic census of medieval world maps. Attempts to quantify the corpus have been made in Destombes, Mappaemondes a.d. 1200–1500, and Woodward, ‘Medieval

Placing the Indies in Space and Time

Figure 26. Ptolemaic world map from the Atlante of Andrea Bianco. Venice, 1436. Venezia, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS It. Z. 76 (=4783), fol. 9. Su concessione del Ministerio per i Beni e le Attività Culturali – Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. Copying not permitted.

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chapter cannot hope to give a full history of these. This chapter instead offers three snapshots of ecumenical cartography — maps that confine themselves to the representation of the known world — from places and periods when particularly interesting map-making work was being produced. Two of the largest and most detailed medieval ecumenical world maps, the Hereford and Ebstorf mappaemundi, were produced in ecclesiastical and monastic contexts in England and Germany in the thirteenth century. My first section examines these works within the context of map-making in northwest Europe, a region that situated itself on the opposite edge of the oikoumene to the Indies in its sights. We then move to the fourteenth century, and to two map-making centres on the shores of the Mediterranean. Pietro Vesconte’s atelier produced a number of world and regional maps, including portolan charts, in early fourteenth-century Genoa.9 Examples of a world map probably of his design, copies of which were commissioned for Marino Sanudo’s crusade proposal, the Liber secretorum, are examined here. In the same century, across the Mediterranean on the island of Majorca, we also have evidence not only for the concentrated production of portolan charts but also for the type of ecumenical maps known in contemporary documents as mapemondes, of which the late fourteenth-century Catalan Atlas is the earliest surviving complete example.10 In the final section, I turn to another maritime centre: Venice, a city in which there is a great proliferation of geographical and cartographic activity around the middle of the fifteenth century. From Bianco’s Atlante to map-maker Giovanni Leardo’s three surviving large mid-fifteenth-century world maps, through copies, translations, and commentaries on Ptolemy’s Geography, to the magnificent and Mappaemundi’, but are incomplete; an account of some of their problems is given in Gautier Dalché, ‘Mappaemundi antérieures au xiiie siècle’. World maps in manuscripts in particular are still very haphazardly catalogued. 9  For details, and on the probable relationship between ‘Pietro’ and ‘Perrino’ Vesconte, both attested as working in the 1310s and 1320s, see Pujades i Bataller, Les cartes portolanes, trans. by Rees, pp. 486–90. 10  See the ‘Introduction’, in Abraham, Mapamundi, ed. by Grosjean, pp. 12–13. Surviving examples of whole and fragmentary ecumenical atlases or world maps (i.e., maps that attempt to cover the full oikoumene) from Majorca are limited to the Catalan Atlas, a fragment of around 1380 in Istanbul’s Topkapi palace, and the Estense Catalan mappamundi of 1450, and, possibly, Angelino Dulceti’s chart of 1339, which may once have covered lands and seas further to the east: Sáenz-López Pérez, ‘La Representación de Gog y Magog y la imagen del Anticristo en las cartas náuticas bajomedievales’, p. 272. A nautical chart in Firenze, Bibloteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, portolano 16 is sometimes described as a partial world map but may never have been complete: Pullè, La cartografia antica dell’India, ii, 110–39.

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Figure 27. Mappamundi in Andrea Bianco’s Atlante. East appears at the top, with a representation of the Terrestrial Paradise. Venezia, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS It. Z. 76 (=4783), fol. 8. Su concessione del Ministerio per i Beni e le Attività Culturali – Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. Copying not permitted.

detailed mid-fifteenth-century works of the Camaldulian Fra Mauro, the city and region produced between the 1430s and 1460s an extraordinary number and range of detailed, innovative, and often reflective maps and cartographic commentaries.11 11 

The context is set out in great detail in Cattaneo, Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi and FifteenthCentury Venice.

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In what follows, I attempt to avoid presenting a history of developments in the cartographic representation of the Indies; it is too easy to fall into the trap of pointing out stepping stones in a history of progress from inferior and less accurate medieval visions towards technically and factually superior cartographies of the age of discovery.12 Inevitably, over a period of several hundred years, changes take place that some may consider developments towards improved cartographic forms, and significant changes will of course be noticed here. But the principal purpose of this chapter is not to trace change for its own sake but, rather, to consider how Indian space was characterized and with what effects, with a view to uncovering the kinds of cultural work that later medieval cartographic representations of Indian space performed within their specific intellectual and representational contexts. Taking as a given that maps do not merely represent, but help to create, the mental worlds of those who use them, I consider the kinds of mental worlds that they endeavoured to create.13 And, proceeding from the assumption that maps do not just represent but also create, direct, and change spatial relationships between their users and the world, I also investigate the varieties of spatial relationship that these cultural products attempted to forge between the Indies past, present, and future, Latin Christendom, the oikoumene, and the whole globe. Scholars of medieval cartography have long remarked on the importance of the temporal in medieval map-making. This chapter also explores the very diverse ways in which cartographic representations of the Indies produced at different times and in different parts of Europe are profoundly inflected, though in very different ways, by their understanding of the interrelation of history and space. It shows, moreover, that mapping the Indies can be an activity that troubles cartographic conventions and modes of representation, though the representational difficulties that the region’s mapping raises may be dealt with in very different ways.

12 

For an example of the stepping-stone approach, see Knefelkamp, ‘Indien in der Karto­ graphie des 15 und 16 Jahrhunderts’. 13  This is not the place for a full discussion of recent developments in cartographic theory. Particularly influential on the thinking behind this chapter have been, in addition to Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. by Nicholson-Smith; Wood and Fels, The Power of Maps; Cosgrove, ‘Introduction: Mapping Meaning’; and the chapter entitled ‘Slices through Space’ in Massey, For Space, pp. 106–25.

Figure 28. Detail of the Indies from the Ebstorf World Map (reconstruction), with East at top. Reconstruction at Ebskart, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, [accessed 27 May 2013]. Reproduced by kind permission of Kloster Ebstorf and Martin Warnke.

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The Other Edge: Northern European Visions of the Far East The vision of the world set out on any medieval map — as indeed on any modern map — is conditioned by its context of production and the purposes it is intended to serve. Whether wall-hung or bound in codices, detailed world maps such as the late thirteenth-century Ebstorf (fig.  28 and plate  1) and Hereford mappaemundi, along with their less well-known forebears and near contemporaries, were principally produced within monastic or ecclesiastical contexts and for didactic or contemplative purposes.14 The northern English Sawley map (c. 1200; fig. 29), for example, appears in a manuscript of Honorius Augustodunensis’s schoolroom geography, the Imago mundi; the volume and its map were in the possession of Sawley Abbey (Yorkshire) by the early thirteenth century, but the map was possibly drawn in a monastic house at Durham.15 A tiny but detailed English map copied into a psalter around 1265 (fig. 30) and the later thirteenth-century wall-mounted map that formerly belonged to the Benedictine convent at Ebstorf both present the oikoumene within the context of Christ’s body; whether personal or public, a contemplative function is indicated by both contexts.16 The wall-mounted Hereford World Map, drawn around 1300, was probably commissioned by the Bishop of Hereford and used in the environment of that city’s cathedral.17 In England, maps also accompanied certain copies of the Benedictine Ranulf Higden of Chester’s fourteenthcentury Polychronicon, a work that opens with a detailed description of the world. Although Higden is unlikely to have designed a map specifically to accompany his work, a map, notable for its careful delineation of Roman prov14  See Gautier Dalché, ‘De la glose à la contemplation’. Scholars have, however, remarked on possible relationships with now-lost maps in secular contexts; Matthew Paris claims that he copied a map from the king’s chamber in Westminster that was destroyed by fire in 1263. Barber suggests that the Psalter map and now fragmentary Aslake and Duchy of Cornwall maps were partially based on the same source: Barber, ‘Medieval Maps of the World’, pp. 21–22. 15  In Cambridge, Corpus Christi Coll., MS 66, p. 2. Harvey, ‘The Sawley Map and Other World Maps in Twelfth-Century England’, p. 33. 16  The Psalter Map is one of two mappaemundi in BL, MS Addit. 28681. It appears at fol. 9r, with a textual mappaemundi on the verso: see Barber, ‘Medieval Maps of the World’, pp. 15–19. The date of the Ebstorf map is not finally resolvable, now that the object has been lost. But is generally thought to be late thirteenth century or c. 1300: Barber, ‘Medieval Maps of the World’, pp. 23–27. Although the Ebstorf map is no longer extant, it is available to scholars in an excellent digitally reconstructed facsimile: see Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte, ed. by Kugler and others. 17  Barber, ‘Medieval Maps of the World’, p. 27; the handwriting is put between 1290 and 1310 in Parkes, ‘The Hereford Map’, pp. 107–17.

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Figure 29. East-oriented mappamundi from a copy of Honorius Augustodunensis’s Imago mundi from Sawley Abbey, Yorkshire. Twelfth to thirteenth century. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 66, p. 2. Reproduced by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

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Figure 30. World map in a Psalter copied around the 1260s. London, British Library, MS Additional 28681, fol. 9r. © The British Library Board.

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ince boundaries, is present in the autograph version of the chronicler’s final recension of his great historical work of around 1340 (San Marino, Huntington Libr., MS HM 132, fol. 4v; fig. 31).18 Related but not identical maps continue to appear included, for didactic purposes, in other copies of the Benedictine’s chronicle; two late fourteenth-century copies appear in a Polychronicon that belonged in the fifteenth century to the abbot of the great Benedictine abbey of Ramsey (BL, MS Royal 14 C.ix), one of which appears to have been produced by a careful reader to complement the Polychronicon (fig. 32).19 One of the acknowledged characteristic features of these mappaemundi and others like them is their close engagement with human history. Alessandro Scafi has characterized mappaemundi as works that ‘project […] history onto a geographical framework’, while, in a discussion of the Ebstorf map’s cartography of India, Shankar Raman points to that map’s ‘subordination of space to time’.20 In what follows, however, I want to reverse the usual order of terms in this assumed relationship. History is important on these maps, not because map-makers viewed space as subordinate to time but because the historical — a sense of time — was a constitutive component of medieval space. Thus, ‘in their own way’, as Gautier Dalché has stressed, these maps ‘represent geographical space’.21 Once this proposition is accepted, we can begin to ask new and productive questions of particular cartographic spaces. What is the nature of the Indian space that these maps represent? What kinds of histories do we find contributing to its production? And in what sorts of broader spatial relationships are these regions implicated? For the makers and users of the German Ebstorf and English Hereford maps and their northwestern near contemporaries, the Indies lay at the very furthest 18 

Described in Galbraith, ‘An Autograph of Ranulph Higden’s “Polychronicon”’, p. 7. Galbraith does not discuss the manuscript’s map. 19  The larger Ramsey map is at BL, MS Royal 14 C.ix, fols 1v–2r and the smaller at fol. 2v of the same manuscript. A monochrome reproduction of the smaller map is printed in Edson, The World Map, 1300–1492, p. 168. Edson suggests that the larger Ramsey map is by a careful reader of the Polychronicon: Edson, Mapping Time and Space, pp. 126–31 (p. 128). Barber sets out a hypothetical stemma for the surviving Polychronicon maps, which he suggests are not of Higden’s design but derive from a ‘pre-existing schematic world map’: Barber, ‘The Evesham World Map’, p. 20. See also Edwards, ‘Geography and Illustration and Higden’s “Polychronicon”’. 20  On the maps as spatializations of time, see Scafi, ‘Defining Mappaemundi’, pp. 346; 349; Raman, Framing ‘India’, p. 105; Woodward, ‘Medieval Mappaemundi’, p. 326; and Brincken, Mappa Mundi und Chronographia. 21  Gautier Dalché, ‘Maps in Words’, p. 224.

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Figure 31. East-oriented mappamundi of Ranulf Higden, Polychronicon England, c. 1340s. San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 132, fol. 4v. Reproduced by kind permission of the Huntington Library.

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edge of the oikoumene. In the east, beyond a river generally identified as the Indus (for example, Higden’s map in San Marino, Huntington Libr., MS HM 132), a region marked out as India or the Indies appears directly below the Terrestrial Paradise, the most visible coordinate at their very top. This position endows the Indies with certain God-given yet oddly incongruous characteristics. On the one hand, they are at the edge of the world, by definition far from the earth’s centre in the Eastern Mediterranean, at or near to Jerusalem.22 Moreover, occupying the eastern and southeasterly quarters of these map­ paemundi, the Indies are physically as far as it is possible to be from viewers situated on the mainland and islands of the northwest. On the other hand, however, their physical location in the far East places them close to the point of origin of human history in Eden. Not only the point of origin and a locus amoenus (‘pleasant place’), however, Eden is also established in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus and medieval exegetical traditions as an enduring and transcendental space, where the patriarch Enoch and prophet Elijah (Elias) will wait, untouched by the passage of time, until the coming of the Antichrist and the last days.23 As we saw in Chapter 1, the twin associations of the edge and the origin were formative influences on the shaping of Indian space in cosmography as well as cartography. The eastern edge of the world was thought of as bordered by the encircling ocean, sometimes dotted with islands but looked upon warily as a dangerous otherworld in the classical tradition inherited by the Middle Ages. To the south, the Indies are shown on the maps as bordered by water. Normally marked out in red, the Red Sea (mare rubrum) in fact represents a conceptual conflation of the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Indian Ocean. This body of water often contains islands (see figs 30 and 32), while in the related Sawley (fig. 29) and Hereford maps the great island of Taprobane is located at the point where the Red Sea meets the encircling ocean. 22 

On the modern myth of the centrality of Jerusalem on medieval mappaemundi, see Woodward, ‘Medieval Mappaemundi’, pp. 340–42. Woodward notes that the city became more commonly depicted as central following the Crusades. The circular northern European maps discussed here tend to centre on Jerusalem, whereas the oval examples tend to centre somewhere on the eastern Mediterranean. 23  See Patch, The Other World According to Descriptions in Medieval Literature, pp. 151–52. On the complicated process by which Enoch and Elijah come to be identified with the ‘two witnesses’ to the apocalypse mentioned in the Book of Revelation (Rev. 11. 3–13), and their incrementally increasing role in the events of the last days, see Emmerson, ‘Two Witnesses’, pp. 791–92.

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Turning to the land mass proper, we sometimes find a singular India positioned in the furthest East, as in the Higden’s Huntington Polychronicon map and others in its tradition, like the smaller Ramsey map in BL, MS Royal 14 C.ix, 2v. In examples such as the Sawley and larger Ramsey maps (fig. 29; fig. 32), however, singular or multiple Indies to the southeast are clearly demarcated from the northeast by rivers and mountain ranges. To the northeast of the Indies, beyond an impassable mountain range in northern Asia, the maps tend to situate Gog and Magog, often identified, following the seventh-century Apocalypse of the Pseudo-Methodius, with the evil nations enclosed by Alexander according to the Alexander Romance.24 The Indies are often, in fact, sundered from their surroundings on all sides by natural barriers. Mountains and rivers mark them out as separate on the Sawley and larger Ramsey maps (figs 29, 32). The Huntington Polychronicon map (fig. 31) draws a wide Indus that stretches, impossibly, from north to south across Asia, whilst a map in the later Polychronicon manuscript in Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Tanner 170, fol. 15v accentuates the division still further. The Tanner map draws the river as a wide dividing band that entirely sunders this furthest region from the rest of Asia.25 This combination of physical characteristics renders the Indies simultaneously marginal and close to the originary and trans­ cendental. The maps attribute a range of physical and spiritual associations to the Indies’ marginal yet originary location. They commonly follow the geographical texts of the same period in situating exotic and mythical animals and peoples of monstrous mores or physiques in the furthest reaches of Asia. Scott Westrem has pointed out that the Hereford map locates nearly 60 per cent of the map’s references to ‘[i]nhabitants and ethnic groups, including humanoids with strange shapes and behaviours’ in this region. 26 On the Hereford map, most monstrous peoples are exiled to the far southern rim of the land mass in Africa and thus close to the uninhabitable Torrid Zone of late antique cosmology dis24 

On Gog, Magog, and Alexander, see Anderson, Alexander’s Gate, Gog & Magog and the Inclosed Nations. But see also the caveats in Westrem, ‘Against Gog and Magog’. On Gog, Magog, and apocalypticism in medieval map-making see Gow, ‘Gog and Magog on Mappaemundi and Early Printed World Maps’, pp. 61–88. 25  For an image, see Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Tanner 170 in the Bodleian Library Online Catalogues of Western Manuscripts [accessed 14 December 2011]. 26  Westrem, ‘Lessons from Legends on the Hereford World Map’, p. 202.

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cussed in Chapter 1. Nonetheless, we find in India texts and drawings referring to giants, pygmies, the Pandaeans, whose distinctive feature is that their rulers are female, and monoculi.27 These maps’ Indies also sometimes include drawings of exotic animals. The Hereford map features images of dragons and elephants, while the Ebstorf map situated many ‘bestias mirabiles’ (‘marvellous beasts’) in the Indies, including the eale, manticore, Indian bull, unicorn, and parrot, alongside drawings of cynocephali, gymnosophists, and icthyophagi — the fish-eaters reprimanded, according to legend, by Alexander.28 The Indies of the larger Ramsey map, in contrast, feature not vignettes but legends concerning the peoples and attributes of a particular place. On this idiosyncratic map, the stretches of land beyond the Indus feature texts concerning babies born grey whose hair darkens with age, pygmies, the cyclops, and men who live by the smell of apples. As well as the land mass, the islands and oceans that, in the geographical sources discussed in Chapter 1, are identified as belonging to the Indies have their own cosmological and spiritual associations. In a discussion of the islands that surround the Indian Ocean on Fra Mauro’s map, Angelo Cattaneo highlights an ancient geographical notion according to which ‘il confine dell’ecumene è segnato e circondato da migliaia di isole’ (‘the limit of the world is signalled and surrounded by thousands of islands’). In cartographic representations influenced by this idea, ‘i confini fisici e metafisici del conoscibile e del conosciuto assumono la morfologia geografica della realtà insulare’ (‘the physical and metaphysical limits of the knowable and known take on the geographical shape of insular reality’).29 However, the representation of islands in the East across this group of maps is sufficiently variable to indicate a certain indecisiveness concerning their relationship to the limits of the ‘knowable and known’, and indeed the position of those limits. The Ebstorf map situated the wealthy and healthful islands Crisa, ‘insula dives auro’ (‘island rich in gold’) and Argire ‘insula argento fertilis’ (‘island of plentiful silver’), in both of which ‘numquam arbores sine foliis sunt’ (‘trees are never without leaves’), along with

27  See The Hereford World Map, ed. and trans. by Westrem, nos 80 (giants), 60 (pygmies), 116 (Pandaeans), and 54 (monoculi). 28  The Hereford World Map, ed. and trans. by Westrem, nos 139 (dragons) and 84 (elephants). Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte, ed. by Kugler and others, p. 50, pl. 11, A1/2; p. 52, pl. 12, A1; p. 36, pl. 4, B2/10; p. 34, pl. 3, A2. References are to page, plate, square, and, where appropriate, legend number. 29  Cattaneo, ‘La Mappamundi di Fra Mauro’, p. 206.

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Taprobane, in the encircling ocean to the southeast.30 Hereford and Sawley place Tiles (Tile, ‘where the trees never lose their foliage’) to the north of Paradise.31 At the same time, however, Hereford brings certain oceanic islands within the compass of the Red Sea: Chryse, Argire, and Ophir, this last, according to i Kings 10. 11, a source of gold, precious woods, and stones.32 The early Huntington Polychronicon map (fig. 31) features no islands at all in the eastern encircling ocean, but a small group towards the outer rim of the Red Sea, a manoeuvre that suggests a level of mistrust of the navigability and habitability of the eastern oceans beyond. The smaller Ramsey Polychronicon map, on the other hand, places biblical Saba out in the ocean, beyond the mouths of the Indus and Red Sea, while the larger Ramsey map situates a ring of schematically drawn islands in the ocean that encircles the known world. Taken together, these conflicting approaches to the treatment of islands suggest cosmological uncertainty about the relationship between islands, ocean, and oikoumene at the eastern edge of the world. The maps provide no clear answer to the question of whether these islands, many of which are endowed with legendary wealth or marvellous attributes, belong to the oikoumene, the ‘espace mouvante’ (‘moving space’) and ‘maritime’ of the ocean, or some indeterminate space and state in between.33 This question is particularly pressing with regard to Taprobane, the idyllic and monstrous vision of Sri Lanka inherited by medieval map-makers from the ancient world. A mysterious island characterized by wealth, great cities, two summers, and yet half overrun by monsters, Taprobane partakes in paradisiacal and terrible characteristics simultaneously (Chapter 1). The maps that show this island (for example, Sawley, Hereford, Ebstorf, Psalter) graphically indicate a sense that the ancient uncertainties concerning the island’s ecumenical status, outlined by Pomponius Mela and reported by later writers, have not been resolved.34 The Hereford and Sawley maps (fig. 29) locate the island precisely at the juncture where the Red Sea and encircling ocean meet, a position that graphically elides the question of whether the island is within the oikoumene or beyond it. The Ebstorf map, however, situ30 

Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte, ed. by Kugler and others, p. 38, pl. 5, A1; A2/6; B2/10. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum, ed. by Lindsay, xiv.5–8; Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, ed. and trans. by Barney and others, p. 286. 32  The Hereford World Map, ed. and trans. by Westrem, nos 135, 140, 136. 33  Bouloux, ‘Les Îles dans les descriptions géographiques et les cartes’, pp. 1, 11. 34  See Pliny the Elder, Histoire naturelle. Livre vi, 2e partie, ed. and trans. by André and Filliozat, 24.81; Pomponius Mela, Chorographie, ed. by Silberman, Bk iii, 7,70. 31 

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ates the island in the encircling ocean, further east even than the Terrestrial Paradise. Half is fertile, rich, and inhabited by men, but ‘quasi dimidia bestiis et elefantis repleta est’ (‘almost half is full of beasts and elephants’).35 On the Hereford map, the half of the island nearest the salubrious climate of Paradise is filled with text that describes its exceptional fertility, whilst the half nearest the hot south (the ‘pars ulterior’) is marked out as ‘elephantis et draconibus plena’ (‘full of elephants and dragons’). 36 In other instances, as though to emphasize the island’s double status, it is shown as entirely bisected by a river.37 In different graphic and textual ways, the maps convey a sense of an unresolved relationship between this large, fertile, and rich but quasi-monstrous island and the adjacent ecumenical Indies. To repurpose the words used in the Ebstorf map’s description — quasi dimidia — the island hovers, not quite part of the oikumene but not quite a world beyond. At the same time as the islands of the East threaten to destabilize the boundary between the oikoumene and the unknown beyond, the position of the Indies in the furthest East simultaneously situates these in peculiarly privileged spatialcum-temporal relationship with the Terrestrial Paradise. The Indies are close to the geographical point where human history originated, yet, because Paradise both exists within human history and transcends it, the Indies’ proximity to Eden on the maps is, as in so much of the literature discussed in Chapter 1, a vivid and present influence.38 Across the eastern edges of the maps in focus here we find images and legends that conjure associations of wealth, health, and fertility. As well as the rich and healthful island of Taprobane, near the Terrestrial Paradise, the Hereford, Sawley, and Ebstorf maps (fig. 29; fig, 28) all depict mountains of gold near the edge of the continental land mass.39 The larger Ramsey map (fig. 32) places the long-lived and virtuous Brahmans in Ultima India, a strip of land that lies directly adjacent to an empty oblong where a planned depiction of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden was never completed.

35 

Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte, ed. by Kugler and others, p. 36, pl. 4, A2/4. The Hereford World Map, ed. and trans. by Westrem, no. 138. 37  The twelfth-century Parisian map in München, Bayerische Staatsbibl., MS Clm 10058, fol. 154v also represents Taprobane partially within and partially beyond the circle of lands and bisected laterally by a river. Reproduced in Barber, ‘Medieval Maps of the World’, p. 7, fig. 3. 38  For a detailed discussion of the positioning of paradise on medieval world maps, see Scafi, Mapping Paradise, pp. 84–159. 39  The Hereford World Map, ed. and trans. by Westrem, no. 136; Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte, ed. by Kugler and others, p. 38, pl. 5, B2/13. 36 

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The Terrestrial Paradise, indeed, forms a link between the world created by God and the world produced through the activities of mankind. It is a link that is both spatial and temporal; the Terrestrial Paradise is not only a garden planted by God but also the point of origin of human history in the world. Many of the maps show this by plotting locations associated with the earliest stages of JudeoChristian history in the furthest East. The Sawley and Hereford maps both place ‘Enos civitas’, described on the Hereford map as ‘antiquissima’ (‘most ancient’) and thought to have been founded by Cain, son of Adam, on a stretch of land close to Eden.40 Ophir, source of King Solomon’s gold, appears on the Hereford map in the Red Sea, again, in the Indies and not far from Paradise. 41 Other sources do the same for biblical Evilath (Havilah); a land rich in gold close to the source of the Phison in Eden (Gen. 2. 11), it is situated by the twelfth-century Descriptio mappaemundi of Hugh of St Victor in ‘India que finem facit’ and by the Anglo-Saxon Cotton map on a promontory opposite Paradise.42 Scholars have often noted the association, common to a number of map­ paemundi, between the furthest East and the earliest stage of human history. Many, indeed, have drawn the conclusion that the maps are, in Stephen McKenzie’s critical summary, ‘models of time and universal history’ that show a ‘westward historical progression’ from Paradise to ‘the final Judgement in the far west’.43 But it is important to note that the more detailed surviving northern European mappaemundi in focus here mark out the Indies with many more trajectories than humankind’s first steps out of Eden, and that the viewer following these trajectories will find that they lead in many different directions. The Ebstorf map, for example, foregrounded the generally eastward trajectory of evangelization from the Mediterranean world into India Inferior. On it, we find, meticulously illustrated, the spatial and temporal trajectory of the Apostle 40 

The Hereford World Map, ed. and trans. by Westrem, no. 63 and note. As Westrem’s note makes clear, the Hereford map draws ultimately on the Parisian Hugh of St Victor’s Descriptio mappae mundi at this point: Hugh of Saint-Victor, Descriptio mappae mundi, ed. by Gautier Dalché, p. 140. 41  The Hereford World Map, ed. and trans. by Westrem, no. 136 and note. 42  Hugh of Saint-Victor, Descriptio mappae mundi, ed. by Gautier Dalché, p. 140. A precise translation of the phrase is difficult, but it seems to share the connotations of the ‘Furthest’ or ‘Final’ India. The Cotton map is in BL, MS Cotton Tiberius B.v, fol. 56v and is reproduced in Barber, ‘Medieval Maps of the World’, p. 6, fig. 2. 43  McKenzie, ‘The Westward Progression of History on Medieval Mappaemundi’, p. 335. On this idea of ‘the progression of history from east to west through the six ages’ as the conceptual basis for mappaemundi, see, for example, Scafi, ‘Defining Mappaemundi’, p. 348.

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Thomas’s mission, through a series of evangelical sites along the Indus, towards the heart of ‘India Inferior’.44 One finds next to the Red Sea — the gateway from the Mediterranean world to the Indies — Eriforum (Heliophorum), a bright, turreted, and domed city in which, according to the Old Latin Acts, Thomas preached, thereby metaphorically building, in the words of the map, ‘Gundoforo regi palatium’ (‘a palace for king Gundoforus’).45 Further inland, along the Indus that snakes towards the upper middle of the map, is located the city of Calaminica, where ‘Sanctus Thomas martyrio coronatur’ (‘Saint Thomas was crowned with martyrdom’). Between the two sites, one finds a great tomb, representing the ‘[s]epulchrum Thome apostoli’, complete with elaborately designed reliquary and still-burning flame.46 The Ebstorf map thus plotted the route and results of evangelization deep into the Indies. The visual language of the map — in particular the eternal flame that burns above the pictured reliquary — shows that this influence is imagined not as past but as contemporary. For the Ebstorf cartographer and his audiences, Thomas’s spatial acts have enduring significance, shaping Indian space not just in the past but also in the map’s present and into its future. But it is not only Old Testament and early Christian history that shape the Indian space represented on this group of mappaemundi. The Ebstorf, Hereford, Psalter, and Sawley world maps also plot routes and locations associated with Graeco-Roman history and legend. The story of Alexander the Great, summarized in the Old Testament (i Maccabees 1. 1–9) but better known to the Middle Ages through the historical and romance texts discussed in Chapter 1, unites biblical and pagan historical mythologies of the Indies. Associations with Alexander are particularly powerful on the most detailed maps. As Naomi Reed Kline has pointed out, Alexander’s itinerary on the Hereford map sprawls over much of Asia.47 The map is dotted with cities founded by the conqueror, such as Nicea and Bucephala, as well as with natural and man-made monuments to his progress. These include the Ydaspis River, crossed during the conqueror’s campaign with Porus, whose kingdom is also plotted on the map, and altars erected to mark the limits of his campaign.48 The Ebstorf map was likewise dotted with physical, toponymic, and iconographic reminders of the 44 

Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte, ed. by Kugler and others, p. 50, pl. 11, B1/11. Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte, ed. by Kugler and others, p. 52, pl. 12, B1/5–6. 46  Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte, ed. by Kugler and others, p. 50, pl. 11, B1/14; B2/16. 47  Kline, ‘Alexander Interpreted on the Hereford Mappamundi’, p. 168. 48  The Hereford World Map, ed. and trans. by Westrem, nos 73, 77, 86, 82. 45 

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Figure 32. Larger east-oriented mappamundi accompanying Ramsey Abbey’s copy of Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon England, later fourteenth century. London, British Library, MS Royal 14 C.ix, fols 1v–2r. © The British Library Board.

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conqueror’s exploits, even featuring, just to the right of Christ’s head at the top of the map, a representation of the oracular Trees of the Sun and Moon from which Alexander learns of his fate.49 In fact, the image of Alexander’s encounter with the oracular trees is placed in a playfully symmetrical relationship with the image, to the left of Christ’s head, of the moment of temptation in the Garden of Eden. The beginning of Judeo-Christian history and the end of the great pagan conqueror’s Indian adventures, both transformative encounters with remarkable trees, are thereby placed meaningfully on the same level, at the Indies’ eastern edge. Even the tiny Psalter map finds space close to the Terrestrial Paradise for a captioned image of the ‘arbor solis’ and ‘arbor lune’, whilst the larger Ramsey map features a historically aware legend in the past tense identifying the location where Alexander ‘petebat responsum ab arboribus’ (‘asked answers of the trees’; fig. 32). Locations and trajectories associated with other figures in the classical pagan pantheon make appearances on these maps too. To the west and south of the Terrestrial Paradise on the Sawley, Hereford, and Psalter maps, the city of Nisa, founded by Dionysius, son of Jove, is marked, while nearby is Mt Meros, legendary location of his birth and fostering.50 Perhaps showing the influence of French vernacular Alexander romances, the Psalter map depicts a pair of pillars set up by the pagan demigod Hercules to mark the geographical limits of his activities in the region.51 Finally, the maps also bear the traces of the Roman world’s journeys made in pursuit of spices from the East. This trajectory was perhaps most fully illustrated on the Ebstorf map. Beyond Meroe in the Nile, not far from Alexandria on the Mediterranean, it offered the navigational advice that ‘[a]b Alexandria Indiam petentibus usque Cotton navigium est, dehinc terrestrium ad Idreum’ (‘for those seeking India from Alexandria it is necessary to take a boat to Cotton [Coptus; the Nile port of Qift], and from here to go by land to Idreum [Hydreuma]’.52 From there, the route can be traced 49  Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte, ed. by Kugler and others, ‘Domus Pori regis’ (‘the home of King Porus’), p. 48, pl. 10, B2/19; the trees of the sun and moon, p. 36, pl. 4, A/6; the enclosure of Gog and Magog, p. 44, pl. 8 B2/7. 50  The Hereford World Map, ed. and trans. by Westrem, no. 121 and note. 51  Barber suggests that the Alexander Romance influenced various depictions and legends on the map: Barber, ‘Medieval Maps of the World’, p. 18. 52  Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte, ed. by Kugler and others, p. 64, pl. 18, B1/18. There were several hydreumata (watering holes) on the route to the Red Sea. The map’s information goes back to Pliny (NH, vi.26.102–03), though it is simplified. On the route and its hydreumata, see Scott, ‘A Long Walk in the Desert’.

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via the Nile and Red Sea to the ancient Indian Ocean port of Cotonare (perhaps confused with the ‘Cotton’ of the earlier legend) where, according to the map, ‘Arabes et Egyptii ab Indis piper omnibus gentibus advehendum suscipiunt’ (‘Arabs and Egyptians undertake to bring back pepper from the Indians for all peoples’).53 Above all, the group of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century northwestern maps discussed in this section demonstrate a concern to chart the diversity of human activities in Indian space, and yet to place these within a divinely ordained cosmological framework. Certainly, the earliest trajectories of JudeoChristian history are marked on the maps, but so too are the eastward trajectories of Thomas the Evangelist, Alexander, and Hercules, and even those of merchants bringing eastern luxuries into Europe via the Mediterranean. Moreover, in preserving the traces of these formative trajectories, the mappaemundi assert the continued influence of these spatial acts in their contemporary world. For evidence of this, we need look no further than at some of the travelling religious discussed in Chapter 2. These travellers’ references to locations such as Porus’s kingdom, Alexander’s altars, Thomas’s tomb, and the Terrestrial Paradise make it clear that these were considered real elements in travellers’ experienced worlds. Though on opposite sides of the world, northern Europe and the Indies are inextricably linked by an imagined shared past, witnessed by the traces it has left across these maps.

Navigation, Evangelization, and Apocalypse: The Indies of Pietro Vesconte’s World Maps and the Catalan Atlas I wish to turn now to the spatial relationships between Latin Christendom and the Indies that are envisaged by two world maps produced in quite different geographical and cultural contexts. The earliest is a world map probably designed around 1320 by Genoese nautical chart-maker Pietro Vesconte (plate 3), in a version produced by the Vesconte atelier around 1325. Alongside a set of regional maps and a portolan chart of the Eastern Mediterranean, Vesconte’s world map accompanied Marino Sanudo Torsello’s plan for the recovery of the Holy Land, the Liber secretorum fidelium crucis.54 Sanudo’s Liber, of which 53 

Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte, ed. by Kugler and others, p. 64, pl. 18 B1/12; p. 38, pl. 5, B2/8. Vesconte’s earliest surviving copy and possible original has been identified as that in his atlas of 1320 (BAV, MS Palatini latini 1362a, reproduced on the CD-ROM accompanying Pujades i Bataller, Les cartes portolanes, trans. by Rees), which Degenhart and Schmitt sug54 

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multiple copies were commissioned for the pope and Christian potentates across Europe, argued for an embargo on trade through Egypt to undercut the Mamlūk Sultanate’s profits from the spice trade, thereby weakening the sultanate, and opening up the possibility of its defeat and the subsequent recapture of Jerusalem.55 The sole surviving world map of the Majorcan specialist maker of ‘mapemondes’ Cresques Abraham, the Catalan Atlas (BnF, MS esp. 30; figs 33 and 34), was produced around half a century later and was in the French Royal Library by 1380.56 That both these maps feature the influence of portolan charts and apparent innovations in their representations of parts of the south and east long been recognized.57 Indeed, these maps are relatively early examples of a broader trend — of which examples can be found in ecumenical cartography from across Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries — towards the representation gest accompanied the copy of Sanudo’s treatise presented to John XXII in 1321: Degenhart and Schmitt, ‘Marino Sanudo und Paolino Veneto’, p. 64. I largely use here the copy of around 1325 in BL, MS Addit. 27376*, a product of Vesconte’s atelier accompanying Sanudo’s treatise, though rebound in the 1930s in a different volume. For an overview of the text’s relationships with the maps and a list of surviving maps, see also Edson, ‘Reviving the Crusade’. Marino Sanudo compiled his treatise between 1307 and 1321. His letters recommending the treatise to powerful secular and ecclesiastical figures date from the 1320s, indicating that the maps were produced at this time: see the ‘Introduction’, in Sanudo Torsello, The Book of the Secrets, trans. by Lock, p. 3. See also Tyerman, ‘Marino Sanudo and the Lost Crusade’. 55  See Sanudo’s summary and list of chapters in Bk 1, parts 1–4, in Sanudo Torsello, The Book of the Secrets, trans. by Lock, pp. 30–31. See also Edson, ‘Reviving the Crusade’, pp. 135–36. 56  The date is implied rather than explicitly stated in the map’s cosmological charts, and the map’s authorship has been the subject of protracted scholarly debate. For a summary of the historical arguments with references, see the ‘Introduction’, in Abraham, Mapamundi, ed. by Grosjean, pp. 9, 12–13. Freiesleben suggests that it was ordered between 1374 and 1376 for Pedro el Ceremonioso of Aragon, then given before 1380 to Charles V of France: see the editor’s introduction to Abraham, Der katalanische Weltatlas, ed. and trans. by Freiesleben, p. 7. A set of detailed commentaries were produced for the CD-ROM Mapamondi: Une Carte du Monde au XIVe siècle. A digital reproduction is available in the CD-ROM accompanying Pujades i Bataller, Les cartes portolanes, trans. by Rees. On Cresques and his son Jafudà (or, after conversion to Christianity, Jaume Ribes) as specialist mapamondi makers, see the ‘Introduction’, in Abraham, Mapamundi, ed. by Grosjean, pp. 2–3; and Pujades i Bataller, Les cartes portolanes, trans. by Rees, pp. 491–92. 57  On the maps’ relationships to portolan charts, see Pujades i Bataller, Les cartes porto­ lanes, trans. by Rees, pp. 488–90, 492, 517; Edson thinks that Vesconte’s map may have drawn on Arabic antecedents in, for example, its open Indian Ocean: Edson, ‘Reviving the Crusade’, p. 138; on the Indian Ocean and Asia on the Catalan Atlas, see Pullè, La cartografia antica dell’India, ii, 111–14.

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of a broader, island-rich Indian ocean (see for example Bianco’s mappamundi, fig. 27).58 Nonetheless, these maps’ representations of the Indies also feature many continuities and shared preoccupations with the English and related northwestern maps discussed in the last section. Vesconte’s and Abraham’s spatial visions are heavily conditioned by their keen sense of temporality, and their Indies are both marked out and connected to the world through the trajectories — spatial and temporal — of human action and providential history. In both instances, as we shall see, these trajectories and the relationships that they create between the Indies, Latin Christendom, and the wider world are closely bound up with the specific epistemological and political circumstances of the maps’ production. It is well established that the copy of Pietro Vesconte’s world map in BL, MS Addit. 27376* (c. 1325; plate 3), was drawn, in Vesconte’s atelier, alongside portolans of the Mediterranean and regional charts of the Holy Land, to provide contextual information for the copy of Marino Sanudo’s Liber secretorum, in the same volume. Scholarship is divided on the level of collaboration between Sanudo and Vesconte over the world and other maps in the collection, and similarly divided on the relationship between Vesconte’s maps and a very similar design that appears in certain copies of works produced in the same period by the Franciscan chronicler and Bishop Paolino Minorita.59 Yet affinities between the map and the treatise’s vision of Indian Ocean trade suggest that Sanudo and/or Vesconte at the very least selected a design that suited the treatise’s aims, and certainly modified that design to achieve a closer fit. Comparison with a map by Paolino (BnF, MS lat. 4939, fol. 9r), close in date and, according to Degenhart and Schmitt, very similar to Vesconte’s main source, highlights the extent to which the copies made by Vesconte’s atelier were specifically configured in ways that made them particularly suitable to Sanudo’s purpose. 58 

For other examples, see Knefelkamp, ‘Indien in der Kartographie des 15. und 16. Jahr­ hunderts’; and O’Doherty, ‘A Peripheral Matter? Oceans in the East’. 59  See the ‘Introduction’, in Sanudo Torsello, The Book of the Secrets, trans. by Lock, pp. 15–16; Edson argues that the world map has ‘little to do with the main mission of Sanudo’s book’: Edson, ‘Reviving the Crusade’, pp. 139–44. As Edson points out (p. 138), there is some dispute over whether Fra Paolino borrowed from Vesconte or vice versa, or worked independently. Pujades i Bataller suggests Paolino as its originator, dating the copy in his volume, BnF, MS lat. 4939, to 1320, prior to the Vesconte versions: Pujades i Bataller, Les cartes portolanes, trans. by Rees, p. 331. In their exceptionally detailed study of the cartographic and iconographic relationships between Sanudo’s and Paolino’s works, however, Degenhart and Schmitt date the world map in BnF, MS lat. 4939 to around 1329, but suggest that Vesconte and/or Sanudo drew on a similar map by the friar: Degenhart and Schmitt, ‘Marino Sanudo und Paolino Veneto’, pp. 71–76.

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The most immediately striking feature of the depiction of the southern and eastern reaches of the known world in BL, MS Addit. 27376* is that it provides minimal detail on the continental Indies but gives an unusual level of prominence to eastern seas. The Red Sea — not coloured red here — and Persian Gulf flow into a broad, unnamed gulf of the encircling mare oceanum, a gulf which separates ‘Ethiopia Inferior’ to its west from ‘India Parva’ (which the map-maker identifies with Ethiopia) and ‘India Magna’ to its east. To the far south, where the gulf joins the open sea, there is an ‘insula piperis’ (‘island of pepper’). In these respects, the map’s representation of the continental and maritime Indies, though striking when set against the thirteenth-century mappae­ mundi discussed in the last section, is largely similar to that in Fra Paolino’s version. However, the Vesconte-Sanudo map’s representation of the Indian Ocean is adapted in ways that accentuate its role as a space of trade and, thus, a source of prosperity and power. It is dotted with a number of islands, among which is ‘Kis’ (Kish; Qais) in the Persian Gulf. ‘Cede Portus’ ( Jidda) and ‘Haden’ (Aden) are marked with building symbols, sometimes coloured red, on the Red Sea, whilst the town of Chus (Kus) is shown adjacent to a tributary of the Nile. These features on the Vesconte-Sanudo map, absent from its Franciscan counterpart, permit its viewers to follow parts of the trajectory of luxury goods outlined in the accompanying volume, the taxes from which, according to Sanudo, supply one-third of the Mamlūk sultan’s income. Sanudo argues — not without exaggeration — that the vast majority of goods transported from the Indies at the time of writing come to the port of Ahaden (Aden), are transported by caravan to Chus (Kus, below Luxor), then by river and canal to Cairo, then Alexandria.60 Readers of treatise and map together are able not only to follow this route of luxury goods across the map, but also to trace out at least one of Sanudo’s proposed alternative spice routes, designed to avoid lands controlled by the sultan in favour of routes through the lands of the Īl-Khāns of Persia, at that time hostile to Egypt. Goods could be transported, Sanudo argues, from Kis (Kish; Qais), via the Persian Gulf, then by river (marked as the Euphrates on the map) to Taurisium (Tabriz), all of which stages are marked.61 Like the 60 

Sanudo Torsello, The Book of the Secrets, trans. by Lock, pp. 49–50. On Īl-Khān-Mamlūk hostilty and cooperation between Europeans (particularly the Genoese) and the Īl-Khāns around the end of the thirteenth century, see Northrup, ‘The Baḥrī Mamlūk Sultanate’, pp. 242–89. Hormuz on the Persian Gulf, the port of Sanudo’s first proposed alternative is not shown. His second proposed alternative (unnamed port, unnamed river, Tabriz, Baghdad) is not shown in full, though the two stages that Sanudo explicitly names — Thaurisium (Tabriz) and Baldac (Baghdad) — are marked. 61 

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kinds of thematic maps that accompany modern works on world politics, then, the Vesconte-Sanudo map in BL, MS Addit. 27376* worked to enable its viewers to visualize the same spatial relationships that the treatise’s author sees and their implications: the threat that certain trade routes pose to Latin Christendom’s struggle for the Holy Land, and the opportunities afforded by alternatives. And, given that a number of the places marked on the map that form crucial staging posts in Sanudo’s narrated routes did not appear in earlier versions of the map, it is likely that the designs of the copies made for Sanudo’s work were continually remodelled to enable them better to illustrate the treatise they accompanied.62 While on the one hand Vesconte’s map functions as a thematic map that traces the routes of goods from the insular and oceanic Indies into the heart of the oikoumene, the map’s lack of concern with the sites of biblical and historical significance that are otherwise usual on ecumenical maps of the period contributes to the map’s equally distinctive continental Indies. Even the Terrestrial Paradise, a site that retains its importance on many fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury ecumenical maps, such as Bianco’s mappamundi (fig. 27), is absent from Vesconte’s vision of the eastern edge of the world. Nor does the map show, as do Sawley, Ebstorf, Hereford, and others, the Old Testament events such as the transitus of the Israelites across the Red Sea. While even an English map as small as the Psalter map contrives to show an Asia replete with cities, rivers, representations of buildings, animals, peoples, and references to historical events, the Vesconte-Sanudo map virtually clears the region. Its uncluttered appearance, however, ensures that what nomenclature it does feature stands out all the clearer, and it prompts map users to consider its significance. Sparse though it may be, the nomenclature of the Vesconte-Sanudo map’s continental Indies nonetheless calls to mind a specific frame of reference: that of evangelization. Just as we find in many texts that treat the history of the world’s evangelization, discussed in Chapter 1, Vesconte’s map features three Indies. These, which cover a large area of the southeast (upper right) of the map, are divided into ‘India Superior Johannis presbiteri’ (‘Upper India of Prester 62 

As well as the noted divergences from Fra Paolino’s map, there are also differences from the earliest known Vesconte version in BAV, MS Palatini latini 1362a, fol. 1v, identified by Degenhart and Schmitt as John XXII’s presentation copy of 1321, which features ‘Cede Portus’ but not the island of Kis, the port of Aden, the Nile staging post of Kus, or Thaurisium. Another possible indication of revisions in the workshop is the fact that many of these inscriptions in the BL, MS Addit. 27376* world map appear to have been written, in a contemporaneous hand, onto areas that appear to have been rubbed away to make way for them.

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Plate 1. Ebstorf World Map (reconstruction). East is at the top. Reconstruction at Ebskart, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, [accessed 27 May 2013]. Reproduced by kind permission of Kloster Ebstorf and Martin Warnke.

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Plate 2. World Map of Fra Mauro. Mid-fifteenth century. South to the top. Cosmological discussions and illustrations in the map’s frame (including a representation of the Earthly Paradise) are not reproduced here. Venezia, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana (no shelfmark). Su concessione del Ministerio per i Beni e le Attività Culturali — Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. Copying not permitted.

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Plate 3. Atelier of Pietro Vesconte, world map to accompany Marino Sanudo Torsello, Liber secretorum fidelium crucis, c. 1325. East is to the top. London, British Library, MS Additional 27376*, fols 187v–188r. © The British Library Board.

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John’) in the furthest East, ‘India Magna’ to its west, and, next to the Persian Gulf, ‘India Parva quae et Ethiopia’ (‘Little India, that is also Ethiopia’). These names carry associations of evangelization in at least two cases. India Superior, identified on the map as the land of Prester John, is also identified as the land evangelized by the apostle Thomas in the Old Latin Life and Miracles of the saint and their derivatives, while the Letter of Prester John also situates the apostle’s tomb in the priest-king’s realm.63 And, just as in Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia imperialia and Hugh of St Victor’s Descriptio mappaemundi, the VesconteSanudo map associates one of its Indies with Ethiopia.64 This association is particularly common in the Middle Ages — as in the Otia and the Descriptio — in the context of accounts of the Indies’ evangelization; indeed, Gautier Dalché traces it ultimately to the apocryphal Acts of the Apostles.65 Vesconte’s continental Indies, then, are marked out principally by place names that function as a kind of toponymic shorthand for evangelized space, and their intertexts and apostolic frame of reference would have been familiar to Sanudo’s educated, powerful addressees. The Indies of the Vesconte-Sanudo map, then, have two principal frames of reference: commerce and evangelization. The two are unlikely bedfellows, a fact that raises the question of why Sanudo or Vesconte should have been so keen to encourage the map’s users to view the Indies through these particular lenses. A clue is provided, perhaps, by a trajectory that begins in a quite different portion of the map, one that, tellingly, does not appear on the version of similar design by Paolino Minorita. In both the Paolino and Vesconte-Sanudo versions of this design, in the northeast of the oikoumene there is a promontory of land. Uniquely in the Vesconte version, however, this is cut off entirely by mountains and identified with the note that, in this location, the Mongols were once enclosed (‘hic fuerunt inclusi tartari’). Their location and enclosure within it corresponds closely with that of Gog and Magog on the northern 63 

For a fuller discussion of these links and references, see Chapter 1, ‘From India to the Indies’. 64  Gervase has Bartholemew preach in Upper India, Thomas in Lower India — where he also locates Gundaphorus’s city of Elioforus — and Matthew in ‘India meridiana que tangit Echiopiam’ (‘southern India, which touches upon Ethiopia’): Gervase of Tilbury, Otia impe­ rialia, ed. and trans. by Banks and Binns, pp. 182–85. See ‘Ethiopica India’: Hugh of SaintVictor, Descriptio mappae mundi, ed. by Gautier Dalché, p. 167. 65  On the association with the apocryphal Acts, which has ‘India quae ad Aethiopiam mittit’, see the ‘Introduction’ in Hugh of Saint-Victor, Descriptio mappae mundi, ed. by Gautier Dalché, p. 78.

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European mappaemundi discussed earlier (e.g., Hereford, Sawley, Ebstorf ), and a ‘castrum Gog and Magog’, located directly alongside their enclosure, renders this association explicit. The Vesconte-Sanudo map, then, sets out visually an association not made in Sanudo’s accompanying treatise but not uncommon in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: between the Mongols, the unclean nations enclosed in northern Asia by Alexander the Great, and Gog and Magog, ‘comites’ (‘companions’) of the Antichrist, as the Ebstorf map puts it.66 The emergence from this enclosure of Gog and Magog would, it was thought, herald the Last Judgement.67 Indeed, according to the thirteenth-century Franciscan and author of a treatise on geography, Roger Bacon, one of the most useful functions of geography for the Church was to counter ‘furorem Antichristi et eorum qui tempora eius praevenire creduntur, ut mundum primo vastent’ (‘the rage of the Antichrist and of those who, it is believed, will come in his age first to ravage the world’).68 However, whereas the Hereford, Ebstorf, Sawley, and related maps project Gog and Magog’s emergence from their enclosure as a future event, the Vesconte-Sanudo world maps depict the chain of events that will usher in the end of history and the Last Judgement as already in motion. The Mongols are no longer enclosed. On a plain to the southwest of Prester John’s kingdom in India Superior, near the ‘Indus fluvius’, the mapmaker records that ‘hic convenit multitudo tartarorum’ (‘here the multitude of Tartars gathered’). In the Liber secretorum that the map accompanied and illustrated, this gathering is described as the meeting in which the Mongols selected Chinggiz Khan as their leader and prepared to march on King David of India, the son and heir of the legendary priest-king.69 Yet, when it is borne in mind that the same map identifies the Tartars with Gog and Magog, this historical detail takes on an eschatological meaning; in the map’s apocalyptic temporality, Gog and Magog have begun to ‘ravage the world’, and the Antichrist is coming soon. 66  Sanudo describes the Mongol homeland as an inhospitable tribal region ‘where the east meets the north’: Sanudo Torsello, The Book of the Secrets, trans. by Lock, p. 372. On the thirteenth-century association between Gog and Magog and the Mongols, see Westrem, ‘Against Gog and Magog’, p. 65. On Gog and Magog and late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century millenarianism, see Schmieder, ‘Edges of the World—Edges of Time’. 67  Die Ebstorfer Weltkarte, ed. by Kugler and others, p. 44, pl. 8, B2/7; Gow, ‘Gog and Magog on Mappaemundi and Early Printed World Maps’, passim. 68  Bacon, Opus majus, ed. by Bridges, i, 309. 69  The reference is to the unification by Chinggiz of the tribes under one leader in 1206. Sanudo Torsello, The Book of the Secrets, trans. by Lock, pp. 373–74.

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Like its northwestern forebears and contemporaries, the Vesconte-Sanudo map in BL, MS Addit. 27376* focuses on the temporal and spatial trajectories that connect places, peoples, and events. The Indies are one moving part of the larger moving machine of the world, and the Vesconte-Sanudo world map indicates these movements in a manner that factually and ideologically complements the Liber secretorum that it accompanies. While patterns of trade through the maritime Indies shore up the wealth and power of the Mamlūk sultans, the events that will lead inevitably to the apocalypse have already begun their own spatial and temporal progress across the oikoumene. At least as much as its northern European forebears and contemporaries, the Vesconte-Sanudo map is concerned with time as well as space. It maps not just the world but also the world at a very specific temporal moment: that of imminent apocalypse. The map does so in order to persuade its powerful viewers across the courts of Europe that the time is upon them to intervene in world events: to disrupt the lucrative Indian Ocean trade and launch a new crusade. Turning now to the Catalan Atlas (BnF, MS esp. 30; figs 33 and 34), we find that, though produced some sixty years later, the map shares certain of the characteristics of the Vesconte-Sanudo world map in that, as well as mapping the trajectories of evangelization and navigation, it too shows particular concerns with prophecy, providential history, and apocalypse. Given this combination of concerns, it is noteworthy that some scholars have argued for the Atlas’s dependence upon models and information from the earlier part of the fourteenth century (c. 1330s–50s), when the missions to Asia discussed in Chapter 2 were still in progress.70 The most immediately striking feature of the Atlas, however, is its form. While copied in the context of a set of cosmological diagrams and notes, the world map itself is laid out in the oblong shape of a navigational chart, and indeed it was first registered as a ‘carte de mer en tabliaux’ (‘a sea chart in plates’) in its earliest catalogue entry in the French Royal library.71 Yet sea charts of this period — whether the splendid examples held in noble libraries or plainer examples that might be used in navigation proper — represented only the maritime space known to Europeans through the practice of navigation. Normally centred on the Mediterranean and criss-crossed by a network of winds to aid direction-finding, portolan charts show the coasts of navigated areas in detail, 70 

See the ‘Introduction’, in Abraham, Mapamundi, ed. by Grosjean, p. 23. It is noted in an inventory of 1380 as a ‘Une carte de mer en tabliaux’ (‘sea chart in plates’); see the ‘Introduction’, in Abraham, Mapamundi, ed. by Grosjean, pp. 9, 12–13. 71 

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Figures 33 and 34. The Indies on Cresques Abraham’s mapamondi, the Catalan Atlas. Plate 5 (opposite) shows the Persian Gulf and west coast of India; plate 6 (above) shows Eastern India, Cathay, and Northern Asia, with a representation of the Antichrist. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds espagnol 30, plates 5 and 6. Reproduced with permission.

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with the names of coastal towns perpendicular to the coastline, thus keeping the sea clear for the representation of navigational hazards.72 The Catalan Atlas, then, is a work that, in its ambition to represent the wider oikoumene, unites mappamundi and portolan chart. It not only represents, as one would expect for a portolan chart of the period produced in a known centre of chartmaking activity, the Mediterranean, Black Sea, and Atlantic coasts then navigated by Europeans but also attempts to figure cartographically the trajectories of recent navigational, political, and religious movements across continental Asia and the Indies.73 Abraham’s representation of the Indies sprawls across two of the four plates that comprise the Atlas’s world map (see figs 33 and 34). Subcontinental India begins on the map’s fifth plate (fig. 33), to the east of the Persian Gulf, which is overlooked by the commanding figure of the ‘Re del Taurisio’.74 It is decorated by the figures of several richly dressed kings, among whom sits a royal figure identified in an accompanying legend as the Sultan of Delhi. The cities of the Sultan’s domains, which stretch from the north down the west coast of India, are marked out by a silver-grey flag with a black vertical bar. The southernmost tip of subcontinental India, however, is beyond the compass of a mapamondi that, as it turns out, does not quite encompass the whole oikoumene. In spite of this breach of the map’s frame to the south, the map represents, beyond peninsular India, to the east, navigable seas traversed by many nations in search of spices, and myriad habitable and uninhabited islands.75 These islands, coloured in red, pink, green, purple, and gold, some with their rulers pictured and some featuring legends or images relating to their marvellous characteristics or peoples, are numbered 7548 in a legend that derives from Marco Polo.76 In the far southeast, the map locates Taprobane. In an echo of the questionable, semiecumenical status we have seen attributed to it elsewhere, the island sits only partially within the map’s frame. Along the northern coast of the Persian Gulf and down the western coast of India, the map shows coastal cities, their topo72 

Pujades i Bataller, Les cartes portolanes, trans. by Rees, pp. 462–63. For the Atlas’s reliance on a 1339 chart by Dulceto, see Pujades i Bataller, Les cartes por­ tolanes, trans. by Rees, p. 492. 74  Abraham, Mapamundi, ed. by Grosjean, pp. 81, 2. Grosjean’s note suggests that the king is a vassal in Timur’s empire, but the depiction and name are generic. The map-maker uses distinctive flags to signal the extent of particular rulers’ political dominion across the Atlas. 75  Abraham, Mapamundi, ed. by Grosjean, p. 92, K. 76  See Polo, Le Divisament dou monde, ed. by Ronchi, p. 537, where 7448 is the number given: Abraham, Mapamundi, ed. by Grosjean, p. 92, no. 1. 73 

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nyms written, portolan style, perpendicular to the coast, alongside crenelated buildings with flags flying above. The origins of the toponyms represented are not always clear. Some apparently derive from Marco Polo: Checimo, Nocran, Femenat (Somnath), and Canbetum (Cambay) all have counterparts in the Divisament.77 Some, as we shall see below, carry echoes of the Indian journeys made by the Dominican and Franciscan missionaries through the subcontinent. Nonetheless, whatever the sources of the cartographer’s toponyms, he presents the coastal towns on this ‘carte de mer’ as connected through navigation. Identical boats in full sail, drawn differently to the European vessel pictured on the map’s second plate, are drawn on either side of peninsular India (figs 33, 34, and cover image), in the eastern and western Indian Ocean. While the southernmost point of India may not be visible, navigation between the two gulfs is nonetheless implied to be possible. Yet the map’s graphical representation signifies something more than a vague and general assertion of navigability. The flags flown by these two ships bear the red square on a gold background that identifies them, within the context of the map, as belonging to the ‘Re del Tauris’ (‘King of Tabriz’). Probably a generic reference to Īl-Khān power in Persia, this legend was somewhat dated even at the time the map was produced.78 The extent of the domains of this Persian king, both in inland Persia and along the northerly coast of the Persian Gulf is marked out by identical flags (fig. 33). The map, then, shows traders from the Persian Gulf operating as far east as the eastern Indian Ocean. While the Catalan Atlas shows Persian navigation as economically dominant between the Persian Gulf and eastern Indian Ocean, it also charts the temporal and spatial progress of quite different political and religious trajectories through the Indies: those of Muslim expansion and Christian mission. These trajectories belong to a fourteenth-century historical moment, though the moment they evoke is, like that of Īl-Khān dominance in Persia, somewhat earlier than that of the map’s composition. The Atlas’s representation of the arena of influence of the Sultan of Delhi, pictured seated in northwestern India but also shown through his emblem as in political control of much of 77 

Abraham, Mapamundi, ed. by Grosjean, p.  84, nos 32, 33, 35, 36, 37. See Polo, Le Divisament dou monde, ed. by Ronchi: Chesimur, p. 362; Kesmacoran, p. 589; Semenat, p. 588; Canbaet, p. 587. Kesmacoran is generally explained as a conflation of the name for the city of Kesh or Kīz with that of the region Makrān: Polo, Le Divisament dou monde, ed. by Ronchi, p. 699. 78  The Īl-Khān empire fragmented after 1335, and its former port of Hormuz transferred to its new location in the Gulf, becoming an independent trading power. On the changing situation of Hormuz and its role in Indian Ocean trade, see Agius, Classic Ships of Islam, pp. 82–85.

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the coastline stretching southwards, cartographically mirrors the cautionary reports produced by Friar Jordan Catala in the 1320s concerning the spread of Islam southwards through the subcontinent. At the same time, the map plots the present and future trajectories of Christian mission across the mainland Indies to the islands beyond. We find, for example, the influence of recent missions reflected in toponyms across the subcontinent. Cocintaya (Thane) has a near counterpart in ‘Cuncatana’, used to denote the town in a letter of Pope John XXII concerning the Dominican missionary Jordan Catala’s activities in India in the 1320s (see Chapter 2), whilst the city of Goga (Ghoga) is also mentioned in Jordan’s correspondence.79 ‘Colombo’, of course, is subcontinental India’s only episcopal see, the seat of Jordan’s bishopric and, thus, a city of some importance in Latin ecclesiastical geography.80 Moving to the east coast of India, we there find place names similar to those witnessed by the Franciscan Giovanni da Marignolli. As is the case in Giovanni’s recollections of his mission (Chapter 2), the body of St Thomas the Apostle is in ‘Miraper’ or ‘Mirapor’ (Mylapore), while the name ‘Cincalan’ is used to denote Guangzhou. 81 The map is also concerned to mark out explicitly the contemporary presence of Christianity in India. To the south of the lands ruled by the Delhi Sultanate are those of the ‘rey Colobo, Christià’ of the ‘Pruvíncia de Columbo’. The extent of this Christian king’s lands are denoted by a series of white flags, marked in red with the province’s appropriate token: the columba (dove) and a cross.82 The representation of Columbum, the Indian episcopal see created with Jordan as its bishop in the 1320s, visited by Odorico da Pordenone in the same decade and Giovanni de’ Marignolli in the 1340s (Chapter 2), reflects its status as the only episcopal see in India in fourteenth-century ecclesiastical geography rather more than any contemporaneous political or religious reality. The imagined and desired Christian king of Columbum is, moreover, not the only example of the map’s triumphalist vision of the progress of fourteenth-century Christian missions in India. To the east of Christian Columbum, the map also locates a second, equally imaginary Christian king ruling over the region where Thomas the Apostle is buried.83 79 

As ‘Coga’: Jordan Catala, Mirabilia descripta, ed. and trans. by Gadrat, p. 311. Abraham, Mapamundi, ed. by Grosjean, p. 84, H. 81  Abraham, Mapamundi, ed. by Grosjean, p. 88, M, 21 and N, 32; ‘Mirapolis’; ‘Cynkalan’: Sinica franciscana, ed. by van den Wyngaert and others, i, 544; 543. 82  Abraham, Mapamundi, ed. by Grosjean, p. 84, H. 83  Abraham, Mapamundi, ed. by Grosjean, p. 88, M. 80 

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Implicitly and explicitly, then, the Catalan Atlas charts Indies that have been evangelized, both in the early Christian era and in recent memory. Elsewhere on the map, moreover, legends invoke the wider eschatological context of Christian missions. There is a biblical reminder, for example, among the islands in the ocean towards the north east (fig. 34), of the Church’s universal missionary responsibilities: Ysayas propheta LXVII ‘Tramatré d’aquells qui salvats seran a les gents en la mar, en Afficha et a Lidia’, e sequeix-se: ‘a les illes luny, a quells qui no hoyran de mi e no veheran la glòria mia, e anunciaran la glòria mia a les gens’ [Vulg. Isiah 66. 19].84 The Prophet Isiah [says in] the 67th [chapter]: ‘I shall send those who are saved to the peoples of the sea, to Africa and Lydia’, and further: ‘I will send to the isles afar off, that have not heard my fame, neither have seen my glory; and they shall declare my glory among the Gentiles.’

Total evangelization and the conversion of the gentes was thought, as has been pointed out in Chapters 2 and 5, a necessary precondition for the second coming of Christ and the Last Judgement. And indeed, alongside these visual and textual evocations of evangelization, the Catalan Atlas, like the Vesconte map before it, also evokes a sense of impending apocalypse. As Sandra Sáenz-López Pérez has decisively demonstrated, an image to the north of Cathay and adjacent to the enclosure of Gog and Magog, whose ‘senyor princep’ (‘chief lord’) is yet to emerge, shows the Antichrist seducing crowds with false miracles in fulfilment of biblical prophecy as the end of the world draws near.85 Given that the Atlas features no Terrestrial Paradise, this vignette ensures that the moment of the world’s end appears more vivid and proximate to its audiences than that of its creation. Vesconte’s and Abraham’s fourteenth-century world maps locate the Indies in multiple ways: spatially and temporally; commercially; in relation to the Latin West; in relation to the Islamic world; and in relation to humankind’s past, present, and future envisaged in Christian terms. We see in these maps evidence of a ‘portolanization’ of Indian oceanic space, a process that brings 84 

Quotation and translation from Abraham, Mapamundi, ed. by Grosjean, p. 90, D. Abraham, Mapamundi, ed. by Grosjean, p. 90, pl. 6b/1. Sáenz-López Pérez explains how the biblical prediction (Matt. 24. 11) warning that ‘multi pseudoprophetae surgent et seducent multos’ (‘many false prophets shall rise and seduce many’) evolves into a notion of an antitype of Christ: Sáenz-López Pérez, ‘La Representación de Gog y Magog y la imagen del Anticristo en las cartas náuticas bajomedievales’, pp. 268, 264, and n. 4. 85 

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the region conceptually within the compass of the navigable world for Latin Europeans. In both cases, however, it would be a mistake to think of these maps as evidence of a shift in concern in world map-making from the mapping of time or history to the charting of geographical space, a development that is sometimes suggested, explicitly or implicitly, to be characteristic of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century cartography.86 Both of the fourteenth-century Mediterranean productions in focus here are, I have argued, shaped at a fundamental level by a concern to situate the Indies they represent both temporally and spatially. In different ways and to varying degrees, both maps draw the region into an expanded Christian world, setting out a vision of these lands’ contemporary situation, but within the framework of God’s universal spatial and temporal plan for all humankind.

The Indies, Ptolemy, and the Rhetoric of Cartographic Modernity in Fifteenth-Century Venice The preceding discussion of the Catalan Atlas and Pietro Vesconte’s world cartography introduced some of the effects of interaction and cross-fertilization between different modes of cartographic representation in fourteenth-century map-making. My final snapshot of medieval cartographic engagements with the Indies takes in a selection of cartographic works produced in mid-fifteenthcentury Venice, a time and place in which many modes of spatial representation and sources of geographical information intersected. Mappaemundi, portolan charts, and Ptolemaic mapping coexisted and were shared in the same circles — even in the same atlas, as Andrea Bianco’s Atlante of 1436 testifies.87 Slightly further afield, the Council of Ferrara’s relocation to Florence in 1439 brought with it delegates from across the Latin Christian world and beyond, their maps and descriptions of the world, and, of course, their personal accounts of their home and neighbouring lands.88 It also attracted Venetian Niccolò Conti, long86 

The absence of historical data and the ‘realistic’, ‘correct’ geography of Vesconte’s maps is stressed in Barber, ‘The Evesham World Map’, p. 31; on the ‘charting of time’ as giving way to illustrations of the contemporary world in late medieval cartography, see Edson, The World Map, 1300–1492, p. 229. For a schema that distinguishes mappaemundi, defined as featuring the terrestrial paradise and mapping the progress of universal history, from other forms of mapmaking, see Scafi, ‘Defining Mappaemundi’. 87  See Cattaneo, ‘Letture e lettori della Geografia di Tolomeo a Venezia’, p. 49. 88  Larner, ‘The Church and the Quattrocento Renaissance in Geography’, p. 33.

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term traveller in the Indies, to the papal curia in search of pardon, presumably in advance of his return to his home town. Poggio’s elegant redaction of Niccolò’s story appears, as we saw in Chapter 4, to have induced influential scholars and administrators in northern Italy to look at the earlier Book of Marco Polo with a more forgiving eye. Within this context of multiplication of modes of representation and of geographical content, the Indies presented a particular challenge to map-makers, who found themselves faced with difficult decisions about whose Indies to represent and how. The challenge of Ptolemy’s Geography, furthermore, has a particular influence in the period. The Alexandrian’s vision of an enclosed Indian Ocean, bounded to the south by terra incognita that joined southern Africa to the furthest eastern regions (fig. 26), contradicted the narratives of both medieval eyewitness travellers and Plinian geography in a striking way. What follows explores three fifteenth-century Venetian works that engage in markedly different ways with this multiplicity of conflicting and coexisting modes of spatial representation and sources of geographical information. Specifically, all are forced to find ways to make sense of the differences between the Ptolemaic vision of the Indies, with its distinctive enclosed Indian Ocean, the imagines mundi of earlier cosmological and cartographic traditions, and the accounts of eyewitness travellers. The purpose of this examination is not to point out how much more information these well-placed Venetian cosmographers (to use the language of the time) had than their forebears concerning the far south and east of the medieval world, and the sources from which they gleaned it. Nor is it to trace increasing cartographic accuracy, by modern standards, in their geographical visions. The point is, rather, to look at their strategies for information management. The availability of multiple information sources and representative forms necessitates selectivity; how and with what justifications do cosmographers make their representative choices? Selected for their diversity of approach and the richness of their cartographic commentary, three works of cosmography, two produced in book form and one map, the great surviving work of Camaldulian ‘cosmographus incomparabilis’ Fra Mauro, all demonstrate how, in the epistemological context of mid-fifteenth-century Venice, mapping the Indies became a problematic activity that provoked reflection and interrogation of the cartographer’s sources and principles.89 Across these works, a bi-directional relationship emerges between map-making and 89 

On Fra Mauro’s career and contemporary reputation as a cosmographer, see Cattaneo, ‘Fra Mauro cosmographus incomparabilis and his Mappamundi’.

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the Indies; as these unfolding continental, maritime, and insular regions are mapped, they also present a challenge to systems for the management of geographical information and the representation of space. Produced roughly contemporaneously with the 1436 Atlante of Andrea Bianco, an anonymous cosmographical compendium (c. 1430–50) in Venezia, Bibl. Naz. Marciana, MS It. VI, 24 (=6111) bears eloquent witness to several of the problems that multiple coexisting modes of representation and bodies of data concerning the Indies raised for cartographers and map users.90 While the manuscript is scattered with erasures, lacunae, and corrections that testify to its status as a working copy, it is nonetheless a very early witness to the translation of sections of Ptolemy’s Geography into the Venetian vernacular. The translator is far from mechanical in his approach, however; the translated sections of the Geography are extensively commented, synthesized, and juxtaposed with excerpts and data from alternative geographical sources. Alongside its translations and commentaries upon selections from Ptolemy, the collection also contains a continent-by-continent written and cartographic description of the world, accompanied by maps that, uniquely for the period, link world and regional cartography on a single page.91 It also includes an account of the ‘universale’ (‘whole world’) that attempts to synthesize Pliny, Solinus, Ptolemy, and Marco Polo, and — of particular importance in this context — a description of Asia which, though it claims to be ‘secondo la tradizione dei moderni scriptori’ (‘according to what is said by modern writers’) in fact largely confines itself to summarizing sections of Marco Polo’s Book. As a whole, the volume throws into relief a cartographic conundrum; how should a map-maker harmonize the geographical content of Ptolemy’s Geography with that of other sources, long considered authoritative? The roughly contemporaneous Atlante of Andrea Bianco, as we have seen, did not make the attempt; two remarkably divergent visions of the Indian Ocean world are anthologized within it without comment. The anonymous Venetian author of Venezia, Bibl. Naz. Marciana, MS It. VI, 24 (=6111), however, attempts synthesis and translation, but, as we shall see, with variable levels of success.

90 

The manuscript is studied in detail, with specific reference to its treatment of Ptolemy, in Cattaneo, ‘Letture e lettori della Geografia di Tolomeo a Venezia’. 91  A detailed outline of the volume appears in Cattaneo, ‘Letture e lettori della Geografia di Tolomeo a Venezia’, pp. 51–52. Cattaneo also discusses (p. 56) the remarkably innovative way in which the cartographer-commentator links world and regional cartography, developing a new ‘sintassa grafica e cartografica’ (‘pictorial and cartographic syntax’, p. 49).

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The synthetic process of Venezia, Bibl. Naz. Marciana, MS It. VI, 24 (=6111) involves translation between the Indies of the past, described by the ancients, and those of the present, described by ‘moderni’.92 The results of this translation vary surprisingly through the volume’s different parts. The written and cartographic region-by-region description of the world that opens the volume (fols 3v–46v) contains, for example, a single-page description and sketch map, based on the Geography, of ‘India intra el fiume Gange’ (Ptolemy’s ‘India intra Gangem’; fol. 44r). The sketch map largely follows Ptolemy’s tenth map of Asia; the mountain ranges and rivers, whether named or not, approximate those of the map, and the names of certain regions (‘Aracosia’), rivers (the ‘Nanagonas’), and gulfs (the ‘Sinus Gangeticus’) are drawn from this source. 93 The short description at the top of the page that accompanies the map, however, identifies the region as the ‘patria del grande kaam’ (‘homeland of the Great Khan’), a geopolitical region described by Marco Polo but long defunct by the anonymous Venetian’s time. A similar process of translation emerges from the volume’s map and description of ‘Trapobanes’ (fol. 42r). The regional map’s simple drawing of Taprobane, with mountain range and rivers, closely follows Ptolemy’s twelfth and final map of Asia. But the accompanying synthetic text reflects a desire to translate Ptolemy’s vision by promising an ‘altro nome’ (‘alternative name’) for Taprobane — though a lacuna is, in fact, left where the name should be. The commentator then relates that the island is ‘diuisa in vii reame’ of which ‘il principale e [christ]iano gli altri vi tre sono de [christ]iani e tre sono de infideli gia ditta uno altro mondo per la gran riceza in quella era’ (‘divided into seven kingdoms’; ‘the principal is Christian. Of the others, three are ruled by Christians and three by infidels. It was formerly called another world on account of its excellent situation’).94 This description clearly synthesizes Ptolemy and other ancient sources on Taprobane with Marco Polo’s account of Abascia (Middle India; Abyssinia), although, as is usual, the anonymous Venetian does not give his source’s name.95 The translator-commentator’s 92 

Venezia, Bibl. Naz. Marciana, MS It. VI, 24 (=6111), fol. 95v. The section is transcribed in Cattaneo, ‘Letture e lettori della Geografia di Tolomeo a Venezia’, p. 51. 93  I have used the facsimile edition of the Rome imprint of 1478 in Ptolemy, Claudius Ptolemaeus Cosmographia, ed. by Skelton, decima tabula Asiae. 94  Venezia, Bibl. Naz. Marciana, MS It. VI, 24 (=6111), fol. 42r. The scribe has corrected his spelling simply by writing over the words where indicated with [ ]. 95  In ‘A’ versions there are normally six kings in all: Polo, Le Divisament dou monde, ed. by Ronchi, p. 599. But the Latin ‘B’ version has a formulation that could be read as referring to seven kings, four of whom are Christian and three ‘saraceni’: Polo, Redazione latina del mano­

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attempt at synthesis is, as the lacuna where the island’s ‘other name’ should be suggests, hesitant and incomplete. In the description of parts of Asia according to ‘moderni’ found in the volume’s closing pages (fols 95v–97r), the anonymous Venetian then demonstrates a process of spatial and temporal translation working in the opposite direction: from modern to ancient. This attempt, though, proves equally problematic. Following the order of Marco’s ‘Book of India’, on which this part of the anonymous Venetian’s volume is based, his account of Asia according to the ‘moderni’ begins with Çipangu ( Japan), ‘una Insola nel mar alto de india ditta day modernii’ (‘an island named by the moderns in the high sea of India’) but ‘par anticho’ (‘formerly’) known as Argeteo, a toponym he appears to have culled from Ptolemy.96 The translator explains that he makes this identification because ‘le conditione medisme day modernii concorde a le antique posta verso oriente auero sia quella iuxta Aurea chersoneso’ (‘the same conditions [reported] by those of our times agree with those of antiquity. It is positioned towards the east and, indeed, is close to the Golden Chersonese’).97 Such attempted identifications continue throughout the translator-commentator’s epitome of Marco’s account. However, the fact that these identifications sometimes flatly contradict those made on the regional maps earlier in the same manuscript adds to the general sense of the volume as an experimental work in progress. To cite just one such contradiction, the treatise identifies ‘Abasia’ (Abyssinia) as ‘posta intra el fiume gangetico el indo’ (‘situated between the river Ganges and the Indus’; fol. 96v), a description that clearly identifies it with the ‘India intra Gangem’ of contemporary Ptolemaic maps. In making this identification, however, the compiler seems oblivious to the fact that he has already, on an earlier map, identified this Ptolemaic region entirely differently: as the ‘patria del grande kaam’. There then follows, attributed to this Indian region, much of the detail that the translator-compiler has already attributed, on the relevant Ptolemaic regional map, to the island of Taprobane. It has seven kings, he explains, four of whom are Christian and ‘congregati ala fede colo Prete Giane’ (‘part of the same faith as Prester John’), but three of whom are ‘colo Gram Kaam’ (‘with the Great Khan’; fol. 96v). Innovative though the translator-compiler’s mode scritto Z, ed. by Barbieri, p. 246. 96  By Argeteo, the compiler seems to refer to a conflation of the Argyre of Pliny and map­ paemundi and Ptolemy’s ‘Argentea metropolis’, in fact a city on an island identified as Labadii: Ptolemy, Claudius Ptolemaeus Cosmographia, ed. by Skelton, undecima asiae tabula. 97  Venezia, Bibl. Naz. Marciana, MS It. VI, 24 (=6111), fol. 96r.

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of spatial representation may be, his attempts at temporal translation and synthesis between geographical and cartographic forms prove more valiant than consistent. Venezia, Bibl. Naz. Marciana, MS It. VI, 24 (=6111) witnesses through practice the twin difficulties of harmonizing ancient and modern accounts of Indian space and, indeed, Ptolemaic and other cartographic and descriptive modes of spatial representation. Indeed, the compiler-commentator’s decision to append an abbreviated version of Marco’s account of the Indies to his volume, supposedly ‘per le varie consuetudine dey luochi, e per li vocabuli moderni’ (‘on account of the different customs of places, and of the modern [geographical] vocabulary’; fol. 97r), suggests a de facto admission on his part that his attempt at cartographic synthesis has not succeeded; ancient and modern Indies are too divergent to be harmonized. When we turn, however, from this anonymous Venetian to two near contemporaries, practising physician and engineer Giovanni da Fontana, working around 1450, and Fra Mauro, working, according to Cattaneo, in the 1440s and 1450s, we find cosmographic works that, when faced with contradictory cartographic models and information regarding the Indies, are much more explicit and consistent about their information management and cartographic decisions.98 Although both cosmographers approach their works in different ways and reach very different conclusions regarding the Indies and the oikoumene as a whole, both bring a new rhetoric into play to justify these. In both cases, the Indies become bound up in a rhetoric of cartographic modernity, though, in each case, the rhetoric is deployed to support a quite different conception of what it might mean to produce a modern map, suitable, as Giovanni da Fontana puts it, ‘for the needs of the times’. Written around 1454, Giovanni da Fontana’s Liber de omnibus rebus quae continentur in mundo is a wide-ranging cosmography, professedly written for the education of the author’s son. 99 The entire fourth book of this five-part 98 

The complex issue of the map’s dating is discussed in Cattaneo, Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi and Fifteenth-Century Venice, pp. 38–46. The map is digitally reproduced in excellent quality and its legends transcribed and translated in Fra Mauro, World Map, ed. and trans. by Falchetta. 99  Cattaneo has put forward the hypothesis that Giovanni da Fontana is the translatorcompiler at work in Venezia, Bibl. Naz. Marciana, MS It. VI, 24 (=6111) and that the Liber de omnibus rebus could be based on his earlier translation work as evidenced in the manuscript: Cattaneo, Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi and Fifteenth-Century Venice, p. 173. However, as Cattaneo rightly points out, there is no palaeographical or textual support for the hypothesis. The study conducted for this chapter has shown that: whereas the anonymous Venetian refers

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work offers an account of the habitable space of the world and, as part of this, a detailed treatment of world cartography illustrated by several schematic maps.100 In addition to using a wide range of cosmological works, including Ptolemy’s Geography, the Liber as a whole also shows remarkably detailed knowledge of the journeys of recent travellers in India and China, including those known, unknown, and fictional. Not only are Marco Polo, Odorico da Pordenone, and Niccolò Conti cited at various points but so also are John Mandeville and an otherwise unknown ‘Constantinus Venetus’ (fol. 119r). In producing his cosmography, Giovanni finds that he must react, rather like Bianco’s Atlante, to a multiplicity of contemporaneous modes of spatial representation and varieties of geographical information, some of which contradict others. Faced with this geographical cacophony, Giovanni sorts his information and modes of representation into two categories: those belonging to the past, and those appropriate to his present. The Indies play a surprisingly important role in this distinction; Giovanni uses knowledge of the Indies gleaned in part from Ptolemy, but also from works attributed to recent travellers, to distinguish between past and present cosmological ideas and modes of spatial representation. The late antique cosmological schema familiar from our discussion of Macrobius and only to Marco Polo among the moderni, Giovanni shows extensive knowledge of a range of accounts; whereas Venezia, Bibl. Naz. Marciana, MS It. VI, 24 (=6111) identifies Taprobane with Marco’s Middle India, Giovanni identifies it with ‘Salien’ (Sri Lanka, fol. 92r); the anonymous Venetian’s modifications to Ptolemy, including his proposed method of representing the whole globe via a ‘dopea figura’ (Cattaneo, ‘Letture e lettori della Geografia di Tolomeo a Venezia’, pp. 52–53 and fig. 3) do not appear in Giovanni’s Liber. Given such differences, it seems likely that we have two distinct, closely contemporary, commentators. 100  Although Giovanni does not identify himself in the work, Lynn Thorndike identified him in the 1930s through the fact that he refers to Giovanni da Fontana’s treatise De trigono balistario as his own. He also refers to events of around 1450 as contemporary and discusses masters known to have taught at the University of Padua in the 1420s as his own masters. His presence at Padua is confirmed by university records: Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, pp. 4, 150–63, 152–55, 157. For a biography and known writings, see Claggett, ‘The Life and Works of Giovanni Fontana’, with notes on the Liber at pp. 21–22. See also Randles, ‘Classical Models of World Geography and their Transformation following the Discovery of America’, p. 37; and Birkenmajer, ‘Zur Lebensgeschichte und wissenschaftlichen Tätigkeit von Giovanni Fontana’. For an assessment of Giovanni’s engagement with Ptolemy, see Gautier Dalché, La Géographie de Ptolémée en Occident, pp. 198–203. His name also appears, in records and criticism, as ‘Giovanni da Fontana’ and ‘Giovanni di Michele’. In the absence of a modern edition, I quote from [Giovanni da Fontana], Liber Pompilii Azali Placentini, under which name the work was published in 1544. I have silently expanded abbreviations and modernized punctuation.

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Martianus Capella in Chapter 1, for example, in which land masses are separated by an uninhabitable Torrid Zone to the south, is consigned by Giovanni to his culture’s intellectual past. It fails, Giovanni explains, to account for the fact, confirmed by travellers, that ‘vltra circulum equinoctiali suppositum versus Austrum, esse partem notabilem habitabilem ab aqua discoperta et insulas multas atque famosas’ (‘situated beyond the equinoctial circle towards the south, there is a notable habitable region not covered by water, and many and famous islands’; Book iv, 90r). First among the ‘many and famous islands’ that Giovanni subsequently lists in this sea is the Taprobane, known to the ancients but now identified as ‘Salien’ (Sri Lanka) by recent eastern travellers (fol. 92r). Incapacity to cope with islands of the Indies discovered by travellers functions as an indicator that ancient cosmologies and their maps belong to the intellectual past. Capacity to represent these regions, including parts of the Indies once thought, like Taprobane, to be beyond or at the limits of the known world, in contrast, is a marker of modernity, or so Giovanni suggests in a detailed discussion of the variety of modes of world cartography in circulation in his day. In this section (Book iv, on the habitable world), Giovanni singles out Claudius Ptolemy for particular praise, on account of his ‘clarius’, ‘copius’, ‘magistralis’, and ‘uerius’ (‘most clear’, ‘most full’, ‘masterful’, ‘most correct’) representation of the world and his capacity to ‘sapientissime partes terrae sub gradibus coeli situare’ (‘most knowledgeably to situate the parts of the world under the degrees of heaven’; fol. 94r). Ignoring Ptolemy’s status as an ancient, in fact, Giovanni presents him rhetorically as a modern; Ptolemy’s cartographic methods are judged ‘debitis temporibus congrue’ (‘well suited to the needs of the times’; fol. 94r). In a thinly veiled dig at the contemporary mappamundi tradition, Giovanni contrasts the second-century Alexandrian favourably to those who, altogether more recently, ‘consueuerunt’ (‘have been accustomed to’) fill their maps with ‘iuxta fabulas superflua’ (‘superfluous things according to fables’), including features such as ‘purgatorium et demonum mansiones atque regna bestiarum’ (‘purgatory, the dwellings of demons and even kingdoms of beasts’), as well as those who claim to have described ‘totam terram habitabilem’ (‘the entire habitable world’) but leave out certain inhabited regions, ‘scilicet Toridae zonae et vltimas partes orientales’ (‘that is to say, the Torrid Zone and the furthest eastern regions’; fol. 94r). Mappaemundi, Giovanni considers, are inadequate in part on account of their content — which Giovanni dismisses as fabulous — and in part on account of their incapacity to represent adequately the expanded known world to the east and south treated in such detail by eyewitness travellers. They are also, rather startlingly, characterized as a mode of representation that map-makers ‘have been accustomed’ to use

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(‘consueuerunt’), placed in rhetorical opposition to the cartographic methods of Ptolemy, so suitable for the needs of present times. Nonetheless, just as was the case in Venezia, Bibl. Naz. Marciana, MS It. VI, 24 (=6111), the very structure of Giovanni’s work betrays the difficulty of synthesizing ancient and modern and alternative modes of representation to produce a homogenous spatial representation. Whilst in Book iv, ‘De locis habitabilis’ (‘Concerning the habitable regions’), Giovanni proclaims his allegiance to Ptolemy’s Geography’s outline description of the world and methods, he is not able to add Indian detail derived from any of his travelogue sources to the short latitude and longitude tables he provides at the end of Book iv (fols 101v–104v). In contrast, Giovanni’s Book v, entitled ‘De mirandis in quacunque sphera’ (‘Concerning the marvels belonging to each sphere’), bursts at the seams with the kinds of ‘historias et fabulas’, more than half of which concern the Indies, exiled from the professedly Ptolemaic Book iv. But, as well as the collection of lively, anecdotal, and occasionally comical ‘historias et fabulas’ derived from Marco, Odorico, Niccolò, John Mandeville, and others, Book v also features Giovanni’s only serious challenge to the nature of Ptolemy’s vision of the Indies, a challenge conspicuously absent from the cartographic discussions he sets out in Book iv. Discussing the fact that Marco Polo and other eyewitnesses testify to the existence of a passage between ‘Media India’ (Middle India) and the many islands of the eastern ocean, Giovanni notices a contradiction between the testimony of eyewitness travellers in the region and the Ptolemaic vision of an enclosed Indian Sea encircled by terra incognita. Having set out this problem, he concludes that Alterum autem horum est, pro scripturarum concordia: aut enim illud vocatum occeanum mare nauigabile orientale non esse vere occeanum extra videlicet fines terrae, sed inter terminos terrae orientalis, vt est mare indicum australe, quod et multi etiam occeanum vocant, aut quod ex hostio vel hostiis existentibus vel anfractibus in parte illa orientali incognita ex occeano maxima aqua, venerit, et dici potuisset occeanum. (fol. 120r)101 Either of these [following] is the case, for the sake of agreement between authorities. Either that sea which is called the navigable eastern ocean is not truly an ocean (that is to say, beyond the land mass), but is within the boundaries of the eastern land mass, just as the Indian Southern Sea, which many still call ocean, is within the limits of the eastern land mass, or, out of an opening or openings that exist there or 101 

[Giovanni da Fontana], Liber Pompilii Azali Placentini, fol. 120r. I have emended ‘potuisse’ to ‘potuisset’.

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that have broken into that unknown eastern region from the ocean, great water has come, that may be called an ocean.

There is a possibility, Giovanni admits, that Ptolemy’s vision of an Indian Ocean enclosed on all sides may be wrong. Exiled as it is, however, to the collection of historias et fabulas concerning the world’s wonders that populate the final Book of Giovanni’s treatise, this contradiction offers no meaningful challenge to the cosmography’s dominant Ptolemaic vision of the oikoumene and the Indian Ocean within it. Explicit concern in mid-fifteenth-century Venice with the appropriateness of map-making to the needs of the present time — what I term here the rhetoric of cartographic modernity — is not confined to Giovanni da Fontana’s Liber de omnibus rebus. Similar concerns are repeatedly articulated, explicitly and implicitly, across the many legends that annotate Fra Mauro’s famous midcentury mappamundi (fig. 35; plate 2). The sole surviving complete Venetian map by this friar-cum-professional cosmographer bears an inscription to the effect that it was made ‘a contemplation de questa illustrissima Signoria’ (‘as an act of homage to this most illustrious Seignory’) — that is, the city of Venice — but a very early copy commissioned by Afonso V is known to have been sent to Portugal in 1459.102 For Fra Mauro, just as is the case in Giovanni da Fontana’s cosmography, the southern and eastern reaches of the known world present a particular challenge to existing systems of knowledge and modes of spatial representation because they have been inadequately described by authorities. But Fra Mauro deals with this challenge in a way unlike that of any other known cosmographer or map-maker, including the two Venetians just discussed. Across the map’s Indian Ocean world in particular, Fra Mauro exposes and indeed dramatizes the conflicts he finds between multiple sources and modes of representation. Through this dramatization, the cosmographus lays claim to a status as a modern authority, as distinguished from the ancient, outmoded alternatives whose shortcomings he exposes. First and foremost among these alternatives is Claudius Ptolemy, whose method of map-making through coordinates of latitude and longitude the friar famously rejects outright.103 For its representation of Asia and the Indian Ocean world, Fra Mauro’s map draws on known sources ranging from ancient authorities such as Pliny, Pomponius Mela, Ptolemy, and Solinus through medieval authors from 102  Cattaneo, Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi and Fifteenth-Century Venice, pp. 36–37; Fra Mauro, World Map, ed. and trans. by Falchetta, no. 2834. 103  Fra Mauro, World Map, ed. and trans. by Falchetta, no. 2834.

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Figure 35. Detail of subcontinental India and the Indian Ocean from Fra Mauro’s mid-fifteenth-century Venetian world map. South is at the top. The larger islands shown (left-right) are Taprobane (Sumatra), Andaman, and Saylam (Sri Lanka). Venezia, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana (no shelfmark). Su concessione del Ministerio per i Beni e le Attività Culturali – Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. Copying not permitted.

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Albertus Magnus to Marco Polo’s Book, to the most recent information available, such as Niccolò Conti’s account of his Indian Ocean journeys. 104 Even among its Venetian contemporaries, however, the map has an unusual relationship with history and with the cartography of its predecessors and contemporaries. Features found on many mappaemundi such as the Terrestrial Paradise and Gog and Magog’s enclosure do not appear within the oikoumene, while sites associated with early Christian evangelism and the Alexander Romance are also absent.105 Fra Mauro replaces such features with a somewhat combative dialogue with the cosmographers and cartographers whom he associates with the past and their emblematic representative: Claudius Ptolemy. As Edson pithily puts it, Fra Mauro engages in ‘a long argument with Ptolemy pursued in bits of text all over the map’.106 These ‘bits of text’ are particularly in common on parts of the map covering regions that fell beyond the Ptolemaic oikoumene or were represented on Ptolemaic world maps as terra incognita, and their criticisms derive their power from their representation of rival cartographies as behind the times. In and around the Indies in particular, Fra Mauro repeatedly takes opportunities to signal the outdated and inaccurate information of his authorities, singling out Ptolemy for particularly ruthless attention.107 Persia is, he points out, ‘divisa in 8 regni e dilata molto più suo confini de quel descrive Tolomeo’ (‘divided into eight kingdoms, and extends far beyond the limited borders that Ptolemy gives it’). ‘Alguni autori’, he notes, in a clear reference to Ptolemy, consider the ‘mar d’india’ (‘Indian Sea’) to be enclosed. Fra Mauro first counters this with opposing views from Solinus, Pliny, and the fourteenth-century Dittamondo of Fazio degli Uberti before invoking the empirical evidence of ‘hi experimentadori de quel camin, homini de gran prudentia’ (‘those who have taken this route [i.e., between the Sea of Arabia and Gibraltar], men of great prudence’) to close the case against the Alexandrian. In eastern China, near 104  On Fra Mauro’s engagement with travel narratives, see Cattaneo, ‘Scritture di viaggio e scrittura cartografica’ and Baumgärtner, ‘Kartographie, Reisebericht und Humanismus’. On the likelihood of as-yet-unidentified Arab sources, see Crone, ‘Fra Mauro’s Representation of the Indian Ocean and the Eastern Islands’. 105  The Terrestrial Paradise is represented and discussed in a corner of the map’s frame. On Fra Mauro’s treatment of Gog and Magog, see Gow, ‘Gog and Magog on Mappaemundi and Early Printed World Maps’, p. 80. 106  Edson, The World Map, 1300–1492, p. 19. 107  The following examples come from Fra Mauro, World Map, ed. and trans. by Falchetta, nos 1490, 53, 2243, and 215 respectively. Further examples are at numbers 134, 1043, and 1424.

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the Yangtze River, the cartographer remarks that ‘Da questa provincia serica in çoso Tholomeo fa terra ignota’ (‘Southwards from this province of Serica, Ptolemy labels as terra ignota’), pointedly contrasting Ptolemaic blank space with his own richly delineated regions. In identifying the Taprobane of classical geography with the Sumatra described by Niccolò Conti, the friar yet again takes an opportunity to signal the limited nature of Ptolemy’s cosmography in comparison to his own. Instead of describing, as he thought, the large and distant island of Taprobane, Ptolemy ‘solamente’ (‘only’) managed to describe Sri Lanka, which, as the map makes clear, is an island both nearer and smaller. Fra Mauro’s relationship with his ancient authorities and Ptolemy in particular is nonetheless no simple and conventional dispute between the relative merits of auctoritas and experientia.108 Although he does not often admit it, Fra Mauro relies on his authorities at least as often as he critiques them. Borrowings from Ptolemy’s geography of the Indies are far too many to cite in full; much of the physical geography and general shape of southern Asia, including the coastline and parts of the river system of subcontinental India, derives from this source.109 Ptolemaic names also designate regions and provinces (Arabia Dexerta), mountain ranges (Sardonis, India), some rivers, peninsulas, and promontories (Satoris, on the Red Sea), and gulfs such as the Sinus Gangeticus. In light of this, we should perhaps consider the cartographer’s relationship with the ‘autori’ in general and Ptolemy in particular as rhetorical as much as geographical, intended to enable a flattering contrast between the outdated, inaccurate information of earlier cartographers and the complete, correct, contemporaneous, and empirical nature of Fra Mauro’s own. And, just as was the case in Giovanni da Fontana’s cosmography, the capacity to represent the Indies according to correct, contemporaneous information is critical to Fra Mauro’s rhetorical self-presentation. Drawing on many contemporary and ancient sources, the map represents an unusually broad and uniquely populous Indian Ocean world, whose trajectories of navigation and trade link it both to the Black Sea on Europe’s doorstep and Cathay on the other side of the world.110 In 108 

For discussion of the authority-experience relationship on the map, see Gow, ‘Fra Mauro’s World View’. 109  As Falchetta points out, though, Fra Mauro’s map positions the Indus in the location that corresponds with Ptolemy’s Ganges, to the east of subcontinental India: see the ‘Introduction’, in Fra Mauro, World Map, ed. and trans. by Falchetta, p. 85. The following examples of borrowings are taken from Fra Mauro, World Map, ed. and trans. by Falchetta, nos 923, 336, 438, and 586 respectively. 110  For fuller explorations of this dimension of the map, see Cattaneo, ‘La Mappamundi di

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support of this representation, the map’s legends repeatedly cite ‘experimentadori de quel camin’ (‘those who have sailed this route’), ‘questi i qual hano visto ad ochio’ (‘those who have seen with their own eyes’), and those who ‘navegano quel mar e che habitano quele insule’ (‘sail this sea and live in these islands’). These formulations draw consistently on eyewitness testimony and experience as the most important sources of the cartographer’s authority. This is not to suggest, of course, that these authorities are always trustworthy, or deployed in a transparently trustworthy manner; Cattaneo has recently pointed out that, alongside the routes traversed by navigators by his time, the map also charts the trajectories of journeys still in the future at the time the map was drawn. Information on the circumnavigability of Africa that the map-maker claims to have from those sent by the king of Portugal to ‘çerchar e veder ad ochio’ (‘explore and see with their own eyes’) testifies, Cattaneo points out, as much to ‘projects of expansion planned by the Portuguese court’ as it does to explorations known to have been completed when the map was made.111 The fifteenth-century Venetian cosmographies discussed here are fascinating for their diverse ways of dealing with the coexistence of multiple modes of spatial representation and conflicting geographical information. They sometimes attempt to translate between past and present; the anonymous Venetian author of Venezia, Bibl. Naz. Marciana, MS It. VI, 24 (=6111) tries and fails to synthesize homogenous, timeless Indies from the varied information in Ptolemy and Marco Polo. In contrast to this attempt to homogenize past and present geographies of the Indies, Giovanni da Fontana and Fra Mauro create temporal schemata in which certain information and models are consigned to the cultural and intellectual past, while others are promoted as appropriate to the present and future. A rhetoric of cartographic modernity emerges from both works, which endeavour to create a rupture between the Indies of an outmoded cartographic past and those of the present, and to align themselves with the latter. Rather ironically, when it comes to detailing the constitutive components of cartography appropriate to the needs of the times, they agree on very little. But that such a map should be able to represent the full extent of the continental and maritime Indies, in the far southern and eastern reaches of the known world, is one of those few points of agreement.

Fra Mauro’; and O’Doherty, ‘A Peripheral Matter? Oceans in the East’, pp. 53–59. The following examples are taken from Fra Mauro, World Map, ed. and trans. by Falchetta, nos 53 and 149. 111  Cattaneo, Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi and Fifteenth-Century Venice, p. 51.

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Conclusion The maps examined in this chapter testify to considerable changes in the cartographic representation of the Indies between the thirteenth and mid-fifteenth centuries, partly as a result of technical change and innovation, partly through changing and increasing source material, and partly as a result of changes in their historical and cultural contexts of production. From the early fourteenthcentury Vesconte-Sanudo world map to that produced by Fra Mauro in the mid-fifteenth century and beyond, certain maps begin to bear witness to a sense of a physically greater and more populous Indian Ocean world, an increased sense of its navigability — achieved in part through the formal influence of portolan charts — and the growth of a sense of its centrality to the economic machinery of the world. But, at the same time, diverse though these three snapshots of later medieval cartography are, certain continuities run through them. No matter how different they may at first appear, all the cartographies of the Indies examined here involve both the temporal and the spatial. The Ebstorf, Hereford, Sawley, and Polychronicon maps discussed at the outset of this chapter present Indies shaped by pagan and Christian temporal and spatial trajectories. The Indies of these maps testify to map-makers’ understandings of contemporary space as shaped by human activities; they bear the vividly present material traces of ancient history, biblical history, and evangelization. The fourteenthcentury maps produced, in conjunction with Sanudo, by Vesconte’s atelier, and Cresques Abraham’s atlas show the spatial and temporal situation of the Indies in a world in the process of being shaped by the moving economic and political trajectories of Islam and the Christian spatial and temporal trajectories of evangelization. Yet all this is placed within the overall temporal framework of providential history, which is represented as heading towards the inevitable end point of the Apocalypse. Among the fifteenth-century Venetian cosmographies highlighted here, temporality emerges as every bit as important, if in a different way. The multiplicity of models and sources of information available in mid-fifteenth-century Venice challenged map-makers to make decisions about which Indies to map and how to map them; whether to attempt to synthesize, or distinguish between, past and present cartographies of the Indies. Under these circumstances, cartographies and geographies of Indies also emerge as sites of self-presentation and promotion for cosmographers, spaces through which it is possible to construct and dramatize one’s own, or one’s culture’s modernity. Across maps from different contexts and periods and with very different purposes and audiences, we also find a repeated tendency to map the trajectories of desire. From the burning flame over the tomb of St Thomas on the

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Ebstorf mappamundi to the Indian Christian kingdoms marked triumphantly on the east and west coasts of peninsular India on the Catalan Atlas, we see the Indies drawn into not just a navigated oikoumene but a fully evangelized world. Moreover, the fact that Fra Mauro’s planisphere turned out to be correct about the circumnavigability of Africa and the consequent interconnectedness of Atlantic and Indian oceans should not distract us from the fact that, at the time he made the sea route real and present through his mapping, it was no more than a project of the Portuguese crown, its realization ahead in an uncertain future. Of course, through the copy of Fra Mauro’s map known to have been sent to the court of Afonso V in Lisbon in 1459, the friar’s cartographic vision had the capacity to play a part in turning into reality Portuguese desires and projects concerning his richly delineated continental and maritime Indies.112

112 

On these connections, see Cattaneo, Fra Mauro’s Mappa Mundi and Fifteenth-Century Venice, pp. 48–49.

Conclusion: Multiple Medieval Indies, Globalization, and Rebellion

A

t the beginning of the present work I set out one of its key premises: that the Indies of the medieval West are plural and unstable. The chapters that followed, have, I hope, shown something of the dizzying variety of ways in which this space and set of metageographical categories were defined, imagined, and experienced in later medieval Europe. The Indies were, in different communities and historical circumstances, the regions conquered by Alexander; home to Prester John’s perfect Christian empire and blessed by proximity to the Earthly Paradise; a world evangelized or awaiting evangelization; a potential locus of crusade; a navigable and navigated world criss-crossed by the trajectories of trade in luxury goods; and home to peoples whose alterity may question, critique, or correct the mores of Latin Christendom. Travellers, geographers, cartographers, writers of crusading propaganda and treatises, and their medieval readers were all able to remake these plural spaces and their shifting associations to achieve particular rhetorical, political, or ideological ends, both within Latin Christendom and in the world at large. The material texts of accounts of travels through the Indies discussed in Part ii indicate that the functions of these texts and their interactions with readers’ worlds were dynamic, changing both in material form and according to audience. Manuscripts produced in periods of crusading fervour might shore up visions of a world seen through the prism of crusade. Latin and vernacular manuscripts, whether belonging to clerics or laypeople, undoubtedly used verbal and pictorial images of insular Indian moral or physical monstrosity in part to thrill and entertain. But manuscript evidence also suggests that these images functioned as lessons, correctives, and prompts to virtuous Christian

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behaviour, as well as engendering in their readers a sense of election and superiority that many doubtless found comforting. A few Latin manuscripts, in particular, even suggest that scholars found comfort in Odorico da Pordenone’s evidence for the success of Latin Christian missions in the Indies. Marginal and iconographic evidence across the vernacular and Latin manuscripts also shows variety in their producers’ and users’ responses to what we might call the traditional image of the Indies of the great medieval encyclopaedias and imagines mundi: as a space of marvels and monstrosity. Whilst some manuscripts bear witness to illustrators and readers supporting this vision through paratexts, annotations, and illustrations focused on traditional mirabilia, others tell a story of the continuing redefinition of the marvellous to incorporate phenomena such as the wonders of production and trade across the world, the vastness of the inhabited insular and oceanic Indies, the wonderful diversity of human languages, and the extraordinary technicalities of Indian navigational practice. And finally, under the influence of Italian humanism and, in particular, Poggio Bracciolini’s India, manuscripts come to be better adapted for the localization of places, peoples, and phenomena, with a concomitant lessening of focus upon marvellous diversity and its potential meanings. Amongst the great variety of mobilizations of ‘the Indies’ delineated throughout these chapters, it is nevertheless possible to tease out certain trends. The later medieval period sees an undeniable turn, in the wake of travellers’ reports, towards the representation of a larger, more important, maritime and insular Indian Ocean world, actually or potentially connected with Europe through trade and navigation. In some ways, indeed, the resulting image is surprisingly similar to Pliny’s triumphant rhetoric in the Naturalis historia concerning the connections of the Indies, drawing ever nearer through trade, to the heart of the early Roman Empire. Indian Ocean trade shapes world politics, but for the worse, in the crusading treatises of Marino Sanudo and William Adam and in the maps of Pietro Vesconte. But, as we see in maps like the Catalan Atlas (c. 1375), map-makers also work graphically to bring the Indies into the navigable and navigated world. We might even say that, through the ‘portolanization’ of Indian oceanic space, the region was navigated imaginatively by European readers and map users many years before it came to be systematically navigated by the Portuguese. Increasing levels of interest in commercial and navigational connections between the Indies and the wider world are found across all manner of sources in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Such interest appears in the widely read Book of Sir John Mandeville, across fourteenth- and fifteenth-century southern European maps, and in the barrels and sacks that recur across the programme of

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images that illustrate the Indies in the Duc de Berry’s Livre des merveilles (BnF, MS fr. 2810). In earlier chapters, I have questioned the arguments of Jacques Le Goff and other scholars that the Indies functioned as Europe’s dreamscape or screen for the projection of fantasy in the period concerned here. The representations we have bear witness, I suggest, to a more complex and reciprocal relationship between the spatial imagination and experience. Indeed, the ‘fantasies’ that are to be found in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century representations are often remarkable for their thoroughgoing commercialization. Commerce is represented as the common interest that unites the cynocephali of insular India with the French and Burgundian courts in the Duc de Berry’s Livre des merveil­ les and is the reason, in the earliest vernacular versions of the Book of Sir John Mandeville, why the court of the Great Khan is so much wealthier than that of Prester John. It is the phenomenon, on Fra Mauro’s map, that links Cathay, the furthest islands of the Indies, and the shores of the Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean world. Repeatedly across the varied texts, images, and maps in focus here, the assumption recurs that, for better or for worse, international commerce shapes the world. And, alongside these persuasive representations of commerce’s formative power, of the economic importance of the Indies and the navigability of the Indian Ocean, come Portuguese interventions in it. The Portuguese crown’s long, later fifteenth-century century push towards the circumnavigation of Africa, inspired in part by the persistence of legends of Prester John, is followed at the end of the century by Vasco da Gama’s landfall in Calicut in search of ‘Christians and spices’.1 In fact, through many of the texts, maps, and images in focus across these chapters, one can follow the various threads of a complex set of relationships between knowledge and description of the Indies on the one hand and varieties of power in the world on the other. In his discussion of Orientalism, defined as a ‘corporate institution for dealing with the Orient — dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it […], a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient’, Edward Said famously and controversially traced the roots of the ‘corporate institution’ back through the Middle Ages, via the Council of Vienne (1311–12) and subsequent focus on the learning of oriental languages, into classical antiquity.2 From Said’s perspective, any descrip1  On the role of the legend in Portuguese explorations, see Pistarino, ‘I portoghesi verso l’Asia del Prete Gianni’, p. 48. 2  Said, Orientalism, p. 2. Said’s proposition with respect to early fourteenth-century descriptions of the Indies and their context is touched upon in García Espada, Marco Polo y la cruzada,

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tive, representational or knowledge-gathering activity that purports to concern any region or people classifiable as ‘oriental’ is potentially compromised, and questions of textual or epistemological authority become enmeshed in questions of political authority and domination.3 Irrespective of the oft-catalogued problems with the medieval elements of the story he tells, Said’s work rightly compels us to consider the relationship between the assembly of geographical information, representation, categorization, and the formation of spatial relationships — which are also political, cultural, and social relationships — between peoples in the world. In fact, the relationships that the present work traces between the representation of the Indies, authority, and acts of attempted or actual domination are varied and never straightforward. In the vernacular Alexander-books discussed in Chapter 1, the Indies are a region first experienced and described, in letters to Aristotle and Olympias, by the Macedonian conqueror. The cultural property of Greece, then Rome, then the Latin Middle Ages, Alexander’s dominion over the Indies is a fantasy, but it is a fantasy of past, not future, military domination. Two versions of The Book of Sir John Mandeville, discussed in Chapter 5, return to this focus on military and political domination, but with an added Christian dimension. The Liège/Ogier and the Vulgate Latin versions of the Book invent, through the Carolingian hero Ogier the Dane, Indies that belong historically to the Holy Roman Empire and thus owe their allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church. Again, notions of Latin Christendom’s domination are played out in a historical fantasy. Paradoxically, they serve not to prompt Latin Christendom to concerted military or colonial activities in the Indies but, rather, to provide justification for non-intervention. The Indians of the Vulgate Latin Mandeville are apostates who have neglected the truths that evangelization has made plain to them, and may be left to their own damnation. But other forms of domination sometimes emerge across the texts, maps, and images under discussion here as more important than the political and military varieties in Said’s sights. In a treatise that argues for a naval blockade in the Indian Ocean as a necessary precondition of the reconquest of the Holy Land, Dominican William Adam includes a description of the Maldives and its islanders, concluding that they are ill prepared to withstand an attack by p. 366. 3  See, for example, Raman, who argues for a close relationship between the rediscovery of map projection techniques in the fifteenth-century West and the cartographic practices that emerged from it and early colonial practices in the Indies: Raman, Framing ‘India’, p. 16.

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European forces because ‘nostri de istis tot caperent quod viderent’ (‘our forces could capture as many of them as they could see’).4 But domination of the Maldives is not Adam’s aim; the islands would simply be a useful base for Adam’s planned blockade to prevent Indian Ocean trade via Egyptian lands, and the islanders would be no more than collateral damage in a larger war. When Jordan Catala suggests, based on his assessment of military capabilities in the Indies, that the king of France might ‘totum mundum sibi subicere, et fidei christiane’ (‘subject the whole world to his own domination and that of the Christian faith’; MD, p. 266), his ultimate aim is the spiritual conversion of the remaining gentes. Military conquest is only one possible means to that end. Neither is domination of the Indies and Indians the ultimate focus of BL, MS Royal 19 D.i, in the pages of which Christians wage war on Saracens across a militarized East. The volume’s focus is the reconquest of Jerusalem. Indeed, in many fourteenth-century works, the relationship between the description of the Indies and political or military domination forms only part of a larger, more complex matrix. Good intelligence about the Indies may help teach Latin European potentates and princes how to conquer the Holy Land. It may also help with missionary strategies to advance the conversion of the gentes, a necessary prelude to the apocalypse. It may even, according to Roger Bacon, function as a form of apocalyptic alarm clock that forewarns the Church of the imminent arrival of the Antichrist. While any visions of political or military control in the Indies are never more than ancillary to other envisaged interventions in the machinery of the world, the notion of the Latin Church’s spiritual dominion across the oik­ oumene is, on the contrary, central. Perhaps the most compelling evidence for a relationship between descriptions of the Indies and the exercise of authority is to be found in the descriptive, imaginative, cartographic, and documentary attempts to mark out Latin Christian Indies and assert religious and spiritual dominion over these. Through the descriptions of mendicant travellers, documents created in the papal curia, The Book of Sir John Mandeville, and maps from the Ebstorf mappamundi to the Catalan Atlas, an ingenious variety of attempts are made, particularly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, to draw the Indies into the spiritual dominion of Christendom. The world view of these documents is heavily inflected by a sense of the world as a space where the plan of God is played out over time. In some such documents, the Indies are presented as fully evangelized, as in the Ebstorf mappamundi and Vesconte’s world maps, while in others, such as the Catalan Atlas and Jordan’s 4 

Adam, De modo Sarracenos extirpandi, ed. by Kohler, p. 554.

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Conclusion

Mirabilia descripta, they are a partially evangelized eschatological battleground. Francesco Pipino’s prologue to Marco Polo’s Book and the early vernacular versions of the Book of Sir John Mandeville, in contrast, picture Indian peoples as potential Christians, waiting in metaphorical darkness for want of spiritual teachers. In all such cases, Indian peoples and space are discursively appropriated, becoming part of an oikoumene conceived of as originally and ultimately Christian, its peoples having one common origin in Eden and a common end at the Last Judgement. At the same time, as though in revolt against such totalizing representations, we also see the Indies functioning in some quarters as sites of rebellion against the varieties of imaginative, descriptive, political, or spiritual dominion asserted over them across this corpus of maps and texts. In particular, insular Indians — their voices, of course, always ventriloquized — rebel against the collapse of all histories and all the world’s diverse spaces into one world, a world which is, to them, somebody else’s. In the vernacular Alexander-books discussed in Chapter 2, the Brahmans remain a people discursively, ideologically, and militarily unconquered by Alexander. They pose a challenge to Alexander’s military ethos and to all claims to temporal authority. Their virtuous lives, moreover, challenge the requirement of faith in Christ for salvation, an oblique statement of resistance to the spiritual dominion of Latin Christendom. Franciscan Giovanni de’ Marignolli, discussed in Chapter 3, situates yet more rebellious insular Indians high on Adam’s Peak in Sri Lanka. A virtuous, non-Christian people, the hilltop Sri Lankans claim, he says, antediluvian origins, and descent from neither Seth nor Cain. The people constitute a challenge to the central JudeoChristian myth of the flood and place themselves beyond the universalizing, Christian vision of space and time that so many representations seek to assert. As Chapter 5 shows, similar resistance crops up amongst the Lamori islanders in the early vernacular versions of The Book of Sir John Mandeville. Whilst the Book’s dominant vision of the world is of present interconnectedness moving towards eventual unity under a single God, the rebellious Lamoreans, in the far reaches of the Indies, argue against what we might call enforced globalization. They claim descent from Adam and Eve, yet simultaneously reject all other connections with the oikoumene and its mores. European visitors to their island must, they insist, belong to another world in which the commandments of God are scorned. Mandeville’s Indies are, paradoxically, both a space in which shared tenets of belief among all rational humans prove the potential for Christianity amongst all humankind and, at the same time, a space of resistance against this ideal. The Lamoreans stand within the oikoumene and yet beyond it, stubbornly — even comically — resisting the appropriation of their space and consequent absorption into a global, interconnected, common Christian world.

Conclusion

303

The ventriloquized protests of the insular Indians bear witness to a struggle in many of the texts and maps between, on the one hand, the desire to know, describe, and traverse the Indies, imaginatively or in reality and, on the other hand, the desire to retain the discursive power of places situated in some way beyond it, from which the world and its mores can be examined and critiqued. In the vernacular Alexander romances discussed in Chapter 1, the desire to represent the Indies as conquered space enters into never-resolved negotiations with unconquerable, transcendental places in the narratives’ imagined Indian spaces that resist rationalization. From such intra-textual viewpoints, the very ethos of conquest and domination may be studied and subjected to criticism. Certain fourteenth- and fifteenth-century maps bear witness to a similar conflict between the knowable and unknowable Indies. The Catalan Atlas is a portolan-mappamundi on which, paradoxically, all the continental and insular Indies cannot be mapped. Fra Mauro’s mid-fifteenth-century world map banishes the Terrestrial Paradise from its usual position to the east of the Indies, yet uneasily incorporates it within the map’s frame. And, although Giovanni da Fontana may assert his wish to follow Ptolemy’s mathematical, locative lead in his cosmography’s account of the habitable space of the world (Book iv), stories of wild and strange Indies roam nonetheless across a space without graticules in his Liber’s Book v, which concerns itself with the world’s wonders. Again and again we find the Indies placed imaginatively at the world’s unplottable edge. While, in certain of the Alexander-books discussed in Chapter 1, the ocean that surrounds the Indies is the edge of man’s allotted world, into which only Alexander dares to penetrate, for the translator of the Vulgate Latin Mandeville, the Indies are the oikoumene’s porous edge, to which travellers come, announcing themselves as visitors from another world. This sense of the Indies as the knowable world’s threshold is, finally, found in a seminal document of Renaissance conquest from the very end of the fifteenth century. In a letter of 1498, concerning his third voyage to the Caribbean islands that he always insisted were the Indies, and the land of ‘Gracia’ (around the Orinoco) beyond, Christopher Columbus finds evidence for the proximity of their legendary, transcendental neighbour. ‘All these islands’, he writes, ‘produce precious things, because of the mild climate which comes to them from heaven and because of their proximity to the highest point of the earth’. At the summit of this highest point is, he suggests, the Terrestrial Paradise, its presence forcefully indicated by the ‘very temperate climate’ and the vast amount of fresh water flowing into the sea from the paradisiacal Orinoco.5 Both of and not of 5 

See Columbus’s narrative of the third voyage, produced for the Catholic sovereigns, in

304

Conclusion

the globe — sticking out like the stalk of a pear in Columbus’s analogy — the Terrestrial Paradise would be, he argues, located on a summit close by if he could only keep sailing upwards. However, this transcendental place is inaccessible without the special grace of God. Just as in the kinds of medieval texts that formed Columbus’s imaginative geography, his Indies, imagined as much as seen and experienced, are a liminal space, characterized by the transcendental, porous places that mark out the very edge and origin of the world.

The Four Voyages of Columbus, trans. by Cohen, pp. 222–23. For a discussion of Columbus’ ideas of the Terrestrial Paradise, see Flint, The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus, pp. 149–81.

Appendices: Manuscripts of Travel Accounts Discussed in Part II Notes to Appendices 1 and 2 Background The number of surviving manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Book, Odorico da Pordenone’s Itinerarium, and Poggio Bracciolini’s India cannot be considered stable. Previously unknown or imperfectly catalogued manuscripts are still occasionally discovered, whilst others occasionally disappear into unidentified private collections. The following outline of numbers known to me at the time of writing, based on the published handlists and catalogues referenced below, should therefore be considered only a guide and a means of contextualizing the information relating to the sample of manuscripts in the following tables. Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Book I identify 134 pre-1500 manuscripts of the text. This number incorporates all those discussed in Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’, plus others either unknown to her or not categorized by her as Polo texts. These additions are: –– Text of Francesco Pipino’s translation in the Courtenay Compendium, Køben­ havn, Kongelige Bibl., MS Acc. 2011/5 (formerly Devon Record Office, Courtenay Papers 150 8M Devon Add- 55/ 11/1, pp. 211–90). Two manuscripts of John of Tynemouth’s chronicle: –– London, Lambeth Pal., MSS 10–12 and –– Cambridge, Corpus Christi Coll., MSS 5–6.

306 APPENDICES

Both of these manuscripts of Tynemouth incorporate, in full, an abbreviated Latin version of Marco’s Book that also circulates separately (see, e.g., Dublin, Trinity Coll., MS 632). –– An earlier-fourteenth-century Franco-Italian fragment (private collection).6 –– Italian (Venetian?) text in Sevilla, Bibl. Capitular y Colombina, MS 7.5.8, fols 2–36v.7 Three Latin manuscripts of German origin noted by Christine Gadrat:8 –– Klosterneuberg, Stiftsbibl., MS 722A –– Melk, Stiftsbibl., MS 1094 [424.H.42] –– Würzburg, Franziskaner-Minoritenkloster, MS I.58. Manuscripts of Odorico da Pordenone’s Itinerarium My calculations number these at c. 103 manuscript copies known from before c.1500. This calculation incorporates the manuscripts listed in Giulio Cesare Testa’s initial sketch but also takes into account additions by Paolo Chiesa along with corrections, and additions and subtractions (often of ‘doubles’ inadvertently counted twice by Testa) in Reichert, Incontri con la Cina, trans. by Sberveglieri.9 My calculation also includes: –– A Latin text of a Brevior recension in the Courtenay Compendium (København, Kongelige Bibl., MS Acc. 2011/5), pp. 291–315 –– A Castillian text embedded in the Libro llamada oltramar (Madrid, Bibl. nac. de España, MS 3013).10 6 

Concina, ‘Prime indagini su un nuovo frammento Franco-Veneto del Milione’. Kristeller, Iter Italicum, iv (1989), pp. 627–28. 8  Gadrat lists a fourth additional German manuscript (Schlierbach, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 37), but it is in fact a double of a Cistercian manuscript already in Dutschke’s list (Schlierbach, Zisterzienserstift, MS 37). Gadrat, ‘Le Livre de Marco Polo et les géographes de l’Europe du nord’, p. 147. 9  Testa, ‘Bozza per un censimento dei manoscritti Odoricioni’; Chiesa, ‘Per un riordino della tradizione manoscritta della Relatio di Odorico’, with errata corrected and notice of the text in Sevilla, Bibl. Capitular y Colombina, MS 7.5.8, in Chiesa, ‘Una forma redazionale sconosciuta della “Relatio” latina di Odorico di Pordenone’; Reichert, Incontri con la Cina, trans. by Sberveglieri, pp. 166–213. 10  See Popeanga, ‘El Relato de viajes de Odorico de Pordenone’. 7 

APPENDICES

307

Manuscripts of Poggio Bracciolini’s India The editions of Michèle Guéret-Laferté and Outi Merisalo provide information on fifty-one pre-c. 1500 manuscripts, including those of Poggio’s De vari­ etate fortunae in full and those of Book iv (India) only. Forty-eight are in Latin. A further vernacular (Venetian?) text appears in: –– Sevilla, Bibl. Capitular y Colombina, MS 7.5.8, fols 45r–55v (alongside the versions of Marco’s Book and Odorico’s Itinerarium in the same volume). The Tables The tables give selected information concerning the sample of manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Book, Odorico da Pordenone’s Itinerarium, and Poggio Bracciolini’s India/DVF, iv, on which the discussions in Chapters 3 and 4 are based. Within each section, manuscripts are listed alphabetically by location of the library in which they are held. A brief explanation is given below of the categories of the information summarized and the terminology and abbreviations, where these are not self-evident.11 Where information is not available

11  Where I have not seen manuscripts, my principal sources for information tabulated here are outlined below. However, sources for specific manuscripts discussed in detail in Chapters 3 and 4 are referenced there. For Marco Polo: Dutschke, ‘Francesco Pipino and the Manuscripts of Marco Polo’s Travels’. This has been supplemented by Sáez Guillén, Catálogo de manuscritos de la Bibl. Colombina de Sevilla; Gadrat, ‘Le Livre de Marco Polo et les géographes de l’Europe du nord’; Concina, ‘Prime indagini su un nuovo frammento Franco-Veneto del Milione’; and personal communication from Dr Suzanne Paul concerning the two Stockholm manuscripts. Concerning Odorico’s Itinerarium, information has come from Chiesa, ‘Per un riordino della tradizione manoscritta della Relatio di Odorico’; Chiesa, ‘Una forma redazionale sconosciuta della “Relatio” latina di Odorico di Pordenone’; and Andreose, ‘“Lo libro dele nove e strane e meravioxe cose”’. See Andreose, ‘Introduzione’; Monaco, ‘I volgarizzamenti italiani della relazione di Odorico da Pordenone’; the ‘Introduzione’ in Odorico da Pordenone, Memoriale Toscano, ed. by Monaco; the ‘Introduction’, in Odorico da Pordenone, Le voyage, ed. by Andreose and Ménard; Cenci, Manoscritti Francescani della Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli; AnderssonSchmitt and Hedlund, Mittelalterliche Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek Uppsala; and Michelant, Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque de Saint-Omer. Concerning Poggio’s India/DVF, iv, I have made use of the ‘Introduzione’, in Bracciolini, De varietate fortunae, ed. by Merisalo; the ‘Introduction’, in Bracciolini, De l’Inde, ed. and trans. by Guéret-Laferté; Sáez Guillén, Catálogo de manuscritos de la Bibl. Colombina de Sevilla; and, for humanist manuscripts, Kristeller, Iter Italicum, ii (1998).

308 APPENDICES

for a given manuscript in published sources and personal examination has not been possible, this is indicated with ‘-’. Manuscript sizes are given to the nearest 5mm. In the ‘Support’ column, only animal skin (‘par.’) and paper (‘pap.’) are distinguished. Manuscript dates are given as precisely as the available data allows, using the standard abbreviations in. (ineunte), med. (media), and ex. (exeunte). The following abbreviations are used: 14 1/2 = 1301–50; 14 3/4 = 1351–75, etc. For composite manuscripts or those produced over a period of time, that date for the section in question is given. The ‘Ruling’ (‘Rul.’) column distinguishes fully ruled manuscripts from those with frame ruling and those entirely unruled. ‘Illumination’ (‘Ilm.’) records the presence of gold leaf in a manuscript’s decoration. ‘Decoration’ (‘Dec.’) indicates decorated initials or filigree, normally in one or more additional colour. ‘Min.’ here signifies that the decoration level is very low or quantity minimal; ‘nc’ signifies a decoration scheme planned but not completed. The ‘Illustrations’ (‘Ills’) column records the use of figurative imagery planned into the manuscript’s layout. Informal marginal pen sketches are classed as marginal signs. The neutral term ‘intertitles’ has been used, because the column registers chapter headings whether in red or black. Scripts have been approximately categorized wherever possible using the commonly accepted terminology for the appropriate geographical area. Textura/textualis/gothic (‘got.’) has, where possible, been qualified, following Derolez, as currens (basic; curr.), libraria (book hand; lib.), and formata (highest quality; form.).12 The quality of cursives (‘curs.’) and mixed cursive-gothic hybrida scripts (‘hyb.’) may be signalled in a similar manner, but with the highest grade formata varieties of later cursive (cursiva recentior) distinguished by the common term bâtarde (bât.).13 In relation to English manuscripts written in cursive scripts, however, I have employed Parkes’s terminology: Anglicana (cursive, generally of documentary appearance); Anglicana formata (book hand variety); Bastard Anglicana (highest quality); and the commonly used ‘secretary’ (‘sec.’) for later cursive (cursiva recentior).14 Among the Italian scripts, the common, angular cursive, thought to derive from chancery contexts, can­ cellaresca (‘canc.’), is distinguished from more basic or irregular cursives, and 12 

On varieties across northern and southern Europe, see Derolez, The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books, pp. 72–122. 13  On cursiva recentior (including ‘bastarda’ or ‘bâtarde’) and hybrida scripts, see Derolez, The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books, pp. 142–75. 14  On Anglicana and Anglicana formata, see Parkes, English Cursive Book Hands, pp. xiv–xvii.

APPENDICES

309

from mercantesca (‘merc.’), an initially lower-status hand found in mercantile contexts but later metamorphosing into a good book hand in its own right. 15 Humanist scripts identified here include the high-grade lettera antica book hand (‘hum. lib.’) and Italic, a cursive initially developed for less formal purposes but soon developed into a book hand in its own right (‘hum. curs.’).16 Many hands, of course, are mixed, and this may be denoted with ‘mix.’ or by registering that a hand shows the influence (‘infl.’) of more than one script. Where a manuscript is written in more than one script, that or those employed in the text in question are given. Marginalia are recorded where they are either dated or appear on palaeographical grounds to predate 1500. I have not attempted to distinguish between marginalia added in the production process and readers’ marginalia; the overlapping roles and practices of scribes, commentators, annotators, and readers in the period are discussed in Chapter 4 (see ‘Guided Voyages’). I distinguish between manuscript copies that contain only non-verbal marks (signa, such as manicules and bracketing) and those that feature written marginal notes. Toponymic glosses are noted separately (‘top. gloss.’) in manuscripts of Poggio’s DVF, iv. Throughout, marginal sketches are included under the category of signa rather than decoration.

15 

Federici, La scrittura delle cancellerie italiane, i, 33–58, 75–81. For the development and spread of mercantesca script, with examples, see Cecchi, ‘Nota di paleografia commerciale’; and Orlandelli, ‘Osservazioni sulla scrittura mercantesca nei secoli xiv e xv’, p. 456. 16  On humanistic book hand, see Wardrop, The Script of Humanism, in particular p. 11. Wardrop also traces the formalization of humanistic cursive over the course of the fifteenth century and includes many helpful plates; see, in particular, pp. 19–35.

310 APPENDICES

Appendix 1: Vernacular Manuscripts 1a. Table 1. Vernacular Manuscripts of Marco Polo from France and Francophone Europe. Manuscript

Lang.

Size

Sup. Date

Rul.

par.

14 2/4

full

Ilm.

Northern Italy 1

No location, Private Collection

FrancoItalian

-

2

BnF, MS fr. 1116

FrancoItalian

305 × 225 par.

14 in.

full

France, Burgundy, Flanders 3

Bern, Burgerbibl., MS 125

French

340 × 265 par.

15 1/2

full

ü

4

Bruxelles, BRB/KBB, MS 9309

French

300 × 215 par.

15 med

fr.

ü

5

BAV, MS Ottoboniani latini 2207

French

315 × 245 par.

14 2/2

full

6

BL, MS Egerton 2176

French

235 × 170 par.

15 med.

full

ü

7

BL, MS Royal 19 D.i

French

425 × 310 par.

1330s

full

ü

8

New York, Pierpont Morgan Libr., MS M. 723

French

310 × 220 par.

14 ex.–15 in.

full

ü

9

BnF, MS fr. 2810

French

425 × 305 par.

14 in.

full

ü

10

BnF, MS fr. 5631

French

215 × 300 par.

14 med.

full

ü

11

BnF, MS fr. 5649

French

245 × 170 par.

15 med.

full

ü

12

San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Aragonese 415 × 290 par. Real Bibl., MS Z.I.2

14 4/4

full

ü

13

Stockholm, Kungliga Bibl., French MS Cod. Holm. M. 304

225 × 160 par.

14 1/2

full

14

Stockholm, Kungliga Bibl., French MS Cod. Holm. M. 305

250 × 180 par.

15 2/2

-

ü

14 ex.–15 in.

-

ü

full

ü

England 15

BL, MS Cotton Otho D.v

AngloFrench

-

16

Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Bodley 264

French

415 × 300 par.

par.

15 in.

APPENDICES

311

1a. Table 1. (continuation of table opposite) Ills

Dec. Script

Inter-titles Marg. signa Marg. notes Medieval owners

ü

got. lib.

nc

-

ü

got. lib.

ü

ü

ü

bât.

ü

Family of Pons de SaintMaurice, Périgord

ü

curs. lib.

ü

Philippe le Bon, Duke of Burgundy

ü

curs. lib.

ü

Loys de Luxembourg

ü

bât.

ü

ü

ü

got. form.

ü

ü

ü

got. form.

ü

ü

ü

got. form.

ü

Jean sans Peur; Jean, Duc de Berry

ü

ü

got. form.

ü

Jean, Duc de Berry; Louis de Bruges

ü

bât.

ü

ü

got. form.

ü

ü

got. lib.

ü

ü

ü

bât.

ü

ü (few)

ü

Angl. lib.

ü

got. form.

ü

ü

nc

ü

ü

ü (few)

-

-

ü (few) ?Philippe VI of France

-

-

1

Charles, Duc d’Orléans ü

Juan-Fernández de Heredia

ü

Charles V of France; Royal Library ?Jehan Gilbert

Richard Woodville (Lord Rivers)

312 APPENDICES

1b. Table 2. Marco Polo Manuscripts in Italian Vernaculars. Manuscript

Size

Sup. Date

Rul.

BAV, MS Chigiani M.VI.140

220 × 150 pap.

15 (2/2) fr.

Ilm.

Ills

Italy 1

Firenze, Bibl. Med. Laur., MS Ashburnham 525 Firenze, Bibl. Med. Laur., MS Ashburnham 534 Firenze, Bibl. Med. Laur., MS Ashburnham 770

300 × 220 pap.

1391

285 × 195 pap.

14 (2/2) full

210 × 145 pap.

15 (ex.)

fr.

5

Firenze, BNCF, MS II.II.61

295 × 220 pap.

1392

none

6

Firenze, BNCF, MS II.IV.88

285 × 205 pap.

14 (1/2) -

7

Firenze, BNCF, MS II.IV.136

305 × 220 pap.

14 (1/2) fr.

290 × 205 pap.

1425

fr.

285 × 225 pap.

14 (ex.)

fr.

295 × 215 pap.

1431

none

305 × 230 pap.

15 (1/2) fr.

2 3 4

8 9 10 11

Firenze, BNCF, MS Magliabechiano XIII, 73 Firenze, BNCF, MS Palatino 590 Firenze, Bibl. Riccardiana, MS 1036 Firenze, Bibl. Riccardiana, MS 1924

fr.

12

BL, MS Sloane 251

295 × 215 pap.

1457

fr.

13

Mantova, Bibl. Comunale, MS 488 (E I.10)

260 × 140 pap.

15 (ex.)

-

14

Padova, Bibl. Civica, MS 211

285 × 205 pap.

1445

-

15

BnF, MS it. 434

275 × 195 pap.

14

fr.

225 × 145 pap.

15

full

290 × 220 pap.

15 (2/2) -

300 × 205 pap.

1469

285 × 200 pap.

15 (2/2) fr.

310 × 210 pap.

1446

16 17 18 19 20

Parma, Bibl. Palatina, MS Pal. 318 Roma, Bibl. S. Alessio Falconieri, MS 56 Sevilla, Bibl. Capitular y Colombina, MS 7.5.8 Venezia, Bibl. Naz. Marciana, MS It. VI, 56 (=6140) Venezia, Mus. Civico Correr, MS Donà dalle Rose 224

fr.

fr.

nc

APPENDICES

313

1b. Table 2. (continuation of table opposite) Dec. Script

min.

Inter-titles Marg. signa Marg. notes

mix. curs.

ü

merc. (neat)

ü

min.

got. lib.

ü

min.

hum-infl. mix. (irreg.)

ü (few)

ü (few) Piero Peruzzi ü (few)

mix. curs. (irreg.)

ü

merc.

ü

merc. merc.-infl. curs.

Amelio Bonagiusi (podestà) Piero del Riccio (1458)

ü ü

ü Doffo Spini; Gachinnoto d’Adonardo de’ Bardi

ü

merc.

ü (few)

merc. (irreg.) min.

canc. (irreg.)

Meo Ceffoni ü

ü

ü Salvador Paxuti (?owner-scribe)

curs. (irreg.) got. curr.; hum.infl. curs.; merc.

ü

-

-

merc.

-

-

-

ü

merc.

ü

-

hum. lib.

nc

nc

ü

ü

Medieval owners

ü (few)

Niccolò Vetturi, Treviso (?owner-scribe) Petre de Celano (15c)

-

-

hum.- infl. curs.

-

-

curs.

ü

ü

Donatus, priest of San Clemente, Padova

-

-

unidentified arms fol. 1r

-

-

hum. lib. hum.-infl. curs.

nc

314 APPENDICES

1c. Table 3. Odorico da Pordenone Manuscripts in Francophone Europe and Iberia. Manuscript

Lang.

Size

Sup. Date

Rul.

Ilm.

full

ü

France, Burgundy, Flanders etc. 1

Bern, Burgerbibl., MS 125

French

340 × 260

par.

15 1/2

2

Besançon, BM, MS 667 G

French

325 × 245

par.

1368

3

BL, MS Cotton Otho D.ii French

-

par.

15 1/2

full

ü

4

BL, MS Royal 19 D.i

French

425 × 310

par.

1330s

full

ü

5

BnF, MS fr. 1380

French

290 × 200

par.

15 1/2

full

ü

6

BnF, MS fr. 2810

French

425 × 305

par.

15 (in.)

full

ü

7

BnF, MS Rothschild 3085

French

285 × 195

par.

14 1/2

full

ü

8

BnF, MS fr. 12202

French

280 × 200

pap.

15 4/4

full

ü

Castilian 290 × 215

pap.

15

full

-

Spain 9

Madrid, Bibl. nac. de España, MS 3013

APPENDICES

315

1c. Table 3. (continuation of table opposite) Ills

Dec. Script

Inter-titles Marg. signa

Marg. notes

Family of Pons de St Maurice, Périgord

ü

curs. lib.

ü

few

ü

ü

curs.

ü

-

-

ü

ü

bât.

ü

-

-

ü

ü

got. form.

ü

nc

ü

bât.

ü

ü

ü

ü

ü

got. form.

ü

ü

ü

got. form.

ü

curs. curr.

ü

got. lib.

nc

ü

1 (rubbed)

ü

Medieval owners

ü

Jacquetta of Lux., Duchess of Bedford ? Philippe VI of France

Jean sans Peur; Duc de Berry Charles V of France; Royal Library

?Juan-Fernández de Heredia

316 APPENDICES

1d. Table 4. Odorico da Pordenone Manuscripts in Italian Vernaculars. Manuscript

Size

Sup.

Date

Rul.

Ilm.

Ills

Italy 1

BAV, MS Barberiniani latini 4047

290 × 205

pap.

15 (2/2)

fr.

2

BAV, MS Barberiniani latini 4048

295 × 205

pap.

15 (2/2)

fr.

3

BAV, MS Urbinati latini 1013

275 × 195

pap.

14 (2/2)

fr.

4

BAV, MS Vaticani latini 5256a 215 × 150

pap.

15 (2/2)

fr.

5

Firenze, BNCF, MS II.II.15

300 × 225

pap.

1377

fr.

6

Firenze, BNCF, MS Conventi Soppressi, C.7.1170

260 × 185

par.

14 (2/2)

full

7

Firenze, BNCF, MS Panciatichi 92

290 × 220

pap.

15 (2/2)

fr.

8

Firenze, Bibl. Riccardiana, MS 683

215 × 150

pap.

15

fr.

9

Roma, Bibl. Angelica, MS 2212 220 × 145

pap.

15 (med.)

fr.

10

Roma, Bibl. Casanatense, MS 1548

220 × 150

pap.

15

fr.

11

Venezia, Bibl. Naz. Marciana, MS It. VI, 102 (=5726)

205 × 150

pap.

14

-

-

12

Venezia, Bibl. Naz. Marciana, MS It. VI, 585 (=12496)

285 × 215

pap.

15

-

-

ü ü

ü

-

APPENDICES

317

1d. Table 4. (continuation of table opposite) Dec. Script

Inter-titles Marg. signa Marg. notes Medieval owners Andrea di Lorenzo di Cieffo di Massino Ceffi, popolo di San Simone, Firenze

merc. ü

hum. infl. curs.

ü

canc. (good)

min.

merc. (good)

ü (few) ü

merc. (good) ü

Female religious order Jacomo D’Albo, Verona

ü

1

got. lib.

ü

merc. (irreg.)

ü

Dominicans, S. Maria Novella, Firenze

ü

canc. min.

merc. (irreg.)

Francesco de Mariotto de Beniimcasa (?owner-scribe)

ü (few)

curs. (irreg.) -

canc. 

-

-

-

-

canc.

ü

-

-

Matteo di Stefano Linaiuolo, Gonfalone del Vaio, Firenze

318 APPENDICES

Appendix 2: Latin Manuscripts 2a. Table 5. Latin Manuscripts of Marco Polo by Region. Manuscript Italy 1 BAV, MS Barberiniani latini 2687 BAV, MS Ottoboniani latini 2 1641 3 BAV, MS Palatini latini 1359

From

Size

Sup.

Date

Rul. Ilm.

Italy

310 × 230

par.

15 med.

fr.

Italy

205 × 145

pap.

15 1/2

fr.

Italy

200 × 135

pap.

15 med.

full

Italy

230 × 170

par.

15

full

BAV, MS Vaticani latini 5260 Italy BAV, MS Vaticani latini 7317 Italy Ferrara, Bibl. Comunale Ariostea, 7 Italy MS Cl.II.336 Firenze, BNCF, MS Con­venti 8 Italy Soppressi, C.7.1170 Firenze, Bibl. Riccardiana, 9 Italy MS 983 10 Modena, Bibl. Estense, MS lat. 131 Italy 11 BnF, MS lat. 3195 Italy

210 × 140 290 × 205

pap. pap.

15 ex. 1458

full full

285 × 200

pap.

14 ex

-

-

260 × 185

par.

14 med.

full

ü

205 × 140

pap.

15 1/2

full

220 × 150 295 × 220

par. par.

14 2/4 14 med.

full fr.

12 BnF, MS lat. 6244A

215 × 145

pap.

1439–40 full

pap.

1465

full

par.

14 1/2

full

par.

1330s

full

4

BAV, MS Vaticani latini 3153

5 6

Italy

Venezia, Bibl. Naz. Marciana, MS Italy 295 × 215 Lat. X, 73 (=3445) France, Burgundy, Netherlands Glasgow, GUL, 14 France 215 × 145 MS Hunter 458 (V.6.8) 15 BL, MS Addit. 19513 S. France 250 × 190 13

16 BnF, MS lat. 1616

France

300 × 215

pap.

15 med.

full

17 BnF, MS lat. 17800 18 BnF, MS n.a.l. 1768 Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August 19 Bibl., Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg England Cambridge, Corpus 20 Christi Coll., MSS 5–6 Cambridge, Gonville and 21 Caius Coll., MS 162/83

S. France 285 × 215 France 270 × 180 Flanders/ 295 × 210 Liège

par. par.

14 14

full none

par.

15 2/2

full

England 510 × 360

par.

15 1/2

fr.

England 220 × 160

par.

14 2/2

fr.

ü

ü

ü

ü

APPENDICES

319

2a. Table 5. (continuation of table opposite) Ills Dec. Script

Inter-titles Marg. signa Marg. notes Medieval owners

ü semicurs. lib.

ü

ü

few

nc hyb. lib.

ü

few

ü

nc got. curs. 1) hum.-infl.; ü 2) got. lib. hum. lib. nc hyb. lib.

nc

few

ü ü nc

got. lib. ü

ü got. lib. 1) got. lib.; 2) hum.- infl. ü got. min. hyb. ü

ü bât. ü

ü

merc.- infl. curs.,

few -

-

ü

ü

ü ü

few

ü ü

ü

ü

ü

ü

Domenico Capranica Bartolomeo Carri (serving Borso d’Este) Dominicans, S. Maria Novella, Firenze

ü

ü

Estense library Zacheti Finaris (door­keeper of Eugenius IV) Giovanni Marcanova; Augustinians of Padova

ü got. lib.

ü

ü got. lib.

ü

ü

ü

nc bât.

ü

few

few

ü semicurs. nc got. curr.; curs.

ü ü

few ü

few ü

Dominicans of Paris (1529)

Nicholas Dex, Treasurer of Metz

hyb. lib.

ü

ü

Cathedral library, Mainz

ü Angl. form.

ü

ü

St Albans Abbey

min. Angl.

ü

ü

ü

320 APPENDICES

2a. Table 5. Latin Manuscripts of Marco Polo by Region. (continued from previous page) Manuscript England 22 Cambridge, CUL, MS Dd.1.17 23 Cambridge, CUL, MS Dd.8.7 24 Dublin, Trinity Coll., MS 632

Sup.

Date

Rul. Ilm.

England 440 × 300 England 400 × 290 England 205 × 140

par. par. pap.

14 ex. 14 med. 15 med.

full full none

England 270 × 185

par.

15 in.

fr.

England 270 × 190

par.

14 ex.

fr.

England 300 × 200

par.

15 med.

full

England 275 × 180

par.

14 med.

full

29 BL, MS Harley 5115

England 320 × 195

par.

14 2/2

full

30 BL, MS Royal 14 C.xiii

England 375 × 220

par.

1327–52 full

London, Lambeth Pal., MSS 10–12

England 405 × 285

par.

14 2/2

full

32 Oxford, Merton Coll., MS 312 England 250 × 180

par.

14 1/2

full

25

Glasgow, GUL, MS Hunter 84 (T.4.1)

København, Kongelige Bibl., MS Acc. 2011/5 Leiden, Universiteitsbibl., 27 MS Voss. lat. F 75 28 BL, MS Arundel 13 26

31

From

Size

Germany, Central Europe 33 BL, MS Addit. 19952

Koblenz 210 × 145

par.

1442

fr.

34 Luxembourg, Bibl. nat., MS 121 München, Bayerische 35 Staatsbibl., MS Clm 5339 München, Bayerische 36 Staatsbibl., MS Clm 18770 New York, Columbia Uni­versity 37 Libr., MS Plimpton 93 Praha, Knihovna Metro­politní 38 Kapituli, MS G. 28 Stuttgart, Württem­bergische 39 Landesbibl., MS Cod. hist. 4o 10

Köln

295 × 230

pap.

1448

-

Germany 290 × 215

pap.

15 2/2

fr.

Germany 220 × 160

pap.

15 ex.

-

Germany 200 × 150

pap.

15 2/2

-

Bohemia 295 × 205

pap.

15in.

-

Germany 215 × 145

pap.

15 2/2

full

40 Wien, ÖNB, MS 3497

Germany 220 ×145

pap.

15 med.

fr.

Germany 290 × 215

pap.

15 med.

fr.

41

Würzburg, Universitätsbibl., MS M. ch. f. 60

ü

ü

ü

APPENDICES

321

2a. Table 5. (continuation of table opposite) Ills Dec. Script

Inter-titles Marg. signa Marg. notes Medieval owners

ü got. lib. ü got. lib. Angl.- sec. mix

ü ü ü

ü Angl. form.

ü

few

ü

ü

min. Angl. Angl. form. ü Angl.

ü

ü

ü

ü got. lib.

ü

1 ü

few 1 ü

ü ü

few

ü Angl. form.

ü

ü got. lib.

ü

nc Angl. form.

ü

hyb.

ü

-

ü

ü curs.

nc

-

ü

min. hyb. curs.

ü

hyb.

ü

ü curs. lib.

ü

ü curs.

-

min. hyb.

few

John Stafford, Bishop of Bath and Wells, Chancellor of England ?Breamore Priory (Augustinian)

ü

ü

ü

Robert Grey, ‘armiger’, Kings­ ton Maurward, Dorset (15) Simon Bozoun, Prior Norwich Cathedral Priory

ü

Durham Cathedral Priory

ü

Clerk of Thomas Bradwardine, Archbishop of Canterbury

ü -

-

ü

ü

ü

ü

-

ü

Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa; Theodore of Xanten Benedictines, Münstereifel

Monastery of St Quirinus, Tegernsee Benedictines, St Sebastian, Ebersberg

Count Heinrich of Württemberg Prebend in Pozsony; Magister Cristoff Plebanus, Haugsdorf Nicholas Horn, doctor of medicine

322 APPENDICES

2b. Table 6. Latin Manuscripts of Odorico da Pordenone by Region. Manuscript

From

Size

Sup. Date

Rul.

Ilm.

1

Assisi, Bibl. Comunale, MS 343

Italy

260 × 190

par.

-

2

BAV, MS Vaticani latini 5256b

Italy

220 × 160

pap. 15 ex.

fr.

3

Firenze, BNCF, MS II.IV.277

Italy

310 × 210

pap. 15 1/2

fr.

4

Firenze, BNCF, MS Magliabechiano VII, 1334

S. Italy

245 × 170

pap. 1431

full

5

Napoli, Bibl. Naz., MS VIII.D.68

Italy

220 × 290

pap. 14

-

-

6

BnF, MS lat. 2584

Italy

340 × 245

par.

14

full

ü

7

Roma, Bibl. Casanatense, MS 276

Italy

210 × 160

par.

14 med.

full

8

Sevilla, Bibl. Capitular y Colombina, MS 7.5.8

Italy (? Padova) 300 × 205

Italy 14

pap. 1469

-

-

France, Burgundy, Netherlands 9

Glasgow, GUL, MS Hunter France 458 (V.6.8)

215 × 145

par.

14 1/2

full

10

BnF, MS lat. 3195

S. France

295 × 220

par.

14 2/2

fr.

11

Saint-Omer, BM, MS 737

Flanders

folio

pap. 1448

-

12

Wolfenbüttel, HerzogAugust Bibl., Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg

Flanders / Liège

295 × 210

par.

15 2/2

full

ü

England 13

Cambridge, Corpus Christi England Coll., MS 275

275 × 180

par.

1400–39 full

14

Cambridge, Corpus Christi England Coll., MS 407

210 × 125

par.

14 2/4

full

15

Cambridge, Gonville and Caius Coll., MS 162/83

England

220 × 160

par.

14 ex.

fr.

16

Glasgow, GUL, MS Hunter 84 (T.4.1)

England

270 × 185

par.

15 in.

fr.

ü

APPENDICES

323

2b. Table 6. (continuation of table opposite) Ills Dec. Script

-

-

got. hyb.

Inter-titles Marg. Signa Marg. notes Medieval owners

-

-

-

hum. infl. curs.

ü

ü

canc.

ü

ü (red)

hum. infl. got. min. -

-

-

ü got. lib. got. lib.

‘Zanobi’ 1483; ?S. Maria Nuova -

-

ü (few)

-

Convent of San Bernadino d’Aquila

ü

ü -

-

Donatus, priest of San Clemente, Padova

ü

ü

ü

? de la Haye family (later)

min. hyb.

ü

ü

ü

hyb.

-

-

-

Abbey of St Bertin

hyb. lib.

ü

ü

Cathedral library, Mainz

curs.

ü

?Udine Franciscans; Pietro Edo (humanist priest)

ü got. lib.

ü Angl.

few

few

Thomas Markaunt, Fellow of Corpus Christi; College Library

ü Angl. form.

ü

ü (red)

Simon Bozoun, Prior, Norwich Cathedral Priory

Angl.

ü

few

ü

Angl. form.

John Stafford, Bishop of Bath and Wells, Chancellor

324 APPENDICES

2b. Table 6. Latin Manuscripts of Odorico da Pordenone by Region. (continued from previous page) Manuscript

From

Size

Sup. Date

Rul.

Ilm.

England 17

København, Kongelige Bibl., England MS Acc. 2011/5

270 × 190

par.

14 ex.

fr.

18

BL, MS Arundel 13

England

275 × 180

par.

14 med.

full

19

BL, MS Harley 562

England

240 × 160

par.

15 1/2

fr.

20

BL, MS Royal 14 C.xiii

England

375 × 220

par.

1327–52 full

21

Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Digby 11

England

145 × 95

par.

14 ex.

22

Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Digby 166

England

260 × 185

par.

14 & 15 full

Spain

-

pap. 15 2/2

none

none

Iberia 23

Barcelona, Bibl. de Catalunya, MS 490

Germany, Central Europe 24

BAV, MS Ottoboniani latini 2087

Bohemia

300 × 210

pap. 15

fr.

25

Praha, Knihovna Metro­ politní Kapituli, MS G. 28

Bohemia

295 × 205

pap. 15 in.

-

26

Uppsala, Universitetsbibl., MS C 26

Konstanz

255 × 155

par.

-

1416

nc

APPENDICES

325

2b. Table 6. (continuation of table opposite) Ills Dec. Script

Inter-titles Marg. Signa Marg. notes Medieval owners

min. Angl.

ü

ü Angl.

ü

?Breamore Priory (Augustinian)

curs. few

few

Simon Bozoun, Prior, Norwich Cathedral Priory

ü

ü

Oxford Franciscans

Angl.

ü

?Gloucester Hall (Oxford)

semicurs.

ü

ü Angl. form.

ü

Angl.

curs. (mix.)

-

-

few

hyb.

ü

-

-

few ?Dominican

-

-

Bridgettine Foundation, Vadstena

326 APPENDICES

2c. Table 7. Latin Manuscripts of Poggio’s India. Manuscript

From

Size

Sup. Date

Rul. Ilm.

De Varietate Fortunae 1

Bernkastel-Kues, Bibl. des St. Nikolaus-Hospitals, MS 157

Italy

295 × 220 pap.

1464

-

-

2

BAV, MS Ottoboniani latini 2134 Italy

255 × 175 par.

1450

full

ü

3

BAV, MS Urbinati latini 224

Italy

355 x 240

par.

1460

full

ü

4

BAV, MS Vaticani latini 1784

Italy

265 × 185 par.

1448

full

5

BAV, MS Vaticani latini 1785

Italy

290 × 220 pap.

1450

fr.

Italy

235 × 150 par.

15 med. full

Italy

255 × 190 par.

1465–80 full

ü

Italy

290 × 215 pap.

15 med. -

ü

Italy

205 × 135 par.

15 2/2

none

10 BAV, MS Vaticani latini 6265

Italy

220 × 145 pap.

1470

full

11 BAV, MS Vaticani latini 7317

Italy

285 × 215 pap.

15 3/4

full

Italy

205 × 140

6 7 8

Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Buchanan D. 4 Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Canon. Misc. 557 Venezia, Bibl. Naz. Marciana, MS Lat. VI, 141 (=2560)

ü

India (Book iv only) 9

BAV, MS Rossiani 369

Firenze, Bibl. Med. Laur., MS Plutei 90 sup. 55 Firenze, BNCF, 13 MS Magliabechiano XXI, 151 Gotha, Forschungsbibl., 14 MS Chart. B 239 12

15 BL, MS Addit. 25712

pap. 1444 & par.

Italy / 220 × 150 pap. N. Europe Italy

205 × 145 pap.

fr.

1465

full

1460s

-

pap. 15 med. full & par. Germany / 1460s– 325 × 220 pap. none Bohemia 70s N. Italy / 245 × 165 pap. 15 2/2 fr. Germany Italy

205 × 280

Italy

205 × 140 pap.

1470s

fr.

19 Udine, Bibl. Guarneriana, MS 121 Italy

295 × 185 pap.

1460s

-

16 BL, MS Harley 2492 17 BL, MS Harley 3716 18

Oxford, Bodl. Libr., MS Canon. Misc. 280

-

APPENDICES

327

2c. Table 7. (continuation of table opposite) Ills Dec. Script

Marg. signa Marg. notes Top. gloss. Medieval owners

- curs.

-

ü hum. lib. ü

-

1

ü hum. lib.

ü

ü hum. curs.

1

ü hum. lib.

ü

ü hum. lib. hum. curs.

-

ü

ü

Nicholas of Cusa Bartholomaeus Ghisilardus Bononiensis Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino (after 1471) Pope Nicholas V

ü

ü

1

Pietro Barbo (later pope); papal library by 1476 [?Girolamo] de’ Panzani

not in IV

Artaxerxes Bayard (?16c) Giovanni Marcanova (scholar; physician); Padova Augustinians

ü hum. curs.

ü

-

hum. curs.

ü

ü

hum. curs.

ü

few

hum. lib.

ü (red)

ü

Domenico Capranica

ü hum. curs.

ü

few

Nicolaus Dominici Ferrei de Vignanensibus

hum. curs.

ü

ü

-

-

Lombard Franciscan

hum. curs.

ü

ü

Abbey of Casamari in 1459

hyb. lib.

ü

ü

ü

Gianfrancesco Cataldini di Cagli

-

-

Guarnerio d’Artegna

semi-got.

-

ü curs. hum.-infl. curs.

-

hum. infl. got. hyb.

-

Bibliography Manuscripts and Archival Documents Assisi, Biblioteca Comunale, MS 343 Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, MS Class. 38 Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya, MS 490 Bern, Burgerbibliotek, MS 125 Bernkastel-Kues, Bibliothek des St. Nikolaus-Hospitals, MS 157 Besançon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 667 G Bruxelles, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique/Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België, MS 9309 —— , MS 10146 Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Dd.1.17 —— , MS Dd.8.7 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MSS 5–6 —— , MS 66 —— , MS 275 —— , MS 407 Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 162/83 Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Barberiniani latini 2687 —— , MS Barberiniani latini 4047 —— , MS Barberiniani latini 4048 —— , MS Chigiani M.VI.140 —— , MS Ottoboniani latini 1641 —— , MS Ottoboniani latini 2087 —— , MS Ottoboniani latini 2134 —— , MS Ottoboniani latini 2207 —— , MS Palatini latini 1359 —— , MS Palatini latini 1362a —— , MS Rossiani 369 —— , MS Urbinati latini 224 —— , MS Urbinati latini 1013 —— , MS Vaticani latini 1784 —— , MS Vaticani latini 1785

330

Bibliography

—— , MS Vaticani latini 3153 —— , MS Vaticani latini 5256b —— , MS Vaticani latini 5260 —— , MS Vaticani latini 6265 —— , MS Vaticani latini 7317 Dublin, Trinity College, MS 632 Ferrara, Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, MS Cl.II.336 Firenze, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Ashburnham 525 —— , MS Ashburnham 534 —— , MS Ashburnham 770 —— , MS Plutei 90 sup. 55 Firenze, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, MS II.II.15 —— , MS II.II.61 —— , MS II.IV.88 —— , MS II.IV.136 —— , MS II.IV.277 —— , MS Conventi Soppressi, C.7.1170 —— , MS Magliabechiano VII, 1334 —— , MS Magliabechiano XIII, 73 —— , MS Magliabechiano XXI, 151 —— , MS Palatino 590 —— , MS Panciatichi 92 Firenze, Biblioteca Riccardiana, MS 683 —— , MS 983 —— , MS 1036 —— , MS 1924 Glasgow, Glasgow University Library, MS Hunter 84 (T.4.1) —— , MS Hunter 458 (V.6.8) Gotha, Forschungsbibliotek, MS Chart. B 239 Klosterneuberg, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 722A København, Kongelige Bibliotek, MS Acc. 2011/5 (also known as the Courtenay compendium (formerly Devon Record Office, Courtenay Papers, 150 8M, Devon Additional 55/11/1)) Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS Vossiani lat. F. 31 —— , MS Vossiani lat. F 75 London, British Library, MS Additional 10049 —— , MS Additional 19513 —— , MS Additional 19952 —— , MS Additional 25712 —— , MS Additional 27376* —— , MS Additional 28681 —— , MS Additional 37512 —— , MS Arundel 13

Bibliography —— , MS Cotton Otho D.ii —— , MS Cotton Otho D.v —— , MS Cotton Tiberius B.v —— , MS Egerton 2176 —— , MS Harley 562 —— , MS Harley 2492 —— , MS Harley 3589 —— , MS Harley 3716 —— , MS Harley 5115 —— , MS Royal 14 C.ix —— , MS Royal 14 C.xiii —— , MS Royal 19 D.i —— , MS Sloane 251 London, Lambeth Palace, MSS 10–12 Luxembourg, Bibliothèque nationale, MS 121 Madrid, Biblioteca nacional de España, MS 3013 Mantova, Biblioteca Comunale, MS 488 (E I.10) Melk, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 1094 [424.H.42] Modena, Biblioteca Estense, MS lat. 131 München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS Clm 5339 —— , MS Clm 6362 —— , MS Clm 10058 —— , MS Clm 18208 —— , MS Clm 18770 Napoli, Biblioteca Nazionale, MS VIII.D.68 New York, Columbia University Library, MS Plimpton 93 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M. 133 —— , MS M. 723 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264 —— , MS Buchanan D. 4 —— , MS Canonici Misc. 280 —— , MS Canonici Misc. 557 —— , MS D’Orville 77 —— , MS Digby 11 —— , MS Digby 166 —— , MS Tanner 170 Oxford, Merton College, MS 312 Padova, Biblioteca Civica, MS 211 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds espagnol 30 —— , MS fonds français 1116  —— , MS fonds français 1380 —— , MS fonds français 2810 —— , MS fonds français 5631

331

332

Bibliography

—— , MS fonds français 5649 —— , MS fonds français 12202 —— , MS fonds italien 434 —— , MS fonds latin 1616 —— , MS fonds latin 2584 —— , MS fonds latin 3195 —— , MS fonds latin 4939 —— , MS fonds latin 6244A —— , MS fonds latin 17800 —— , MS nouvelle acquisition latine 1768 —— , MS Rothschild 3085 Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, MS Pal. 318 Praha, Knihovna Metropolitní Kapituli, MS G. 28 Roma, Biblioteca Angelica, MS 2212 Roma, Biblioteca Casanatense, MS 276 —— , MS 1548 Roma, Biblioteca Sant Alessio Falconieri, MS 56 Saint-Omer, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 737 San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, MS Z.I.2 San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 132 Sevilla, Biblioteca Capitular y Colombina, MS 7.5.8 Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, MS Cod. Holm. M. 304 —— , MS Cod. Holm. M. 305 Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, MS Cod. hist. 4o 10 Udine, Biblioteca Guarneriana, MS 121 Uppsala, Universitetsbibliotek, MS C 26 Venezia, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS It. VI, 24 (=6111) —— , MS It. VI, 56 (=6140) —— , MS It. VI, 102 (=5726) —— , MS It. VI, 585 (=12496) —— , MS It. XI, 32 (=6672) —— , MS It. Z. 76 (=4783) —— , MS Lat. VI, 141 (=2560) —— , MS Lat. X, 73 (=3445) Venezia, Museo Civico Correr, MS Donà dalle Rose 224 Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 3497 Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg Würzburg, Franziskaner-Minoritenkloster, MS I.58 Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek, MS M. ch. f. 60

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Index of Manuscripts

Assisi, Bibl. Comunale MS 343: 165 n. 14, 322 Bamberg, Staatsbibl. MS Class. 38: 25 n. 29 Barcelona, Bibl. de Catalunya MS 490: 119 n. 45, 324 Bern, Burgerbibl. MS 125: 114 n. 27, 310, 314 Bernkastel-Kues, Bibl. des St. Nikolaus-Hospitals MS 157: 169 n. 32, 326 Besançon, BM MS 667 G: 114, 314 Bruxelles, BRB/KBB MS 9309: 135, 310 MS 10146: 25 n. 30 Cambridge, CUL MS Dd.1.17: 166 n. 22, 320 MS Dd.8.7: 167 n. 22, 178, 320 Cambridge, Corpus Christi Coll. MSS 5–6: 166 n. 21, 167 n. 22, 178, 179 n. 57, 305, 318 MS 66: 248 n. 15, 249 MS 275: 161 n. 1, 171 n. 41, 181, 322 MS 407: 166 n. 20, 182–83, 322 Cambridge, Gonville and Caius Coll. MS 162/83: 318, 322 Città del Vaticano, BAV MS Barberiniani latini 2687: 318 MS Barberiniani latini 4047: 150, 316 MS Barberiniani latini 4048: 151, 316 MS Chigiani M.VI.140: 312

358

INDEX OF MANUSCRIPTS

MS Ottoboniani latini 1641: 184, 186, 189 n. 65, 191–92, 198, 318 MS Ottoboniani latini 2134: 172 n. 44, 326 MS Ottoboniani latini 2207: 108, 310 MS Palatini latini 1359: 318 MS Palatini latini 1362a: 262 n. 54, 266 n. 62 MS Rossiani 369: 326 MS Urbinati latini 224: 172, 189, 326 MS Urbinati latini 1013: 150, 155, 157, 316 MS Vaticani latini 1784: 169 n. 31, 326 MS Vaticani latini 1785: 161 n. 1, 169 n. 31, 326 MS Vaticani latini 3153: 318 MS Vaticani latini 5256a: 316 MS Vaticani latini 5256b: 184, 192, 198, 322 MS Vaticani latini 5260: 318 MS Vaticani latini 6265: 326 MS Vaticani latini 7317: 169 n. 30, 170, 171 n. 39, 318, 326 Dublin, Trinity Coll. MS 632: 178, 306, 320 Ferrara, Bibl. Comunale Ariostea MS Cl.II.336: 169 n. 29, 173 n. 45, 318 Firenze, Bibl. Med. Laur. MS Ashburnham 525: 312 MS Ashburnham 534: 156, 312 MS Ashburnham 770: 312 MS Plutei 90 sup. 55: 326 Firenze, BNCF, MS II.II.15: 149 n. 94, 316 MS II.II.61: 149 n. 94, 150 n. 96, 152 n. 108, 312 MS II.IV.88: 312 MS II.IV.136: 158, 312 MS II.IV.277: 322 MS Conventi Soppressi, C.7.1170: 151, 155 n. 113, 164, 174 n. 47, 316, 318 MS Magliabechiano VII, 1334: 322 MS Magliabechiano XIII, 73: 149 n. 94, 150, 156, 312 MS Magliabechiano XXI, 151: 326 MS Palatino 590: 312 MS Panciatichi 92: 316 Firenze, Bibl. Riccardiana MS 683: 316 MS 983: 318 MS 1036: 150 n. 98, 312 MS 1924: 154, 158, 312 Glasgow, GUL MS Hunter 84 (T.4.1): 168 n. 28, 320, 322 MS Hunter 458: 174 n. 47, 189, 318, 322 Gotha, Forschungsbibl. MS Chart. B 239: 167 n. 23, 326

INDEX OF MANUSCRIPTS Klosterneuberg, Stiftsbibl. MS 722A: 306 København, Kongelige Bibl. MS Acc. 2011/5: 166 n. 20, 189 n. 65, 305–06, 320, 324 Leiden, Universiteitsbibl. MS Voss. lat. F 75: 189 n. 65, 190–91, 320 London, BL MS Addit. 19513: 168, 192, 197, 318 MS Addit. 19952: 169 n. 32, 193, 320 MS Addit. 25712: 326 MS Addit. 27376*: 263 n. 54, 264, 268, 265–66, 273 MS Addit. 28681: 248 n. 16, 250 MS Addit. 37512: 207 n. 13, 208 n. 17 MS Arundel 13: 184, 185, 189 n. 65, 190–92, 198–99, 320, 324 MS Cotton Otho D.ii: 119 n. 48, 314 MS Cotton Otho D.v: 117–18, 310 MS Cotton Tiberius B.v: 258 n. 42 MS Egerton 2176: 108 n. 11, 310 MS Harley 562: 324 MS Harley 2492: 326 MS Harley 3589: 207 n. 13, 208 n. 17 MS Harley 3716: 326 MS Harley 5115: 320 MS Royal 14 C.ix: 251, 254, 260 MS Royal 14 C.xiii: 166 n. 20, 182, 320, 324 MS Royal 19 D.i: 107–10, 111 n. 18, 113 n. 24, 115–17, 119 n. 48, 120, 122–26, 128, 136, 137, 138, 159, 301, 310, 314 MS Sloane 251: 312 London, Lambeth Pal. MSS 10–12: 166 n. 21, 167 n. 22, 178, 305, 320 Luxembourg, Bibl. nat. MS 121: 320 Madrid, Bibl. nac. de España MS 3013: 119 n. 45, 306, 314 Mantova, Bibl. Comunale MS 488 (E I.10): 312 Melk, Stiftsbibl. MS 1094 [424.H.42]: 306 Milano, Biblioteca Ambrosiana MS F 45 sup.: 164 n. 11 Modena, Bibl. Estense MS lat. 131: 172 n. 45, 318 München, Bayerische Staatsbibl. MS Clm 5339: 170, 320 MS Clm 6362: 25 n. 30 MS Clm 10058: 257 n. 37 MS Clm 18208: 25 n. 30 MS Clm 18770: 320

359

360

Napoli, Bibl. Naz. MS VIII.D.68: 165 n. 14, 172, 322 New York, Columbia University Libr. MS Plimpton 93: 320 New York, Pierpont Morgan Libr. MS M. 133: 127 n. 66 MS M. 723: 120, 127–28, 131, 134–35, 141, 142, 310 Oxford, Bodl. Libr. MS Bodley 264: 108, 119 n. 46, 120, 124–28, 131–32, 134–35, 138, 139, 140, 160, 310 MS Buchanan D. 4: 326 MS Canon. Misc. 280: 172 n. 43, 186, 187, 188–89, 198, 326 MS Canon. Misc. 557: 326 MS Digby 11: 165 n. 16, 171 n. 41, 183–84, 191, 324 MS Digby 166: 171 n. 41, 183–84, 189 n. 65, 324 MS Tanner 170: 254 Oxford, Merton Coll. MS 312: 168 n. 28, 320 Padova, Bibl. Civica MS 211: 151, 154 n. 112, 312 Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal MS 3511: 119 n. 47 MS 5219: 119 n. 47 Paris, BnF MS fonds espagnol 30: 275 MS fr. 1116: 106, 310 MS fr. 1380: 119 n. 48, 314 MS fr. 2810: 110, 116, 119–20, 127–29, 131–34, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 157, 299, 310, 314 MS fr. 5631: 310 MS fr. 5649: 114 n. 27, 310 MS fr. 12202: 314 MS it. 434: 150, 312 MS lat. 1616: 169 n. 29, 318 MS lat. 2584: 167, 322 MS lat. 3195: 172 n. 42, 189, 199, 318, 322 MS lat. 4939: 264 MS lat. 6244A: 169 n. 29, 170–71, 189 n. 65, 318 MS lat. 17800: 166 n. 22, 318 MS n.a.l. 1768: 165 n. 13, 318 MS Rothschild 3085: 109, 117, 119 n. 48, 314 Parma, Bibl. Palatina MS Pal. 318: 312 Praha, Knihovna Metropolitní Kapituli MS G. 28: 320, 324

INDEX OF MANUSCRIPTS

INDEX OF MANUSCRIPTS Roma, Bibl. Angelica MS 2212: 316 Roma, Bibl. Casanatense MS 276: 181, 322 MS 1548: 316 Roma, Bibl. S. Alessio Falconieri MS 56: 312 Saint-Omer, BM MS 737: 166 n. 19, 322 San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Real Bibl. MS Z.I.2: 310 San Marino, Huntington Libr. MS HM 132: 251, 252, 253 Schlierbach, Stiftsbibliothek MS 37: 306 n. 8 Sevilla, Bibl. Capitular y Colombina MS 7.5.8: 161 n. 1, 168 n. 27, 171 n. 39, 179, 180 n. 58, 197, 306–07, 312, 322 Stockholm, Kungliga Bibl. MS Cod. Holm M. 304: 107, 113, 310 MS Cod. Holm M. 305: 108 n. 11, 310 Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibl. MS Cod. hist. 4o 10: 320 Udine, Bibl. Guarneriana MS 121: 172 n. 44, 326 Uppsala, Universitetsbibl. MS C 26: 170 n. 35, 324 Venezia, Bibl. Naz. Marciana MS It. VI, 24 (=6111): 282–83, 284 n. 97, 285, 288, 293 MS It. VI, 56 (=6140): 312 MS It. VI, 102 (=5726): 150 n. 99, 316 MS It. VI, 585 (=12496): 316 MS It. XI, 32 (=6672): 155 n. 113 MS It. Z. 76 (=4783): 242 n. 7, 243, 245 MS Lat. VI, 141 (=2560): 167 n. 23, 326 MS Lat. X, 73 (=3445): 167 n. 23, 318 Venezia, Mus. Civico Correr MS Dona dalle Rose 224: 312 Wien, ÖNB MS 3497: 170, 320 Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August Bibl. Cod. Guelf. 40 Weissenburg: 318, 322 Würzburg, Franziskaner-Minoritenkloster MS I.58: 306 Würzburg, Universitätsbibl. MS M. ch. f. 60: 320

361

General Index

Abascia, Abasia see Abyssinia Abel, biblical figure: 92 Abraham, Cresques: 263–64, 274–75, 276, 279, 294 Abruzzi: 151 Abyssinia (Abascia, Abasia, Middle India): 59, 74, 154, 283–84 Acre: 55–56 Adam, biblical figure: 89 n. 82, 90–92, 95, 110, 130, 228 n. 55, 229, 232, 257–58, 302 Adam, William, Archbishop of Soltaniyeh, De modo sarracenos extirpandi: 56, 71–73, 134, 221, 222 n. 44, 298, 300–01 Adam’s Peak: 90, 92, 302 Aden (Ahaden, Haden): 55, 65, 70–72, 74, 178, 265, 266 n. 62 Aegyptus see Egypt Æthiopia see Ethiopia Afonso V, king of Portugal: 289, 295 Africa: 25, 65, 254, 279 circumnavigability of: 293, 295, 299 East: 4, 53, 59, 74–76, 178 North: 208–09 South 226, 234 see also Abyssinia; Egypt; Ethiopia Agrippa: 15 Ahaden see Aden Akbari, Suzanne Conklin: 3 al-Dīn, Ghiyāth: 81 n. 72 al-Dīn, Qutb: 81 n. 72 al-Mansur: 172 Albertus Magnus: 291

Albo, Jacomo D’: 317 Alexandre de Paris Roman d’Alexandre (Li Romans du bon roy Alixandre): 42, 43, 46–47, 50, 94, 126–27, 140 Alexander the Great of Macedon: 4, 13, 16, 81, 84–85, 87, 297 Alexander-books (romances): 31–32, 36–38, 41–47, 49–51, 89, 116, 122, 134, 217, 254–55, 259, 261–62, 272, 291, 300, 302–03; see also Alexandre de Paris; Historia de proelis; Leo of Naples; Thomas of Kent; Walter of Châtillon and commemorative markers: 87–88, 262 and Giovanni de’ Marignolli: 87–88, 94 illustrations: 124, 126, 140 in late antiquity: 31–32, 36 and maps: 259, 261–62, 272, 291 and Pliny the Elder: 17, 19, 26, 30 and Trees of the Sun and Moon: 36, 46, 51, 209, 236, 261 and Valley of Shadows: 46–47, 50–51, 93–94 Alexandria: 53 n. 1, 265 Alminiber see Minabar Alphonsus, Petrus, Disciplina clericalis: 172 amanuenses: 7, 54, 57, 60, 66, 68, 76–77, 79, 89, 95, 163 Ancona, Cyriaco d’: 186 Ancrene Wisse: 101 Andaman see Angamanam Andreae, Thorirus: 170 Angama see Angamanam

364

Angamanam (Andaman, Angama): 126, 132, 145, 179 n. 57, 290 Angelo della Scarperia, Jacopo d’: 241–42 anthropophages (cannibals): 69, 131–32, 156, 189–90, 192–93, 214, 233 Antichrist: 49, 253, 272, 274–75, 279, 301 Antichthones: 16 antoecumenical spaces (antipodes): 204, 226, 229, 232, 234, 238; see also terra incognita and Antichthones Aquinas, Thomas: 219–20 Arabia: 18, 24, 26, 53, 65, 70, 74–75, 195 Dexerta: 292 Sea of: 291 Arachota, satrapy: 15 Aracosia: 283 Aragon: 58 Argeteo: 284 Argire see Argyre Argyre (Argire): 15, 26, 28, 255–56 Ariane: 24 Arios, satrapy: 15 Aristotle: 32, 44, 172, 300 Armenia: 178, 209 Greater: 110 Arrian, Indica: 14 n. 5 Artegna, Guarnerio d’: 172, 327 Asia: 26, 29, 41, 53, 254 Central: 170 as geographical-conceptual unit: 4, 6, 27 in maps: 25, 274–75, 276, 282–84, 289, 292 and Marco Polo: 54–56, 74, 259 missionary activity in: 54–57, 60, 80, 214, 266–73 South: 208 see also Cathay; China astomi: 17 auctoritas: 292 Augustine of Hippo, saint: 29, 92 Augustinians: 166–67, 319, 322 Ava: 188 Avignon: 81, 83 papal court at: 57 n. 16, 79 n. 69, 163, 167–68, 192, 197 Bacon, Roger: 272, 301 Baghdad see Baldac Baḥrī Mamlūk sultans: 55

GENERAL INDEX Bakhtin, Mikhail: 205 Baldac (Baghdad): 265 n. 61 Banda: 70 Barbarigo, Jacomo: 171 Barbo, Pietro, cardinal see Paul II, pope Bardi d’Adonardo, Gachinnoto de’: 313 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum: 208, 211 Bartholomew, apostle: 34–35, 271 n. 64 Bassiano, Marchesino de: 163 Bayard, Artaxerxes: 327 bears: 130 Beaufort, Henry, bishop of Winchester: 169 Bec, Christian: 103 Beckington, Charles F.: 3, 6, 33 Beijing see Khanbalik Benedict XII, pope: 109 Benedict XIII, pope: 167 Benedictines: 166, 171, 176, 178, 321; see also Ebstorf; Higden, Ranulf; Jean le Long Beniimcasa, Francesco de Mariotto de: 317 Bhānudeva II, king: 79 n. 68 Bianco, Andrea, Atlante: 242, 243, 244, 245, 264, 266, 280, 282, 286 Bible historiale: 116 birds of prey: 130–31 Bisticci, Vespasiano da: 172 Black Sea: 241, 276, 292 blemmyae: 126, 129 Boccaccio, Giovanni, Decameron: 221, 222 n. 44 Bohemia: 86 Bohun de, family, earls of Hereford: 108 Boldensele, William of: 109 Bonaguisi, Amelio: 149, 152–54, 159, 313 Bononiensis, Bartholomaeus Ghisilardus: 327 Borneo: 70 Bosco, Helias de: 169 n. 29 Boterrigo: 69 Bozoun, Simon, prior of Norwich Cathedral Priory: 181–82, 321, 323, 325 Bracciolini, Poggio: 95, 161 De varietate fortunae: 59, 78, 164, 169, 172–73, 186; see also India India: 70, 72–73, 78, 161, 163–64, 186–88, 187 Latin versions of: 161, 163–64, 168–73, 182–83, 186–88, 307

GENERAL INDEX manuscripts of: 102, 164, 198, 203, 281, 298, 305, 307, 326–27 marginalia of: 174, 182–83, 186–88, 187, 191, 193, 198, 309 readers/circulation of: 102, 164, 167–71, 173 Bradwardine, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury: 168, 171, 321 Bragino see Brahmans Bragmanae see Brahmans Brahmans (Bragino, Bragmanae, Bregomanni): 41, 45–46, 158–59, 188, 191, 217, 220, 302 illustrations of: 128, 131–32, 142, 145 on maps: 257 and pearl fishing: 184 in Pliny the Elder: 16 see also Dindymus Braudel, Fernand: 68 Breamore Priory: 166, 321, 325 Bregomanni see Brahmans Broach see Parocto Broquière, Bertrandon de la: 59, 134 Brunetto Latini, Tresor: 208 Bucephala: 17, 259 Bucephalus, Alexander the Great’s horse: 17 Buddhists: 90 bulls, Indian: 255 Buondelmonti, Cristoforo, De insulis: 186 Cail (Kayal): 70 Cain, biblical figure: 92, 258, 301 Cairo: 59, 265 Calamia: 237 Calaminica: 259 Calicut: 65, 76, 299 Caligardamana: 27 Calixtus II, pope: 31, 47 Callisthenes: 31 Cambay (Canbetum): 65, 72, 132–33, 277 Cambodia: 67 Cambridge: 171 Campbell, Mary Baine: 38 Cana see Thane Canbetum see Cambay Çangihibar (Zanzibar): 67, 74–75 cannibals see anthropophages Canton (Cincalan, Guangzhou): 64, 278

365

Capranica, Domenico, Cardinal: 169–70, 319, 327 Caribbean: 303 Carri, Bartolomeo: 319 cartography ecumenical (terrestrial): 20 n. 16, 244, 256–57, 263, 266, 276 innovation in: 246, 263, 294 modern mathematical: 7, 60–61, 62–63, 94, 248 and modernity: 280–93 pre-modern: 5–8, 60, 207–08, 241–95 regional: 242, 244, 262, 264, 282–84 world (mappaemundi): 241–42, 243, 244, 245, 247–80 247, 249, 250, 265, 266–67, 268, 274–75, 291, 295, 301–02 see also maps Casamari Abbey, Lazio: 167 Caspian Sea: 18 Catala de Sévérac, Jordan, Mirabilia descripta: 56, 64, 79–86, 92–93, 168, 192, 197, 215, 278, 301–02 readers/circulation of: 100 Cataldini di Cagli, Gianfrancesco: 186, 188, 198, 327 Cathay: 109, 116 and Giovanni da Fontana: 58 and Giovanni de’ Marignolli: 87 and Jean de Mandeville: 209, 215, 222–24 in maps: 274–75, 279, 292, 299 and Marco Polo: 122, 125, 128–29, 131 and missionary activity: 57, 84, 180, 215 see also China Cattaneo, Angelo: 255, 285, 293 Caua see Thane Caucasus Mountains: 27–28 Cede Portus ( Jidda): 265, 266 n. 62 Ceffoni, Meo: 150, 313 Celano, Pietro de: 151 n. 101, 313 Cenci, Cesare: 165 Cepoy, Thibaut de: 107 Cerreto Guidi: 149, 152 Chaldea: 155 Chamba, Champa see Ciamba Chana see Thane Chandragupta see Sandracottus Charlemagne, Holy Roman emperor: 236–37 Charles IV, Holy Roman emperor: 57

366

Charles V, king of France: 107, 109, 117, 263 n. 56, 315 Charles VI, king of France: 107 n. 7 Charles, count of Valois: 107 Charles, duke of Orléans: 107, 114, 313 Chaudhuri, K. N.: 65, 75 Checimo see Chesimur Chennai: 75 Chesimur (Checimo, Kashmir): 277 Chiesa, Paolo: 163 China: 111–12, 170, 177, 291 missionary activity in: 56, 73, 86–87, 215 southern: 53, 56–57, 64–65, 69, 76, 86, 123, 154, 194; see also Mançi trade with India: 64–65, 67, 70, 76, 125 Chinggiz Khan: 128 n. 67, 135, 272 Chios: 77 chorography: 178, 186, 193 Greek and Roman: 13 late antique: 25 see also Pomponius Mela, De chorographia Chryse (Chrysa): 15, 26, 28, 256 Chus (Kus): 265 Ciamba (Chamba, Champa, Cyamba, Zampa): 67, 69, 112–13, 122–23, 194 Cianba (Cianda, southern Vietnam): 75, 126, 136, 140 Ciandu see Shangdu Cieffo, Andrea di Lorenzo di: 150, 317 Cincalan see Canton Clanchy, Michael: 158 Claudius, Roman emperor: 19 Cochin: 65 Cocintaya see Thane Columbus, Christopher: 303–04 Constantinople: 3 Constantinus: 58 Constantinus Venetus: 286 Conti, Niccolò: 70, 72–73, 78, 102, 161, 163–64, 170, 173, 186, 188, 194, 203, 286, 288, 291–92 apostasy: 58–59, 280–81 on Prester John: 135 see also Bracciolini, Poggio, De varietate fortunae conversion of Indian space: 76–94 Coptus see Cotton Coromandel Coast see Maabar cosmology: 28, 38–39, 42, 61, 68

GENERAL INDEX and cartography: 7, 255–56, 262, 273, 281 Greek and Roman: 13–19, 286–87 in Jean de Mandeville: 7, 204–05, 208–12, 221–32, 234, 238 late antique: 14, 19–28, 254 in Odorico da Pordone: 155 in Poggio Bracciolini: 70 zonal: 231–32, 254 Cotonare: 262 Cotton (Coptus, Qift): 261–62 Councils of Church Constance (1414–18): 169 Ferrara: 280 Florence (1439–45): 59, 170, 280 Vienne (1311–12): 299 Cranganore see Singulun Crisa: 255 crocodiles: 183 crusade in illustrations: 121–25, 134, 137, 253 n. 22, 263 n. 54, 273 and travel narratives: 5 n. 16, 82, 106–11, 115–19, 122, 124–25, 134, 159–61, 168, 197, 204, 244, 297 treatises: 56, 118, 122–23, 197, 297–98 see also Holy Land, recovery of Ctesisas of Cnidos: 17, 21 n. 20 Cuncatana: 84, 278 Cyamba see Ciamba cyclops: 126, 255 cynocephali (dog-headed men): 17, 21, 69, 126, 128, 131–32, 157, 179, 193, 198–99, 214, 255, 299 illustrations of: 145, 146 Çypanga see Japan Dalbo, Jacopo: 150, 157 Dandin see Dondin Dante, Divina commedia: 150 Darius, Persian king: 36, 43 David, Indian king: 272 De adventu patriarchae Indorum ad Urbem sub Calisto II: 47–48, 77 De miraculis beati Thomae apostoli: 34–35 Degenhart, Bernhard: 264 Delhi sultanate: 81–82, 214, 224 n. 47, 276–78 Deluz, Christiane: 205–07, 236 Demetrius of Armenia: 80

GENERAL INDEX Denmark: 3 Deventer: 193 Dex, Nicholas: 169 n. 29, 319 Dindymus, king of the Brahmans: 32, 46, 217 Dionysius, ambassador of Ptolemy Philadelphus: 17 Dionysius ‘Liber Pater’, Graeco-Roman god: 15, 26, 30, 45, 50, 261 Directoire a faire le passage de la Terre Sainte: 116–17, 122–23, 137 Directorium ad passagium faciendum: 109 dog-headed men see cynocephali dogs, wild: 130 Dominicans: 317 of Avignon: 168 n. 26 of Bologna: 165 n. 15 missionary activity of: 55, 80, 89, 148 n. 91, 162, 164, 216, 277; see also Adam, William; Catala de Sévérac, Jordan of Oxford: 165 of Paris: 165, 319 of Santa Maria Novella, Florence: 151, 164, 317, 319 of Treviso: 165 n. 15 see also Aquinas, Thomas; Philip of Slane; Pipino, Francesco; Ranzano, Pietro; Waleys, Thomas Donatus of San Clemente: 168, 313, 323 Dondin (Dandin, Doudin): 69, 157, 192, 233 Doudin see Dondin dragons: 29, 38, 41, 130, 255–56 Dufar: 74 Dulceti, Angelino: 244 n. 10 Durham: 248 Cathedral Priory: 166, 178, 321 Dutschke, Consuelo Wager: 99, 106–07, 124, 134, 148, 151, 165 eale: 255 Eden see Paradise, Terrestrial, Indies as Edessa: 77 Edo, Pietro: 323 Edson, Evelyn: 291 Edward III, king of England: 108, 118 Edward IV, king of England: 107, 110 Egypt (Aegyptus): 24, 71, 72 n. 50, 195, 262, 301 Mamlūk sultanate in: 56, 118, 263, 265

367

Elemoysina, Johannes: 80 n. 71 elephants: 19, 26, 29, 255–56 Elijah, biblical prophet: 253 Ely (Eli): 65 n. 34, 129–30, 143 Emodus mountains (Himalayas): 15 Enoch, biblical patriarch: 253 Eos: 27 Eratosthenes: 15 Eriforum (Heliophorum): 259 eschatology and cartography: 95, 235, 272, 279, 302 and conversion: 55, 82, 86, 89, 212–21, 230, 239 Estado da India: 4 Estat et gouvernance du Grant Caan: 109 d’Este, Borso, duke of Ferrara: 168, 173 n. 45, 319 Ethiopia (Æthiopia): 24, 37, 50, 58–59, 225, 230 and Alexander the Great: 45 on maps: 265, 271 missionary activity in: 35, 81, 84 and Pliny the Elder: 17, 21, 30, 34 and Prester John: 38, 93 ethnography: 21, 25, 30, 147–48, 153, 156–58, 181, 198–99, 224 Eugenius IV, pope: 59, 168, 170, 319 Euphrates, river: 265 evangelization see missionary activity under Asia; Cathay; China; Dominicans; Ethiopia; Franciscans; Indian Ocean; Kollam; Mandeville, Jean; Persia Eve, biblical figure: 89 n. 82, 90–91, 95, 130, 228 n. 55, 229, 232, 257, 302 Evilath see Havilah Expositio totius mundi et gentium: 33 Femenat (Somnath): 277 Finaris, Jacobus: 169 n. 29, 319 fish-eaters see icthyophagi Flandrine (Flandrina, Pandarini): 214, 236 Florence: 149 n. 95, 150 Santa Maria Novella: 164 Fontana, Giovanni da: 58, 60 n. 25, 233 n. 60 Liber de omnibus rebus quae continentur in mundo: 285–89, 292–93, 303 Forster, E. M., Howards End: 221

368

Franciscans: 127, 164, 167 of Bologna: 165 n. 15 of Ferrara: 165 n. 15 of Gubbio: 165 n. 15 of Manzi: 237 martyrdom in Thane: 64 n. 33, 80, 84–86, 115, 157, 182, 184 missionary activity of: 55, 80, 84–87, 89, 115, 157, 162, 182–84, 216, 237, 277; see also Giovanni de’Marignolli; Giovanni da Montecorvino; Pordenone, Odorico da of Oxford: 165, 171, 184, 325 of San Bernadino at L’Aquila: 165 of Udine: 165, 323 of Zaiton: 85, 157 see also Bacon, Roger; Paolino Minorita; Solagna, Guglielmo da François Louis de Bourbon: 107 Frederick Barbarossa, German emperor: 48 n. 85, 135 Gadrat, Christine: 166–68, 193, 195, 197 Gama, Vasco da: 7, 58, 299 Ganges, river (Phison): 26–28, 72–73, 194, 284 on maps: 284 and Paradise: 40, 258 source of: 17, 21 García Espada, Antonio: 100, 197 Gaullier-Bougassas, Catherine: 36 Gautier Dalché, Patrick: 39, 198, 242, 251, 271 Gedrosia, satrapy: 15 Genoa: 221–22, 224, 244, 262 geographical writings: 39–42 George, saint: 87 Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica: 168 Gervase of Tilbury, Otia imperialia: 35, 39, 41, 271 Ghiselardi, Bartolomeo: 172 n. 44, 327 Ghoga see Goga giants: 255 Gibraltar: 291 Gilbert, Jehan: 311 Giovanni de’ Marignolli: 57, 73, 78, 80, 86–89, 91, 95, 278, 302 Giovanni di Montecorvino, bishop of Khanbalik: 56, 68, 71, 78, 215

GENERAL INDEX Giovanni da Pian del Carpine: 116 globalization: 297–304 glosses: 78, 86, 190, 198 Gog and Magog: 32, 41–42, 254, 271–72, 279, 291 Goga (Ghoga): 278 Goldie, Matthew Boyd: 229 Gospel of Nicodemus: 253 Gossouin de Metz, Image du monde: 33, 40–42 Gozarat see Gujarat Greece: 13–14, 23, 34, 300 Gregory IX, pope: 216 Gregory X, pope: 54 Grey, Robert: 321 Griffenclorus, Ioannes: 58 Grosseteste, Robert: 174 gryphons: 29, 41, 67, 126, 143 Guangzhou see Canton Guigimencote: 68 Gujarat (Gozarat): 75, 84, 179 n. 57 Gundophorus, king of the Indians: 36, 259, 271 n. 64 gymnosophists: 17, 21, 45–46, 255 Haden see Aden hagiography: 30–1, 33, 64, 76–80, 85, 114, 148, 155, 157, 160, 184; see also Passio sancti Bartholomaei; Passio sancti Thomae; Thomas the Apostle, saint Hahn, Thomas: 45 Hakluyt, Richard: 207 Hangzhou see Quinsai Harf-Lancner, Laurence: 111–12, 177 Havilah (Evilath, High Ynde): 34 n. 47, 210–11, 258 Hayton of Armenia, Fleur des estoires d’Orient: 109, 116, 120, 208, 222 Heers, Jacques: 100 Heffernan, Carol: 3 Heliophorum see Eriforum Henry of Glatz: 163, 167 Henry of Kirkestede: 165 n. 17 Hercules: 26, 45, 50–51, 261–62 Heredia, Juan-Fernández de : 311, 315 Hereford bishop of: 248 see also maps, Hereford Hiatt, Alfred: 25, 226

GENERAL INDEX Higden, Ranulf, Polychronicon: 248, 251, 252, 253–54, 256, 260, 294 Higgins, Ian MacLeod: 3, 204–05, 208, 210, 215, 221, 226, 230–31, 235, 237 High Ynde see Havilah Himalayas see Emodus mountains; Imaui mountains Hipanis (Hypanis), river: 26, 28, 30 Historia de proeliis: 32, 122 Holy Land: 109, 208, 264 recovery of: 56, 71, 115–18, 122, 134, 263, 266, 300 see also crusade; Jerusalem Holy Roman Empire: 236, 300 Honorius Augustodunensis, Imago mundi: 33, 40–41, 66, 248 Hormuz: 114, 180 as port: 65, 68, 70, 72–74, 85, 209, 222, 265 n. 61 Howe, John M.: 77, 89 Hugh of St Victor, Descriptio mappaemundi: 258, 271 Hulna: 47 humanism: 58–59, 72–73, 100, 162–64, 167, 169, 171–72, 186, 192, 198, 242, 298, 323 humanistic scripts: 148, 151–52, 184, 309 Humbert of Romans: 165 Hydreuma see Idreum Hypanis river see Hipanis, river Iberia: 118 icthyophagi (fish-eaters): 21 n. 19, 26, 255 Idreum (Hydreuma): 261 Īl-Khāns see Persia illustrations of travel narratives: 7, 9, 101, 105, 107–08, 111, 113, 116, 118–34, 136–46, 155, 157, 159, 174, 186, 199, 298–99, 310–27; see also maps Imaui mountains (Himalayas): 27 indexes: 175, 179, 188 India Anterior: 73 Columbina: 73 Extra (Citra) Gangem: 34, 73, 194 Inferior: 34–35, 36 n. 54, 73, 258–59 Intra (Infra) Gangem: 34, 73, 283–84 Magna: 265, 271

369

Major (Greater): 6, 33–34, 37, 74–75, 83–84, 93, 112, 114, 129, 131, 143, 154–55, 158, 194, 214 Media (Middle): 34, 73–75, 154, 158, 188, 283, 286 n. 99, 288 Minor (Lesser): 6, 33–34, 74–76, 81, 83–84, 93, 112–13, 123, 154, 180, 197 n. 78, 214 Prima: 34, 72–73 Prior: 73 Secunda: 34 Superior (Upper): 34–35, 36 n. 54, 37–38, 68–69, 73, 77–78, 85, 114–15, 155, 184, 194, 196, 215 n. 31, 266–72 Tertia: 34–35, 93 Ulterior: 34–35 Ultima (Further): 34, 36, 38, 72–73, 257 Indian Ocean (Mare Indicum, Southern Ocean): 1, 27, 39, 105, 208, 253 blockade of: 56, 222 n. 44, 300–01 as dreamscape (‘oneiric horizon’): 4–5, 60–61, 72, 299 enclosed: 195, 281, 289 islands of: 7, 75, 179 n. 57, 183, 212, 226, 255, 264, 298 maps of: 62–63, 255, 264, 265, 277, 279, 282, 289, 290, 291–92, 294–95, 299 and Marco Polo: 55–56, 66–68, 74, 118, 126–28, 131, 154–55, 194–96, 199, 205 and missionary activity: 53, 61 navigation in: 26, 28, 177, 294, 299 and Pliny the Elder: 15, 18, 26, 28 as social space: 67–68 and trade: 4, 55–56, 61, 65–66, 70–73, 75–76, 134, 262, 265, 273, 277, 298, 300 and zonal system: 23–24 Indies boundaries of: 5–6, 23–30, 38–39, 50 in cosmography: 7, 9, 13–15, 23, 31, 39, 65, 151, 203, 205, 207–08, 210, 226–28, 231, 253, 281–82, 285–86, 289, 291–94, 303 division, tripartite: 34–37, 50, 72–73, 214, 266; see also under India insular: 5, 22, 126–27, 133, 211–38, 282 littoral: 5, 19, 74 maritime: 5, 19, 25, 64–76, 126, 213, 222,

370

233–34, 256, 265, 273, 282, 293, 295, 298 multiple: 6, 8, 14, 30, 33–38, 50, 254, 279, 297–304 Indochina: 74, 76 Indonesia: 4, 53, 55, 65, 74, 76, 130, 199 n. 80 Indus, river: 15, 24, 26–28, 72, 75 on maps: 253–56, 259, 272, 284, 292 n. 109 Innocent IV, pope: 216, 218, 220 intertitles: 105, 111, 133–34, 153–54, 158–59, 173, 177–80, 182–84, 186, 308; see also rubrication Isaiah, biblical prophet: 279 Isidore, bishop of Seville, Etymologiarum: 20, 27–29, 39–41, 208, 225 Istanbul: 244 n. 10 Jacob, biblical patriarch: 87–88 Jacques de Vitry, Historia Hierosolymitana: 168 Jacquetta of Luxembourg, duchess of Bedford: 110, 119 n. 48, 315 Jagannātha, festival of: 79 n. 68 James of Padua: 80 Japan (Çypanga, Çipangu): 67, 74, 177, 284 Jauss, Hans Robert: 203 Java: 69–70, 213, 236 Lesser see Sumatra Jean de Vignay: 109–10, 115–17, 137 Jean, duc de Berry: 107, 110, 132, 313, 315 Livre des merveilles: 127–29, 132 n. 81, 133–34, 160, 299 Jean le Long, abbot of St Bertin: 109, 114, 116, 208 n. 15, 212 Jean sans Peur, duke of Burgundy: 107, 110, 120, 132 n. 81, 313, 315 Jeanne de Bourgogne, queen of France: 109 Jerusalem: 3, 32, 125 n. 63, 208–09, 226–27, 231, 236, 253, 263, 301; see also Holy Land Jews: 53 n. 1, 214 Jidda see Cede Portus Job, biblical figure: 218 John XXII, pope: 83, 89, 168, 263 n. 54, 278 John of Tynemouth, Historia aurea: 166, 178–79, 198, 305–06 Jove see Jupiter

GENERAL INDEX Julius Valerius, Res gestae Alexandri Macedonis: 31–32, 36, 43 Jupiter/Jove, Graeco-Roman god: 15 n. 8, 26, 30, 50, 261 Kayal see Cail Kerala: 21, 75, 79 n. 69 Kesmacora, region of Pakistan (Checimo, Nocran): 75, 277 Khalijī, ‘Alā al-Dīn: 81 n. 72 Khanbalik (Beijing): 56, 178 Kis (Kish, Qais): 265, 266 n. 62 Kline, Naomi Reed: 259 Kohanski, Tamara: 203 Kollam (Coilun, Colombo, Columbum, Lombe, Pabulo, Polombe, Polumbo, Polumbum): 65, 68, 72, 74, 156, 213, 236 bishop of, see Catala de Sévérac, Jordan and missionary activity: 81, 85 and pepper: 132–33, 146, 179 n. 57, 181 and trade: 70 Kosta-Théfaine, Jean-François: 128 Kota (Kotte): 92 Kublai, Great Khan: 54–55, 109, 111–12, 125, 177, 283–84 illustration of: 131, 144 in Jean de Mandeville: 210, 222, 223 n. 46, 299 Kus see Chus Kyng Alisaunder: 32 n. 42 L’Aquila, San Bernadino: 165, 172, 323 Lambert of St Omer, Liber floridus: 36 Lambri, region of Sumatra (Lamen, Lamori): 68 n. 46, 179 n. 57, 192, 208, 238, 302 nakedness of inhabitants: 69, 157, 213, 228–30, 233–34 Lar: 145, 179 n. 57, 191 Latini, Brunetto, Livres dou tresor: 40–41 Le Goff, Jacques: 3–4, 33, 60–61, 72, 211, 299 Leardo, Giovanni: 244 Lefebvre, Henri: 1–2, 67 Leo of Naples, Navitas et victoria Alexandri magni: 32, 43–44, 46 leopards: 131 Letter of Alexander to Aristotle: 36

GENERAL INDEX Letter of Prester John: 31, 35–36, 42, 47–49, 51, 222–23, 271 Lewis, Martin W.: 6 Libya: 24 Liège: 171, 193, 199 liminal sites: 39, 42–51, 76, 89, 92–93, 234, 304; see also Paradise, Terrestrial, Indies as; Thomas the Apostle, saint Linaiuolo, Matteo di Stefano: 317 lions: 130 Locac (Thailand): 199 locus amoenus: 29, 89, 91–93, 253 locus horribilis: 89, 93 Louis de Bruges: 311 Loys de Luxembourg: 311 Lydia: 279 Maabar (Coromandel Coast, Mabron, Manabar, Moabar, Mobar): 68–69, 128, 179 n. 57, 184, 191 funerary customs of: 114, 156, 188 illustrations of: 123, 131, 138 on maps: 75 and tomb of Thomas the Apostle: 78, 86, 115, 194, 233, 236 Mabron see Maabar Macrobius, Commentarii in somnium Scipionis: 20, 22, 23–25, 38, 225, 231, 233, 286 Madagascar: 67, 74 Magi (Three Kings): 34 Mahaut, countess of Artois: 107 Majorca: 244, 263 Malabar see Minabar Malacca: 65 Malaysia: 74 Maldives: 300–01 Maleus, mountain: 26 Malpuria see Mylapore Mamluks: 55–56, 118, 134, 263, 265, 273 Manabar see Maabar Mançi (India Superior, Mangi, Mangy, Manzi, southern China): 69–70, 73, 114–15, 122, 125, 154–55, 194, 196–97 illustrations of: 127 in Jean de Mandeville: 209, 214–15, 237 Mandeville, Jean de, Mandeville’s Travels

371

(Book of Sir John Mandeville): 3, 7, 194–95, 286, 288 Continental version: 205 n. 9, 206, 232 cosmography of: 203, 207–08, 210 cosmology of: 204–05, 208–12, 221–31, 234, 238 ecumenical geography of: 207, 210–11, 225 editions of: 205 n. 9, 206–07, 208 n. 17 eschatology of: 212–21 Insular (Anglo-French) version: 205, 221, 224, 231–32, 234 itinerary of: 207–13, 232 Liège or Ogier version: 206, 236–37, 239, 300 manuscripts of: 203, 205 and maps: 207–08 Middle English version: 206, 228 and missionary activity: 212–21, 237–39, 302 as multi-text: 204–05, 207 and Odorico da Pordenone: 203, 206, 208, 212–14, 223, 228 readers/circulation of: 100, 203 spatial representation in: 207, 211–12, 224, 234–36 and trade: 221–30, 238, 298–99 Vulgate Latin translation of: 205–06, 208 n. 17, 228, 230–39, 300, 303 manicules (manicula): 174, 182–83 manticores: 21, 255 Manuel Comnenus, Byzantine emperor: 31 mappaemundi see cartography, world; maps, Ebstorf, Hereford, Sawley maps, medieval: 241–95, 298–301 Aslake: 248 n. 14 Catalan Atlas: 244, 263, 273–80, 274–75, 295, 298, 301–02 collections of: 242 Cotton: 258 Duchy of Cornwall: 248 n. 14 Ebstorf: 225, 244, 247, 248, 251, 255–59, 261, 266, 272, 294–95, 301 Hereford: 225, 244, 248, 251, 253–59, 261, 266, 272, 294 mappaemundi/ world maps see cartography, world; maps, Ebstorf, Hereford, Sawley of Mauro, Fra: 255, 266–67, 281, 285, 289–95, 290, 299, 303

372

of Paolino Minorita: 264, 265, 271 Polychronicon see Higden, Ranulf Psalter: 248, 249, 256, 259, 261, 266 Ptolemaic: 73 n. 54, 194, 242, 243, 280–89, 291–93 Ramsay: 251, 254, 256–57, 260 Sawley: 225, 248, 249, 253–54, 256–59, 261, 266, 272, 294 Venezia, Bibl. Naz. Marciana, MS It. VI, 24 (=6111): 282–85, 288, 293 Vesconte-Sanudo: 244, 262–64, 268, 265–73, 279–80, 294, 298, 301 see also cartography Marcanova, Giovanni: 167, 171, 319, 327 Mare Indicum see Indian Ocean Mare Rubrum see Red Sea marginalia: 153–54, 157–59, 174–75, 182–99, 298, 309 Markaunt, Thomas: 171 n. 41, 323 Markus, Robert: 84 Martianus Capella, De nuptiis: 23, 25–27, 196, 231, 287 marvels see mirabilia; monstrous races Matthew, apostle: 34–35 Mauritania: 210–11, 225 Mauro, Fra, world map of: 60 n. 25, 245, 255, 281, 285, 289–95, 303 illustrations: 266–67, 290 McKenzie, Stephen: 258 Medes Mountains: 21 Media: 209 Mediterranean Sea: 68 maps and portolan charts of: 241, 244, 253, 258–59, 261–62, 264, 273, 276, 280 Megathsenes, ambassador of Seleucus I Nikator: 13, 16–18, 21 n. 20, 26, 30 Men and Women, island of: 128, 141 Menabar see Minabar Meroe, mountain: 15, 26, 30, 261 Merrills, Andrew H.: 13 Merus see Meroe Messina: 58 metageography: 4, 6, 72, 74–76, 83, 95, 112, 114–15, 154, 194, 214, 297 metals see precious stones and metals Metz: 169 Middle India see Abyssinia Millett, Bella: 101, 173

GENERAL INDEX Minabar (Alminiber, Malabar, Menabar, Miniber): 68, 115, 181 Minnis, Alistair J.: 158 mirabilia (marvels, wonders): 28, 30, 50, 105–06, 111, 114–16, 122, 125, 129, 133–34, 147, 152–60, 179, 182–83, 186, 190, 193, 198–99, 214, 235, 288–89, 298, 303 Wonders of the East traditions: 30, 64 miracles: 77, 79–80, 84–86, 88, 95, 152, 157, 163, 165 n. 14, 181–82 false: 279 see also under Thomas the Apostle Miraper, Mirapolis, Mirapor see Mylapore mise-en-page: 7, 101, 105, 111, 115–16, 118, 133–34, 159 missionary activity see under Asia; Cathay; China; Dominicans; Ethiopia; Franciscans; Indian Ocean; Kollam; Mandeville, Jean de; Persia Moabar, Mobar see Maabar Mogadishu (Mogdasio): 67, 74–75 Molephatam: 84 Molepor see Mylapore Monaco, Lucio: 148, 150 Mongolia: 170 Mongols: 53 n. 1, 109–10, 118, 162, 216, 237, 271–72; see also Cathay; Kublai, Great Khan monoceros: 29 monoculi: 17, 21, 255 monstrous races: 17, 21–22, 29–30, 41, 43, 48, 59 n. 22, 69, 105, 122, 126–29, 131, 192, 198–99, 234, 254–55 illustrations of: 139, 140, 142 Montbaston, Jeanne de: 123 Montbaston, Richard de: 122 Montefeltro, Federico da, duke of Urbino: 172, 188 Motupalle see Mutfili Motyfy see Mutfili Muhammad: 81 Muldoon, James: 216 Multan: 81 Mumbai: 80 Muslims (Saracens): 85, 90, 123–24, 127, 213, 277–79, 301 Turkish: 81–83 Mutfili (Motyfy, Motupalle): 75, 113, 177

GENERAL INDEX Mylapore (Malpuria, Miraper, Mirapolis, Mirapor, Molepor): 56, 78, 79, 188, 278 Nanagonas, river: 283 Naten (Panthen): 130, 144 navigation: 1, 18–19, 21, 58, 64–76, 95, 222, 224, 241, 262–80, 292, 298 in Pliny the Elder: 21, 26, 28 Necuveram see Nicuveram Nestorians: 78–79, 85 Nicea: 259 Nicholas V, pope: 169, 327 Nicholas of Cusa, cardinal: 169, 171, 193, 319, 327 Nicobar Islands see Nicuveram Nicuveram (Necuveram, Nicobar Islands): 69, 132, 146, 214 Nile, river: 21, 26, 261–62, 265, 266 n. 62 Nisa see Nysa Nocran see Kesmacora Norwich, Cathedral Priory: 166, 181, 323 notabilia: 115, 156, 174, 182, 184, 186, 199 Nysa (Nisa): 15, 26, 30, 259 Ocean Sea: 24, 113 n. 25, 155, 195 Odorico da Pordenone: 80, 278 and Terrestrial Paradise: 90–92 and Thomas the Apostle: 78–79, 85–86 Itinerarium: 56, 64, 68–69, 71, 73, 78–79, 84–86, 90–92, 94, 109–10, 119, 129, 134, 147, 165, 168, 286, 288, 298 codicology of: 102, 149–50 French versions of Itinerarium: 102–03, 109–10, 147–60; see also Jean de Vignay; Jean le Long and hagiography: 78–79, 85–86, 155, 157, 184 illustrations of: 111, 119, 122, 124, 129–33, 143, 144, 155, 157 and Jean de Mandeville: 203, 206, 208, 212–15, 223, 228 Latin versions of Itinerarium: 161, 163–73, 179–82, 198 manuscripts of: 102, 109–10, 114–17, 119–20, 153, 185, 306–07, 314–17, 322–25; see also Jean de Vignay; Jean le Long marginalia of: 153, 159, 174, 182–85, 188–94, 196–99

373

as moral mirror: 147–59 readers/circulation of: 100, 102–03, 147–59, 164–73, 179–82 rubrics of: 114–17, 153, 155, 159, 181–83 Ogier the Dane, duke: 237, 300 oikoumene: 19, 25, 33, 38–39, 44, 67, 155, 195, 204 n. 6, 209–10, 225–29, 232–34, 242, 244, 246, 248, 253, 256–57, 266–72, 273, 276, 285, 289, 291, 295, 301–03 Old Man of the Mountain: 209 Olschki, Leonardo: 65–66 Olympias: 300 Ophir: 34 n. 47, 256, 258 ordinatio in travel narratives: 113–14, 118, 159, 173 Orinoco, river: 303 Orissa see Puri Orosius, Paulus, Historiarum libri septem contra paganos: 20, 27–28, 30–31, 66 Ortona: 77 Ottorogorra, river: 27 Outremer: 59, 116–17 see also Holy Land ownership of travel narratives: 7, 107–10, 119, 124, 132, 149–51, 164–72, 182, 321–27 Oxford: 165, 171, 184, 325 Padua: 286 n. 100 Augustinian canons of: 167 San Clemente: 168 Pakistan see Kesmacora Palibothra: 26 Pandaeans: 16, 26, 255 Pandarini see Flandrine Panzani, [?Girolamo] de’: 327 Paradise, Terrestrial, Indies and: 3, 17–29, 32, 40–42, 46–51, 76, 86, 89–95, 130, 209, 232, 236, 241, 253, 256–58, 261, 266, 279, 291, 297, 302–04 illustrations of: 245, 291 n. 105 Paropanisidas, satrapy: 15 paratexts: 101, 103, 105–60, 175–82, 298 Greek: 172 see also glosses; indexes; intertitles; marginalia; rubrication

374

Paris: 113, 165 Paris, Matthew: 248 n. 14 Parkes, Malcolm: 113 Parocto (Broach): 81 parrots: 255 Pasé: 76 Passio sancti Bartholomaei: 33, 35 Passio sancti Thomae: 35 Patale: 18 Patalene: 23 Paten: 69 Paul II, pope (Cardinal Pietro Barbo): 169, 327 Paulino Minorita, bishop: 264, 265, 271 Paviot, Jacques: 59, 134 Paxuti, Salvador: 313 pearls/pearl fishing: 19, 29, 128, 131, 156, 184 Pedro IV el Ceremonioso, king of Aragon: 263 n. 56 Pentoxoyre: 223 pepper production: 29, 71, 115, 132–33, 146, 179 n. 57, 181, 262, 265 Persia: 55–56, 72, 110, 181, 209 Īl-Khāns of: 265, 277 on maps: 291 missionary activity in: 80, 162 Persian Gulf: 53 n. 1, 56, 64, 72–73, 155 on maps: 253, 265, 271, 274–75, 276–77 and Pliny the Elder: 18, 21, 26 Peruzzi, Piero: 313 Pervily: 91 Peter of Siena: 80 Petrarch, Francis: 174 Petrucci, Armando: 103 Petworth, Richard: 169 Philip of Slane: 168 Philippe VI, king of France: 107–09, 115, 118, 120, 311, 315 Philippe le Bon, duke of Burgundy: 59, 107, 134–35, 311 Phison see Ganges, river Phoenicia: 42 phoenix: 42 pilgrimage: 78, 89–90, 127, 131, 190–91, 204, 208 Pillars of Hercules: 43, 261 Pipino, Francesco: 99, 108, 151, 162–80, 184, 186, 190–93, 197–98, 302, 305

GENERAL INDEX Pisa, Rustichello da: 54, 66, 106, 162 n. 4 Pliny the Elder, Naturalis historia: 15–22, 25–28, 30, 34, 37, 50, 281–82, 289, 291, 298 pole star: 157, 184, 196 southern: 234 Polo, Maffeo: 123 n. 58 Polo, Marco Book of: ‘Book of India’ (‘Livre de Indie’): 65–67, 70, 74–75, 111–12, 114, 129, 154, 158, 177–78, 284–85, 302 codicology of: 102, 149–50 Devisement du monde (Court French): 54, 107–08, 110–16, 119–20, 122–35, 136, 138–46, 148, 159–60, 166, 177 Divisament dou monde (Franco-Italian): 54–55, 65–68, 70, 74–76, 78–79, 85, 89–92, 106, 107 n. 4, 110, 112, 114, 117 n. 40, 147, 162, 177 n. 55, 277, 306, 310 illustrations: 107, 111, 113, 116, 118–34, 136, 138–46, 164 manuscripts of: 99–100, 102, 106–10, 113–20, 148, 153, 162, 166, 305–07, 310–13, 318–21; see also Devisement du monde; Divisament dou monde and maps: 276–77 marginalia: 153–54, 158–59, 174, 182, 184, 188–90, 192–99 Milione: 54, 147, 150, 152–54, 158, 168 mise-en-page: 118, 133–34, 159 as moral mirror: 147–59 Pipino, Francesco, Liber de consuetudinibus et conditionibus orientalium regionum: 99, 108, 151, 162–80, 184, 186, 190–93, 197–98, 302, 305 readers/circulation of: 99–100, 102–03, 106–07, 110, 147–59, 164 rubrics: 112–15, 123, 126–27, 135, 153–54, 156–59, 177, 179 itinerary of: 66–68 and Thomas the Apostle: 78–79, 85 Polo, Niccolò: 123 n. 58 Pomponius Mela, De chorographia: 18, 21, 24, 38, 41, 186, 188, 198, 256, 289

GENERAL INDEX portolan charts/portolans: 67, 241, 244, 262–64, 273, 276–77, 279–80, 294, 298, 303 Portugal: 4, 59 n. 23, 78 n. 65, 289, 293, 295, 298–99 Porus, Indian king: 37–38, 43–45, 49, 51, 81, 85, 122, 124, 213, 259, 262 Prasians: 16 precious stones and metals: 19, 26, 28–29, 40–41, 47, 71 91–94, 130, 143, 156, 183, 188, 223, 255–57 see also pearls/pearl fishing Prester John, legendary priest-king: 4, 31, 38, 42, 77, 284, 299 and European political landscape: 59, 134–35 in Jean de Mandeville: 209–10, 215, 217, 222–24, 226–28, 231, 237 and liminality: 47–50, 76, 93, 297 on maps: 266–72 see also Letter of Prester John Probane see Taprobane Pseudo-Abdias: 35 Pseudo-Callisthenes: 32 Pseudo-Methodius, Apocalypse: 254 Ptolemy, Claudius: 34 nn. 45–46, 193 Geography: 73, 169–70, 194–96, 242, 244, 281–89, 291–93, 303 translated as Cosmographia: 242 Ptolemy Philadelphus: 17 Pujades i Bataller, Ramon: 241 Puri (Orissa): 79 n. 68 pygmies: 16, 26, 41, 255 Qais see Kis Qift see Cotton Quanzhou see Zaiton Quasideus, father of Prester John: 49 Quigley, Maureen: 124 Quinsai (Hangzhou, Quinsay, Quisci): 70, 122–23, 125, 136, 138, 210 Quintus Curtius Rufus, Gesta Alexandri magni: 31–32, 43 Quisci see Quinsai Raman, Shankar: 251 Ramsay Abbey: 251 Ranzano, Pietro, Annales omnium temporum: 58

375

Red Sea (Mare Rubrum): 24, 27, 53 n. 1, 64, 71 on maps: 25, 253, 256, 258–59, 262, 265, 292 and Pliny the Elder: 18, 21, 26 Riccio, Piero del: 313 Riccoldo da Montecroce: 109 Richard, Jean: 33, 64 Rimoc: 49 Rinieri, Filippo di Piero: 149 n. 95 Roger of Stanegrave, Li Charboclois d’armes du conquest precious de la terre sainte de promission: 118 Röhl, Suzanne: 99 Rombulo, Pietro: 58 Rome: 17, 23, 58, 300 Romm, James: 229 Rouse, Mary and Richard: 108, 111, 115–16, 123, 159 rubrication: 111–17, 123, 125–27, 133, 135, 153–59, 174, 177, 179, 181–85, 197 rucs: 67 Ryan, James D.: 78 Saba: 256 Sacrobosco, Sphera: 233 n. 60 Sáenz-López Pérez, Sandra: 279 Said, Edward: 2, 14, 44, 299–300 St Albans Abbey: 166, 178 St Pol, count of: 108 Salien see Taprobane Salih, Sarah: 212 Samora Promontory: 27 San Daniele del Friuli: 172 Sandai: 70 Sandracottus (Chandragupta), Indian king: 13, 30 Sanudo Torsello, Marino, Liber secretorum fidelium crucis: 72 n. 50, 168, 244, 262–64, 268, 265–73, 294, 298 Saracens see Muslims Sarchan: 125 Sardonis: 292 Satoris: 292 satyrs: 17 Sawley Abbey: 248, see also maps, Sawley Scafi, Alessandro: 241, 251 Schmieder, Felicitas: 215 Schmitt, Annegrit: 264

376

sciopods: 126, 129 scribes: 25, 101, 108, 111, 153–55, 158–59, 172, 174, 183, 186, 188, 193, 197, 309, 313, 317 scripts: 113 n. 25, 148–52, 167 n. 22, 184, 193 n. 66, 308–09 Sea of Cin see Southern China Sea Seillan see Taprobane Seleucus I Nikator: 13, 17 Seres: 26 Serica: 292 Serican Ocean: 27 serpents see snakes Seth, biblical figure: 92, 302 Seyllan see Taprobane Sfera: 151 Shangdu (Ciandu): 55 n. 5, 144 Sillan see Taprobane Sinai: 59 Singland see Singulun Singulun (Cranganore, Singland): 214, 236 Sinus Gangeticus: 283, 292 skin colour: 83, 190 in illustrations: 123, 133 snakes/serpents: 21, 31, 217 Socotra: 56, 75 Solagna, Guglielmo da: 57, 147, 163 Solinus, Gaius Julius: 179, 282, 289, 291 De mirabilibus mundi (Collectanea rerum memorabilium; Polyhistor): 20–23, 25–30, 37, 41 Solomon, biblical king: 258 Soltaniyeh: 56, 71, 148 n. 91 Somnath see Femenat South China Sea (Sea of Cin): 195 Southern Ocean see Indian Ocean Spain: 26, 53 n. 1 spatiality: 2 n. 5, 3, 7, 50, 60, 69, 94, 99, 231 multiple: 9, 14, 230 spices: 29, 70–71, 95, 115, 125, 132–33, 146, 181, 186, 223, 261–62, 265, 299; see also pepper, production of Spini, Doffo: 313 Sri Lanka see Taprobane Stafford, John, bishop of Bath and Wells: 168, 321, 323 Stahl, William: 25 Strabo, Geography: 14 n. 5 Strickland, Debra: 121, 126, 131, 133

GENERAL INDEX Sumatra (Lesser Java): 65–66, 70, 76, 127, 190, 192, 194, 199 maps of: 290, 291 see also Lambri Supera (Surat): 81 Surat see Supera Tabriz (Tauris, Taurisium, Thaurisium): 80 n. 71, 148 n. 91, 265, 266 n. 62, 276–77 Tafur, Pero: 59, 78, 134 Tana see Thane Taprobane (Probane, Salien, Seillan, Seyllan, Sillan, Sri Lanka, Trapobanes): 26–28, 40, 58, 91, 92, 186, 209, 287 and Alexander romances: 38, 45–46, 51 illustrations of: 141, 143 on maps: 253, 256–57, 276, 283–84, 290, 292 and Marco Polo: 74, 89–91, 112 n. 21, 128, 156, 177 and Odorico da Pordenone: 68, 130, 191 and Pliny the Elder: 15–17, 19 and Poggio Bracciolini: 70 Tartary: 55, 56 n. 9, 165, 208 Tauris, Taurisium see Tabriz terra incognita: 225, 281, 288, 291; see also antoecumenical spaces Thane (Cana, Caua, Chana, Cocintaya, Tana): 65, 68 n. 46, 72, 148 n. 91, 213–14, 217, 233, 278 martyrdom of Franciscans at: 64 n. 33, 80, 84–86, 115, 157, 182, 184 Thailand see Locac Thaurisium see Tabriz Theodore (Dietrich) of Xanten: 193, 321 Thomas, duke of Gloucester: 108 n. 9 Thomas of Kent, Roman de toute chevalerie: 36–38, 43, 45–46, 50–51 Thomas of Tolentino: 80 Thomas the Apostle, saint: 31, 34, 36, 50, 114, 215, 258–59, 271 erroneous beliefs of followers: 83, 197, 213 miracles of: 35, 49, 78–79, 184, 238 tomb of: 49, 76–80, 85–86, 90, 115, 127, 177, 183–84, 236–38, 262, 278, 294–95 Tibet: 210 Tigris, river: 26

GENERAL INDEX

377

Tile (Tiles): 28–29, 256 Torrid Zone (zona perusta): 24–25, 38, 50, 195, 211, 232–33, 254, 287 illustrations: 22 trade/merchants: 26, 53–60, 65, 70–76, 95, 103, 106, 125, 163, 199, 205, 212, 221–30, 238, 297–99 illustrations: 131–33 Indo-Roman: 18 maps: 264, 265–71, 273, 279, 292 monsoon-based: 66, 75–76 routes: 1, 18, 58, 222, 266 see also Indian Ocean, blockade of; pearls, production of Trapobanes see Taprobane Trees of the Sun and Moon: 36, 46, 51, 209, 236, 261 Treviso: 151, 165 n. 15 troglodytes: 17 Tzanaki, Rosemary: 99, 235

Vetturi family: 151 Niccolò: 313 Vietnam: 67, 75, 112, 122 Vignanensibus, Nicolaus Dominici Ferrei de: 327 Vincent de Beauvais, Speculum historiale: 39, 41, 116 Visconti, Teobaldo: 193 n. 68 Le vraie ystoire dou bon roi Alixandre: 122

Uberti, Fazio degli, Dittamondo: 291 Udine: 165 Uebel, Michael: 3–4, 38, 42 unicorns: 129–30, 255

Yangtze, river: 292 Ydaspis, river: 259 Ydonus, river: 47 Yuan dynasty: 57

Vadstena: 170 Vaio, Gonfalone del: 317 Valley of Shadows: 46–47, 50–51, 93–94 van Os, Peter: 207 n. 13 Var: 177, 179 n. 57 Venice: 55 n. 5, 107, 222, 224, 244–45, 280–81, 289, 294 Verona: 150 Vesconte, Pietro: 244, 262–64, 268, 265–73, 279–80, 294, 301

‘Zacher Epitome’: 31, 32 n. 42, 36, 43 Zaiton (Quanzhou): 64, 67–68, 85–86, 125, 139, 157, 178, 183 Zampa see Ciamba ‘Zanobi’: 323 Zanzibar see Çangihibar Zarchee (Zarke): 214, 236 Zarncke, Friedrich: 48 Zindanbaba: 91 Zumthor, Paul: 100

Walter of Châtillon, Alexandreis: 32, 43–44, 50–51 Walys, Thomas: 165 Westrem, Scott: 254 Wigen, Kären E.: 6 Wittkower, Rudolph: 129 wonders see mirabilia; monstrous races Wonders of the East tradition see mirabilia Woodville, Richard: 107, 110, 313

Medieval Voyaging

All volumes in this series are evaluated by an Editorial Board, strictly on academic grounds, based on reports prepared by referees who have been commissioned by virtue of their specialism in the appropriate field. The Board ensures that the screening is done independently and without conflicts of interest. The definitive texts supplied by authors are also subject to review by the Board before being approved for publication. Further, the volumes are copyedited to conform to the publisher’s stylebook and to the best international academic standards in the field. Titles in Series Rita George-Tvrtković, A Christian Pilgrim in Medieval Iraq: Riccoldo da Montecroce’s Encounter with Islam (2012)