Mandeville was the Bruce of the fourteenth century, as often calumniated
and even ridiculed. The most ingenuous of voyagers has been condemned as
an idle fabulist; the most cautious, as credulous to fatuity; and the
volume of a genuine writer, which has been translated into every
European language, has been formally ejected from the collection of
authentic travels. His truest vindication will be found by comprehending
him; and to be acquainted with his character, we must seek for him in
his own age.
At a period when Europe could hardly boast of three leisurely wayfarers
stealing over the face of the universe; when the Orient still remained
but a Land of Faery, and "the map of the world" was yet unfinished; at a
time when it required a whole life to traverse a space which three years
might now terminate, Sir JOHN MANDEVILLE set forth to enter unheard-of
regions. Returning home, after an absence of more than thirty years, he
discovered a "mervayle" strange as those which he loved to record--that
he was utterly forgotten by his friends!
He had returned "maugre himself," for four-and-thirty years had not
satiated his curiosity; his noble career had submitted to ordinary
infirmities--to gout and the aching of his limbs; these, he lamentably
tells, had "defined the end of my labour against my will, God knoweth!"
The knight in this pilgrimage of life seems to have contracted a duty
with God, that while he had breath he should peregrinate, and, having
nothing to do at home, be honourable in his generation by his enterprise
over the whole earth. And earnestly he prays "to all the _readers_ and
_hearers_ of my book," (for "hearers" were then more numerous than
"readers,") "to say for him a _Pater-Noster_ with an _Ave-Maria_." He
wrote for "solace in his wretched rest;" but the old passion, the
devotion of his soul, finally triumphed over all arthritic pangs. The
globe evidently was his true home; and thus Liege, and not London,
received the bones of an unwearied traveller, whose thoughts were ever
passing beyond the equator.
With us, to whom an excursion to "the Londe of Promyssioun or of Behest"
has sometimes arisen out of a morning engagement--we who impelled by
steam go "whither we list," with those billets which might serve as
letters of recommendation in the steppes of Tartary,--we may wonder how
our knight, who would not win his way by the arts of commerce, like his
predecessor Marco Polo, bore up his chivalry; for in his traversing he
had nothing to offer but his honourable sword, and probably his medical
science, which might be sometimes as perilous. But difficulties
insuperable to us could not enter into the emotions, nor were they the
accidents which impeded the traveller, "who, on the day of St. Michael,
in the year of our Lord 1322, passed the sea, and went the way to
Hierusalem, and to behold the mervayles of Inde." A deep religious
emotion, an obscure indefinite curiosity, and a courageous decision to
wander wherever the step of man could press on the globe, to tell the
world "the mervayles" it unconsciously holds within its orb, were the
inspiration of a journey which stood next in solemnity to a departure to
the world of spirits. Sir John had prepared himself, for he was learned
not only in languages, but in authentic romance, and in romantic
history; and he honestly resolved to tell all "the mervayles" which he
had seen, and those which he had not; and these last were not the least.
Sir John Mandeville's probity remains unimpeached; for the accuracy of
whatever he relates from his own personal observation has been confirmed
by subsequent travellers. On his return to Europe he hastened to Rome to
submit his book to the Pope, and to "his wise council," and "those
learned men of all nations who dwell at that court." The volume was
critically reviewed; and his holiness "ratified and confirmed my book in
all points," by referring to an account in Latin: this account was
probably written by some missionary; Rubriquis had been dispatched on an
unsuccessful mission to Christianize the great Khan of Tartary in 1230;
or it was the writings of Marco Polo, which could not be unknown at
Rome. In that day all real information was consigned to the fugitive
manuscript, partially known, and often subject to the interpolations and
capricious alterations of its possessor, and what sometimes occurred, to
the silent plagiarisms of other writers--of which even Mandeville
himself has been suspected.
The Pope decreed that not only all that Mandeville related was
veracious, but that the Latin book which his holiness possessed
contained _much more_, and from whence the Mappa Mundi had been made.
Indeed Mandeville has himself told us that he wrote only from his
recollections as they "would come into his mind;" these necessarily were
often broken and obscure. Some "mervayles" remained unrecorded, and
hereafter were to be "more plainly told;" but I fear these are lost for
us.
In this "true" book we find many things very untrue, but we may doubt
whether any in that day were as positive in this opinion. The author
himself designed no imposition on his readers; he tells us what he
believed; part of which he had seen and the rest he had heard, and
sometimes had transcribed from sources deemed by him authentic. Who can
suspect the knight of spotless honour, and whose piety would not
relinquish his _Ave-Marias_ for a dominion? Having fought during two
years under the ensign of the Sultan of Egypt, and being offered in
marriage the Sultan's daughter and a province, he refused both, when his
Christianity was to be exchanged for Mahometanism.
This was a period when the marvellous never weakened the authenticity of
a tale. The mighty tome of Pliny, that awful repository of all the
errors of antiquity, and other writers of equal name, detail prodigies
and legends, and so do the Fathers. Who would not have rejoiced to
transcribe Pliny or St. Austen? Who imagined that all the delectable
adventures of the romances, over which they passed many a dreamy day,
with the very names of the personages and the very places where they
occurred, were solely chimeras of the brain? The learned Mandeville was
evidently not one of these sceptics: for he observes, that "the trees of
the sun and of the moon are well known to have spoken to King
Alisaundre, and warned him of his death." The unquestioned fact is in
that famed romance; and others might be referred to if we required
additional authority. I have read of these talking trees of the sun and
moon in _Guarino detto il Meschino_, who lived a year among them to
learn his own genealogy, and then was graceless enough to laugh at
these timber-oracles. Mandeville forgot not in the island of Lango, not
distant from Crete, the legend of the unfortunate "Lady of the Land,"
who remained a dragoness, because no one had the hardihood to kiss her
lips to disenchant her. He tells likewise of the Faery Lady who guarded
the sparrow-hawk; whoever ventured to assist that lady during three days
and nights, was rewarded by the boon of having whatever he wished. A
king who, not wanting anything, had the audacity to wish to have the
lady herself, was fairly warned that he did not know what he asked, as
happens to the reckless; but, persisting in his absolute will, he
incurred the curse of perpetual war to the last of his race!
We trace such tales among the romances, with all their circumstances;
and some may have reached the listener from the Arabian tale-teller. The
monsters he describes Mandeville never invented; these, human and
animal, he gave as some of his predecessors had done, from Pliny, or
Aelian, or Ctesias,[1] who have sent them down to be engraven in the
Great Nuremberg Chronicle, and adorned in the immortal page of
Shakspeare. Marco Polo had noticed that portentous bird which could lift
an elephant by its claws; he does not tell us that he had seen any bird
of this wing, but we all know where it is to be found--in the Arabian
Tales! Sir Thomas Browne accuses Mandeville of _confirming_ the fabulous
accounts of India by Ctesias; but, in truth, our knight does not
"confirm these refuted notions of antiquity;" he only repeats them, with
the prelude of "men seyn." No one was more honest than Mandeville, for
when he had to describe the locality of paradise, he fairly acknowledges
that "he cannot speak of it properly, for I was not there; it is far
beyond, but as I have _heard say_ of wise men, it is on the highest
part of the earth, nigh to the circle of the moon." However, he has
contrived to describe the wall, which is not of stone, but of moss, with
but a single entrance, "closed with brennynge fyre;" and though no
mortal could enter, yet it was known that there was a well in paradise,
whence flowed the four floods that run through the earth. "Wise men," he
tells us, said this; some of these "wise men" were the Rabbins; and
three centuries afterwards, the accounts of paradise, by a finer genius
than Mandeville, the illustrious Rawleigh, remained much the same.
To explain some of those incredible incidents which occurred to the
author himself might exercise some critical ingenuity. Mandeville's
adventure in "the Valley Perilous," when he saw the Devil's head with
eyes of flame, great plenty of gold and silver, which he was too
frightened to touch, and, moreover, a multitude of dead bodies, as if a
battle had been fought there, might probably be resolved into some
volcanic eruption, the rest supplied by his own horrifying imagination;
for he tells, with great simplicity, "I was more devout then than ever I
was before or after, and all for the dread of fiends that _I saw in
divers figures_;" that is, at the _shapes_ of the disparted rocks. The
travellers were beaten down by tempests, winds, and thunder, which raged
in this pent-up vale. As he marks the locality, the spot may yet be
ascertained.
There was no imposition practised in all such legends; it is we who are
startled by the supernatural in a personal narrative; but in the
fourteenth century the more wonderful the tale, the more authentic it
appeared, as it sunk into the softest and richest moulds of the most
germinating imagination. The readers, or the hearers, were as well
prepared to believe, as the writers prompt to gather up, their fictions.
Collections of "Mirabilia Mundi," "Wonders," were a fashionable title
applied to any single country, as well as to the world--to England or
Ireland, to the Holy Land or the Indies. The "Mirabilia" might be the
running title for a whole system of geography. The age of imagination
has long been unfurnished of all its ingenious garniture, and yet we
still catch at some evanescent hour of fancy susceptible of those
ancient delights. We have lost something for which we have no
substitute. Would not the modern novelist rejoice in the privilege of
intermingling supernatural inventions to break the level of his
every-day incidents and his trivial passions so soon forgotten? But that
glowing day has set, leaving none of its ethereal hues in our cold
twilight. Mandeville may still be read for those wild arabesques which
so long unjustly proved fatal to his authentic narrative. His simplicity
often warrants its truth; he assures us that Jerusalem is placed in the
middle of the earth, because when he stuck his staff in the ground,
exactly at noon, it cast no shadow; and having ascertained the spherical
form of the globe, he marvels how the antipodes, whose feet are right
upwards towards us, yet do not fall into the firmament! When he
describes the elegant ornaments of "a vine made of gold that goeth all
about the hall, with many bunches of grapes, some white, and the red
made of rubies," he tells what he had seen in some divan; but when he
records that "the Emperor hath in his chamber a pillar of gold, in which
is a ruby and carbuncle a foot long, which lighteth all his chamber by
night," it may be questioned whether this carbuncle be anything more
than an Arabian fancy, a tale to which he had listened. Some of his
ocular marvels have been confirmed by no questionable authority.
Mandeville's description of a magical exhibition before the Khan of
Tartary is a remarkable instance of the strange optical illusions of the
scenical art, and the adroitness of the Indian jugglers--a similar scene
appears in a recent version of the autobiography of the Emperor Akber.
What seemed the spells of magic to the Europeans of that age, and of
which some marvellous descriptions were brought to Europe by the
crusaders or the pilgrims, and embellished the romances, our exquisite
masques and our grand pantomimes have realized. Three centuries were to
elapse ere the court of England could rival the necromancy of the court
of Tartary.
Mandeville first composed his travels in the Latin language, which he
afterwards translated into French, and lastly out of French into
English, that "every man of my nation may understand it." We see the
progressive estimation of the languages by this curious statement which
Mandeville has himself given. The author first secured the existence of
his work in a language familiar to the whole European world; the French
was addressed to the politer circles of society; and the last language
the author cared about was the vernacular idiom, which, at that time the
least regarded, required all the patriotism of the writer in this
devotion of his pen.
Copies of these travels were multiplied till they almost equalled in
number those of the Scriptures; now we may smile at the "mervayles" of
the fourteenth century, and of Mandeville, but it was the spirit of
these intrepid and credulous minds which has marched us through the
universe. To the children of imagination perhaps we owe the
circumnavigation of the globe and the universal intercourse of
nations.[2]