PREFACE.
The little work here presented was printed in the original Latin at Paris in 1839, under the editorship of M. Coquebert-Montbret, in the Recueil de Voyages et de Mémoires, publié par la Société de Géographie, vol. iv.
I cannot find that it has ever been published or translated in England, or even noticed in any English book, except in the Ceylon of Sir James Emerson Tennent, where there is an allusion to it.
The book itself does not add anything to our knowledge; but the observations of a traveller who resided in India so far back as the beginning of the fourteenth century must be very dull indeed if sufficient interest cannot be derived from their date to make them acceptable. Nor do I think our author is dull, whilst I regret that he is so brief, and has omitted so much that he might really have laid up as an addition to our knowledge. The very fact that there were Roman Catholic missionaries and a bishop in India at that period, just between the days of Marco Polo and those of Ibn Batuta, may indeed be excavated from old ecclesiastical chronicles; but it is certainly unfamiliar to the knowledge of those who do not dig in such mines.
The translation which follows has been made, and the brief particulars which I shall give respecting the author have been derived, from the Recueil above indicated.[22]
The manuscript from which the French editor transcribed belonged to the Baron Walckenaer. It is on parchment, of the fourteenth century, and contains other matter, the work of Jordanus occupying twenty-nine quarto pages.
The author is termed a native of Séverac. That he was a Frenchman will appear from several passages in his book. But there are at least five places of the name of Séverac in France. Three of these are in the district of Rouergue, in the department of the Aveyron (near the eastern boundary of the old province of Guyenne, and some ninety miles N.E. of Toulouse), and it was probably from one of these that he came. There was a noble family of this province called De Séverac, of which was Amaulry de Séverac, Marshal of France in the time of Charles VII. But, as will afterwards appear, our traveller was called Catalani.[23]
The dates of his birth, his death, or his first going to the East, are undetermined. But it is ascertained that he was in the East in 1321-1323, that he returned to Europe, and started again for India, in or soon after 1330. There appears to be nothing to determine whether this book of Mirabilia was written on his first, or on a subsequent, return to Europe.