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 Ælian, 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.