Before Orientalism. Kim M. Phillips

manuscript copies mostly in Latin and French and became widely popular in the early era of the printing press.⁷⁵ Hetoum (Hayton, Haiton, or Hethoum, before 1245–c. 1310/14) was an Armenian monk, probably a canon regular of the Premonstratensian order, though previously married and a father.⁷⁶ Hetoum’s visit to Clement V at Poitiers was prompted by desire to see a joint crusade mounted for the reconquest of Jerusalem. Although in part a work of crusade propaganda, La flor surveys geography and peoples from Cathay to Syria and is valued by modern scholars particularly for its third book, a history and description of Mongol peoples. Glenn Burger believes Falcon had little input into Hetoum’s text, given the text’s accuracy on dates and claims about Mongol history and culture,⁷⁷ but the involvement of an amanuensis should be taken into account. Moreover, it is unlikely that Hetoum undertook any eastern travel, although his uncle, King Hetoum I, had traveled on a diplomatic mission to Karakorum in 1254–55 and an account was produced.⁷⁸ We must therefore acknowledge the secondhand nature of much of his material and its propagandistic purpose. Hetoum’s relatively positive account of the Mongols, for example, should be read with the understanding that he hoped to persuade the French pope to form a crusading alliance with them.

      While missionaries maintained their hopes for eastern converts, Italian merchants kept up their small but steady flow to India and China. Francesco Balducci Pegolotti’s guidebook for merchants, Libro di Divisamenti di Paesi (Book of the Descriptions of Countries), named La Pratica della Mercatura by its eighteenth-century editor, was produced sometime between 1335 and 1343 and survives in a single manuscript. Pegolotti was not a traveler but worked for the Bardi Company, and his book is a thoroughly practical work of advice and information on long-distance trade.⁷⁹ It is valued by travel historians for its information for merchants wishing to make the journey to Cathay: grow one’s beard; obtain a Turkish translator, some good male servants, and perhaps “a woman” at Tana to assist on the journey; and obtain a certain amount of provisions. Although lacking in ethnographical information on the peoples of the East, the book indicates that trade and travel between Italian merchants and Asia were not uncommon at the time. Indeed, Pegolotti claims the road from Tana to Cathay is “perfectly safe” (sicurissimo) by day or night.⁸⁰

      Niccolò dei Conti (c. 1395–1469) was a Venetian trader whose observations on India and southeast Asia are preserved in book 4 of Poggio’s De varietate fortunae (1448).⁸¹ The genesis of the book was unusual. Niccolò returned to Venice in 1439 after around twenty years of travel across the Indian Ocean to India, Burma, the islands of southeast Asia, and possibly Champa (southern and central Vietnam). Following a confession to the pope that he had been obliged to adopt a false Muslim identity and dress for his personal safety while abroad, he was required as penance to dictate an account of his travels to the papal secretary, humanist scholar Poggio Bracciolini, which he did in Florence. De varietate fortunae, true to its name, is a study of the vicissitudes of fortune, beginning with a description of the ruins of ancient Rome and a meditation on Rome’s passage over time from greatness to decay (book 1). Books 2 and 3 deal with the turbulence of more recent history, before Poggio turns in book 4 to the more pleasing topic of Niccolò’s travels, hoping “it may serve for relaxation and at the same time turn the minds of the readers from the severity of fortune to a gentler fate, so to speak, and to the pleasant vicissitudes of things.”⁸² Joan-Pau Rubiés nonetheless emphasizes the serious and scholarly intention of the work and locates it within Poggio’s broader humanist endeavors to found a new era of secular scholarship and the quest for objective information about the world.⁸³ The book was quite popular: Merisalo lists thirty-one extant manuscripts of the full work or first two books and a further twenty-three containing fragments of the first or fourth book.⁸⁴ Niccolò’s account garnered special attention and was soon detached from the remainder of Poggio’s work and circulated independently as a work of travel literature, India Recognita (1492), and subsequently translated from Latin into Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and English.⁸⁵ A shorter independent discussion of Niccolò and his travels appears in the travelogue of Spanish nobleman Pero Tafur, who says he met the Venetian with his “Indian” wife and their children in Egypt on Niccolò’s homeward journey in 1437.⁸⁶ Niccolò’s experiences, then, come to us only via Poggio and Tafur. The version in Poggio’s book is presented in Latin rather than in the Venetian or other vernacular in which it was presumably dictated and no doubt involved Poggio’s selection and reorganization. The book must be seen as a collaborative work, with Poggio’s own authorial intentions and inclinations brought to the fore. These were both to provide the reader with useful and interesting information and to give pleasure.⁸⁷

      Four other accounts from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries will merit brief mention. Ruy González de Clavijo (d. 1412) was a Castilian nobleman who traveled to the court of Temür in 1403–4 as ambassador for Henry III of Castile.⁸⁸ His testimony is valuable chiefly as witness to the new Turkic-Mongol regime of the early fourteenth century and the splendid court at Samarkand. Johann (“Hans”) Schiltberger (c. 1381–1430) is a hazy figure, by his own account a Bavarian soldier captured by Turks at the battle of Nicopolis in 1396 and subsequently enslaved by Temür and various of his kin and vassals. If we are to believe him, Schiltberger spent around thirty years in servitude to these eastern potentates before finally escaping while on campaign near the Black Sea and returning to Germany in 1428. The circumstances of his book’s composition are unknown. Though it is written in a Bavarian dialect, it may have been dictated. Four fifteenth-century copies survive and it was often printed in the early modern era.⁸⁹ Hieronimo di Santo Stefano was a Genoese merchant who left a short tale of travel to the East Indies via the Coromandel Coast of India around 1499. He has been little regarded by modern scholars; consequently, not much can be said about the book’s composition or circulation.⁹⁰ The Bolognese Ludovico de Varthema (c. 1470–1517) is the last of our authentic travelers, having made a voyage to India via Arabia in 1502–8.⁹¹ His Itinerario was printed in Italian in 1510, was soon translated into Latin, and remained popular through the sixteenth century with many vernacular translations. Significant doubts hang over the authenticity of parts of his narrative, and indeed it seems unlikely that he ventured beyond the Bay of Bengal to Burma and the eastern Spice Islands as he claims.⁹² Ludovico is interesting as a representative of a new breed of traveler in the sixteenth century—that is, of a practically motiveless traveler, who undertakes journeys for their own sake out of a thirst for novelty rather than for specific diplomatic, mercantile, or missionary purposes. His was also a work of travel writing produced for the age of print with the new sense of a potentially unlimited audience.⁹³

      To these reports by genuine travelers we must add fictive travelogues often regarded as true by medieval readers. One work stands above all others in this respect: the Book of “Sir John Mandeville.” With about 300 manuscripts surviving across Europe in around ten languages, it had far greater popularity than many of the other great works of medieval literature commonly studied in modern universities.⁹⁴ No serious reader now believes the author undertook the voyage described, though he may at some point have traveled to the Holy Land, and many think his nom de plume is borrowed or invented. For a long time Jehan de Bourgogne (“Jehan le Barbe”), a Liège physician, was presented as a candidate for authorship, and there have been various alternative hypotheses.⁹⁵ M. C. Seymour and John Larner favor Jean le Long (Jan de Langhe), abbot and historian at the Abbey of St. Bertin in St. Omer in northern France in the mid-fourteenth century, chiefly because he had benefit of access to a large monastic library that contained Mandeville’s identifiable sources and in 1351 had produced French translations of a number of these (Hetoum, Odoric, and William of Boldensele, as well as Ricold, “The Book of the Estate of the Great Caan” and some letters from the Khân to Pope Benedict XII). Odoric’s book, Vincent of Beauvais’s encyclopedia (notably Vincent’s excerpts from Carpini), Hetoum’s La flor, and The Letter of Prester John were the Mandeville author’s most important sources for the far eastern parts of his narrative, though some also believe he must have read Marco Polo’s book; Polo’s influence, alternatively, may have been filtered through Odoric.⁹⁶ Jean le Long’s contemporary and disciple at St. Bertin, Thomas Diacre, completes the picture with a vivid description: “A man who was erudite, pious, who delighted in the study of history,