Through this diverse body of sources, which we may gather under the heading of medieval “travel writing,” Europeans of the Latin West embarked on bold new textual voyages. The Mongol incursions of the early thirteenth century had revealed the world was far larger and more diverse than either classical or biblical authorities had suggested. Once European travelers began to make their own journeys deep into the Asian continent they immediately began to record their observations and experiences, and audiences at home responded with enthusiasm. The boundaries of the world were suddenly expanded. Previously unknown peoples and cultures came into view; eastern cities, landscapes, and natural wonders began to stir the European imagination. To some extent the authors and audiences of these new books sought to fashion eastern realms in conformity with familiar structures of thought; thus monstrous peoples, the Earthly Paradise, mythical beasts, and biblical waterways recurred in certain texts but most particularly in the fictional travels of Mandeville and his ilk. However, the writings of genuine travelers—while certainly not immune from traditional imagery, especially when amanuenses and later copyists made their own mark—painted pictures of Asia with many details entirely new to European readers. For the modern reader intrigued to explore these, it is tempting to jump straight to the content of medieval travelogues, but this would be to overlook their textual production, literary form, and the responses of contemporary readers. Considering the production of travelogues requires much more than straightforward examinations of authorship. When we try, as twenty-first-century readers, to come face-to-face with Odoric, Rubruck, Marco Polo, and others we find ourselves chasing fleeting ghosts. Trying to confront fictional travelers such as Mandeville or Johannes Witte de Hese is even more confounding, as they recede like Cheshire cats. Through considering matters of audience, textual transmission, and relative popularity we may arrive at a more grounded understanding of the resonances of writings on the distant Orient for medieval readers.
Chapter 3
Travel Writing and the Making of Europe
“Travel writing” is a modern term for a recognized branch of literature, but we need to consider its suitability to medieval texts. Many modern readers, as we will see, find some medieval “travel” texts disappointing because they fail to live up to certain expectations, such as that travel literature presents a first-person narrator with an exciting tale of encounters with the foreign or that it documents the formation of both personal and cultural identity. Not only a version of personal memoir, travel writing also allows the author to explore the broader cultural encounter of Self (for example, “the West” or “Europe”) and Other (“the East” or “Orient”). Can travel writing exist without a first-person narrator, need it incorporate the kind of individual reflection most likely to engage modern readers, and to what extent did medieval descriptions of far eastern places adopt a perspective one might truly call “European” in an era before European identity was necessarily a strong preoccupation?
This chapter finds that our expectations about the nature of travel writing need to be reset before we can fully appreciate medieval reports of Asia and that concepts of European identity, as opposed to a notion of Christendom, are identifiable but not yet dominant during this early stage of European-Asian encounter. It contends, and the remainder of the book will illustrate, that while responses to Otherness presented a common refrain in many travelers’ tales, sameness, similarity, or a sense of relationship between a traveler and peoples newly encountered were also regular motifs. When foreignness and estrangement were asserted, it was often for particular pragmatic reasons or because the authors in question were fictional travelers more prone to repeating old stereotypes of nomadic barbarians or the marvels of the Indies. Curiosity and the hunger for knowledge, it is argued, were at least as important as either hostility or wonderment for many of our authors and their audiences.
Travel Writing
“Travel” as such is not usually the main subject of works produced out of late medieval encounters with the far Orient, though details of journeys feature particularly in Carpini’s, Rubruck’s, Odoric’s, Clavijo’s, Witte’s, and Ludovico’s books and to some extent in Marco Polo’s. Some of these (notably Rubruck’s and sometimes Odoric’s) were given the title Itinerarium in manuscripts, but it would be futile to pin great significance to contemporary titles given that they vary so much from one manuscript to another. More than half the works pay little or no attention to the subjective experience of travel. On what grounds, then, are they labeled “travel writing” here, and would medieval readers have viewed them as having anything in common?
The new interdisciplinary field of “travel writing studies” has put some energy into defining travel writing as a genre and asks whether it is indeed a genre at all. There is some agreement that works so named should contain matter drawn from actual or imagined journeys, even though in some cases the journey itself is not described. The style or form in which that content is expressed may, however, vary substantially and include itineraries or travelogues, letters, diaries, guidebooks, and geographic, ethnographic, or chorographic description.1 Does “genre” refer primarily to the style of text or its thematic content? Hans Robert Jauss’s concept of “horizon of expectations” would encompass both, but in the case of travel writing it seems unproductive to focus too much on form.2 Joan-Pau Rubiés, a specialist in late medieval and Renaissance travel writing, focuses on content in offering a flexible yet precise definition:
[Travel literature] can be defined as that varied body of writing which, whether its principal purpose is practical or fictional, takes travel as an essential element for its production. Travel is therefore not necessarily a theme, nor even a structuring element, within the body of literature generated by travel. … The crucial point is that the writer, who could easily be an armchair writer, ultimately relied on the materials and authority of first-hand travelers.3
This capacious formulation has the virtue of applicability to travel texts from any era or cultural context and is better suited to describing late medieval travel writing than definitions suggested by specialists in modern travel books. It does not require “travel writing” to provide a descriptive first-person account of a journey undertaken, for example, as Jan Borm and Tim Youngs do:
[Travel writing] is not a genre, but a collective term for a variety of texts both predominantly fictional and non-fictional whose main theme is travel. … [The travel book is] any narrative characterized by a non-fiction dominant that relates (almost always) in the first person a journey or journeys that the reader supposes to have taken place in reality while assuming or presupposing that author, narrator and principal character are but one or identical.4
[T]ravel narrative is always controlled by the first person singular. Predictably, therefore, questions of identity are frequently to the fore, suggesting the degree to which physical travel often tends, in its writing, to become symbolic of interior journeys of the mind or soul.5
Mary B. Campbell, one of medieval travel writing’s greatest interpreters, also makes the subjective perspective a definitive element: “Travel literature is defined here