While many late medieval travel texts dealing with the distant East do involve a first-person narrator who undertook a journey, or pretended to have done so, some take the form of a descriptio of distant lands more than an itinerarium through them. This is particularly the case for Ricold’s Liber peregrinacionis (despite its title), Hetoum’s La flor des estoires de la terre d’Orient, Jordan’s Mirabilia descripta, “Le livre de l’estat du Grant Caan,” and Poggio’s account of Niccolò dei Conti’s observations, but even Marco Polo’s book is more chorography than travelogue.8 Pegolotti undertook no journey himself, yet his account of the merchant’s route to Asia can be understood as “travel writing” according to Rubiés’s definition as it is based on information provided by travelers. The odd one out among the items discussed in this book is the anonymous Letter of Prester John, which is not known to be based on the testimony of actual travelers. Despite its lack of perfect fit with Rubiés’s classificatory scheme, the Letter’s later influence determines its inclusion.
The matter of a travel narrative’s truth status is more vexed for medieval texts. In modern travel-writing studies, whether or not a narrative is actually true—or, rather, has its basis in lived experience and observation—is not so relevant; what matters most is that readers generally believe in its veracity. In Borm’s words, a “referential pact” exists between author and reader. The “horizon of expectations” (in Jauss’s famous phrase) a reader brings to a work of travel writing includes the belief that it is based to a degree on real experience.9 Scott D. Westrem concurs that “the success of a travel book depends on a thread of faith extending from narrator to audience. Only when a traveler’s experience is accepted at least tentatively as legitimate can travel’s lessons—whether meant to be informative or entertaining—be learned.”10 But as we saw in Chapter 2, medieval accounts of the distant East were widely but not invariably seen as authentic. It is perhaps better to set aside the requirement for credibility in drawing tentative lines around what we might count as medieval travel writing.
One way to address the question of whether medieval audiences would have perceived the texts gathered here as having anything in common is to look at their manuscript contexts. While sometimes the longer works, especially the Divisament, are found alone in their bindings, they were much more often bound up with several other texts of our interest. To take a handful of examples from dozens of potential exempla, Bern, Burgerbibliothek Cod. 125 contains French versions of Marco Polo, Mandeville, Odoric, “L’estat du Grant Caan,” Hetoum, and Ricold along with William of Boldensele’s itinerary of pilgrimage to the Holy Land and letters exchanged between the Great Khân and Benedict XII; London, BL MS Additional 19513 contains the unique surviving copy of Jordan’s Mirabilia descripta and Pipino’s version of Marco Polo along with the first book of Jacques de Vitry’s Historia Hierosolimitana, Marino Sanuti’s book on the Holy Land, and an abbreviated version of Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hiberniae, along with some non-travel literature; London, BL MS Arundel 13 contains only Marco Polo and Odoric; London, BL MS Royal 14 C xiii (owned by Simon Bozoun, Prior of Norwich, 1344–52) contains Rubruck, Odoric, and Marco Polo along with works by Jacques de Vitry and Gerald of Wales among others; Cambridge, UL MS Dd. i. 17 contains Marco Polo, Hetoum, and Mandeville among numerous other works.11 The regularity with which works on eastern contexts (both in the Holy Lands and farther east) are bound together (though we need to be cautious about the possibility of postmedieval compilation) suggests owners and readers perceived relationships among these kinds of texts, though many of the manuscripts in question also contain works that had nothing whatever to do with travel including lists of European archbishoprics, cures for worms in children, saints’ lives, Aesop’s fables, and treatises on urine. What, then, did they have in common? In addition to the spiritual edification supplied, especially by works on the Holy Land, they filled a European hunger for learning about faraway peoples. They supplied visions of oriental realms, often associated with the ancient notion of the “Indies” but also lands brought more recently into the spotlight such as Mongolia and China that helped satisfy a craving for knowledge, and were particularly prized when they fired the imagination too. A chief difference between their expectations and those of more recent readers, however, is that medieval readers did not regard a first-person account of the journey or a meditation on personal development as essential elements in making a work valuable and interesting. If travel writings are texts that take “travel as their essential condition of production,” then it is reasonable to put the works being considered in this book in this category. “Ethnographic writing” is another postmedieval term that has been applied to medieval travel writing with excellent results but perhaps does not have quite the range suggested by “travel writing.” Ethnography is, primarily, writing about human cultures; travel writing naturally encompasses this but also takes in matters of climate, geography, and other natural phenomena and does not imply the scientific distance that the former term properly holds.
It is worth considering further the ways medieval travel books often seem to disappoint or confuse modern readers, no doubt because they have become accustomed to common elements in recent travel literature. These include a distinctive authorial personality, forward narrative momentum, and a persistent emphasis on the strangeness of worlds encountered, whether that strangeness takes the form of the charming, bizarre, contemptible, savage, or ridiculous. In Campbell’s words, “travel literature as we know it today [is] … fully narrative, fully inhabited by its narrator, self-conscious about the problem of presenting difference in terms that neither inadvertently domesticate nor entirely alienate.”12 The importance of strong authorial presence is in keeping with the powerful desire to denote Self as separate from Other, which many scholars see as central to modern travel writing. Casey Blanton states that “travel books are vehicles whose main purpose is to introduce us to the other, and … typically they [dramatize] an engagement between self and world.”13
Medieval travel writing’s failure to meet some modern readers’ horizons of expectation helps explain their often mixed, contradictory, or negative reactions to Marco Polo’s Divisament dou monde. Descriptions of the Divisament vary so much, whether by popular or scholarly writers, one might think the readers had picked up different volumes:
In the account of Marco Polo—Il milione, to Italians—we have the most balanced and lush of all medieval re-creations of the East: the grotesque titillations of [The] Wonders [of the East] and the splendor and fertility of Paradise are here combined in a single comprehensive image. It was that “mirage” that drew Columbus to our shores.14
Yet the book is surprisingly dull. Polo did not set out to write an account of his travels, despite the name by which it has always been known [sic]. … Instead he wrote a dry, factual guide to commerce in the East, a book by a merchant for other merchants, containing mainly lists of the merchandise available for sale on the caravan routes, as well as advice on how to overcome the difficulties that might be met along the way. … It is not a romance, nor a book of wonders, nor a history of the world in the manner of Herodotus.15
Marco Polo travelled to tell a fantastic story. He is singularly obsessed with difference and the desire to represent it. The world that sprouts from Marco Polo’s pen is as strange as the dreamscape of old fables. The text authorizes its vocation to capture this world by invoking the imperial command of the Great Khan himself, who, Marco Polo says, “would rather hear reports of these strange countries, and of their customs and usages, than the business on which he had sent them.”16
Unfortunately, those who actually read the Description of the World will discover that much of Marco Polo’s account of the East does consist of tons of salt and distances. Though these descriptions are sometimes intermingled with stories about Caliphs and Magi, they are fundamentally practical and, even without following a logical itinerary, the book serves more as a merchant’s view of the world than that of a creative writer.17
Marco Polo, whose rather limited vocabulary for describing marvels does not seem to have undercut the popularity