What riches has the East then to offer in comparison with these [Quas igitur hiis comparabiles orientales regio diuitias habet]? It has, of course, many-colored silken cloth produced by the silk-worm; it has precious metals of certain types, sparkling gems and aromatic spices. But what are these in comparison with the loss of life and health? They are obtained only by enduring constantly the enmity of an enemy that one cannot get away from—the air that is within, and that surrounds one.34
All the elements of the East, he explains are pestiferous; they
threaten his wretched life, deprive him of health, and finally kill him. If you put your naked foot upon the ground, death is upon you; if you sit upon marble without taking care, death is upon you; if you drink unmixed water, or merely smell dirty water with your nostrils, death is upon you; if you uncover your head to feel the breeze the better, it may affect you by either its heat or its coldness—but in any case, death is upon you. The heavens terrify you with their thunder and threaten you with their lightnings. The sun with its burning rays makes you uncomfortable. And if you take more food than is right, death is at the gate; if you take your wine unmixed with water, death is at the gate; if you do not hold your hand back from food long before you are satisfied, death is at the gate.
Furthermore, Gerald continues, poison is all around, dealt out by stepmothers to stepsons, wives to husbands, and cooks to masters, and if poisoned food and drink do not get you, the toxic “clothes, chairs and seats of all kinds” will. In contrast, the pleasant mildness of the western climate is incomparable: “Let the East, then, have its riches—tainted and poisoned as they are.”35 Gerald’s references to gems, silks, and spices indicate a concept of the East extending to China.
In Gerald’s account, and those of other high medieval writers such as Honorius, “the East” is a place one can generalize about no matter how vast its area and variety of peoples. Yet when travelers from the Latin West (or “North”) stepped east from the mid-thirteenth century, representations of the Orient changed. Although several late medieval travel writers weave strands of the European “Indies” tradition into their narratives, their works represent a new phase in European perspectives. Asia becomes varied, particular, familiar, or knowable. In this sense, their narratives from the period c. 1245–1510 could be described as Between Orientalisms.
Even in Gerald’s description, where climate is the key marker of regional identity, the cultural homogenization that Said finds definitive of modern Orientalism is lacking. “Orientals,” says Said on modern writing, were portrayed as “almost everywhere nearly the same.” For example, British imperialist discourse painted Indians as “gullible, ‘devoid of energy and initiative,’ much given to ‘fulsome flattery,’ intrigue, cunning, and unkindness to animals.” They are dishonest, devious, depraved, childlike, and above all irrational.36 Caricatures of oriental despotism, passivity, and sensuality also abound.37 Disregard for cultural differences across Asia is thus exacerbated by negative stereotyping. Now, we must again acknowledge that Said’s account offers a very narrow and one-dimensional view of modern views on Asia and is remarkably reductive particularly in relation to the works of Orientalist scholars. Nonetheless, if we limit our acceptance of his stereotype to some novelists, artists, and travel writers, we may observe that this tendency in modern western perceptions of oriental cultures was little shared by the travelers of our present study. Medieval travelers and pseudo-travelers rarely lumped diverse oriental cultures together or resorted to overarching caricatures. As we shall see, most genuine medieval travelers made some attempt to provide descriptions of the places they passed through and the customs of their inhabitants. When vagueness, generalization, or literary tradition crept in, it was generally because the traveler had shifted to description of a location he had not visited himself and/or was working with an amanuensis not always much concerned with accuracy. Poggio Bracciolini’s version of Niccolò dei Conti’s account of “India beyond the Ganges” falls into this category, as Niccolò seems not to have ventured into China and in any case did not pen his own narrative.38
Concepts of “Orient,” the “East,” “Asia,” or “India,” then, circulated in a range of European discourses, and each potentially posits an East against which the West might be set, but their generalizations deal mainly in matters of geography, climate, and marvels. The inattention to cultural differences that offends Said in modern Orientalist discourse is much less apparent. Thus, in the second part of Said’s definition, later medieval travel narratives represent perspectives “before” Orientalism.
Orientalism potentially emphasizes attractive aspects of Asian Otherness, but in Said’s version the juxtaposition of western superiority with eastern inferiority is paramount, and it is this that justifies imperial and colonial projects. Said suggests “the essence of Orientalism is the ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority.”39 Here we have the key to the third strand of Said’s definition (“The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony”),40 which has helped give birth to postcolonial studies but has also attracted outrage from established parties wishing to defend western scholarship. To take one of the more recent critiques as an example, Robert Irwin’s 2006 For Lust of Knowing (titled Dangerous Knowledge in its U.S. edition) offers an impassioned riposte to Orientalism, a book he blames for the decline of Oriental studies.41 Irwin’s concern is not so much with Orientalism as a theme of literature and the visual arts but with the reputation of generations of scholars whom he believes Said defamed in his “work of malignant charlatanry.”42 Said’s effort to apply Foucauldian theories about the interrelated nature of knowledge and power particularly offends Irwin, yet he does acknowledge a connection between European imperialism and Orientalism from around the early eighteenth century. For example, discussing Peter the Great’s expansion of the Russian Empire into largely Muslim Central Asia and the Caucasus, he notes that study of oriental languages and the Qur’an received royal patronage as “it was obviously desirable to understand Islam better in order to govern those Muslims more effectively.”43 Furthermore, in the 1770s, while a number of French Orientalists were engaged in academic work on the Middle East, “French politicians, merchants and soldiers had developed a more predatory interest in that region” and “[t]here were plenty of French theorists ready to argue that Ottoman Turkey, a typical Oriental despotism, was in full decay, because … despotism conduced inevitably to slavery, polygamy and softness.”44 The founding and expansion of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) was explicitly linked to British foreign expansion, while the “belated beginnings” of American Orientalism paralleled the United States’ growing hunger for oil and “ambitions to supplant Britain as the leading power in the Middle East.”45 Irwin reluctantly acknowledges “it must be conceded that Said has perhaps as much as half a point.”46
Said is unfortunately prone to dramatic overstatements in Orientalism, which may explain why specialists have found his influence so galling. Take, for example, the following: “Islam excepted, the Orient for Europe was until the nineteenth century a domain with a continuous history of unchallenged Western dominance. This is patently true of the British experience in India, the Portuguese experience in the East Indies, China, and Japan, and the French and Italian experiences in various regions of the Orient.”47 One would not be advised to take this as a guide to the history of European influence in Asia. Yet a broader point, which might have been more seriously pursued, is that financial support for the development of European intellectual study of Middle Eastern and Asian languages and cultures corresponded with the growth in European commercial and political interests in the regions. France’s École Spéciale des Langues Orientales was founded in 1795 between phases of French economic colonialism in Asia and in prelude to the Napoleonic and later eras of direct French rule in Indochina, and the school’s founding document stated that its mission was to teach living Oriental languages “of recognized utility for politics and commerce.”48 The distinguished British Sinologist Herbert A. Giles (1845–1935) complained at the end of his career that while a professor he had had “only one student