Mandeville's Travels

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, commonly known as Mandeville's Travels, is a book written between 1357 and 1371 that purports to be the travel memoir of an Englishman named Sir John Mandeville across the Islamic world as far as India and China. The earliest-surviving text is in French, followed by translations into many other languages; the work acquired extraordinary popularity. Despite the extremely unreliable and often fantastical nature of the travels it describes, it was used as a work of reference: Christopher Columbus, for example, was heavily influenced by both this work and Marco Polo's earlier Travels.^[1]

According to the book, John de Mandeville crossed the sea in 1322. He traversed by way of Turkey (Asia Minor and Cilicia), Tartary, Persia, Syria, Arabia, Egypt, Libya, Ethiopia, Chaldea, the land of the Amazons, India, China and many countries in the region. He had often been to Jerusalem, and had written in Romance languages as they were generally more widely understood than Latin.^[2]

It is fairly clear that "Sir John Mandeville" was an invented author, and various suggestions have been put forward as to the real one. Most of these are figures from France or the Low Countries who had not travelled as widely as the author; none have achieved general acceptance. The book very largely depends on other travel books, sometimes embroidered with legendary or fantastical elements. Mandeville's Travels may contain facts and knowledge acquired by actual travels and residents in the East, at least in the sections focused on the Holy Land, Egypt, the Levant and the means of getting there. The prologue points almost exclusively to the Holy Land as the subject of the work. The mention of more distant regions comes in only towards the end of this prologue and (in a manner) as an afterthought.^[3] However, this is commensurate with Mandeville's emphasis on 'curiositas'—wandering—rather than Christian 'scientia' (knowledge).^{[citation needed]}