Thus, where Odoric has given a most curious and veracious account of the Chinese custom of employing tame cormorants to catch fish, the cormorants are converted by Mandeville into "little beasts called loyres which are taught to go into the water" (the word loyre being apparently used here for " otter", lutra, for which the Provençal is luria or loiria). However, in a number of cases the writer has failed to understand those passages which he adopts from Odoric and professes to give as his own experiences. These passages are almost always swollen with interpolated particulars, usually of an extravagant kind. The greater part of these more distant travels, extending from Trebizond to Hormuz, India, the Malay Archipelago and China, and back to western Asia, has been appropriated from the narrative of Friar Odoric (1330). Sources evidently used įurther information: Europeans in Medieval China However, this is commensurate with Mandeville's emphasis on 'curiositas'-wandering-rather than Christian 'scientia' (knowledge). The mention of more distant regions comes in only towards the end of this prologue and (in a manner) as an afterthought. The prologue points almost exclusively to the Holy Land as the subject of the work. 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 book very largely depends on other travel books, sometimes embroidered with legendary or fantastical elements. 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. It is fairly clear that "Sir John Mandeville" was an invented author, and various suggestions have been put forward as to the real one. He had often been to Jerusalem, and had written in Romance languages as they were generally more widely understood than Latin. 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. Īccording to the book, John de Mandeville crossed the sea in 1322. 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. The earliest-surviving text is in French, followed by translations into many other languages the work acquired extraordinary popularity. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, commonly known as Mandeville's Travels, is a book written between 13 that purports to be the travel memoir of an Englishman named Sir John Mandeville across the Islamic world as far as India and China. Portrait of Sir John Mandeville, manuscript of 1459
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