Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 36.djvu/30

 century, and is the only Latin version as yet printed.

In his prologue the author styles himself Jehan de Mandeville, or John Maundevylle, knight, born and bred in England, of the town of St. Aubin or St. Albans; and he declares that he crossed the sea on Michaelmas day 1322 (or 1332, in the Egerton and some other English manuscripts), and had passed in his travels by Turkey (i.e. Asia Minor), Great and Little Armenia, Tartary, Persia, Syria, Arabia, Upper and Lower Egypt, Libya, a great part of Ethiopia, Chaldæa, Amazonia, and Lesser, Greater, and Middle India. He adds that he wrote especially for those who wished to visit Jerusalem, whither he had himself often ridden in good company, and in the French prologue he ends by stating that, to be more concise, he should have (j'eusse) written in Latin, but had chosen Romance, i.e. French, as being more widely understood. In the Latin, and all the English versions except the Cotton manuscript, this last sentence is suppressed, so that each tacitly claims to be an original work; in the Cotton manuscript it is perverted and reads: ‘And ye shall understand that I have put this book out of Latin into French, and translated it again out of French into English that every man of my nation may understand it.’ These words not only contradict the French text, but make Mandeville himself responsible for the English version in which they occur, and on the strength of them he has even been styled the ‘father of English prose.’ But the Cotton version, equally with the others, is disfigured by blunders, such as an author translating his own work could never have made (see Roxburghe edit. p. xiii). In the epilogue Mandeville repeats that he left England in 1322, and goes on to say that he had since ‘searched’ many a land, been in many a good company, and witnessed many a noble feat, although he had himself performed none, and that, being now forced by arthritic gout to seek repose, he had written his reminiscences, as a solace for his ‘wretched ease,’ in 1357, the thirty-fifth year since he set out. This is the date in the Paris manuscript; others, French and English, have 1356 (or 1366 in the case of those which make him start in 1332), while the vulgate Latin has 1355. In the Latin, moreover, he says that he wrote at Liège, and it is in the Cotton manuscript alone that, by an inexact rendering, he speaks of having actually reached home. The passage common to all the English versions, that on his way back he submitted his book to the pope at Rome, is, no doubt, spurious. It is at variance with his own account of the circumstances under which the work was written, and between 1309 and 1377 the popes resided not at Rome but at Avignon. A short dedicatory letter in Latin to Edward III, which is appended to some inferior French manuscripts, is also probably a late addition. In some copies the author's name appears as J. de Montevilla.

The work itself is virtually made up of two parts. The first treats mainly of the Holy Land and the routes thither, and in the Paris manuscript it gives the title to the whole, viz. ‘Le livre Jehan de Mandeville, chevalier, lequel parle de l'estat de la terre sainte et des merveilles que il y a veues.’ Although it is more a guide-book for pilgrims than strictly a record of the author's own travel, he plainly implies throughout that he wrote from actual experience. Incidentally he tells us he had been at Paris and at Constantinople, had long served the sultan of Egypt against the Bedouins, and had refused his offer of a prince's daughter in marriage, with a great estate, at the price of apostasy. He reports, too, a curious colloquy he had with the sultan on the vices of Christendom, and casually mentions that he left Egypt in the reign of Melechmadabron, by whom he possibly means Melik-el-Mudhaffar (1346–7). Finally, he speaks of being at the monastery of St. Catharine on Mount Sinai, and of having obtained access to the Dome of the Rock at Jerusalem by special grace of the sultan, who gave him letters under the great seal. But in spite of these personal references almost the whole of his matter is undeniably taken from earlier writers. The framework, as Sir Henry Yule pointed out, is from William of Boldensele, a German knight and ex-Dominican who visited the holy places in 1332–3, and wrote in 1336 a sober account of his journey (, Die Edelherren von Boldensele, 1852, 1855). From first to last Mandeville copies him closely, though not always with intelligence; but at the same time he borrows abundantly from other sources, interweaving his various materials with some skill. Apart from his use of church legends and romantic tales, the description he gives of the route through Hungary to Constantinople, and, later on, across Asia Minor, is a blundering plagiarism from the ‘History of the First Crusade’ by Albert of Aix, and his topography of Palestine, when not based on Boldensele, is a patchwork from twelfth- and thirteenth-century itineraries. His authority, therefore, for the condition of the holy places in his own time, though often quoted, is utterly worthless. Other passages can be traced to Pliny and Solinus, Peter Comestor, Vincent de Beauvais, Bru-