Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 36.djvu/31

 netto Latini, and Jacques de Vitry. From the last, for example, he ekes out Boldensele's account of the Bedouins, and it is from a careless reading of De Vitry that he turns the hunting leopards of Cyprus into ‘papions’ or baboons. The alphabets which he gives have won him some credit as a linguist, but only the Greek and the Hebrew (which were readily accessible) are what they pretend to be, and that which he calls Saracen actually comes from the ‘Cosmographia’ of Æthicus! His knowledge of Mohammedanism and its Arabic formulæ impressed even Yule. He was, however, wholly indebted for that information to the ‘Liber de Statu Saracenorum’ of William of Tripoli (circa 1270), as he was to the ‘Historiæ Orientis’ of Hetoum the Armenian (1307) for much of what he wrote about Egypt. In the last case, indeed, he shows a rare sign of independence, for he does not, with Hetoum, end his history of the sultanate about 1300, but carries it on to the death of En-Násir (1341) and names two of his successors. Although his statements about them are not historically accurate, this fact and a few other details suggest that he may really have been in Egypt, if not at Jerusalem, but the proportion of original matter is so very far short of what might be expected that even this is extremely doubtful.

In the second part of the work, which describes nearly all Asia, there is, apart from his own assertions, no trace of personal experience whatever. The place of Boldensele is here taken by Friar Odoric of Pordenone, whose intensely interesting narrative of eastern travel was written in 1330, shortly after his return home (, Cathay and the Way thither, 1866;, O. de Pordenone, 1891). Odoric left Europe about 1316–18, and travelled slowly overland from Trebizond to the Persian Gulf, where he took ship at Hormuz for Tana, a little north of Bombay. Thence he sailed along the coast to Malabar, Ceylon, and Mailapur, now Madras. After visiting Sumatra, Java, and other islands, Champa or S. Cochin-China, and Canton, he ultimately made his way northward through China to Cambalec or Pekin. There he remained three years, and then started homeward by land, but his route after Tibet is not recorded. Mandeville practically steals the whole of these extensive travels and makes them his own, adding, as before, a mass of heterogeneous matter acquired by the same means. Next to Odoric he makes most use of Hetoum, from whom he took, besides other details, his summary description of the countries of Asia and his history of the Mongols. For Mongol manners and customs he had recourse to John de Plano Carpini and Simon de St. Quentin, papal envoys to the Tartars about 1250. These two thirteenth-century writers he probably knew only through lengthy extracts in the ‘Speculum’ of Vincent de Beauvais (d. 1264?). This vast storehouse of mediæval knowledge he ransacked thoroughly, as he did also to some extent the kindred ‘Tresor’ of Brunetto Latini (d. 1294). He admits in one place (contradicting his prologue) that he was never in Tartary itself, though he had been in Russia (Galicia), Livonia, Cracow, and other countries bordering on it, but, without once naming his authorities, he writes throughout in the tone of an eye-witness. He even transfers to his own days, ‘when I was there,’ the names of Tartar princes of a century before (Roxb. ed. p. 209). Much in the same way he adopts Pliny's language about the ships of his time, so that it serves for those of the fourteenth century (ib. p. 219), and gives as his own a mode of computing the size of the earth which he found recorded of Eratosthenes (ib. p. 200). But it may be that from Vincent de Beauvais's ‘Speculum,’ and not directly from Pliny, Solinus, or the early Bestiaries, he obtained particulars of the fabulous monsters, human and brute, the existence of which he records as sober fact in the extreme East. Without doubt in the ‘Speculum’ he read Cæsar's account of the customs of the Britons, which he applies almost word for word to the inhabitants of one of his imaginary islands (Roxb. ed. p. 218). But, whether repeating fact or fable, he associates himself with it. A good example of his method is his story of the mythical Fount of Youth. He takes this from Prester John's letter, and foists it upon Odoric's account of Malabar, but he adds that he himself had drunk of the fount, and still felt the good effects. Similarly at various stages he makes out that he had taken observations with the astrolabe, not only in Brabant and Germany towards Bohemia, but in the Indian Ocean, had seen with his own eyes the gigantic reeds of the island of ‘Panten,’ had sailed within sight of the rocks of adamant, and had been in the country of the Vegetable Lamb. He even represents that his travels extended from 62° 10߱ north to 33° 16߱ south. Further, in following Odoric through Cathay he adds conversations of his own at Cansay and at Cambalec, and asserts that he and his comrades served the Great Khan for fifteen months against the king of Manzi. The way he deals with Odoric's story of the devil-haunted Valley Perilous is curious; for in working it up with augmented horrors he tells how,