64 Primary Source Reading 6: Sir John Mandeville (Excerpts)
64 Primary Source Reading 6: Sir John Mandeville (Excerpts)
Primary Source Reading: Sir John Mandeville Explorer
Sir John Mandeville is the supposed author of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, a travel memoir which first circulated between 1357 and 1371. The earliest surviving text is in French. By aid of 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 it. Although the book is real, it is widely believed that “Sir John Mandeville” himself was not. Common theories point to a Frenchman by the name of Jehan a la Barbe. Recent scholarly work suggests that The Travels of Sir John Mandeville was “the work of Jan de Langhe, a Fleming who wrote in Latin under the name Johannes Longus and in French as Jean le Long. Jan de Langhe was born in Ypres early in the 1300s and by 1334 had become a Benedictine monk.
Chapter I
To teach you the Way out of England to Constantinople
In the name of God, Glorious and Almighty!
He that will pass over the sea and come to land [to go to the city of Jerusalem, he may wend many ways, both on sea and land], after the country that he cometh from; [for] many of them come to one end. But troweth not that I will tell you all the towns, and cities and castles that men shall go by; for then should I make too long a tale; but all only some countries and most principal steads that men shall go through to go the right way.
First, if a man come from the west side of the world, as England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, or Norway, he may, if that he will, go through Almayne and through the kingdom of Hungary, that marcheth to the land of Polayne, and to the land of Pannonia, and so to Silesia.
And men pass through the land of Pyncemartz and come to Greece to the city of Nye, and to the city of Fynepape, and after to the city of Dandrenoble, and after to Constantinople, that was wont to be clept Bezanzon. And there dwelleth commonly the Emperor of Greece. And there is the most fair church and the most noble of all the world; and it is of Saint Sophie.
Chapter II
Of the Cross and the Crown of our Lord Jesu Christ
At Constantinople is the cross of our Lord Jesu Christ, and his coat without seams, that is clept Tunica inconsutilis, and the sponge, and the reed, of the which the Jews gave our Lord eysell and gall, in the cross. And there is one of the nails, which Christ was nailed with on the cross.
And some men trow that half the cross, that Christ was done on be in Cyprus, in an abbey.
This holy cross had the Jews hid in the earth, under a rock of the mount of Calvary; and it lay there two hundred year and more, into the time that St. Helen, that was mother to Constantine the Emperor of Rome. And she was daughter of King Cole, born in Colchester, that was King of England, that was clept then Britain the more; the which the