Medieval Ethnographies European

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The Expansion of Latin Europe, 1000-1500

Medieval Ethnographies
 THE EXPANSION OF LATIN EUROPE, 1000-1500

General Editors: James Muldoon and Felipe Fernández-Armesto

P art I

1 The Medieval Frontiers of Latin Christendom: Expansion, Contraction, Continuity

E dited by Jam es Muldoon and F elip e Fernández-Armesto

2 Internal Colonization in Medieval Europe

E dited by F elip e Fernández-Armesto and Jam es M uldoon

3 The North Atlantic Frontier of Medieval Europe: Vikings and Celts

E dited by Jam es M uldoon

4 The North-Eastern Frontiers of Medieval Europe: Scandinavia and the Baltic

(Provisional title)

5 The Medieval Latin Frontiers in Central Europe

(Provisional title)

6 The Expansion of Medieval Latin Europe in the Eastern Mediterranean

E dited by E lean or Congdon

7 The Expansion of Medieval Latin Europe in the Western Mediterranean

E dited by E lean or Congdon

8 The Expansion of Medieval Latin Europe in Spain and the Atlantic

E dited by E lean or Congdon

P a r t II

9 Medieval Ethnographies: European Perceptions of the World Beyond

E dited by Joan -P au Rubiés

10 Travelers, Intellectuals, and the World Beyond Medieval Europe

E dited by Jam es M uldoon

11 Religion and Expansion: The Medieval Missionary Impulse

E dited by Jam es F. Ryan

P a r t III

12 The Expansion of Orthodox Europe: Byzantium, the Balkans and Russia

E dited by Jonathan Shepard

13 The Mongol Empire and its Impact

(Provisional title)

14 Islamic Expansion in the Later Middle Ages

(Provisional title)
The Expansion of Latin Europe, 1000-1500

Volume 9

Medieval Ethnographies
European Perceptions of the World Beyond

edited by
Joan-Pau Rubiés
First published 2009 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X 14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint o f the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition copyright © 2009 Taylor & Francis, and Introduction by Joan-Pau Rubiés. For copyright
of individual articles refer to the Acknowledgements.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any
electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and rec-
ording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identificati-
on and explanation without intent to infringe.

ISBN 9780754659556 (hbk)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Medieval ethnographies : European perceptions of the world
beyond. - (The expansion of Latin Europe, 1000-1500)
1. Ethnology - Europe - History - To 1500 2. Travel,
Medieval 3. Ethnicity - Europe - History - To 1500
4. Europe - Intellectual life
I. Rubiés, Joan-Pau
305.8Ό094Ό902

US Library of Congress Control Number: 2008940507

THE EXPANSION OF LATIN EUROPE, 1000-1500 - VOL 9

 Contents

Acknowledgements vii

General Editor’s Preface ix

Introduction xiii

PART ONE - CONTEXTS AND GENRES

1 The Outer World in the European Middle Ages

Seymour Phillips 1

2 The Emergence of a Naturalistic and Ethnographic Paradigm in

Late Medieval Travel Writing
Joan-Pau Rubiés 43

3 Ethnographers in Search of an Audience

J.K. Hyde 65

PART TW O -M Y TH S

4 Continental Drift: Prester John’s Progress through the Indies

Bernard Hamilton 121

5 The Medieval West and the Indian Ocean: An Oneiric Horizon

Jacques Le Goff 155

6 Marco Polo and the Pictorial Tradition of the Marvels of the East
Rudolf Wittkower 175

7 The Indian Tradition in Western Medieval Intellectual History

Thomas Hahn 209
vi CONTENTS

PART THREE - ENCOUNTERS

8 Gerald’s Ethnographic Achievement

Robert Bartlett 231

9 William of Rubruck in the Mongol Empire: Perception and Prejudices

Peter Jackson 273

10 Neolithic Meets Medieval: First Encounters in the Canary Islands

David Abulafia 291

11 Veni, vidi, vici\ Some Fifteenth-century Eyewitness Accounts of Travel in

the African Atlantic before 1492
Peter Russell 315

12 Travel Fact and Travel Fiction in the Voyages of Columbus

Valerie I.J. Flint 329

PART FOUR - EXPLAINING CULTURAL DIFFERENCES

13 The Image of the Barbarian in Medieval Europe

W.R. Jones 347

14 Perceptions of Hot Climate in Medieval Cosmography and Travel Literature

Irina Metzler 379

Index 417
 Acknowledgements

The chapters in this volume are taken from sources listed below, for which the editors and
publishers wish to thank their authors, original publishers or copyright holders for permission
to use their materials as follows:

Chapter 1: Seymour Phillips, ‘The outer world in the European Middle Ages’, in Stuart
B. Schwartz (ed.) Implicit understandings'. Observing, Reporting and Reflecting on the
Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (1994): 23-63.

Chapter 2: Joan-Pau Rubiés, ‘The emergence of a naturalistic and ethnographic paradigm

in late medieval travel writing’, extracted from J. Eisner and J.P. Rubiés (eds.) Voyages and
Visions: Towards a Cultural History o f Travel (1999), ‘Introduction’, pp. 2 9 ^ 6 . Copyright ©
Reaktion Books 1999.

Chapter 3: J.K. Hyde, ‘Ethnographers in search of an audience’, in J.K. Hyde [ed. by Daniel
Waley], Literacy and its Uses. Studies on late medieval Italy (Manchester University Press:
1991), pp. 162-216.

Chapter 4: Bernard Hamilton, ‘Continental Drift: Prester John’s progress through the Indies’,
in C.F. Beckingham and Bernard Hamilton (eds.) Prester John, The Mongols and the Ten
Lost Tribes (Ashgate: 1996), pp. 237-69. Copyright © 1996 C.F. Beckingham and Bernard
Hamilton.

Chapter 5: Jacques Le Goff, ‘The Medieval West and the Indian Ocean: an Oneiric Horizon’,
in Jacques Le Goff, Time, work and culture in the Middle Ages, translated by A.Goldhammer,
(Chicago, 1980), pp. 189-200. Copyright © 1980 University of Chicago Press.

Chapter 6: Rudolf Wittkower, ‘Marco Polo and the pictorial tradition of the marvels of the
East’, Oriente Poliano (Rome, 1957): 155-72.

Chapter 7: Thomas Hahn, ‘The Indian tradition in western medieval intellectual history’,
Viator 9 (1978): 213-34. Copyright © 1978 University of California Press.

Chapter 8: Robert Bartlett, ‘Gerald’s ethnographic achievement’, from Gerald o f Wales,

1146-1223 (Oxford, 1982), ch. 6.
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

C hapter 9: Peter Jackson, ‘William of Rubruck in the Mongol empire: perception and
prejudices’, in Zweder von Martels ed., Travel Fact and Travel Fiction. Studies on fiction,
literary tradition, scholarly discovery and observation in travel writing (Brill: 1994): 54-71.
Copyright © 1994 Brill Academic Publishers.

C hapter 10: David Abulafia. ‘Neolithic meets medieval: first encounters in the Canary
Islands’, in D.Abulafia and Nora Berend (eds.) Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices
(Ashgate: 2002), pp. 255-78. Copyright © 2002 David Abulafia and Nora Berend.

C hapter 11: Peter Russell, 'Veni, vidi, vici: some fifteenth-century eyewitness accounts
of travel in the African Atlantic before 1492’, in Historical Research 66 (1993): 115-28.
Copyright © 1993 Institute of Historical Research.

C hapter 12: Valerie I.J. Flint, ‘Travel Fact and Travel Fiction in the voyages of Columbus’,
in Z.von Martels (ed.), Travel Fact and Travel Fiction. Studies on fiction, literary tradition,
scholarly discovery and observation in travel writing (Brill: 1994), pp. 94-110. Copyright ©
1994 Brill Academic Publishers.

C hapter 13: W.R. Jones, ‘The image of the barbarian in Medieval Europe’, Comparative
Studies in Society and History XIII (Cambridge, 1971): 3 7 6^07.

C hapter 14: Irina Metzler, ‘Perceptions of hot climate in medieval cosmography and travel
literature’, Reading Medieval Studies 23 (1997): 69-105.
 General Editors’ Preface

This series began with a suggestion that a volume dealing with medieval European expansion
would make an interesting prologue to the Expanding World: The European Impact on World
History 1450-1800 series that was already appearing. Several of the volumes in that series did
include articles dealing with aspects of the medieval background, but the medieval ‘expansion
of Europe’ - within and along the frontiers of Latin Christendom - lay outside the terms of
reference. So did an important part of the medieval prelude to the story of the ‘expanding
world’: the growth of neighboring cultures with which Latin Christendom collided.
Motives, practices, and tools characteristic of modem European expansion were creations
or developments of the Middle Ages. ‘The internal colonization of Europe’ was the basis of
subsequent overseas colonization. Along the edges of Latin Christendom, expanding societies
encountered Celts, Scandinavians, Slavs, and others who were organizing societies of their
own that could block or redirect European expansion, initiate cultural exchange, and exercise
varying degrees of influence on the way Europeans thought about themselves and the world.
As medieval Christian society expanded further, Europeans encountered other societies with
which they competed or cooperated.
The introductory volume for the entire series will deal with the expansion of European
society during the Middle Ages in terms of the frontier experience, setting the stage for the
entire series. Gradually or fitfully, with occasional reversals, between the late ninth and mid-
fourteenth centuries, the culture of Latin Christendom spread outwards in all directions from
the heartlands of western Europe. In spite of the contraction of Latin Christendom after the
Black Death, the check to the outward growth of the frontier, and the continuing expansion of
Islam, the basic motives for expansion remained, as did knowledge of institutional structures
employed in developing overseas trade and colonization.
Other volumes will deal with the expansion of Europe in geographical terms. The first
will examine the internal colonization of Europe that began around 1000 as the population
began to increase, previously unfarmed areas were transformed into arable land, and new
towns created. This period of growth provided impetus for acquiring new lands to settle and
for developing the techniques of colonization, techniques that were to have a long history.
Remaining volumes will deal with European expansion along specific frontiers. While
European expansion possessed some general qualities, each frontier had its own particular
characteristics.
The first external frontier to be considered is with the Muslim world. One volume devoted
to the Muslim frontier deals with the crusades and related efforts to block or reverse Muslim
X GENERAL EDITORS’ PREFACE-

expansion in the Mediterranean. The crusades were also early examples of colonization as
the crusaders established permanent settlements and a kind of European feudal government
in the reconquered territories occupied by an urban population of Christians, heretical and
schismatic, Jews, and Muslims.
The second volume dealing with Christian expansion along the frontier with the Muslim
world will examine the reconquista in the westward-facing parts of Spain and Portugal, a
process that not only led to the creation of the Spanish and Portuguese kingdoms, but also
to Christian occupation of parts of the African coast, exploration of the Atlantic, and the
discovery of several island chains. These efforts in turn led to Columbus’s voyages and to
Portuguese explorations that eventually linked the Atlantic to the trade routes of the Indian
Ocean.
Along other frontiers, European Christians expanded into lands occupied by a variety
of societies, often employing religious motives to justify their actions as they had done
in the crusades to regain the Holy Land. For example, expansion along the Celtic frontier
brought Anglo-Norman conquerors of England into contact with Scots, Welsh, and Irish,
all Christians yet, by continental standards, ‘uncivilized’. Expansion here meant not only
conquest but also, as in the case of Ireland, a responsibility for reforming the Church as
well. There was also the task of transforming the pastoral societies of the Celtic fringe into
agricultural societies that the intruders assumed to be the basis for fully civilized society. On
the northern, southern, and eastern shores of the Baltic where unevangelized Slavs and Baltic
peoples dwelled, and - further south - along the Danube and inland from the Dalmatian coast,
Christian Scandinavians, Germans, Slavs and Magyars faced a variety of intractable infidels
who deployed modest levels of material culture in terrain classifiable, according to the values
of the time, as savage.
English and Spanish medieval experience of dealing with the peoples encountered along
the frontier shaped initial responses to peoples encountered in the Americas. When they came
to the New World they came with perceptions about people who lived on the frontier and
with institutions for dealing with them. Europeans saw, or thought they saw, in the Americas
societies like those that they had encountered in the course of their medieval expansion so they
attempted apply lessons learned from that expansion to the Americas. Within two generations,
however, colonizers began to recognize that the Americas were different and that the lessons
learned in the course of medieval expansion were not necessarily directly applicable to the
New World.
The second set of volumes deals with two inter-related issues; first, the role of religion
in shaping the medieval response to the world beyond Europe and the perceptions of non-
Europeans that circulated throughout Europe. The Christian responsibility for preaching to all
mankind encouraged missionaries to move beyond the geographical frontiers of Christendom
to preach to infidels who lived along those frontiers. Early modem overseas expansion,
Catholic and Protestant, renewed this notion of mission on a large scale. A further volume
 GENERAL EDITORS’ PREFACE xi

in this category deals with European knowledge of the world beyond Europe. Much of this
knowledge came from missionaries, especially Franciscan friars, and from merchants such as
Marco Polo who had visited China, India, and the Islamic world. Missionaries and merchants
subsequently wrote down their observations about these worlds, providing their fellow
Europeans with the earliest first-hand information about the eastern world, information that
shaped the fifteenth-century search for a new route to Asia.
The third group of volumes focuses on the other expanding societies that Latin Christians
encountered in the course of expansion. These volumes demonstrate how expansion led to
interaction with other societies, some expanding, others contracting. The Byzantine Empire
ruled a Christian society that became increasingly estranged from the Latin West over
theological and cultural issues between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries. To some
extent, the Byzantines found themselves caught between two expanding societies, the Latin
Christians of Europe and the Muslims who had emerged from Arabia in the seventh century,
eventually conquering a great deal of territory that the Byzantines once ruled. The crusades
that Europeans launched at the end of the eleventh century aimed at assisting in the defense of
the Byzantine Empire and at freeing the Holy Land from Muslim hands. As things turned out,
however, the crusaders were not interested in restoring the lands to Byzantine control. They
sought instead to carve out kingdoms for themselves at the expense of both the Muslims and
the Byzantines.
Muslim expansion was not only at the expense of the Byzantines, however. From the
mid-seventh century to the late seventeenth, Muslim expansion also had a serious impact
on Western European development. Christian armies encountered Muslim societies in Iberia
where a several-centuries long series of wars led to the creation of numerous small states.
At the other end of Europe, Muslim expansion through the Balkans from the fourteenth
century to the seventeenth century blocked European expansion eastward and pushed the
boundaries of Latin Christendom back as traditionally Christian kingdoms such as Hungary
fell to Turkish armies. European expansion into the African Atlantic began in the fifteenth
century partly in order to find a route to Asia that would outflank the Muslim-dominated
eastern Mediterranean.
Another society whose expansion impinged on Europe was the Mongol Empire that
Genghis Khan (1162-1227) created. On the one hand, the Mongols wrought a great deal of
havoc on the eastern frontiers of Christian Europe as well as on the Muslims in the Near East.
On the other hand, Mongol control of the routes between Europe and Asia made it possible for
European merchants and missionaries to travel back and forth, thus providing Europeans with
more accurate knowledge about the East than they had ever possessed before.
The collapse of the Mongol Empire in the fourteenth century made possible the creation
of new states out of the Mongol domain. From the perspective of Western Europe the most
important of these successor states was Moscow whose rulers embarked upon a policy of
expansion that eventually led to the creation of a Russian Empire. This empire not only
xii GENERAL EDITORS’ PREFACE-

succeeded to the Mongol hegemony in Central Asia, it also took over the Byzantine Emperor’s
role as leader and defender of Orthodox Christianity, identifying Moscow as the Third Rome
and heir to the Byzantine tradition. Subsequent expansion brought the Russians into conflict
with peoples of the Latin West, Islam, and China. Russian expansion eventually extended
through Siberia, across the Bering Strait to the North American mainland.
The expansion of Europe between 1000 and 1492 provided the foundation upon which
modem expansion built. This first stage of European expansion was a part of a larger process,
global age of expansion. This series traces the origins of a vital aspect of modernity back into
the Middle Ages and sets an early chapter of the rise of Europe in the context of the history
of the world.

James Muldoon and Felipe Fernández-Armesto

General Editors
 Introduction

In recent decades a traditional image of the European Middle Ages as a static period of
primitive economies, fragmented jurisdictions and obscurantist learning dominated by
religion has been qualified, when not actually discarded, through an awareness of how
economically creative, politically decisive and culturally dynamic the period between the
twelfth and the fifteenth centuries was - that is, what can be conventionally defined as the
Late Middle Ages. These were also four centuries marked by the territorial and maritime
expansion of Latin Christendom.1 One of the many legacies of this period that contributed to
the emergence of Western Europe as a leading civilization in world history was the growth of
empirical ethnographies. Of course, when compared with the growth of travel writing and the
historiography of colonial imperialism, and indeed knowledge of exotic societies, civilized
or savage, in the early-modern period, the medieval contribution seems indeed modest. Nor
is ethnography as obviously significant as sailing ships and firearms are for the history of
the global expansion of Europe. It is nevertheless the case that some of the key foundations
of the ethnographic genres that became so prominent after the sixteenth century were laid in
the late Middle Ages. Moreover, medieval ethnographic texts articulated European views of
other cultures no less decisively than would be the case after the Renaissance. The growing
attention paid by historians to these medieval ethnographies is therefore justified not only
for the important insights that their study offers into what has been called ‘the medieval
expansion of Europe’, but also for what they add to our understanding of the cultural roots of
the ‘western divergence’, by which early-modern Europe emerged as historically unique in a
global context.
For the purposes of this volume of selected essays, and for practical reasons, the rich
historiography concerning the encounters between Latin Christians, Islam and Judaism has
not been represented (although it should be found elsewhere in the same series).2 However,
it is important to emphasize that European perceptions of cultural diversity, always mediated
to some extent by religious considerations, encompassed at its most fundamental level a
confrontation with peoples of the two rival Biblical religions. Either as religious minorities
under Christian rule, or as political enemies in the case of the long Islamic frontier extending
from Spain to the Middle East, Jews and Muslims were always the primary others of European
Christians. A case could be made for including Oriental Christians - Greeks, Armenians,

1 J.R.S. Phillips, The m edieval Expansion o f Europe (Oxford, 1988); Robert Bartlett, The making o f
Europe. Conquest, colonization and cultural change 950-1350 (Harmondsworth, 1993).
2 Jim Muldoon is preparing a parallel volume, Travellers, Intellectuals, and the World Beyond
M edieval Europe which will include a number of articles concerned with the scholastic and missionary
traditions.
xiv INTRODUCTION

Nestorians, Jacobites and other churches considered ‘heretical’ - within a similar category. In
my discussion below, therefore, this dimension will be briefly considered.
Let us, as a starting point, acknowledge some non-European perspectives. Although the
importance of Arab and Persian geographical and historical literature has long been recognized,
including the genre of the rihla which described a form of extended pilgrimage within Islam,
there is still much to be learned from a systematic comparison of European and non-European
ethnographic genres. The use of travel accounts to describe other cultures was far from
uniquely European, and important traditions existed not only in Islam, but also in China, for
example under the early Ming, when both extensive maritime expeditions and land embassies
were professionally recorded. Ambassadorial reports can be particularly illuminating of the
empirical potential of those genres, because political envoys were under pressure to report
accurately about foreign courts and to find common grounds of understanding that transcended
religious definitions. When we consider for example accounts of early-fifteenth century
Persian embassies from Timurid Herat to China and India alongside the near-contemporary
account of a Castilian embassy to Timur’s court, or the earlier descriptions of the Mongols
produced by Franciscan envoys such as William of Rubruck, what seems most striking is the
universality of the capacity for descriptive empiricism. It is also pretty clear that ethnocentric
attitudes were prevalent in all maj or cultural traditions, although the particular modalities could
differ (hence Chinese travellers constructed their sense of cultural superiority on the basis of
Confucian ideals, with little reference to the religious categories that were so determinant for
both Christian and Muslim writers). Finally, it is also quite remarkable the extent to which
notions of civilization inspired by urban culture and its artistic products were analogous,
whilst not even the most religiously bigoted observers were unwilling to praise some foreign
customs as acceptable on the basis of a limited form of pragmatic relativism.
From this comparative perspective, what seems especially notable in the trajectory of
the Latin West is not simply the emergence of a growing sense of cultural confidence after
the twelfth century (at the same time that the central lands of Islam suffered from numerous
waves of conquest and devastation), but also the increasing importance of the genre of
empirical ethnographies within the cultural system. Yet, however influential, a book such as
Marco Polo’s was a rarity in medieval Europe, and it was only during the Renaissance that
the growing disparity with China and Islam in the development of the ethnographic genres
becomes entirely obvious. In other words, what is most distinctive of Europe is the genre’s
long-term ‘impact’ rather than its ‘empirical potential’, and, from a comparative perspective,
what needs emphasizing is the multiplication of original writings over time, their increased
circulation, and their more authoritative status as a ‘scientific’ discourse.3
Whilst cultural ethnocentrism and the religious justification for conquest and enslavement
were far from being something exclusive to Europe, it remains nevertheless important to note
the extent to which fundamentalist attitudes in the Latin Church inspired religious intolerance

3 I offer this argument more extensively in my ‘Late-medieval ambassadors and the practice of
cross-cultural encounters 1250-1450’, in Palmira Brummett (ed.) The ‘B o o k ’o f Travels: Genre, Ethnology,
Pilgrimage 1250-1700 (Leiden, 2009): 37-112.
 INTRODUCTION XV

and, more generally, negative attitudes towards other cultures. If at one end of the theological
spectrum Augustinian views encouraged the idea that there could be no salvation outside the
Church and that therefore deviations of belief and worship were devilish and idolatrous, the
more rationalist philosophies of the scholastic period also led to the assumption that the truth
of Christianity was not only universal, but also corresponded to the supposedly rational norms
of European civil life and morality. The distinction between faith and civil customs - between
religious law and secular law - was theoretically possible, for example in Thomas Aquinas’
theology, but not always consistently observed, especially when applied to societies perceived
to be barbarian (most obviously nomadic peoples).4
In fact, the role of reason in the theology of salvation remained notoriously tricky. Although
Christian writers, notably Augustine, had consistently emphasized the need for faith (‘seek to
believe that you may understand’), late medieval apologists and missionaries, especially the
Dominicans, also developed the assumption that natural science was fully compatible with
faith, and that the most rational peoples - those most civilized - should be especially prone to
accepting the truth of Christianity. As the early fourth-century Latin apologist Lactantius had
suggested in his Divine Institutes, it could be said that whilst human reason was not sufficient
to know divine truth, it nevertheless made it possible to create the antechamber to true wisdom
by proving to others, without recourse to contested scriptural authorities, that Christianity was
more rational than any other religion, whether idolatrous/polytheist or heretical/monotheist
(and of course atheism, the denial of Providence, was obviously untenable, as all the
mainstream ancient schools had already proved in their polemics against Epicureans).5 This
rationalizing impulse, revived after the twelfth century, gave Latin Christians a sense of cultural
superiority, a temptation even to seek to prove their religion through reason alone, as Ramon
Llull’s convoluted arguments with Jews, Muslims and gentiles exemplify. Latin confidence
was made possible by military strength and only truly shaken when Providence seemed to
turn decisively against Christians: as the Dominican Riccoldo da Montecroce revealed in
an agonized letter to God written in Baghdad following the fall of Acre, in practical terms
the only argument that truly mattered was not theological, but rather whose side was God
supporting, with miracles or simply through history: in the face of the prosperity of Islam ‘it
seems that you, God, have turned yourself into the executor of the Koran’.6

4 Aquinas’ strategy consisted of distinguishing the realm of rational norms (natural law) from the
realm of grace as expressed through direct divine revelation, which perfected, but did not contradict,
what human reason could discover in nature.
5 Hence the point of rational arguments was not to prove the faith, but rather to prove that the
doctrines of idolaters and heretics were inspired by demons and contrary to reason. The Jews, who had
the Law directly from God, were a different case, since their sin was a refusal to accept Christ - the
New Law - who had been born amongst them. So arguments with Jews were often conducted from
within scriptural authorities rather than philosophically. Whilst reason could be used to interpret the Old
Testament from a Christian perspective, its authority as Revelation could be assumed, and there was no
need for a rational defence of monotheism or monolatry.
6 ‘Epistolae quinque commentatorie de perditione Acconis 129Γ, ed. Reinhold Rôhricht, Archives
de Γ Orient Latin II (1884), 264-96.
xvi INTRODUCTION

Such doubts were rarely expressed. On the contrary, Europe’s success in the West (notably
in Spain) seemed to compensate for setbacks in the East, which in any case mainly affected
oriental Christians, and the assumption that the ‘Franks’ had both Providence and reason on
their side made Latin Christians less, rather than more, tolerant of other religions. Seymour
Phillips suggests in his essay ‘The outer world of the European Middle Ages’ (Chapter 1)
that the aggression expressed in European attitudes towards overseas peoples in the fifteenth
century to some extent represented a transfer of the previous development of institutionalized
persecuting attitudes within Christian society - towards heretics and Jews for example.7 As
a matter of fact, close scrutiny of various late medieval encounters reveals that pragmatic
considerations (involving trading opportunities with Muslims, for example, or the royal
taxation of Jews) often took precedence over any blanket intolerance of religious and cultural
diversity. However, there is also abundant evidence suggesting that ecclesiastical campaigns
imbued with the crusading ideology or with millenarian expectations could undermine existing
traditions of limited tolerance, providing a channel for the diversion of social frustrations
against religious minorities, and eventually creating the basis for a state policy in pursuit of
religious uniformity, as happened in Spain in the fifteenth century.
The primacy of religious considerations notwithstanding, the more recent historiography
has emphasized the growing importance of empirically-based ethnographies after the twelfth
century, in a manner that did not necessarily oppose the religious assumptions of Christian
superiority, but which on the other hand often went beyond a mere desire to justify expansionism
and brutality by condemning cultural diversity. Although the number of such texts was
limited, their significance grew, as shown by the wide circulation of key travel accounts such
as the books by Marco Polo and Sir John Mande ville. These two most remarkable texts in
reality were radically different from each other, both in conception and empirical validity, but,
interestingly, medieval contemporaries could not usually have been in a position to appreciate
this. This is symptomatic of a wider problem, namely the complexity of the late medieval
genre of travel writing. The sheer diversity of authorial intentions, target audiences, levels
of circulation and generic assumptions has led to various attempts to classify the material
according the sub-genres.8As I myself suggested in my ‘The emergence of a naturalistic and

7 It was also in the fifteenth century that the persecution of witches became systematic. On the rise
of persecuting attitudes see Bernard Cohn’s classic study Europe s inner demons. An enquiry inspired by
the great witch-hunt (London, 1975), emphasizing the decisive role of the growth of the irrational idea
of a secret sect devoted to devil worship, and R.I. Moore, The Form ation o f a persecuting Society. P ow er
and deviance in Western Europe (Oxford, 1987), whose key point is not that religious persecution was
peculiar to the Latin West (it was not), but rather that it grew in importance in the High Middle Ages,
becoming remarkably institutionalized. It should however be noted that Christianity, as a result of its
complex theology, has a historically unparalleled tendency to spawn sectarian interpretations, hence any
period marked by a hegemonic Church organization has tended towards the definition and persecution
of heresies.
8 Amongst various attempts to sort out the problem of genre in medieval travel writing see Jean
Richard, L es récits de voyage et de pèlerin age (Tumhout, 1981); Mary Campbell, The witness and the
other world. Exotic European travel writing 400-1600 (Ithaca and London, 1988); J.P. Rubiés, ‘Travel
writing as a genre: facts, fictions and the invention of a scientific discourse in early-modern Europe’,
 INTRODUCTION xvii

ethnographie paradigm in late medieval travel writing’ (Chapter 2), geographical literature,
ambassadorial reports, mission and pilgrimage all contributed to a pre-humanistic ethnographic
impulse, which in turn must be related to the growth of naturalistic and historical narrative
forms, rather than to any desire to challenge traditional religious ideologies.9
Particularly symptomatic was the empirical turn in traditional pilgrimage narratives, the
religious genre par excellence. The prevailing model until the fourteenth century consisted of
describing those places that could be linked specifically to scriptural or miraculous events,
making abstraction of the changing historical reality of the Holy Land. By contrast, the
continuous juxtaposition of passages depicting the cultivation of piety in sacred locations with
descriptions of historical peoples and contexts becomes apparent in a number of fourteenth-
century vernacular narratives, beginning with that produced by the Franciscan Friar Niccolô da
Poggibonsi in 1350, where a combination of practical advice and sheer curiosity leads to vivid
descriptions of savage Arabs, oriental Christians, exotic animals (for example an ostrich), the
loss of a faithful interpreter in the desert, or a friendly visit to a synagogue.10 Here perhaps
the most significant underlying issue was the growth of self-centred narratives of personal
encounters in the historical world, remarkable precisely because pilgrimage was traditionally
understood as seeking the opposite effect, a transcendent experience, and Christian fathers
such as Augustine had warned specifically against curious travel, the perfect metaphor for the
distracting enjoyment of the amenities of the journey that was man’s life on earth. However
problematic, the late medieval tendency towards personal and curious observation is too
general to be accidental, and was given its most influential expression in the fictional travels
of Sir John Mandeville, whose core identity was that of a pilgrim - modelled, in this case,

Journeys 2000 [now in Travellers and Cosm ographers. Studies in the History o f Early M odern Travel
and Ethnology (Aldershot, 2007), I]. See also Scott D. Westrem, B roader Horizons. A study o f Johan n es
Witte de H esse s Itinerarius and M edieval Travel Narratives (Cambridge Mass. 2001).
9 The essay ‘The emergence of a naturalistic and ethnographic paradigm’, included in this volume
at the suggestion of the series editor James Muldoon, is an extract from the ‘Introduction’ written
together with Jas Eisner to our edited collection Voyages and Visions. Towards Cultural History o f
Travel (London, 1999). I am grateful to Jas Eisner for his willingness to see this extract published
separately and, more generally, for his insightful classicist’s contribution to my thinking about the topic,
as reflected especially in the sections of the ‘Introduction’ dealing with ancient travel and pilgrimage.
See in this respect now also Jas Eisner and Ian Rutherford eds. Pilgrim age in G raeco-R om an & early
Christian antiquity. Seeing the Gods (Oxford, 2005).
10 Fra Niccolô da Poggibonsi, ‘Libro d’Oltramare’, in P ellegrini Scrittori. Viaggatori Toscani
del Trecento in Terrasanta, ed. by A. Lanza and M. Troncarelli (Firenze. 1990). Other examples of
pilgrims of this type are the Irish Franciscan Symon Semeonis (1324), the Florentine patricians Simone
Sigoli, Lionardo Frescobaldi and Giorgio Gucci (1384), and later in the fifteenth century the German
Dominican Felix Fabri (1480/1483). The narratives by friar Niccolô and others are discussed in Kenneth
Hyde’s excellent essay ‘Italian pilgrim literature in the late Middle Ages’, published posthumously in
his Literacy and its uses. Studies on late m edieval Italy, ed. by Daniel Waley (Manchester, 1993), with
an emphasis very similar to the one I offer here. See also Christian K. Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrim age:
the literature o f discovery in fourteenth-century England (Baltimore, 1976), and A. Gabroïs, L e pèlerin
occidentale en Terre sainte au Moyen Age (Paris, 1998).
xviii INTRODUCTION

upon the German Dominican William of Boldensele, although massively amplified with other
(often historical) materials.11
In order to appreciate fully what the rise of ethnography represents, we must consider the
extent to which cultural relations could be dealt-with non-ethnographically. The traditions of
crusade and chivalry are obvious examples. The crusading experience stimulated the growth
of a lay historiography which implied encounters with Muslims and oriental Christians, but
this was seldom represented with ethnographic accuracy. Muslims were often presented in
epic chansons as pagan idolaters who worshipped Muhammad (the genre served as crusading
propaganda).12Better informed historians of the crusades like Guibert of Nogent did not deny
the monotheism of Islam but treated it as a profane heresy by a false prophet that debased true
religion. Subsequent chroniclers of military expeditions in the lands of the Byzantine empire,
from Geoffreoy de Villehardouin to Ramon Muntaner, could be historically-minded narrators
of controversial events, but repeatedly fell back to literary stereotypes about treacherous
Greeks and enemy Turks without expressing any ethnographic curiosity.13 Chivalric literature,
in turn, was full of allegorical journeys and encounters with fabulous figures of ‘otherness’,
monstrous or simply marvellous, but it was only in a few proto-novels of the fifteenth-century,
such as the notable Tirant lo Blanc, that realist settings began to appear.
Most notably, the rich literature of theological disputations against Jews and Muslims,
whether intended for internal consumption or (more rarely) for actual engagement with
opponents, revealed very little attention to religious practices. As Norman Daniel argued in
his classic study Islam and the West, the making o f an image, the dominance of polemical
intentions meant that negative legends about Muhammad abounded, and in those cases when
knowledge of Islam was better grounded, its presentation was notably distorted to facilitate
apologetic aims.14 Even those authors of the late thirteenth century committed to missionary

11 On Mandeville see, amongst others, the classic study by Josephine W. Bennett, The rediscovery
o f Sir Joh n M andeville (New York, 1954), the decisive work by Christiane Deluz, L e livre de Jeh an
de M andeville: une G eographie au XlVè siècle (Louvain, 1988) and, more recently, the sophisticated
analysis by Iain Macleod Higgins, Writing East. The “Travels o f Sir Joh n M andeville (Philadelphia,
1997). The importance of Boldensele’s L iber de quibusdam ultramarinis partibus (1336) as model for
Mandeville, who essentially ‘overwrote it’ on the basis of Jean le Long’s French version, is emphasized
by Higgins, pp. 64 ff. and also by Scott D. Westrem, who has publishd a similar kind of text by a
Dutch writer in his B roader Horizons. On the reception of Mandeville see also Rosemary Tzanaki,
M andeville's M edieval Audiences. A Study on the reception o f the Book o f Sir Joh n M andeville (1371-
1550) (Aldershot, 2003).
12 In a literary setting Muslims could nevertheless be more honourable than some Christians. A
notable example is the twelfth-century vernacular Castilian epic Poem o f the C id (written down c. 1207),
remarkable for its semi-historical setting, and where the hero is betrayed by his Castilian sons-in-law to
the horror of his Moorish feudatory ‘Avengalvón’ (Ibn Ghalbun).
13 For a recent overview of the complexity of the European engagement with the Levant see Michel
Balard, L es Latins en O rientXle-X Ve siècle (Paris, 2006).
14 Norman Daniel, Islam and the West. The making o f an Im age (Oxford, revised ed. 1993 [1st
ed. I960]). For a more recent discussion that seeks to go beyond Daniel’s shocked denunciation of
how distorted the Christian image of Islam was, in order to answer why this was the case, see also the
important synthesis by John Tolan, Saracens. Islam in the M edieval European Im agination (New York,
 INTRODUCTION xix

work through rational arguments in the frontier areas of the Mediterranean and Middle East,
such as William of Tripoli, Ramon Llull, or Riccoldo da Monte Croce, whose study of Arabic
and the Koran placed them in a position from which to construct a reasonably accurate image
of Islamic beliefs, were not particularly interested in representing Muslim practices, except
when they could be used to shame Christians into a more consistent moral behaviour.15 The
attitude of the Catalan (Majorcan) mystic and inventive apologist Ramon Llull is particularly
interesting, since his contact with Islam was sufficiently extensive for him to borrow literary
forms from Sufi poetry and even express admiration for the recitation of the Koran, yet at the
same time he believed that the Muslim intellectual elites were far too rational to seriously
accept the doctrines of Islam, and in his popular exposition of those doctrines he relied on the
stereotype of Muhammad the heretic and impostor. 16A similar dichotomy pertains to the rich
tradition of polemics with Jews: from the middle of the twelfth century, better knowledge of
Hebrew literature was framed within an apologetic context (aiming to prove Christianity from
rabbinic authorities) that did not lead to more tolerance, and often excluded any description
of actual Jewish life.17

2002). For the distorting role of apologetic aims in the parallel case of the Jews see the review-essay by
Harvey Hames, O n the Polemics of Polemic: Conceptions of Medieval Jewish-Christian Disputation’,
Studia Lulliana 37 (1997): 131-36.
15 For example, Riccoldo, P érégrination, 158: ‘We were surprised to find how a law of such
perfidy could produce works of such perfection. We will here report some of the works of perfection
of the Saracens, more for the confusion of Christians than to give praise to the Saracens’. In any case,
proponents of rational dialogue such as Llull were not necessarily unwilling to resort to crusade in
other circumstances. In this respect see Benjamin Kedar, Crusade and Mission. European approaches
towards the Muslims (Princeton, 1984), 159-203. For the general context of the missionary ideal of the
late thirteenth century see the classic discussion by Robert Burns S.J., ‘Christian-Islamic confrontation
in the West: the thirteenth-century dream of conversion’, American H istorical Review 76 (1971): 1386—
1434. The author of the De statu Saracenarum (1273), a work traditionally attributed to the Dominican
William of Tripoli, is perhaps the most exceptional in his positive attitudes towards Muslims (but not
Muhammad). This was only because he perceived them as much closer to Christianity than any other
writer. It was missionary ecumenism that justified a sympathetic portrayal.
16 John Tolan, “‘Saracen Philosophers secretly deride Islam’” , M edieval Encounters 8 (2002), 184—
208, emphasizes the growth of the idea that intelligent Muslims could not really believe in the Koran.
On Llull’s knowledge of Islam see Dominique Urvoy, P enser I Islam : les présu pposés islam iques de
l ART de Lulle (Paris, 1980), and Angel Cortabarria, ‘La connaissance de l’Islam chez Raymonde Lulle
et Raymond Martin, O.P.: parallèle’, C ahiers de Fanjeaux 22 (1987), 33-55. Where Urvoy insists on
the fragmentary nature of Llull’s knowledge of Islam, Cortabarria emphasizes that, compared with the
Dominican missionary and fellow Catalan Ramon Marti, author of the influential Pugio F id ei, Llull was
formally more inventive, allowing Muslim sources to influence his style (possibly because he sought to
address a wider audience, including laymen). However his description of Islam in the Doctrina P ueril,
a book written for children (1275), contains things such as the following: ‘The actions of Muhammad
were so villainous and obscene, and his words and actions so far from those that pertain to the holy life
of a profet, that the majority of those Saracens who are knowledgeable and of subtle intelligence and
high understanding do not believe that Muhammad was a prophet’.
17 The literature on attitudes to Jews is vast and growing. See especially Jeremy Cohen, The friars
and the Jew s: the evolution o f m edieval anti-Judaism (New York, 1982); Robert Chazan, D aggers o f
XX INTRODUCTION

The situation is notably different when analysing travel writers, whether ambassadors,
spies or even pilgrims. Whenever not trying to prove Christianity superior (and this was
seldom their main focus), these first-hand observers were often quite accurate ethnographers.
The emergence of this ethnographic impulse can not however be taken for granted: it was
not a default mode, but rather, one of the original creations of the late medieval period.
As we have seen, the evolution of pilgrimage narratives demonstrates that even a highly
conventionalized religious genre could be transformed from the abstract piety of the early
medieval centuries to the almost worldly curiosity that came to prevail after the thirteenth
century. Kenneth Hyde’s remarkable overview of the rise of ethnography in his provocatively
titled ‘Ethnographers in search of an audience’ (Chapter 3) offers a complex chronology of this
process, one that emphasizes the role of literate friars in the East in the thirteenth century, and
of literate merchants in the Atlantic in the fifteenth, with a long hiatus following the collapse
of the so-called pax Mongolica, when fresh ethnographies were rare. However, in his view,
writers were perhaps less decisive than audiences: it was the narrative skill of Rustichello da
Pisa that made Marco Polo’s description of the world - a geography rather than a travelogue
- possible and, indeed, more popular than the systematic ethnography of the Mongols by
John of Piano Carpini; even the latter had most impact through the summary in the clerical
encyclopaedia written by Vincent of Beauvais, which privileged the historical element over
the ethnographic.18 Hence, again, it was the life of genres that gave life to the expression of
individual creations and determined their impact.
The striking manner by which a writer like the Florentine Dominican Riccoldo da Monte
Croce could reveal deep contact with Islam during a stay in Baghdad in the early 1290s in
his narrative of pilgrimage (Itinerarius), and yet later deploy crude scholastic arguments in
order to misrepresent it as a confused, violent and permissive law that implicitly granted the
Christian gospels a higher status (a discourse developed in his Contra legem Sarracenorum of
c. 1300), is revealing of the fact that empirical knowledge was not the decisive issue, but rather,
how it was culturally constructed in specific contexts and for particular aims. In Riccoldo’s
case, a man who had transformed his pious pilgrimage into a bold preaching mission, the
sudden collapse of the remaining Latin enclaves in the Holy Land created a crisis of faith that

faith : Thirteenth-century Christian missionizing and Jew ish response (Berkeley, 1989); Anna Sapir
Abulafia, Christians and Jew s in the twelfth-century R enaissance (London, 1995); Jeremy Cohen,
Living letters o f the law: ideas o f the Jew in M edieval Christianity (Berkeley, 1999). Also, in French,
Gilbert Dahan, L es intellectuels chrétiens et les ju ifs au moyen âge (Paris, 1990), with a more positive
emphasis on cases where Christian theologians showed respect for Jews as expert interpreters of the
Hebrew Bible. Ramon Llull is again a peculiar case because, largely working outside the scholasticism
of the mendicant orders, he tried to develop an apologetic method that would connect to the intellectual
trends of his religious opponents, even subjecting the key Christian tenets of the Incarnation and the
Trinity to rational proof (not an orthodox move). For a fascinating exploration of his knowledge of
Jewish Kabbalah see Harvey Hames, The art o f Conversion. Christianity & K abbalah in the thirteenth
century (Leiden, 2000).
18 On the remarkably faithful editorial practices of Vincent of Beauvais see also Gregory Guzman,
‘The encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais and his Mongol extracts from John of Piano Carpini and Simon
of Saint-Quentin’, Speculum 49 (1974): 287-307.
 INTRODUCTION xxi

could only be met with a literary effort, a fresh attempt to believe in order to understand, as
he explained in his extraordinary prayers in the form of letters addressed to God.19 The next
step was a violent apology for Christian core beliefs undertaken upon his return to Florence,
an effort probably more important for buttressing his own Latin Christian identity than for its
potential effects amongst oriental audiences. The apparent virtues of Muslims, such as their
piety, could only be interpreted as a warning to Christians, and their worldly success against
Christians as a test of faith. Riccoldo’s polemic was built upon previous texts found in a
Florentine library (notably the 12th century Liber denudationis by a Spanish Muslim convert
to Christianity), rather than inspired by his own rather disturbing Eastern experiences.20
Perhaps we can generalize by saying that the more elaborate the theology of religious
difference, the weaker the ethnographic impulse: it was the encounter with pagans or ‘gentiles’,
rather than with Muslims, Jews, or oriental Christians, that generated the most detailed
empirical descriptions of exotic customs, rituals and beliefs. When dealing with ‘gentiles’
the religious categories were vaguer, the polemical tradition almost non-existent, and there
was little opportunity to limit the argument to the interpretation of a contested tradition of
scriptural authority, pitting authentic against non-authentic text, or, when books were held
in common reverence, the correct interpretation against the incorrect one. When after the
thirteenth century Buddhists, Brahmins and shamans were actually encountered, they had
little in common with the (purely) philosophical gentiles that a few Christian apologists such
as Abelard, Llull or Aquinas had been debating against. Peter Jackson’s analysis of William of
Rubruck’s account of the Mongols amply demonstrates that missionaries could, when acting
also as ambassadors, become accurate ethnographers, whilst Kenneth Hyde emphasizes the
careful planning that went into John of Piano Carpini’s Ystoria Mongalorum, behind the
apparent simplicity of its ecclesiastical Latin: his was a ‘literary and intellectual achievement
of a high order’. However, it is also clear that the fact that the Mongols were a novel pagan
presence helps explain the curiosity of these Franciscan envoys for recording their customs.
Similarly, Riccoldo da Monte Croce was fascinated by the savage customs of Turcomans,
Tartars and Kurds whom he encountered in his journey from the Holy Land to Tabriz, but said
little about oriental Christians and Jews, other than to oppose their heretical views. It is also
true that the Dominican friar’s personal narrative was less vivid than William of Rubruck’s:
next to the historical legends picked up in his travels and the theological condemnations found

19 Riccoldo, ‘Epistolae’. The remarkable depth of this crisis of faith led the friar to openly question
why God had not spared the many good Christians of Acre, including many saintly Dominicans, in order
to punish a few impious ones (reversing his mercy towards the people of Sodom, who would have been
spared provided only ten just men could be found). The only reply he received was that God’s power, as
shown in the Sacred Scriptures, was arbitrary.
20 For a discussion of the sources of Riccoldo’s Contra legem Sarracenorum with an edition of the
text see J.M. Mérigoux, ‘L’ouvrage d’un frère prêcheur en Orient a la fin du XHIe siècle’ in M emorie
Dom inicane 17 (1986): 1-144. On the L iber denudationis see Thomas Burman, Religious p olem ic and
the intellectual history o f the M ozarabs (Leiden, 1994).
xxii INTRODUCTION

in the libraries of the preaching order, the account of what Riccoldo actually experienced
pales into insignificance.21
There can be no doubt that the Mongol conquests had a decisive impact upon European
ethnographic genres after the thirteenth century. The fact that the ‘Tartars’ were classified as
gentiles was of course relevant, but the competition to convert them to Roman Christianity
was also stimulated by the huge geopolitical consequences of their sudden emergence in
Eastern Europe and the Middle East (and the complex relationship between diplomatic and
religious roles remains one of the key issues for interpreting the mendicant embassies). Theirs
was a vast and aggressive empire which, for many decades, made it possible for people, goods
and cultural influences to travel relatively easily across the whole Eurasian mainland, from
the distant countries of the Franks in the barbarian west to the richest prize of all, Cathay
in northern China. For Europeans the ‘Tartars’, most notorious for their cruelty, obviously
represented an immediate threat, but perhaps more significant, in the long term they were also
a potential ally against a more immediate common enemy, in particular after they successfully
settled in Persia, where the Ilkhans made their capital in Tabriz. The contemporary collapse of
the crusading states of Outremer together with the steady retreat of the Greek empire, under
the combined pressures of the Mamluk restoration in Palestine and the advance of the Turks in
Anatolia, created a structure of diplomatic exchanges and missionary dreams (mainly led by
the papacy) that would outlast the conversion of the Ilkhans to Islam, casting a shadow until
the seventeenth century.
This geo-strategic re-alignment, whilst causing immediate destruction to both Eastern
Christianity and many Islamic lands, also coincided with a growth in military power, economic
sophistication and cultural confidence in the Latin West. It gave European writers of the late
thirteenth century a strategic vision of world geography that a variety of practical genres, lay
and religious, were ready to articulate. European descriptions of Asia all the way to India
and China, such as Marco Polo’s rather exceptional Divisament dou monde (c.1298), became
suddenly possible, as did a substantial amount of missionary accounts, from the early efforts
by John of Piano Carpini and William of Rubruck amongst the Mongols of Central Asia
to, a few decades later, the travels in India and China of Odoric of Pordenone and John of
Marignolli, also Franciscan friars.22 The detailed accounts of the Mongols written by John of

21 This priority of the legendary leads to some incongruities, such as when after describing how
the Kurds were known to be murderers, robbers sand betrayers, he notes that they actually treated him
with great hospitality at a time of great need! See Riccoldo, Pérégrination en Terre Sainte et au p roch e
orient. Lettres dur la chute de Saint Je a n d'Acre [Latin text with facing translation], ed. by René Kappler
(Paris, 1997), 120.
22 A few Dominicans also reached India, for example Jordanus Catalani of Severac, but they tended
to be more active in Persia and Armenia. After 1318 a formal division of missionary areas had been
agreed, with the Franciscans in charge of the Mongol lands all the way to Cathay, and the Dominicans
responsible for Iran and India. On these various missions to the East and European relations with the
Mongols see Jean Richard, La papau té et les missions catholiques en Orient au Moyen Age (XIIIe— XVe
siècles), 2nd ed. (Rome, 1998). On some obscure episodes, such as the identification of Ghinggis Khan
with Prester John in the ‘Relation of David’, or the account of the Mongols by Simon de Saint-Quentin,
see also his Au delà de la P erse et de L Arménie. L ’Orient Latin et la découverte de lA sie intérieure
 INTRODUCTION xxiii

Piano Carpini and Simon of Saint Quentin were incorporated with astonishing rapidity into
the Speculum Historiale of the French Dominican Vincent of Beauvais (c.1254), perhaps
the most important encyclopaedic synthesis of the Late Middle Ages. The crusading ideal
generated more direct ethnography and attention to oriental sources during its messy retreat
than at the time of its apparent initial success, that is, when it coincided with an expansion
of scientific and narrative genres. It is symptomatic that in this context, in 1307 the exiled
Armenian prince Hayton (Hetoum) would preface his appeal to a joint Latin-Mongol crusade
that would restore the fortunes of the Christian kingdom of Lesser Armenia (Cilicia) with a
substantial account of the peoples of the East from Syria to Cathay, as well as a history of the
Muslim dynasties and mostly of the ‘Tartars’. Much of this was based on personal observation
and stories gathered at the Mongol courts in places such as the cosmopolitan city of Tabriz.23
(It was also in Tabriz that Rashid ad-Din was then preparing his universal history, written in
Persian for his Mongol patrons, with chapters on India, Cathay and ‘the Franks’.)
As the fourteenth century advanced, direct contacts became more difficult, but in Europe
the new ethnography of the East continued to be copied and translated, summarized and
propagated by chroniclers and encyclopaedic writers, and assembled in vernacular collections
such as that created in French by the Benedictine monk Jean le Long of Ypres in 1351, who
in this way made it possible for someone, perhaps himself, to write the popular travels of
John Mande ville (Mande ville’s account of the East is primarily taken from Pordenone’s
vivid travelogue). Fresh ethnographic materials were also integrated in a remarkably
systematic fashion into revolutionary mappamundi\ one such was the Catalan Atlas prepared
by the Majorcan Jew Abraham Cresques in the 1370s, who complemented the navigational
empiricism of the portulan charts with the legends of Marco Polo’s account of the far East to
inaugurate a tradition of world maps influential until the expeditions of Columbus.
Few of these writings were entirely empirical, since all combined personal observations
with hearsay, and much of the latter tended towards emphasizing the marvellous. As Peter
Jackson notes in his essay ‘William of Rubruck in the Mongol empire: perception and
prejudices’ (Chapter 9), even the most personal of narratives contained a great deal of
inaccuracy and misunderstanding, manifested for example in the friar’s difficulties making
sense of Buddhism or distinguishing it from Manichaeism. The importance of the legend
of Prester John also testifies to the continued impact of the ideological wishful thinking that

(Turnhout, 2005). In English J.R.S. Phillips, The M edieval Expansion o f E urope, chapter 5, offers a
good summary.
23 The F lo r des estoires de la terre d ’Orient was dictated to Nicholas Faulcon at Poitires (where
Hayton stayed as a Premonstratensian monk) at the request of pope Clement V, and then was translated
into Latin. It deserves more attention from scholars, not only because of its pervasive influence as a
source of geographical knowledge, but also as prime example of the cultural mediation exercised by
oriental Christians connected to the crusader estates. Prince Hayton was in exile as part of the factional
struggle in Cilician Armenia - he was a member of the pro-Latin faction that collaborated with the
House of Lusignan in Cyprus. It is likely that the crusading treaty was written separately. One must
still consult the edition and study by C. Kohler in R ecueil des Historiens des croisades. Documents
Arméniens, II (Paris, 1906).
xxiv INTRODUCTION

underlay relations with the East: the myth of the Christian priest-king who would join forces
with the Latin Christians for a restoration of the crusade, originally inspired by the Qara-
Khitai’s decisive defeat of the Seljuq Sultan in 1141, was little more than a primitive version
of the later idea that the Mongols would convert to Roman Catholicism and crush the Muslim
powers of the Middle East. Although Rubruck could assert that reports about the conversion
of various Mongol khans to Christianity had been exaggerated by self-interested Nestorian
Christians (whom he considered profoundly ignorant in any case), in Europe the legend of the
Christian ally not only persisted, but indeed was revived in the most extraordinary sequence
of transformations, to eventually inspire the Portuguese in their Atlantic explorations of the
fifteenth century. In his illuminating essay ‘Continental drift: Prester John’s progress through
the Indies’ (Chapter 4), Bernard Hamilton shows how, from the twelfth century, and in a
variety of crusading contexts, fabricated letters and obscure prophecies were conveniently
attached to specific potential allies as situations arose, with very little concern for geographical
rigour.24 By 1221 Ghinggis Khan himself had become Prester John as one ‘King David’, his
recent destruction of the Christian Georgian army notwithstanding. A few decades later a
better informed William of Rubruck suggested that Prester John should rather be related to the
Nestorian Turkic Khans of Central Asia belonging to the Naiman and the Kerait tribes. The
fact that Marco Polo eventually recounted the defeat and utter subjection to Ghinggis Khan
of the leader to the Keraits Toghril (Wang Khan), whom he openly identified with Prester
John, and mentioned that his descendant George was a Christian and a vassal of Kubilai,
did not prevent, but rather encouraged, the final migration of the myth to Christian Ethiopia,
where, throughout the 14th century, the Solomonic dynasty was able to expand southwards
and then initiate a diplomatic exchange with Latin powers such as the kings of Aragon.
Paradoxically, the Ethiopian Negus was a monophysite, that is, he entertained a very different
kind of Christological doctrine, one quite opposite to the Nestorian. What this reveals is not
utter disregard for geography, let alone theology, but rather the process of accommodation to
new empirical realities of a powerful myth that retained its political relevance. Hence there
was not a pure religious mythology of the Prester John, but rather a continuous tension and
compromise between ideological dream and historical reality.
A similar tension between traditional ideas based on literary stereotypes and new realities
affected images of the peoples of India, although in this case the literary tradition was
particularly strong due to the existence of various classical sources, whilst actual contacts
were remarkably limited until Marco Polo late in the thirteenth century, and even then never
as intense as with Armenia, Persia and Central Asia. This combination produced a remarkable
persistence of fabulous themes, what in his essay (Chapter 5) Jacques Le Goff calls ‘an
oneiric horizon’, which he relates specifically to the ‘mediocre’ collection of Hellenistic-
Latin geographical sources available to Europeans, including the Ptolemaic idea of a closed
sea, so confusing for fifteenth-century cartographers. India, a vast expanse of ill-defined and
often shifting contours, became for centuries the land of the marvellous, both in positive and

24 See also Charles F. Beckingham, ‘The achievements of Prester John’ [1966], reprinted in his
Betw een Islam and Christendom (London, 1983).
 INTRODUCTION XXV

in negative terms. It was the place where paradise, but also the monstrous races described by
Pliny, could be located: a land where nature experimented with freaks (the point that marvels
represented extreme nature rather than anti-nature was important to Christian theologians
like Augustine) Jacques le Goff, venturing into a kind of psychoanalysis of the collective
medieval mentality, interprets it also as a space of liberation, an anti-Mediterranean, a space
opposed to rational civilization. Whilst it can be argued - as I have done elsewhere - that
most of the marvellous elements described by actual travellers such as Marco Polo derived
from oriental hearsay rather than expressing a collective mentality shaped by the weight of
centuries of literary and iconographie influences, there is no denying that no sober description
of India was produced in Europe until the humanist Poggio Bracciolini subjected the Venetian
traveller Nicolô Conti to a rigorous interview in fifteenth-century Florence.25
One area in which the literary tradition of antiquity exercised a great influence was in the
emphasis on marvels and monsters, which medieval authors, following the classical precedent
(for example Pliny and Solinus), tended to locate at the extremes of the world. It is important to
distinguish the general idea of the marvellous, which simply referred to what is extraordinary
and worthy of note, for example peculiar products, animals and customs, from the more
specific theme of the monstrous races, which could suggest a transgression from the laws
of nature, and had been given an utterly ethnocentric religious interpretation by Augustine
(God could never have erred, hence he may have created monstrous races in the East so that
Christians be less questioning of occasional monsters in their midst!). There was nevertheless
an easy overlap between the two themes, since the most marvellous was often that which
seemed unnatural. Whilst empirical travellers such as Marco Polo were understood to tell
marvellous stories, included the tale of the dog-headed people from the Andaman and Nicobar
islands (also reported in Arab sources), they were also prone to dismiss other tales as fabulous.
By contrast, the less empirical accounts were those most reliant on previous literature and
therefore more prone to seek to confirm or elaborate existing mythical representations, within
a pure logic of self-representation.
The relative rarity of detailed empirical ethnographies such as those produced by the
Franciscan missionaries or by lay travellers such as Marco Polo not only made it difficult to
establish their superior credibility, but also ensured that there was no linear progression from
fabulous accounts to sober ones. An example of this is the Mirabilia Descripta by Jordanus
Catalani, a Dominican engaged in serious missionary work in fourteenth-century India (he
became Bishop of Quilon in 1329), but apparently more interested in witnessing exotic
marvels than in producing a balanced and informed assessment of the lie of the land. What
he sought was not pure fantasy, but rather to record the novel and the extraordinary of, in his

25 Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology, chapter 3. Le Goff must also be corrected in relation to Conti’s
saying about the three eyes of the world - the ‘Indians’ had two, the Franks one, and the other nations
were blind. These ‘Indians’, as I have argued, are in fact the Cathayans (Chinese). See Rubiés, ‘Late
medieval ambassadors’, 40-55.
xxvi INTRODUCTION

own expression, ‘another world’.26 He did so in a rather disorderly way, failing to transmit a
clear sense of the geography of India.27 Hence, amongst descriptions of mangoes and coconut
trees he repeated (obviously from hearsay) the popular story of the dog-headed islanders,
revived the traditional idea that one could find many precious stones with special ‘virtues’,
and emphasized that the darker people were, the more attractive they were considered. He
also offered an account of the sati sacrifice, a description of idolatrous rites, and a confused
catalogue of gentile sects, but never a description of a city or a court.
This emphasis on the marvellous, supported by a mixture of observations and hearsay,
was not peculiar to the European image of India. Gerald of Wales began his description
of Ireland (Topograhia Hibernica) of c. 1188 by noting that the West no less than the East
produces wonders of nature (it was indeed his aim to restore the balance by giving an account
of the western marvels). He went on to distinguish the truly miraculous from those things
that were marvellous in themselves, that is, placed by nature in the appropriate climates, and
which he subsequently sought to rationalize (these included stories of fish with golden teeth,
men who were half oxen, or bearded women).28 Assuming of course a religious vision by
which miracles were entirely possible, the obvious question about marvels was not accuracy,
but rather interpretation. Marvels, in other words, were an expression of divine power, but
because (as declared by Augustine) the created world was the greatest marvel of all, admiring
it was, more than anything, an exercise in religious piety, one which led from a consideration
of rare wonders in exotic islands to an increased appreciation of the wonder that is nature in its
everyday cycles. Admittedly, Gerald also had a political agenda: the wonders of Ireland could
testify to the worth of the colonizing project of Henry II of England, since they proved that the
land, with its mild and healthy climate, had a great deal of natural potential, in opposition to
the more famous East, were all the elements, from extreme heat to lions and, most especially,
poisons, invited death.
One interesting problem is interpreting historically the psychology of belief associated
with the medieval emphasis on marvels. If we assume that human rationality can operate
within a variety of cultural parameters, it is quite possible to make sense of the evidence of
belief in the marvellous without relying on the facile assumption of a collective mentality
that would be particularly credulous and lead, for example, to interpretations of ‘the other’
as monstrous. This is not to deny the existence of cultural stereotypes, but these were not

26 Jourdain Catalani de Sévérac, M irabilia Descripta. L es M erveilles de l ’A sie, ed. Henri Cordier
(Paris, 1925). There is a new edition with commentary Une im age de I ’orient au X IV siècle. L es M irabilia
D escripta de Jordan C aíala de Sévérac, ed. Chrisitne Gadrat (Paris, 2005). Jordanus’s rather unromantic
conclusion was that Christendom was the best land in the world, and with the best customs, if only
Christians kept their law properly.
27 There were different traditions concerning the division of ‘India’ into three parts. Jordanus’s
account of ‘The Third India’, namely East Africa, was particularly fantastic, because entirely based on
hearsay.
28 Bartlett, G erald o f Wales, chapter 4. On this point see also Caroline Walker Bynum, M etam orphosis
and identity (New York, 2001). As has often been noted, in later editions of the Topographia H ibernia
Gerald elaborated his interpretations with additional erudition and a great deal of moralizing.
 INTRODUCTION xxvii

fixed.29 Ethnographie sources, in particular, reveal a variety of attitudes that often reflect
the assumptions of different kinds of observers and audiences. Rudolf Wittkower’s classic
essay ‘Marco Polo and the pictorial tradition of the marvels of the East’ (Chapter 6) offers
an interesting example of this. Taking as starting point the tendency of audiences to interpret
a novel account of diverse peoples such as Marco Polo in relation to familiar categories,
he examines in particular the iconography of some an important manuscript of the early
fifteenth-century - part of a large collection of travel accounts dealing with the East - and
shows that to a large extent the artist departed from Marco Polo’s text. The simpler point
is that the artist did not have the first-hand experience of the traveller and had to rely on
the conventions of traditional imagery. The more subtle one is that a series of manuscripts
combining literary material (such as the romance of Alexander) with descriptions by actual
pilgrims and travellers could be unified by this type of iconography of the marvellous. An
aristocratic audience reading accounts of the East originally composed a century earlier, and
without access to fresh sources of information, need not have been particularly credulous in
order to accept this invitation to believe in traditional marvels without discriminating between
factual and legendary history. However, this should not imply a culturally-determined lack of
rationality. Attitudes could change easily if and when new literary and visual sources were
made available in sufficient numbers - something that happened in the sixteenth century.
In the meanwhile, the marvellous became most significant when supporting myths,
positive or negative. The duality of positive and negative marvels found at the extreme
of the inhabited world represented by India is also apparent in relation to its most famous
inhabitants, the Gymnosophists, soon identified with the Brahmans. Thomas Hahn’s ‘The
Indian tradition in Western medieval intellectual history’ (Chapter 7) examines the indirect
influence of the classical accounts of these Indian sages first written by Greek travellers who
accompanied Alexander, later summarized by Hellenistic historians and geographers (such
as Arrian and Plutarch), and finally elaborated in the multifarious Romance o f Alexander
of Pseudo-Callisthenes (c.300), with the various apocryphal writings derived from it.30 The
Alexander romance was eventually translated from Greek into Latin (most famously by Leo
of Naples in the tenth century) and various European vernaculars.31 What is interesting here is

29 On the theme of monsters see John Friedman’s classic study, The monstrous races in m edieval
art and thought (Cambridge Mass 1981); Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order
o f Nature, 1150-1750 (New York, 1998). More recently, Rhonda Knight, Saracens, demons a d Jew s:
making monsters in m edieval art (Princeton, 2003) and two interdisciplinary collections: Timothy Jones
and David Sprunger (eds.), Marvels, monsters and miracles. Studies in the m edieval and early-m odern
imaginations (Kalamazoo, 2002), and Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills (eds.), The monstrous M iddle
Ages (Cardiff, 2003).
30 Of particular importance for the Christianization of the Brahmans as ascetic contemplators, as
noted by Hahn, was the work of Palladius of Hellenopolis (in Bythinia), a fifth-century bishop keen
on the idea of the salvation of gentiles, as revealed in his De vita bragmanorum narratio, which led to
accusations of Origenism. Interestingly, a similarly liberal interpretation had been offered by Philo the
Jew. For a modern English edition with a very useful introduction see Richard Stoneman ed. Legends o f
Alexander the Great (London, 1994).
31 See also George Cary, The M edieval A lexander (Cambridge, 1956).
xxviii INTRODUCTION

the medieval ambivalence towards the Brahmans as emblematic figures of natural virtue, that
is, as rational philosophers. Taking as a starting point the historical encounter of Alexander the
Great with the naked philosophers of India, in particular two, Dandamis and Calanus, there
emerged an apocryphal exchange of letters between the heroic but morally flawed king and an
ascetic philosopher - the Collatio Alexandro cum Dindimo - which adapted the mainly Cynic
and Stoic themes of the ancient Greek sources to the Christianized image of a virtuous gentile
observing natural law, an image which was still relevant in the fourteenth century, when
John Mandeville came to describe India. However, there also existed an explicit patristic
rejection of the idea of pagan virtue, best exemplified by Augustine, which tended to dominate
in ecclesiastical culture, the efforts of rationalist philosophers like Abelard to proclaim the
sanctity of Dindimus notwithstanding. Thomas Hahn charts how Dindimus survived in the
Latin West by becoming ever more Christian, and indeed a vehicle for attacks on idolatry.
However, he does not consider the impact of late medieval ethnographies. When empirically
described in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by Latin travellers, whether lay writers
like Marco Polo or missionary friars such as John of Montecorvino, Odoric of Pordenone and
Jordanus Catalani, the Brahmans of India quickly emerged as the most notorious of gentile
idolaters, those who worshipped the ox for their god and even (Odoric of Pordenone noted)
sanctified themselves with οχ-dung. But the idea of a virtuous gentile did not entirely die
out in the face of what seemed like manifest idolatry. For Marco Polo it was Buddha, not the
Brahmans, who deserved praise: had he been a Christian, he would have been a saint.
If in the case of distant India the weight of literary tradition overwhelmed fresh
observations for many centuries, the active frontiers of Christendom North and West made
possible a number of encounters with ‘gentiles’ that found expression in the rise of empirical
ethnographies. Whilst the case of the Mongols, already reviewed, was crucial in the thirteenth
century, a much earlier missionary interaction had taken place with Celts and Slavs, and as
early as the eleventh century the ecclesiastical historian Adam of Bremen offered an empirical
description of Scandinavian and Baltic peoples, a tradition continued by Helmold of Bosau in
the following century when he recorded in some detail the idolatry of pagan Slavs. However,
the greatest ethnography of the twelfth-century Renaissance concerned the Irish and the
Welsh, who although Christian, were perceived as culturally alien by Anglo-Norman writers
like Gerald of Wales. As Robert Bartlett emphasizes in Chapter 8, the interest of Gerald’s
Descriptio Kambriae of 1194 is not simply its empiricism, but also the complexity of the
personality of a well-read writer living in a frontier society and moved by local piety, who,
for example, displayed his mixed heritage by writing both about how the Welsh should
be conquered, and how they should resist. Possibly the greatest achievement of Gerald’s
description of Wales was that it explained why the geography and economy of the land made
liberty the supreme value of its people, but prevented them from coming together to defend
it. In that context, moral polarities between virtue and vice (obviously inevitable in Gerald’s
ecclesiastical culture) did not lead to a simple moral condemnation of the cultural ‘other’.
By contrast, the earlier Topograhia Hibernica is more one-sided, as it was written clearly to
reflect the point of view of the Anglo-Norman invaders. It was also a work that made many
Another random document with
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 tics, 396
Sheif, 347
Sheikh, the, 380
Shemar, 283
Shiel, Lady, 154
Shiraz, 218
climate, 224
famine at, 253
game at, 221
gardens of, 223
ladies, 219
lambs, 220
pipe-clay, 334
priest, 140
unhealthiness, 224
water, 241
wine, 229
women, intrigues of the, 276
Shirazi, gaiety of the, 219
Shirts, 317
Shitūr Gūlū, 226
Shoemakers, 190
Shoes, 321
Shooting antelope, 88
from the saddle, 84
Shopkeepers, 189
Shrine at Kūm, 387
of a saint, 362
Shulwar, 321
Shūr ab, 387
Shūrgistan, 261
Shushan, the palace, 109
Sick-leave, 207
Sick-room, a Persian, 244
Signs of wealth of Imād-u-Dowlet, 112
Silence of young married women, strange, 132
Silver doors, 196
Singers, Persian, 114
Sinsin, 386
Sir A. Kemball, 208
H. Rawlinson, 109
F. Goldsmid, 56, 157
Oliver St. John, 350
Sitting, mode of, 318
Skilled house-decorators, 164
Slavery in Persia, 326
Sleepers in mosques, 197
Smoking, 31
Snakes, 307
superstition as to, 306
Snipe, 116
double, 107
Snow-chair, 272
in Turkey, 213
Socks, 321
Soh, 384
Souhāli, 326
Soup Gework, 143
Spears, 179
Spurious cavalry officer, 73
Staff, health of the, 296
Stages, list of, 411
Stanley, the traveller, 224
Steamer, Caspian, 211
Steelyards, 221
Stone doors, 142
mortars, huge, 360
Storing wine, 58
Story, Persian, 285
Story-teller, 44
Straw, cut, its uses, 175
Stripped, I am, 263
Students, cells of, 197
Studs of horses, 89
Substitute for bells, 139
Successful Armenians, 143
Suez, 342
Suffid Rūd, 400
Suicide of a scorpion, 249
Suleiman Mirza, 90
Summer palace, 372
Sunset gun, 284
Sunstroke, dangers of, 375
Supposed lioness, 35
Surmeh, 260
Susmani girls, 114
Susmanis, 108
Swamp, shooting in a, 117
Swollen eyes, 213
Syudabad Pass, 101
Syud at Kasvin, 208
Houssein, 71
Syuds, dress of, 320
Hassan and Houssein, 153
the three, their fate, 156

T⸺, Mr., 27
Tabriz maund, 220
Tager, 188
Takhtrowan, 368
Taking quinine, 398
Talár, 57
Talisman, 290
Talking lark, 94
Tame pigs, 302
Tame gazelle, 167
lion, 306
partridges, 308
Tanks, 198
Tannūr or oven, 335
Tarantass, 12
Tarantulas, 248
Tattooing, 323
Tax-man at Dehbeed, 133
Tax of turkeys, 144
Taylor, Consul, 212
Taziana, the, 380
Tazzia, 279
Tazzias, dervishes at, 281
T-cloths, marks on, 194
Teachers of religion and law, 338
Teetotaler, a, 380
Teheran, 28, 372
races, 214
Teleet, 136
Telega, 11
Telegraph office, 198
flight of Baabi women to, 154
Telegraph poles, wooden, 80
Temple at Kangawar, 107
Tenets of Baabis, 339
Tent for Tazzia, 280
pitching, 399
Tents, 107
“The Sticks,” 377
Thief-catching, 85
Thieves, gang of, 269
Thorns in feet, 267
Tiflis, 14, 17
“Tiger’s boy,” 341
Tiled dome, 196
halls, 197
mosque, 197
Tile inscription, 177
work gates, 372
Titles, 38, 289
Tobeh, 388
Toffee, expensive, 80
Token, custom of the, 250
Tomb of Cyrus, 355
Esther and Mordecai, 75
Hafiz, 279
Saadi, 278
Tombs of the Kings, 119
Tombstone bridges, 163
Toolahs, 306
Trade credits, 188
in Teheran, 373
Traders, economy of, 172
Trades, 197
Traffic in drink in Julfa, 141
Transit of Venus, 331
Trap-horses, 352
Travellers’ law, 132
Travelling in Persia, 413
when ill, 208
Treasure finding, 76
of Darius, 78
 trove in Julfa, 361
Trebizonde, 212
to Teheran, 213
Trees, sacred, 364
Tsaritzin, 406
Tumbakū, 30
Tūmbūn, 324
Turkeys, 375
in Julfa, 144
Turkish barber, 6
chibouques, 6
coffee-houses, 6
saddle, 7
use of, 24
Turkomanchai, 27
Turkoman horses, 104

Uncleanliness of Armenians, 316

Ungrateful baker, an, 183
Uniform, I appear in, 48
in Russia, 15
Unleavened bread, 335
Unripe fruit, eating of, 168
Ussher on the Meana bug, 217
tomb of Cyrus, 355
Ussher’s description of Persepolis, 217
Usury, 192
Utū-Kesh, 191, 333
Vaccination, 363
Vails, 68
Valliāt, 366
Valley of Yezdikhast, 261
Value of land, 175
Van cats, 305
Variable climate, 339
Varieties of kabob, 297
Vassilliardes, M., 401
Vegetables, 170, 300
Vegetation near Caspian, 400
Veil, the, 325
Venus, transit of, 331
Vienna, stay in, 4
Virgin, Pass of the, 350
Virtuoso, story of a, 37
Visit to Baabis, 201
Imād-u-Dowlet, 112
Visits, Persian, 28
Viticulture, 310
Volga, the, 405

W⸺, Mr., 133

Wages of servants, 67
Walker’s road, 350
Walling up alive, wholesale, 203
Walton, Mr. H. V., 137, 167
Want of roads, 248
Washerman, the, 333
Watch-dogs, 306
Watch-towers, 177
Water-fowl, 301
Water-melons, 169
Water of Shiraz, 241
Water-pipes, 29
Wedding of Kasim, 282
We find treasure, 80
Weighing, 221
corn, 192
Weights, 220
Well of death, the, 275
Wheat, 174
White eunuch, 39
Wholesale and retail, 188
walling up alive, 203
Wild asparagus, 168
ass, the, 308
ducks, 176
flowers, 173
geese, 116
pig, 177
sow, 178
Wine, Cholar, 229
cost of, 234
jars, 230
 Kerman, 235
Kishmish, 159
making, 232
mode of packing, 236
purity of, 235
sellers, Armenian, 142
Shiraz, 229
varieties of, 235
Winter room, my, 206
Wisdom of a judge, 184
Women, bastinadoed, 122
costume of, 323
educated, 339
execution of two, 122
hair of, 323
head-dress of, 131
of Shiraz, intrigues of, 276
out-door dress of, 325
Women, sentimentality of, 339
Woodcut, Persian facsimile, 287
Wrestling, 98

X⸺, Mr., 330

Yabū, 107, 348

Yakhjal, 240
Yapunjah, 319
Yari Khan, 78
Yarns, 329
Yezd, 162
marble, 114, 276
 nammads, 152
Yezdikhast, 261, 357
Yezeed, 283
Yezeedis, 126
Young pigs, 178

Zalābi, 284
Zambūreks, 52
Zangi, Spring of, 241
Zenda Rūd, 135, 193
Zerejumah, 317
Zergūn, 260, 354
Zil-es-Sultan, 146, 154, 203, 205, 365
accident to, 255
and his dogs, 366
and the bear, 227
boat of, 248
character of, 366
conversation with, 155
dress of, 257
his kalāat, 258
illnesses of, 149
petition to, 155
politeness of, 366
procession of, 256
prospects of, 199
rudeness of, 367
Zinjan, 154, 272
Zoban-i-Gūngishk, 359
Zoological Gardens, 35
 THE END.
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“The determination of the publishers of the ‘Minerva Library’ to
render the series attractive and representative of English literature of
all kinds, is strikingly displayed in this volume.... The book is well
printed and bound, and will be eagerly welcomed by all desiring to
obtain at a small cost a good edition of the works of the famous
humourist.”—Liverpool Courier.

Volume III.—Third Edition.

BORROW’S BIBLE IN SPAIN: The Journeys, Adventures, and
Imprisonments of an Englishman, in an attempt to circulate the
Scriptures in the Peninsula. By George Borrow, Author of
“The Gipsies of Spain.” With a Biographical Introduction by the
Editor, and Illustrations.
“Lovers of good literature and cheap may be commended to the
‘Minerva Library’ Edition of ‘The Bible in Spain,’ edited by Mr. G. T.