Medieval Ethnographies

European Perceptions of the World Beyond

Joan-Pau Rubies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351918619
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

From the twelfth century, a growing sense of cultural confidence in the Latin West (at the same time that the central lands of Islam suffered from numerous waves of conquest and devastation) was accompanied by the increasing importance of the genre of empirical ethnographies. From a a global perspective what is most distinctive of Europe is the genre's long-term impact rather than its mere empirical potential, or its ethnocentrism (all of which can also be found in China and in Islamic cultures). Hence what needs emphasizing is the multiplication of original writings over time, their increased circulation, and their authoritative status as a 'scientific' discourse. The empirical bent was more characteristic of travel accounts than of theological disputations - in fact, the less elaborate the theological discourse, the stronger the ethnographic impulse (although many travel writers were clerics). This anthology of classic articles in the history of medieval ethnographies illustrates this theme with reference to the contexts and genres of travel writing, the transformation of enduring myths (ranging from oriental marvels to the virtuous ascetics of India or Prester John), the practical expression of particular encounters from the Mongols to the Atlantic, and the various attempts to explain cultural differences, either through the concept of barbarism, or through geography and climate.

1
The Outer World in the European Middle Ages

Seymour Phillips

I. Columbus

ALTHOUGH the final significance of the discovery by the Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus of a series of islands previously unknown to Europeans in the western Atlantic during the autumn of 1492 is still a matter of dispute, there can be little doubt that this event proved to be a turning-point in the history both of the discoverers themselves and of the peoples whom they discovered. Even before Columbus had finished his fourth and final voyage in 1504, the Florentine businessman, explorer and self-publicist Amerigo Vespucci was writing about his own discovery of a “new world/’ while perceptive observers, like the Italian humanist Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, were beginning to realize that it would now be necessary to add a new continent to those of Europe, Asia, and Africa into which the land mass of the world had conventionally been divided since classical antiquity; and in 1507 the German cosmographer Martin Waldseemüller, named this new discovery as America in honour of Vespucci.¹ Within thirty years of the first voyage of Columbus, the conquest of the New World had been begun by the Castilian adventurer Hernán Cortés, and the globe itself had been circumnavigated by the few survivors of the expedition of Magellan. It is even possible that as early as the 1520s the shores of the continent of Australia had been sighted by Portuguese explorers.²

The profound upheaval in European understanding of the physical nature of the world that these events initiated and that was brought to a conclusion only at the time of the voyages of James Cook in the eighteenth century was accompanied by an equally profound transformation in European experience and understanding of mankind itself. Edmund Burke, writing in 1777, was to characterize the change as the unrolling of the “Great Map of Mankind,” so that “there is no state or Gradation of barbarism, and no mode of refinement which we have not at the same instant under our View. The very different Civility of Europe and of China; the barbarism of Tartary, and of Arabia. The Savage State of North America, and of New Zealand.”³ This process, the “clash of cultures,” “the fall of natural man,” or, in a more neutral phrase, “the discovery of man,”⁴ had begun both literally and symbolically the moment that Columbus set foot on the island he named San Salvador on 12 October 1492.⁵ Indeed, the very act of crossing beaches in order to land on islands has been shown to be one of the most potent metaphors available for the historian wishing to describe the encounters between peoples of different cultural backgrounds.⁶

However, the intention here is to explore some of the assumptions about the world and its peoples that may already have been implicit in the mind of Columbus in 1492 as well as in those of other European explorers of the late fifteenth century. Some important clues can be found in the letter that Columbus wrote early in 1493 while still at sea on the return from his momentous first voyage:

Since I know that you will be pleased at the great success with which the Lord has crowned my voyage, I write to inform you how in thirty-three days I crossed from the Canary Islands to the Indies, with the fleet which our most illustrious sovereigns gave me………………… When I reached Cuba, I followed its north coast westwards, and found it so extensive that I thought this must be the mainland, the province of Cathay’; ⁷……………… From there I saw another island eighteen leagues eastwards which I then named ‘Hispaniola’………………….. In this island of Hispaniola I have taken possession of a large town which is most conveniently situated for the goldfields and for communications with the mainland both here, and there in the territories of the Grand Khan, with which there will be very profitable trade.⁷

Despite his observation that on the island of Cuba “one of these provinces is called Avan, and there the people are born with tails,” Columbus also remarked,

I have not found the human monsters which many people expected. On the contrary, the whole population is very well made”;…. “Not only have I found no monsters but I have had no reports of any except at the island of ‘Quaris’, which is the second as you approach the Indies from the east, and which is inhabited by a people who are regarded in these islands as extremely fierce and who eat human flesh.⁸

The references by Columbus to “the Indies,” “the province of Cathay,” the “territories of the Grand Khan,” and to the city of “Quinsay” and the island of “Chipangu” (which Columbus mentions in his journal⁹) are a clear demonstration that he was, initially at least, convinced that the destination he had reached by a long and hazardous westward voyage across the mysterious Atlantic ocean was essentially the same one that had been reached by Marco Polo of Venice by the land route eastward across Asia in the 1270s, and his search for monsters in human form has obvious parallels in the narratives of Marco Polo and of other thirteenth- and fourteenth-century European travelers such as Giovanni di Piano Carpini, William of Rubruck, and John of Marignolli. None of this is at all surprising because it is well known that Columbus had read and annotated one of the early printed editions of the travels of Marco Polo, from which he had learned about the wonders of the dominions of the Great Khan in Cathay as well as about the island empire of Japan (Chipangu), which Marco Polo described but had not actually seen. Together with his assiduous readings of other fourteenth- and fifteenth-century authors and of newly published editions of classical authors, such as Claudius Ptolemy, Columbus’s mind was therefore well stocked with ideas and impressions about the wider world around him.¹⁰

II. Places

Despite the extensive contacts that existed between medieval Europe and other parts of the world, with the lands of the eastern Mediterranean, with large areas of Asia, with parts of Africa and its adjoining oceans, and with the North Atlantic and even North America,¹¹ understanding of what lay out in this wider world was not always accurate, and older ideas frequently coexisted with and sometimes took precedence over new and more reliable information.¹² Thus we find the persistent search, in which Columbus was only the latest participant, for strange races of men, descriptions of whom can be traced back to the writers of classical antiquity.¹³ Or, to take a more recent example, there was from the twelfth century the quest for Prester John, the supposed ruler of a Christian realm of immense power and wealth lying somewhere in the East, who was allegedly awaiting only the opportunity to come to the aid of a beleaguered Christendom against its Moslem opponents.¹⁴ But erroneous as they were, such ideas were part of the spur and the incentive for would-be explorers, and they were probably as influential in the fifteenth century as they had been in the twelfth or thirteenth.

A twentieth-century student of medieval Europe’s relations with and perceptions of the outer world can have a much broader view of the subject than his medieval predecessor: No thirteenth- or fourteenth-century traveler, for example, would necessarily know even what his own contemporaries had discovered about the world. Although it is possible that John of Monte Corvino might have heard reports of Marco Polo’s stay in China, which had ended shortly before his own arrival in Peking in 1294, there is no reason to suppose that Marco Polo knew anything of John. Similarly, it is most improbable that Ibn Battuta of Tangier, one of the greatest of all Moslem travelers, who visited India in the 1330s, probably visited China in 1346 and also crossed the Sahara in the early 1350s, and whose career is often compared with that of Marco Polo, ever heard of the Venetian’s exploits.¹⁵ A number of European travelers wrote about their experiences in Asia soon after the event: In some instances, like those of Giovanni di Piano Carpini in 1247 and Odoric of Pordenone in 1330, their accounts were widely read; in other cases, narratives that are now regarded as of great historical importance, such as those of the Franciscans William of Rubruck, who visited the court of the Great Khan at Karakorum in Mongolia in 1253-4, and John of Marignolli, who was in China in the 1340s, were either little known or were altogether unknown at the time they were written.¹⁶ But all these travelers did at least visit various parts of a continent whose existence was a familiar part of European knowledge: In the case of the Viking navigators from Iceland and Greenland who discovered and explored a part of the North American continent in the early eleventh century and who perhaps continued to go there as late as the fourteenth century, there is very little evidence that anyone outside their own ranks even knew of their exploits, let alone was influenced by them.¹⁷

Another difficulty arises from the nature of the records of medieval travel. Although it is possible for us to conclude that some contemporary or near-contemporary accounts were written with a considerable degree of objectivity and that others contain a substantial amount of imaginative writing, such distinctions would have been less apparent to a medieval reader and would probably have had little meaning. Outstanding examples are the narratives produced by Giovanni di Piano Carpini, who was sent as a papal envoy to the Mongol Great Khan in 1245, and William of Rubruck who wrote about the Mongols a few years later. Although both men were traveling at a time when the terrors of the Mongol attacks on Europe were fresh in their minds and were describing a society that was alien almost beyond imagining, they nonetheless succeeded in treating the Mongols with sympathetic understanding.¹⁸ However, in other cases, most notably perhaps the works commonly known as Marco Polo’s Travels and The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, their form is both an attraction to the reader and a barrier to a full understanding of the material they contain. It is well known that Marco Polo’s description of his travels was written for him around 1300 by a professional author, Rustichello of Pisa, who did not hesitate to incorporate highly colored passages to make his story more interesting, and also on occasions reused material from earlier works of his own. Exactly where Marco Polo’s contribution began and ended is difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain.¹⁹ On the other hand, there is no reason to suppose that Marco Polo did not actually go to India and China as he claimed. By contrast, the eponymous Sir John Mandeville did not visit any of the lands described in his travels, and probably never existed. Here we are faced with a skilfully written and very popular piece of literature by an unidentified author who probably intended both to entertain and to improve the minds of his readers and who made use of a wide variety of sources, representing both real and imaginary travels. It is also significant that of the four examples cited, Mandeville’s Travels was probably the best known and most widely read in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.²⁰

Although the spherical shape of the earth was well understood and serious attempts were made by classical writers, notably Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria in the mid-second century A.D. to supply details of latitude and longitude for all the important places on the earth’s surface, the inaccuracy of their results meant that throughout the classical and medieval periods there was a fundamental imprecision in spatial relationships. In the fifteenth century, for example, there was no agreement among European scholars on either the measurement of the circumference of the earth or on the East-West extent of Asia and Europe: The two most common estimates of the latter were 180 degrees of the earth’s circumference (a figure derived from Ptolemy) and 225 degrees (a figure quoted in the early fifteenth century by Pierre d’Ailly but derived ultimately from Marinus of Tyre, a predecessor of Ptolemy). Both calculations were overestimates, the true figure being about 130 degrees. The consequences for the calculations of Christopher Columbus, who also accepted Ptolemy’s considerable underestimate for the earth’s circumference, are well known.²¹ No classical or medieval European traveler, not even one as much traveled as Marco Polo, actually succeeded in traversing the full extent of Eurasia from ocean to ocean. But even if someone had done so, his conclusions would have been of little help because the separation of places was seen not so much in degrees of latitude or of longitude or in miles as in the time taken to cover the distance. For instance, it took Giovanni di Piano Carpini over a year in 1245-46 to travel by land from Lyons to the vicinity of Karakorum in Mongolia and John of Monte Corvino took over two years to travel by sea from Iran to China between 1291 and 1293-94, whereas Marco Polo’s land journey to China took about three and a half years from 1271 to 1274-75.

Although the compass was available for use at sea in the thirteenth century, and by the end of that century portolan charts were beginning to make it possible to navigate by following a compass bearing, long journeys on land were commonly made by the use of itineraries of the kind that had originally been designed for travel around the provinces of the Roman world. In principle, all the traveler needed to know was the place he was...