The Riddle and the Knight Read online

  While the eighteenth-century public may not have believed Sir John, they cheerfully lapped up his tall stories. But such popularity was short-lived. Victorian England found itself unamused by his book, and dismissed Mandeville as a charlatan and a liar who never even left England. In 1820 the critic Hugh Murray summed up the prevailing opinion when he denounced Sir John's book as "a pure and entire fabrication" which had been copied and pillaged from other books. "What he added of his own," he concluded, "consists quite exclusively of monstrous lies."

  The Victorian critics who did so much to bury Sir John's reputation started from the premise that he hadn't travelled at all, and they cited the tall tales as proof that his entire voyage was a fiction. But in doing so, they overlooked the fact that even men who definitely did travel in the Middle Ages recounted marvels they had clearly invented. They also ignored the fact that to sustain the fiction of having travelled—if indeed it was fiction—would have been no mean feat. Other writers who have attempted similar deceits have almost always come unstuck because of a simple error or foolish slip.

  Their attempt to blacken Mandeville's name by accusing him of copying from other travel books was similarly unfair. Medieval writers had a very liberal attitude to plagiarism, and it was deemed perfectly acceptable to lift interesting passages from other books and incorporate them into your own. Chaucer himself had few scruples when it came to borrowing stories from his contemporaries. Mandeville had copied vast chunks of William of Boldensele's Itinerarius, lifted wholesale from Vincent of Beauvais's Speculum Historiale, and transcribed verbatim from William of Tripoli's Tractatus de Statu Saracenorum. He had

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  Egypt: "The Sultan has four wives, of whom one shall be a Christian and three Saracens."

  Egypt: "[The Sultan's] men stand round with drawn swords in their hands."

  The Manuscript

  St. Catherine's monastery, Sinai: "Rooks and crows come in a great flock [and] each one brings in its beak ... a branch of ohve."

  Land of Amazon: "These women are noble and wise warriors [andj kings of neighbouring realms hire them to help in their wars."

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  Ethiopia: "There are some who have only one foot ... it is so big it will cover and shade all the body."

  India: "They say that the ox is the holiest animal . . . and therefore they represent their God as half man and half ox."

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  Quilon, India: "In that land pepper grows in a forest [which] is 23 days' journey in length."

  St. Thomas's shrine, India: "His hand lies in a reliquary [and] men of that country judge who is right by that hand."

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  even skilfully interwoven passages from .AJbert of Aix's History of the First Crusade, despite the fact that it had been written two centuries earlier.

  My trip to Istanbul set me thinking that Sir John could have been telling the truth after all. The more 1 exammed his book, the more clues I found scattered throughout its pages. It was entirely possible, indeed plausible, that Mandeville really did undertake a lengthy pilgrimage to Constantinople and Jerusalem; the route through the Holy Land was a popular one in the Middle Ages, and thousands visited the holiest shrines in Christendom. Even his claim to have travelled to the Far East held an inkling of truth because trade had opened up the route to India and China, and Marco Polo was not long returned from his historic voyage. A trickle of papal emissaries had also reached the Mongol court and survived to tell the tale. .nd although Mandeville claims to have gone even farther afield—to Tibet, Borneo, Java, and Sumatra—it would be surprising if a man so fascinated by foreign travel had not even attempted a trip. Though it would not have been easy, it was by no means impossible.

  But would it ever be possible to discover whether he had gone or not? .lthough a few scraps of evidence had emerged in Istanbul, it seemed unlikely that any concrete record of his travels would have survived the centuries. After all, it was proing difficult enough to find out anything about him in this countn'.

  Despite his early fame, Mande'ille left behind little trace of his life. History picks and chooses its heroes and can discard even the most famous of men within a generation. Time has not been kind to Sir John; no statue, caring, or stained glass window has been left as a memorial to the knight who, six centuries previously, was being celebrated right across Europe.

  Only the inscription in St. Albans Abbey has surived, and although it is almost illegible today, its words had been clearly isible in the seventeenth centun,-, for in 1657 the famous Elias Ashmole, whose notes are housed in the Bodleian Library, scribbled them into the margin of a book. They were, as I had thought, half in Latin and half in English, and this is what they said:

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  Siste gradum properans; reqiiiescit Mandevil urna

  Hie humili; noriint et monumenta mori.

  Lo, in this Inn of Travellers doth lye

  One rich in nothing but a Memory.

  His name was Sir John Mandevil content

  Having seen much, with a small continent.

  Toward which he travelled ever since his birth,

  And at last paun'd his body for that Earth

  Which by a Statute must in mortgage be

  Till our Redeemer come to set him free.

  This transcript was an exciting find, for I could recognize several of the words that I myself had noted down from the St. Albans pillar. The lines in Latin were especially interesting. Although the first phrase is a formulaic reflection on mortality, the second sentence records that "here rests Mandeville in an humble urn."

  This had me confused: since cremation was not the practice of the Middle Ages, did this mean that Mandeville's entire body had been placed in an urn and buried at the base of the pillar? If so, what had happened to this massive object? Is it even today resting under the flagstones?

  It is impossible to know for certain (I felt sure that the dean would not allow me to dig up his floor), but the most plausible explanation is that Mandeville's heart was removed from his body after death and carried to the abbey. This would be entirely in keeping with burial practices in the Middle Ages. Many distinguished people had their hearts cut out and buried separately from their bodies. But it also opened up the possibility that Sir John died abroad . . .

  The more I read about Sir John, the deeper the mystery became; it was soon apparent that not everyone has been as attracted by his charms as I. Disturbing rumours have followed him down the centuries; his contemporaries said he had written books on the magic properties of herbs; that he dabbled in the black arts; that he indulged in necromancy. I found several manuscripts on alchemy that purported to be written by him, while other manuscripts claimed he was the author of a subversive treatise on pagan philosophy. And while a small

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  group of supporters said he had undertaken secret negotiations on behalf of King Edward 11, a different group suggested he had been involved in a political assassination. Strangest of all was a curious little tale concerning the foreign alphabets scattered throughout his book.

  These unrecognizable squiggles, it was suggested, were not alphabets at all. They were a secret code containing instructions on how to overthrow the Pope.

  For all its tales of monsters and giants. The Travels must have made depressing reading to Sir John's contemporaries, for it systematically charts the loss to Islam of the great Christian cities of the Middle East. Two centuries before Mandeville's voyage, tens of thousands of crusaders had marched across Europe towards Jerusalem, brutally wresting the Holy City from the infidel in 1099. For almost one hundred years, the Holy Land was ruled by an uneasy alliance of Christian kings and princes, but it proved impossible to defend these precarious kingdoms. Jerusalem fell back into infidel hands in 1244. Acre was lost in 1291. And within a centurv' of Sir John's arriving in Constantinople, the imperial capital itself would f
all into the hands of the Turks.

  Ever since a shocked Europe learned of the loss of Acre, the recon-quest of the Holy Land had been the objective of all in positions of authority. Throughout Sir John's childhood, the idea of a new crusade was continually being mooted. In his old age, Edward I had expressed the wish to lead such a crusade, and the English Parliament enthusiastically backed his calls for an armed expedition. The King of France, too, was said to be keen on an anti-Turkish alliance with the Tartars, although plans never got beyond the drawing board.

  It was in this climate that Mandeville wrote his Travels, and it

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  would have been extraordinary if he hadn't mentioned the subject. But even in the prologue, where he discusses the possibilities of such a campaign, his call to arms remains muted: "Each good Christian man who is able, and has the means, should set himself to conquer our inheritance, this land, and chase out from there those who are misbelievers [for] if we be true children of Christ, we ought to lay claim to the heritage that our Father left to us, and win it, out of strange men's hands."

  He stops short of calling for a rally to arms, perhaps because he knew that at the time of writing the Hundred Years' War between England and France had all but destroyed any hope of an alliance against the Turks. There had been other setbacks as well: the great crusading Order of the Templars had been suppressed not many years earher, and when the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem set up their new headquarters in Rhodes, the different nationalities spent most of their time bickering among themselves. Yet this passage—right at the beginning of The Travels —is just one in a series of anticlimaxes scattered throughout the book, and it left me wondering what on earth had been in Sir John's mind when he set pen to paper.

  It was a similar story in the second part of The Travels. By the time Mandeville came to write about Persia, India, and China, the great explorations to the Far East were almost over. The Turkish domination of the Middle East had all but closed the trade routes to India, and the last papal emissaries were on their way back from China. But unlike most medieval writers who pleaded for missionaries to go back to the east and demanded the forcible conversion of the Mongols, Sir John's only object seems to be to fire people's imaginations with fabulous tales from the Orient.

  Even the short chapter in which he "proves" that it is possible to circumnavigate the world had me scratching my head. Although he presents details of his theory and backs it up with scientific observations and astronomical calculations, the passage is seemingly plonked into the book at random and, once discussed, is never mentioned again. If Sir John had really made such a momentous discovery, then surely he would have returned to it again and again, especially since he was challenging many of the accepted theories of his day. Most of his contemporaries had a view of the world that today seems deliciously

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  naive, and their maps were more like romances than today's atlases. Jerusalem was always placed right at the centre of the world and enclosed by a giant circle. The upper half of this circle represented Asia, while the lower half contained Europe and Africa. The British Isles, if they made it onto the map at all, were squeezed into the bottom left-hand corner—not only on the fringes of Europe but right on the edge of the world. Yet even the most accurate of medieval charts showed only the top half of the world, for it was widely believed to be impossible to cross the Equator into the southern hemisphere. As late as the 1580s—more than two centuries after Sir John wrote his Travels — church fathers were arguing that the heavens did not extend around the earth but were only above.

  Had Sir John really written the controversial passage about circumnavigation, or had it been added at a later date by an unscrupulous scribe? I was beginning to doubt Mandeville's word when I stumbled across two medieval documents in Paris that seemed to vindicate him entirely. One of these recorded that in the very year that geographers were converging on Paris to debate the issue of circumnavigation, a young man named John de Mandeville was living in the city. The second fragment was an even more exciting find: it was part of a Comptus Roll of students attending the University of Paris, and it recorded that a Johannes de Sancto Albano was studying there in 1329. If this Johannes was the author of The Travels, his tutor, perhaps, was the controversial John Buridan, rector of the university, whose lectures questioned whether the extreme fringes of the globe were inhabitable. And if Sir John was attending such lectures, a thought might one day have come into his head. Instead of listening to endless debates on whether it was possible to circumnavigate the world, why not set out on a journey—a journey around the world—that would prove it once and for all.

  Qlgprus

  Mandeville wrote an Itinerary, or Account of his Travels, in English, French, and Latin; which were falsified by the monks, who destroyed much of their credit, by mingling them with legendary tales and stories out of Pliny.

  History and Antiquities of Hertfordshire, Robert Clutterbuck, 1815

  ^^'Y orthern Cyprus was on holiday when I arrived. It was the fes-nJSk^ tival of Kurban Bayrami, and the seaside town of Kyrenia was ^W' ^ crowded with Turks. This is one of the great religious feasts of the year, when the Muslim faithful gather to celebrate the thwarted sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. It used to be a time for family celebrations. In the mountain villages that overlook the town, sheep would be slaughtered and roasted on spits, while in Kyrenia there would be merriment and three long days of festivities. But times have changed. I was sitting in a bar beside the harbour when the Muslim call to prayer— the wail of Allah Akbar, "God is great"—rang out across the harbour to announce the start of Kurban. No one stirred. No one moved from the bar. No one even seemed to hear it.

  I finished my drink and wandered up to the mosque, which was set in a narrow street just up from the harbour. Inside, there were just five men standing in a row behmd the imam, who led the prayers facing in the direction of Mecca. Five men stood, kneeled, then prostrated themselves in the empty mosque while the rest of the town sat enjoying their beers.

  "We are not a religious people," an elderly Cypriot told me later. "We are not like the Arab countries. A few of the older people might

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  occasionally go to the mosques, but the rest of us ... well, we go maybe once or twice a year."

  He chuckled as two young Turkish girls in bikinis walked past. "Even the immigrants from Anatolia seem to give up going to the mosques when they get here. The first thing the women do is get rid of their veils. If your knight was worried about Cyprus being overrun by Islam, he needn't have been. You won't find the mosques overcrowded here."

  Cyprus was never over-enthusiastic about embracing Islam. Even after the Ottoman conquest of the island in 1571, which saw the principal churches converted into mosques, only a minority of the population were Muslim. The vast majority on the island were Greek Orthodox who, like their compatriots in Constantinople, were left to practise their religion in relative peace.

  Everything changed with the Turkish invasion of 1974, and a brief glance at a map illustrates the full tragedy of Cyprus. A line of red dots weave their way across the mountainous backbone of the island and down into the dusty central plain. They run from Famagusta in the east to Lefke in the west, and even plough through the heart of Nicosia, one-time capital of the island. South of the red line is the Republic of Cyprus, the Greek half and the rump of the once-united island. In the north is the smaller self-styled Republic of Northern Cyprus, recognized by no country in the world except Turkey. Anyone not familiar with the political situation will learn about it long before arriving in the north of the island: the worldwide boycott of Ercan Airport requires that all international flights touch down in Turkey before continuing on to Cyprus.

  Though the division of the island occurred more than two decades ago, it is still the main topic of conversation. The Greek Cypriots have a well-oiled publicity machine that blitzes newspapers with angry letters as soon as there is any
possible hint—real or perceived—of support for the position of the Turkish Cypriots. The travel article I wrote on my return prompted hundreds of letters from Greeks outraged that I had even set foot in the north. Most provided me with an outUne of the 1974 invasion, followed by horrific details about mass rapes, tortures, and destruction of property. While they varied in tone, virtually all

  I

  Cyprus

  ended with a similar sentiment: "Do not allow such articles to appear without an accurate account of the island's unfortunate history . . ."

  It is not just the Greeks who are keen to promote their point of view. I had scarcely entered a bar on my first night before an elderly Turk, a retired teacher, approached me and asked what I thought about Cyprus's problems. When I explained that I had only just arrived, he welcomed me to the island and said he would like to tell me briefly what he thought.

  "I have no quarrel with the Greeks," he said with a sigh. "I speak fluent Greek. I used to have Greek friends. I even played football in the streets with my Greek schoolmates. The problem with today's Greeks is their wealth. They are millionaires, multimillionaires, and they build luxury hotels and huge houses."

  He stretched out his arms to show me just how rich they were. "Do you know a song called 'Money, Money, Money'? Well that, my friend, is the Greeks. And us? We have nothing. If the Greeks were allowed to buy property in Northern Cyprus, they would buy us up. They would cover the island in hotels and we wouldn't stand a chance. We Turks would be ruined."