KNIGHTLY VISITS

Before the Victorian Era, a mysterious medieval writer named Sir John Mandeville was considered the father of English literature. His influence coursed through the work of Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser and Chaucer (whom the Victorians crowned as English lit's true sire). The whimsy and fantastical images found in Mandeville's 14th-century travelogue of Asia and the Holy Land was too grotesque for the cold, Christian rectitude of latter 19th-century Britain. Victorian critics not only dismissed the knight's tales as ludicrous lies--they cast doubt on Mandeville's very existence.

In the wake of this thorough trashing, Mandeville, once England's most famous author, sank into near oblivion. His painted memorial in the nave of St. Albans' cathedral in Hertfordshire has all but flaked away.

British historian Giles Milton established a reputation in the United States with the success of his last two books, Nathaniel's Nutmeg and Big Chief Elizabeth. On the strength of these titles, his first book, 1996's The Riddle and the Knight, has finally been published here. In many ways Milton's book on Mandeville is the missing puzzle piece to the historian's work, which has been focused on the age of European exploration. Milton's task is to not only resurrect the rubbished knight of St. Albans as the driving force behind English letters but to claim him as the man who launched the ships of discovery.

Mandeville's Travels are like no other medieval text--quite an achievement, considering that the knight merrily stole stories and experiences from a shelf-full of contemporary accounts. His gift was to embellish the purloined narratives with verve and wit, making them highly readable. But did Mandeville actually do any traveling? In the narrative of his investigation, Milton, with his Penguin edition of the Travels in hand, takes off for Istanbul, Damascus and Jerusalem to verify that Mandeville had indeed been there. Once he's verified many of the firsthand observations found only in the Travels, Milton returns to England to dig in the British Museum's vaults to attempt a biography of the unknown wanderer. What he finds is even more mysterious than Mandeville's hairy dog-faced men of India (perhaps the first European encounter with a baboon).

Milton's exploration of Mandeville's world is, itself, a fascinating journey. In the back alleys of the Middle East, Milton discovers the last remnants of cultures Mandeville wrote about. He finds a handful of Nestorian Christians in a shabby Syrian town, tracks down the last speakers of Aramaic (the language early Christians spoke), and visits the elderly Greek Orthodox monks of Turkey, whose deaths will close the final chapter of the Byzantine Empire's 1,700-year history.

Milton also shows how rare Mandeville's work was for its time. In his memoir, the knight encounters Islam and vestiges of paganism without passing moral judgment. Milton argues that the real impetus behind the Travels was to counter the murderous crusading impulses of Christian Europe with a plea for tolerance. In fact, Mandeville's tales are filled with a level of empathy for strangers that even our own times lack.

But more importantly for Milton, Mandeville was one of the first voices since the Classical Age to argue that Earth could be traversed by ship. Indeed, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, who first turned down Columbus' plan to cross the Atlantic, changed their minds after reading Mandeville.

Consequently, Columbus discovered what Mandeville hoped we all could find: that the world is much larger than we've allowed ourselves to imagine.

The Riddle and the Knight: In Search of Sir John Mandeville, The World's Greatest Traveler
By Giles Milton
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 220 pages, $23)


The Travels of Sir John Mandeville
(Penguin Classics, 206 pages, $12.95)



"To these children of imagination perhaps we owe the circumnavigation of the globe."

--Isacc D'Israeli

WWeek 2015