What the author seems to be focused on here is solely how the surrounding land is connected to his faith. His descriptions of the appearance of the terrain are sorely lacking; even when he does deign to focus on the terrain, his description of it is riddled with Christian superstition. He writes of the Dead Sea, “Neither man nor living beast is able to die in it … if one throws in a piece of iron it comes up again, and if one throws in a feather, it sinks to the bottom and that is against nature.” (Madeville 51). What we would attribute to the high salt content of the water, John would attribute to the “wrath of a vengeful god”. His description of the people is practically nonexistent, save for brief descriptions of how people worship; even his description of how he was able to enter the Sacran temple is kept only to the fact that he was able to pass into the temple, where others, Jewish people and Christian people, were turned away for he had with him a document with the chief seal of the Sultan upon it. His description of the physical environment and that of his own physical journey is rough and scattered at best. While one could supposedly make some crude calculations regarding the time it took to travel and the paths he used, the author fails to supply them for us. Likewise, in the realm of the details of his lodging, the weather, the food, the clothing, the author seems to gloss over these points entirely in favor of the continued description of the holy places which he visits. We may, on this point, make the assumption that what was important to him and to his culture was reverence for the Christian god above all else. Given his extensive reading on the location and the surrounding holy places, nothing seems to come as a great surprise to the author. The only particularly unusual thing that he pays any great head to is the Dead Sea, and even then, he is more appalled rather than shocked at the water and the fruits which turn to ash under the blade of his knife.

The author’s intended audience can be made readily apparent in the way in which he speaks of his own faith. On page forty-one, John writes that “you should know that when He died Our Lord was aged thirty-three years and three months.” (Mandeville 41), seeming to both indicate his own belief in Christianity and suggest that his intended reader would share in his beliefs; this can be seen in both the capitalization of “He” when John refers to the Christian God and his use of “Our Lord”. This can also be seen in his focus on the Holy Sepulchre (the tomb of Jesus), Mount Calvary (where Jesus died), and indeed in his knowledge of and reference to the prophecy of David. He shows not only a base understanding of the words written but also of the historical context surrounding the prophecy in his calculation of Christ’s age. Additionally, his focus on the terrain and the cities surrounding Calvary would surely be of no small use to those who would seek to make their own pilgrimage. Thus, we may reasonably assume that he is writing, at the very least, in the beginning of his entry on Jerusalem, to reasonably well-educated Christians who intend to make their pilgrimage to the site upon which their lord met his death.