The ink that John dedicates to Persia is significantly less than he has dedicated to Jerusalem. While this may seem, in and of itself, to be marvelous as Persia takes up significantly more space, and the travels through the lands of Persia must’ve taken John several long months, if not longer. To see his meager two pages in which he attempts to cover all of the geographical and political observations that he must necessarily have made during this time traveling through distant lands must seem absurd until we realize perhaps the most important facts about Sir John Mandeville. The first is that he is not real. He is a fictitious character invented by a monk who imagined a knight’s pilgrimage across the southeastern quarter of the world. This explains why “John” has so few accounts of the practical or physical aspects of his journey or accounts of the temporality of the journey. It also explains the lack of time dedicated to this section; rather than having spent several months hard journey through this land, he’s spent none at all. Additionally, it is not across a canyon, which we need to make the logical leap across that a monk would have more ready access to information on the lands of Jerusalem than he would of the lands of Persia. This would also explain the overwhelming focus on broader geography; when one has a globe in front of them, it is much easier to write, “the land of Ethiopia borders to the east with the Great Desert, west to the land of Nubia…” (104) rather than the observations that a man who is travelling through these lands must necsesarily make such as the mountain passes which divide these lands and the rivers that one must ford to reach the lands of the Great Khan.

There is one section that John, as I will continue to call him in spite of his fictitious nature, seems to find most interesting. John writes of the “Land of Darkness”, which is three days across and covered with the thickest of fogs so that none dare travel within this region, and yet the locals speak of the words of men, the whines of horses, and the sound of birds from within. John writes, “they know well that people are living there, but they don’t know what kind of people.” (103). The story of the land of darkness is of persecuted Christians saved by the hand of God, which ends with their freedom to travel as they wish. This story must be very appealing to a people whose faith calls upon them to travel far from the safety and comfort of their homes, and yet it is hard for me to stomach that this author believed in such tales. Rather than make the journey himself and rely on the power of his God and the strength of his beliefs to carry him through the lands of his enemies, he saw it fit to stay with the safety of his monastery. Showing that he is writing for those making pilgrimages but drawing into question his own religious fervor.