The fact of the matter is that it does not even make sense to put the travels of Mandeville on any map that even tangentially holds to reality. Any map that even pretends to depict Earth shows that he either loved traveling in the worst possible way to get anywhere or that he was simply not real. Spoiler alert, he was not real. This becomes the most obvious when you see how he ping pongs across the Mediterranean. When you read the travels, it makes sense that he goes from where St. Nicholas was born to where he was elected bishop. That makes perfect sense, right? Nope! Not even a little bit. The monk who was sitting alone in his tower, thinking about St. Nick, must have thought that St. Nick travelled a couple of miles outside of his hometown and got set up as a bishop. But he did not do that at all! He crossed half the bloody Mediterranean to get elected bishop. So this monk, or whoever wrote the travels, we’re not quite sure who wrote them, but given the content, of the centrality of the trip to Jerusalem, the focus on religious figures as he moves through the world, his knowledge of the places where religious figures were and his lack of practical information regarding their physicality it is safe to say that he was a monk. Let us just call him Tim, for convenience. (We can dismiss entirely the idea that Sir John Mandeville was a real person. He rarely, if ever, talks about how he gets to places, or the people that he talks to there, and the people he does talk to seem more like rhetorical devices than actual people.) So Tim has his OC, John Mandeville, and wants to take him along the paths that important religious figures in the past took, without any regard to geography. Tim wants John to follow these people’s itineraries, where they were and where they were going. What map do we use for that? Even on the most weird and fucked up t-map, even on one that centers Jerusalem, which I agree would seem to be the best in a story that clearly so centrally deals with Jerusalem, the trip from Patras to Myra passing over Kos and Rhodes, which he then goes back to, does not make any sense. If I am going to Cedar Point, in Ohio, with my younger sibling Teddy (a real trip that I’m looking forward to), and we leave from Pittsburgh and decide that we want to stop in Youngstown and Akron, we’re not going to stop in Akron and then double back to Youngstown. That’s going to add an hour to the trip, not to mention the cost of gas, Dr. Pepper, and Doritos that this detour demands. If you told me that you were taking that route, I would assume that you had not taken this trip and put it on a map. I do not need to tell you that the medieval costs of travel were astronomically higher than some petrol and snacks. This trip would get you killed if you had not planned properly. If Mandeville were real, this kind of stupidity would have gotten him killed long before he would have had the chance to write any of this down. Mandeville is so bogus that it does not make sense to use any map other than an itinerary map. Tim was not thinking in terms of geography but in terms of connections and temporality. Need more proof? John goes from Chios, passes Ephesus, to Patmos, then doubles back to Ephesus! Why does he do this? Because it follows the temporality of the life of John the Baptist. John the Baptist wrote The Apocalypse in Patmos and was then buried in Ephesus. Tim just likes to have John move through the word along with the lives of the Saints. It makes for an interesting narrative technique. It also makes it so that there is no real way for us to properly map John’s travels, except for the itinerary map. We could discuss the virtues of the other kinds of maps until we’re blue in the face, but the only way that we can look at the travels of John Mandeville on a map without dismissing it immediately as the merest glint of moonshine is by looking at it through the lens of an itinerary map. I end this blog post feeling as if I have spent my entire post belaboring a single point, but I feel as if it is an important one, and indeed, the only one that I can make. He was not real; he’s a narrative device. Everything that he does is for the sake of the narrative.
The bad way to get to Cedar Point https://maps.app.goo.gl/vBeUT6u2J5Mxkg9G9
https://www.canva.com/design/DAG3tET4e64/_6Snk3xgHFOzYt46ZtGRMQ/edit?utm_content=DAG3tET4e64&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=sharebutton
https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1uJCNSU-tfz4Smqy_qcJnyzDgTNMH_Cw&usp=sharing
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