Author: Gev, the Scaled Scorch

Whoever wrote this book, whether it be a monk or a knight or whomever, had the kind of faith that let Moses turn rivers to blood. Which is to say really galldarn intense. We can see this on page 9 as Tim (the name we’ll use as a stand in for the monk who wrote John Mandeville) starts us off with a phrase that should trigger our “crazy wild unsubstantiated claims are about to be made” alarms, “And you must know,” (9) prime bs indicator, “that our lord was nailed lying down,” (9) here we see that his audience is Christian as he does not say my lord but rather our lord, also in this first claim about stuff that we all know he sort of does hit the nail on the head, this probably would be common knowledge. Now that he has established both our faith in Christianity and our knowledge that he has both faith and knowledge of Christianity he’s immediately going to try to cash all of that in immediately. “Moreover Greek and foreign Christians say,” (9) ‘all of the Christians are saying this so of course it is true,’ “that the wood used for the Cross which we say was cypress waa actually from thhe tree of which Adam ate the apple,” (9) oh my goodness this is a wild conspiracy theory. John, is there any other way to know this is true? Of course with this wild theory you have some evidence? “This is backed up in their writings.” (9) Wonderful, they said it and they wrote it down? Well then it has to be true.

Like with all things in Mandeville this makes sense in the frame of a story. I feel like I’m beating a dead horse but this travel narrative makes about as much sense as a puma in a nightgown. Once you understand that it isn’t a puma (travel narrative) at all but instead a hairless little sphinx cat (piece of cristofascist propaganda) then the jammies (weird and incongruous bull shit that is littered on every single fucking page of this book!!!) you start to realize that everything makes a ton of sense. The rascism is the only thing that can be explained through the lens of a travel narrative because travel narratives also have a vested interest in being rascist. Maintaining the hierarchical structure which is supported by bigotry.

Gotten slightly off track so let me root myself back in the text. Constantinople. He never went. I do find his phrasing here to be intriguing. “It is my task to make you know” (11) he goes on in classic Mandeville style to say only things that one could glean from the most coursory of glances at an account of Constantinople but this offers a good deal of insight into the motivation of the author. His task therefore is to guide people to Jerusalem. But he gives no actual tangible details that would help you get there and even when he does the details are hardly sufficient to get you there. He must’ve been writting for a mental pillgram.

Unshockingly, the idea that a man named John, a very classic English name, who is Christian, a very classic English tradition, is the emperor of India, is inherently racist and carries with it the idea that India should be ruled by an Englishman. The idea also that his land is populated with Christians is one borne of the fear of the encroachment of Muslim forces into Christian lands, a fear at least in part motivated by racism. Mandeville describes the land as hard to reach and even talks about the merchants which is a common feature of the travel narrative but not one that is usual within the writing of John Mandeville, as he’s merely a fiction drawn up by the hand of a monk; this is unusual, but can be explained away by acknowledging that Mandeville barely writes about the merchants and only uses their absence to show the richness of his land. While his land is described as not rich, this most likely refers to trade rather than physical mineral deposits. We can see this supported on the end of page one hundred and eight and going onto page one hundred and nine, as Mandeville writes, “they also carry in front of him another vessel, full of gold and jewels, gems like rubies, diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, topaz, irachite, chrysolities, and various other gems, signifying his lordship and his power.” (108-109) The emphasis on the relation of material wealth to his lordship may seem to be a strange one for a Christian knight to espouse. At the time, the Christian beliefs were much more embroiled in the divine right of kings, the idea that if one is rich and noble, then they must have necessarily been ordained by God. His power both comes from God and is then used in his name. The banners of Prester John are crosses, which are representative both of his dedication to religion and of his God’s power. His defense of the standards is fierce and “he has innumerable men when he goes into battle against other rulers.” (108) As I struggle to find the ways that Mandeville is moving through or interacting with this land, I am hard pressed to find any examples. In only one paragraph of this chapter does Mandeville talk about how he is moving through the lands of Prester John, “I was once travelling on that sea and I saw something like a kind of long island with many trees and branches and tree-trunks growing from it. The sailors told me that it was all the big ships that the adamantine had caused to be left there, and all the things that spilt from these ships.” (107) Mandeville has just made up some mineral that is so magnetic and powerful that it would rip iron from the ships, which were at the time being fashioned with enough iron that if they were to pass through the sea of the lands of Prester John. This travel is entirely a rhetorical device to instill a religious fervor within the people of England in order that they may have the fire to sustain a war in the Middle East.

Sincerely,

Gev, the Scaled Scorch

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

Medieval (Re)interpretation of the Holy Places: Virtual Pilgrimage, Matthew Paris’s Itinerary Map, and Meditative Tools – The Pilgrim’s Guide

In the Kingdom of Manzi we find ourselves in a rather strange spot. Literarilly speaking. Sir John Mandeville, as we will continue to call him, has, so far in the adventures we’ve talked about together, confined himself almost entirely to his own Christian faith. This is due, of course, to his incorporeal nature. Meaning that he is not real. These are the writings of a monk, and now, we get to hear him talk about animals and feasts! He’s not even racist about it! I know! He even, believe it or not, has a conversation. I’m so excited.

He’s not even weird about poor people or other religions’ beliefs about the soul! We can see this in his interaction with a monk, whom I want to assume is Buddhist, given his belief in the reincarnation of the soul and how the life that you lived shapes your next life. He observes their feeding of the animals with the monastery scraps, and he listens and asks questions respectfully. This is delightful.

“The monk said that these animals are the souls of dead men, the gentle and attractive animals being the souls of aristocrats and gentlemen, and those that are ugly being the souls of commoners. I asked him if it would not be better to give these leftovers to poor men than to these animals. He replied that there are no poor men in that country, and, even if there were people who needed alms, it would be better to give it to these souls which suffer their penance there and may not go out and seek food, unlike people who have the knowledge to find food and the capacity to work.” (88)

This quote is interesting because it shows how Sir John Mandeville is able to recognize that poor men are more deserving than beasts, which is great. Leads to a big question: where are all of the disabled people? Does this monk define disabled people as people? He says that people have the knowledge and capacity to work, and yes, most do, but not everyone is able-bodied. My hope is that they’re being accommodated and given good jobs, but sadly, I’m faced with a more likely option. The monk who is writing this work considers a perfect city to be one without any disabled people. We can also observe the classism that the monk exhibits in the assigning of souls to animals, or animals to souls? It is not entirely clear. What is clear is that beauty is linked to morality as well as to class. This gives us the question: in this system of morality, are a person’s actions and character determined by their class, or is their class determined by their character? The more important question is: are we supposed to buy this correlation between class and character? On the surface, the answer is no. The person doing the talking is a monk of a non-Christian religion who is talking about reincarnation, which is not recognized by Catholic doctrine. Looking deeper, the fact that this didn’t actually happen leads me to believe that we are supposed to buy it. A Buddhist monk didn’t say this; a monk created a knight and another monk and put them into conversation. If Sir John Mandeville doesn’t respond, it isn’t due to his lack of a witty retort; the monk has all the time in the world to think of a fiery comeback, it is because the monk is choosing to have him leave this point entirely unchallenged. Also, considering we are very much in the days of kings and queens, it seems to me as if we should be buying it.

So long and thanks for all the fish,

Gev, the Scaled Scorch

https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1uJCNSU-tfz4Smqy_qcJnyzDgTNMH_Cw&usp=sharing

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.

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.