1. Travel as Travail *

The oracle at Delphi pronounced the happiest man in the world to have been Aglaus of Psophis, who experienced little sadness in life because he never left his small farm in a remote corner of Arcadia. Pliny records this anecdote in his Historia naturalis, an eclectic and vast encyclopedia of science that reached most of its medieval European readers via Solinus’s compilation Collectanea rerum memorabilium (ca. A.D. 240). This is the book of wonders that C. Raymond Beazley dismissed as having been assembled “on the principle ‘Credo,’ or at least ‘Lego, quia impossibile,’ ” in which geography functions merely “as a framework on which the web of the story-teller is woven into the garments of romance.”1 Solinus was justly nicknamed Polyhistor, and given the fabric of his many descriptions of marvels and monsters found throughout the world, Aglaus’s good fortune as a happy homebody cannot rescue him from cutting a boring figure.

This is the paradox of travel, as both an activity and a subject for verbal entertainment. Even today, with supersonic transportation, air conditioned hotels, and a nearly universal language, travel is not without its discomforts and perils. It was all the more irksome during the Middle Ages (when the English word was more aptly travail and when reisen/reizen in Germanic languages also meant ‘to march an army’). Yet for centuries audiences have derived pleasure from participating vicariously in journeys to remote lands; those attributed to Saint Brendan, Marco Polo, and Sir John Mandeville survive in many hundreds of manuscripts. Indeed, as these three names suggest, a traveler may occasionally be refashioned or even invented to amuse—perhaps also to instruct—the Aglauses who never leave home. One such invention is the subject of this book.

That travel resonates in the Western imagination is no mystery. Medieval Europe learned from its three influential monotheistic religions that history began with a fall from grace that forced humanity’s progenitors to take “their first journey” as exiles from Paradise.2These faiths also liken each individual’s life to a pilgrimage whose goal and resting place is God/Allah, and they have made this analogy manifest by endorsing actual journeys to holy places on earth. In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the drama of redemption is replete with the imagery of motion: the flight out of Egypt, the way of the cross, the hegira. From this perspective, the ideal of harmonious stasis in Arcadia, while it may offer bucolic charm, is naïve because it ignores the fundamental facts of human existence. The gulf fixed between Aglaus and Adam is sin. Although both experience life in a happy garden, the contented man of the Golden Age does not commit a primal act of disobedience that all his restless descendants in a baser Age of Iron will be condemned to repeat. In this classical tradition, travel is a symptom of sin rather than its penalty.3 At the same time, however, Arcadia cannot be regained, as may Paradise by the believer who moves, with wandering steps and slow, toward salvation.

Thus, it seems only human that writers and their readers are more interested in any far-flung activity of a Ulysses or an Aeneas than in the domestic tranquillity of an Aglaus: for story-tellers and their audiences, some plot is better than none at all. Two putative travelers are particularly noteworthy for their unusual appeal during the Middle Ages. The first of
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these is Alexander the Great, whose exploits in Africa and Asia are the subject matter of a network of texts, which collectively form the “Alexander Legend,” written over the course of a millennium in a host of languages, from Greek and Latin (most prominently, Walter of Châtillon’s superlative Alexandreis [ca. 1180]) to Persian and various European vernaculars (some of which cast the tale in verse that seldom rises above “rime doggerel”).4 The second is the narrator of Le Livre de Jehan de Mandeville (ca. 1360), an encyclopedic description of the world supposedly based on the international experience of a mercenary soldier who journeyed from England to Cathay between 1322 and 1356 but in fact mostly gleaned from reports by actual travelers to, or residents of, Asia. However scanty the evidence may be for the existence of “Sir John Mandeville,” his Book was copied and translated with such frequency (ca. 300 manuscripts in ten European languages are known today) that it became one of the most successful works of the later Middle Ages. Since the 1470s it has enjoyed a robust history as a printed book as well.5

2. The Matter of the Itinerarius

The literary victory of Alexander and John Mandeville over Aglaus may help to explain the modest popularity during the fifteenth century of a relatively short treatise, entitled Itinerarius in its first printed edition (ca. 1490) and written by a Dutchman in holy orders named Johannes Witte de Hese, according to the earliest manuscripts. If we believe his book, his zeal for pilgrimage enabled him to witness wonders effected by familiar saints and fantastical animals, and to experience danger, terror, imprisonment, opulence, disorientation, perplexity, the kindness of strangers—in short, the full range of adventure—during more than two years of travel in Asia during the late 1300s.6

Witte begins his account by identifying himself as a “presbyter”—a priest or, perhaps, a Benedictine—from the “diocese of Utrecht,” territory that during the later Middle Ages comprised much of what is today the Netherlands, and by claiming that he was visiting holy places in Jerusalem, during May of 1389, when he decided to continue his pilgrimage to the Jordan, which he followed to the Red Sea and to Hermopolis, called the “capital city” of Egypt, where the Virgin Mary lived for seven years with the young Jesus.7 This first sentence characterizes the Itinerarius as a whole. It briskly gives information about the narrator and his vocation as a clericpilgrim, transports him some 300 miles along a vaguely delineated route, and offers quick sketches of key stops on his journey. The language is at once pious, authoritative, and ambiguous, a peculiar blend that rescues the book from being dismissed as a fantasy in puerile Latin. The devotion that leads Witte to the Jordan, the string of toponyms marking his passage to Hermopolis, and the imprecise use of prepositions to describe his movement (as well as his attribution to an unnamed source [“dicitur”] of the name of Egypt’s capital [5]) all encourage the reader to trust a well-intentioned, if ineloquent, narrator rather than to notice that he appears to believe that the Jordan river flows into the Red Sea and to know nothing of Cairo.8

Witte’s voyage to Hermopolis exposes him to unusual marine life, an early glimpse of the exotica that will characterize his Asia and of the laconic writing style of this narrator, who seems ruffled by nothing. He samples a species of fish—it has the head of a cat and the beak of an eagle—that flies over the water the distance a bolt can be shot from a crossbow and requires long boiling. After claiming to have “no memory” of the many other odd animals he observed, he recalls seeing serpents soaring back and forth between water and land, poisoning humans unlucky enough not to have the antidote: ashes from palm trees or a plant called “choral,” which grows at the site, marked by four stones, where Moses led the children of Israel
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through the Red Sea. Once in Hermopolis, Witte visits places associated with the domestic life of the Holy Family, each of which is characterized by a marvel (water from the fountain where the Virgin Mary washed her “things” continues to cure people). From its beginning, the Itinerarius establishes a pattern of linking wondrous events that occur in the present—many of which concern healing, purification, and vision—with moments in Christian history.

Witte proceeds to Amram (32), an otherwise unattested port city from which he sails back across the Red Sea, then walks for a week until he reaches the monastery of Saint Catherine at Mt. Sinai. Here thirteen canons regular live austerely, each associated with a lamp that burns of its own accord until he dies, whereupon it goes out and rekindles itself when a replacement is chosen. The body of Saint Catherine emits some kind of oil, but much less than it used to. Birds participate in cloister life by flying in with olive branches, whose use is unspecified. In the desert, some four days’ journey from Mt. Sinai, is the field of Elim (“Helym” [50]), the site of a crumbling altar and seventy-two palm trees, all the work of Moses, as well as twelve fountains, whose water permanently protects anyone who drinks it from blindness. Venomous animals poison the nearby “river of Marach” (58-59) every night after sunset, but each morning a unicorn detoxifies the stream with its horn, a marvel Witte specifically claims to have witnessed. Not far away he sees a holy hermit who feeds on manna from heaven. The Sinai peninsula, traversed by many medieval pilgrims who recall its place in Old Testament history, is here a territory where marvels occur on a daily basis.

Now around one-fifth of the way into his narrative, Witte follows a bizarre route through the desert for fifteen days, then through the land of the Urcaldees (“per terram Urcaldeorum” [71-72]), home to people he calls Red Jews, until he reaches the Nile, which he follows for a day until he arrives at Damietta (“Damiad” [74]). Here he boards a ship and sails without benefit of the Suez Canal, to Ethiopia, also known as Lower India (“inferior India” [76]), the land evangelized by the apostle Bartholomew. He claims at this point to be not in the Red Sea but in the great “Sea-Ocean” (“mare Occeanum” [75]), the name medieval geographers gave to the expanse of water surrounding the oikoumene, the known landmass of Asia, Africa, and Europe. Somewhat farther down the coast, he reports, vegetarian pygmies, who live in caves and conch shells, battle storks for survival, a conflict he specifically states he did not see, as if this disclaimer (like the reference to the mission of Saint Bartholomew) will make up for the problematic geography of the previous sentences. Witte now appears to encounter real danger for the first time as he maneuvers past the “Liver and Sandy seas” (“maria Iecoreum et Arenosum” [85-86]. The first of these has a floor of lodestone, which attracts vessels carrying any iron, and the second is sand that ebbs and flows, made even more precarious by the local one-eyed cannibals (“Monoculi” [92]) who prowl for fish and unwary sailors.
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Despite their eerie nocturnal labors and gleaming eyes, these Monoculi are definitely human, since they may be governed. Their king is named Grandicanis, a corruption of “Great Khan” (magnus Canis), a name much bruited in Europe since the 1240s but a title abolished when the Ming dynasty came to power in China in 1368.

Witte survives these several hazards and sails on to Middle India (“ad mediam Indiam” [99]), where Grandicanis rules at the imperial pleasure of Prester John, the legendary Christian priest-king whom many sought, between the mid-1100s and the mid-1500s, but only Witte found in his full grandeur. It is fitting, then, that his first port of call in this territory should be “Andranopolis” (101), a place known (in this context) to no other traveler. According to Witte, the city, evangelized by Saint Thomas, is inhabited by many Christians and characterized by a bustling international harbor, a towering lighthouse, five hundred stone bridges, buildings so tall that streets remain always in shadow, and a Franciscan monastery where Christian pilgrims are buried. A northern European of the late 1300s would have found this first landfall in eastern Asia no more alienating than Venice.

Not far from here, however, trouble strikes. Witte is taken prisoner by henchmen of Grandicanis and is brought to a fortress called Compardut (a corrupt form of the early Mongol capital of Khanbaliq [modern Beijing]). Here he remains for eight weeks. This is a pivotal event in the Itinerarius, because in relating the experience, Witte casually drops two pieces of important information. His verb forms subtly shift from first-person singular to first-person plural, indicating that he is not traveling alone.9 Moreover, he now has a destination: when Grandicanis himself arrives at Compardut, Witte tells him—and, thus, the reader—that he and his companions are pilgrims underway to the shrine of Saint Thomas, the apostle to whom Christian tradition ascribes the evangelization of India. At this news the great ruler instantly releases his prisoners and, after wining and dining them for seven days, arranges an escort to take them to the city of “Eleap” (127), some twelve days’ journey away, at the frontier of Upper India (the territory is not named until line 150).10 The entourage continues the voyage for well over a month, and the route to the more remote devotional goal becomes increasingly dangerous. Witte sails through a pitch black, three-mile-long natural tunnel at whose far end is a terrifying waterfall; he sees the
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valley where pepper grows, describing how the fields are set ablaze to drive away serpents so that the precious commodity can be harvested; and he reports on the horrible clamor that emanates from a nearby passageway in the mountains through which a stream runs, also for three miles, carrying with it great boulders and echoing with frightful noise (we never learn if the travelers had to negotiate this second peril). At length, the vessel reaches “Gadde” (146), where Prester John has his customs house.

Witte’s strenuous efforts are rewarded at last when, two weeks later, he arrives at Edissa (148-49), Prester John’s capital, which is twenty-four times the size of Cologne.11 Dominating the city, at its center, is the square imperial dwelling (“habitacio” [152]), measuring two miles on each side and resting on what would seem a relatively flimsy foundation of nine hundred columns, some of them elaborately carved or even part of a mechanical contraption. This area provides a large open space for public gatherings. Within the palace is a plaza decorated with images of the popes and the Roman emperors, together with some queens. The building’s architecture, which mirrors the emperor’s extraordinary wealth and piety, as well as his existence purely in the realm of imagination, is the subject of approximately one-quarter of the Itinerarius (152-266). Each of its seven stories is larger than the last, and five hundred steps—every one guarded by two lions, who (“it is said”) kill all intruding heretics and pagans—lead merely to the entrance.

The levels of the monumental palace are dedicated to different spiritual entities, whose holiness increases with height, as does the size of the building. In ascending order Witte describes: 1) the “Palace of Prophets,” decorated with precious fabrics and gilded sculptures of “all the prophets” (174-80); 2) the “Palace of Patriarchs,” where Abraham’s body lies, a clock announces the presence of any stranger, and a library attracts scholars (181-90); 3) the “Dwelling of Holy Virgins,” which houses the dining room for lay people and servants (191-93); 4) the “Dwelling of Holy Martyrs and Confessors,” where lords eat and sleep (194-96); 5) the “Choir of Holy Apostles,” site of a beautiful church, Prester John’s marvelous dining table (lightweight, though made of precious stones, it automatically purifies poisoned food or drink), a fountain, a bell commissioned by Saint Thomas (it drives away evil spirits), and bedrooms for important prelates (197-219); 6) the “Choir of the Holy Virgin Mary and the Angels,” where Mass is sung daily after sunrise in a special chapel and where Prester John’s counselors meet in a special vaulted, revolving palace (220-27); and 7) the “Choir of the Holy Trinity,” the location of an even more beautiful chapel than the others (Mass is sung here daily before sunrise) and Prester John’s private quarters, which include a mechanical model of the universe, a magic
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mirror, an elaborate representation of Christ in Majesty, a giant who guards Prester John from enemies who have somehow evaded the lions and the clock on the lower levels, and twenty-four revolving rooms (228-60). Atop this dizzying wonder of engineering stand twenty gilded towers. There is more—much more—but Witte claims that he is simply unable to record anything else. The palace’s organization and interior design reflect a European’s imagination rather than any informed knowledge of Asia, and yet its hierarchical arrangement—with the upper levels given over to the higher echelons of “Indian” society—runs counter to medieval domestic architecture. The royal residence is thus much more a mental construct than a mirror of actual European building design.

Before moving on, Witte makes several observations about the local landscape and society. The palace stands over the “Tigris,” one of the four rivers of Paradise mentioned in Gen. 2:10-14 (267-68); a few paragraphs later, he claims that the “Phison,” “Gyon” (Nile), and “Eufrates” are there as well (293-97).12 Outside the huge structure stands a sign proclaiming in golden letters that thirty thousand people eat there daily. Prester John’s wardrobe receives attention: in keeping with his status as a sacerdotal emperor, he dresses like a pope in the morning and a king in the afternoon. The people wear silk and leather garments, not wool “as we do” (280-81). In what seems an odd afterthought, Witte points out that only men live there; women inhabit the nearby Land of Females (“Terra Feminarum” [285]) and negotiate the four-day voyage three times a year, their schedules adjusted to the Latin ecclesiastical calendar, in order to become pregnant.13 Daughters remain with their mothers, but sons join fathers at the age of three.

With only one-third of his narrative remaining, Witte finally reaches what he told Grandicanis was his destination: the shrine of Saint Thomas, located in the city of “Hulna” (310) on an island four days away from Edissa and two miles off shore.14 The apostle is commemorated in a great church to which pilgrims, after demonstrating profound devotion by fasting and confession, walk from the mainland on dry ground, because the sea parts for a week before and after his feast day; for some reason, non-Christians are unable to make the crossing. Witte focuses on the events of two days during this fortnight, his attention directed largely on liturgical matters. While the ritual he describes is distinctly Latin, some of his report accords with what is known about medieval Indian Christianity: the unusually
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communal and participatory character of worship, the emphasis on self-denial, and the reckoning of solemn days by beginning them on the previous evening.15

On the vigil of the feast of Saint Thomas, between first and second vespers (not a very long time), the apostle’s body is placed on a great gilded throne before the high altar; crowds of pilgrims watch and pray under the vigilant eyes of more than one thousand armed guards. On the festival day itself, Prester John arrives with the patriarch, archbishops, bishops, and other prelates, who participate in many religious ceremonies. The day’s climax comes when the patriarch celebrates High Mass: Saint Thomas’s face is uncovered, and, as the host is elevated three times, it literally changes complexion, from the pallor of a corpse to the rosy cheeks one might associate with a Dutch child. As Prester John, the clerics, and the pilgrims come forward to receive the sacrament, the patriarch places each wafer in the apostle’s hand, which, held by two archbishops, in turn offers it to worthy communicants and refuses it to sinners. As if aware that readers may begin to wonder at the annual supernatural events, the universally harmonious devotion, and the sheer amount of time it would take to administer the host individually to such a throng, Witte intervenes here to testify that when he was present on the feast day—in 1391—he saw three people rejected by the omniscient hand, although after many prayers of intercession from the whole congregation they eventually warranted its approval. Then he reports on additional miracles of healing. Prester John and the other priests return Saint Thomas’s body to its fabulous reliquary, which is shut up in a tower for another year, surrounded by inextinguishable lamps. Precious stones, gleaming in the five lofty towers above the church, act as beacons for sailors far off in the sea. In a coda to the marvels of the pilgrimage to Hulna, Witte observes that the magi, whose remains were venerated at Cologne, once lived in these eastern lands, but then he retreats from this suggestion of correspondence between East and West to mention some commonplaces of Oriental exoticism: Asia has perpetual summer, dangerous vipers, and a towering mountain that divides the world into night and day.

Although Witte has attained his spiritual goal, he is far from home, and his adventures are far from over. The last one-sixth of the Itinerarius consists of brief vignettes that summarily describe the range of pleasures and perils travel can offer, particularly when governed by the imagination.16 After receiving permission from Prester John and other rulers to depart,
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Witte and his companions sail for ten days before reaching a small tropical island, replete with flowers and birds; he goes ashore with eleven others and the ship’s captain, who forbids them to bring anything away with them. They are so overcome with the local splendor that what they believe to be a three-hour stroll turns out to have lasted for three days, as they learn from the mates who stayed behind; this slowing of, but not complete release from, time is appropriate for a place called “Root of Paradise” (“Radix Paradisi” [378-79]). Twelve days sailing from here, Witte says, one finds Mount “Edom” (380), location of the inaccessible Earthly Paradise, whose walls reflect the setting sun’s light like a star. Only a mile farther is the mountain where Alexander the Great, identified as a Roman emperor, once was. For a medieval writer to claim sufficient holiness to warrant a glimpse of Eden, even in fiction, would have been audacious—would have repeated Alexander’s arrogance—and Witte’s avoidance of first-person verbs in these two vignettes (he uses the passive voice instead) suggests that even he has his limits.

Witte is now “in the remotest parts of the sea,” from which navigating in any direction would be a “return” (390-91). After approximately one more month at sea, he approaches the rocky island of Purgatory, where, amid the crying of souls, he says a mass for the dead on each of three days, thus securing the release of three of them, as a loud voice triumphs. Four months later he and his companions go ashore on an island that turns out to be Jasconius, an inhospitable whale that submerges when they light a fire to prepare dinner, causing them to lose both pots and food but no lives. Given the pseudo-geography of this book, landing on the satanic leviathan described in medieval bestiaries is almost to be expected of someone who has just sailed past Paradise and Purgatory (motion that somewhat ominously reverses Dante’s).

The last stops on Witte’s itinerary expose him to human and animal wonders, although they are quite tame in comparison to the crew of creatures that inhabit the edges of the Ebstorf, London Psalter, or Hereford mappaemundi. Three months after they flee Jasconius, Witte and his companions encounter a black monk who entertains twelve of them graciously while asking questions about Saint Thomas; his island is home to sheep and goats that grow to be the size of cattle because they are permanently put out to pasture. Deviating to the north from an otherwise easterly course, Witte sails for six days between smoking mountains and reaches an island inhabited by naked wild men and various strange animals that are not described. On another island live apes the size of yearling calves. Four months later, near a second smoking mountain, he and his companions hear sirens (but are not drawn into danger) and see horrible monsters that terrify them (but the source of their frightfulness is not stated, and in any event nothing happens). An ensuing storm drives them into a gulf where, for five days, they remain in total darkness. The weather improves, and, setting a course to the east for a month and returning to the great Sea-Ocean, they
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reach a land called Amosona, whose queen bears this same name (434-35). In one final geographical portrait that underscores his penchant for outlandish, ambiguous, and evasive descriptions, Witte notes that local people are black and white, they have two faces (one in front, one in back), and Gog and Magog, an entity associated elsewhere with Antichrist and apocalypse, are said to be imprisoned between two mountains. Although he supposedly rested here for eight days, Witte writes so imprecisely that we cannot know if he is referring to one, two, or several population groups; indeed, employing verbs in the imperfect passive and the present subjunctive, he leaves open the possibility that no one at all lives currently in Amosona, except, of course, its queen.

Witte’s sudden return to Jerusalem after another quarter year of navigation “toward the territory in the east past many islands” (440) is in every way a surprise. First of all, in a single sentence it snaps the reader back from the edges of the earth and the fringes of language to a site that for medieval Europe was the center of the world and of faith. Second, by following an easterly route to the very end of his narrative, Witte has managed to circumnavigate an earth with three continents.17 Finally, with this eager pilgrim having returned to the place he left in the first sentence, a reader may expect at least some attention to the Holy City’s sacred sites. Instead, Witte refuses to say anything about them because, as he abruptly and somewhat vaguely concludes, “how things may be laid out there is known to many. The end.”

3. The Genre of the Itinerarius

Readers, like Johannes Witte de Hese, will have good reason to wonder at the world of this Itinerarius. As the next chapter will document, the book’s first audiences, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, appear to have accepted it as a source of generally factual information, but since the eighteenth century many scholars—its only remaining public—have dismissed it as a not particularly well written travel lie, and then felt free to turn over the leaf and choose another tale. While the work is not reliable history or moving literature, it has an important place within the context of early European travel writing. First of all, the Itinerarius is evidence that by 1400, the action of travel could drive fiction: Witte’s journey is the plot of the story, not a device employed to unify otherwise disparate narrative elements, as is the case in The Divine Comedy or The Canterbury Tales.
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Owing in part, perhaps, to its author’s limitations as a writer, the book (in its original form) emphasizes linear, first-person narrative, causing it to resemble the writings of other medieval travelers more than do the sprawling informational works ascribed to Marco Polo and John Mandeville.18 At the same time, the Itinerarius is neither a report about pious journeying—a conventional pilgrimage itinerary, a guide book to holy places, or an account of missionary ventures—nor an encyclopedia of the world’s wonders. Instead, it is a hybrid, distinct from most earlier travel books. Witte’s single mission is to visit sites made sacred because of their role in Christian history, and he manages to locate them all around the world. Devotion does not evolve into curiosity as he moves from Jerusalem to Hulna; instead, the two attitudes temper each other all along, so that he reports seeing a unicorn near Mt. Sinai and saying Mass off the coast of Purgatory with the same measured treatment of marvels.

The hybrid form that results from Witte’s extension of the pilgrim’s horizon to include all of Asia suggests several parallels with The Book of John Mandeville, which also begins with the pilgrimage to the Holy Land (but, unlike the Itinerarius, exhaustively treats shrines from Constantinople to Cairo to Mt. Sinai to Palestine), then moves east to describe central Asia, the great khan’s empire, and Prester John’s land. Because scholars remain puzzled by questions relating to the Book’s authorship, style, and purpose, Witte’s analogous—if less substantial—text may contribute to the search for answers.

The Book was probably written near Liège about one generation before the Itinerarius appeared, very likely in the nearby Rhineland.19 Both works depend on other sources for much of their content, although the author of the Book copied directly, if also deftly, from an eclectic set of fairly sophisticated texts, while Witte culled information from written and perhaps oral reports in so general a way that borrowings can seldom be
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specifically identified.20 Some critics who admit that the Book’s author produced an unoriginal “pastiche of tales and lore” nevertheless have praised his invention of the persona of “John Mandeville, knight” to tell the story.21 Johannes Witte de Hese also appears to be a fiction, bringing to the Itinerarius the voice of a priestly guide who organizes the chaotic experience of a journey and authenticates it by occasional assurances of his reliability. The significance of this invention should not be overlooked. Iain Macleod Higgins observes that the first-person claims by John Mandeville echo “the ‘quasi-juridical’ formula of fourteenth-century French chroniclers and historians” and, in turn, present “a layman’s contribution to geographical knowledge.”22 E. V. Gordon, in his edition of the dream-poem Pearl, found it necessary to attempt to date the appearance of “the purely fictitious ‘I,’ . . . a first person feigned as narrator who had no existence outside the imagination of the real author.”23 In Witte, Mandeville has a likeness that is more than just rhetorical: these two narrators share a mind that is, to quote Christian K. Zacher’s assessment of Mandeville, “at once naive, inquisitive, ironic, self-deprecating, and serious.”24 Six centuries later, they remain alive in the imagination as travelers eager to go places, able to learn
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from observation, attentive to marvels but not given to awe, and willing to admit fear and forgetfulness. They are not frauds or lunatics but emblems of Englishmen and Germans born under the sway of the inconstant moon, driven, in John Gower’s words, to “travaile in every lond.”25

At times, however, Witte seems outrageous. We do not need to turn to zoology textbooks or medieval bestiaries to discredit his description of preparing to cook dinner on a whale’s back. Of course, it is difficult to prove—and even harder to assess—a medieval “lie.” It might be argued that Witte did in fact travel a great distance but mistook or misunderstood what he saw, that he compromised actual observations to accommodate what books instructed him to see, or that he embellished his experience in order to amuse readers without intending to commit fraud. Still, the Itinerarius is not just suspect; it is flagrant in its claims. Yet for this very reason its author should be given credit for recognizing, as did the writer of The Book of John Mandeville and as would Jonathan Swift, that the success of a travel book depends on a thread of faith extending from narrator to audience. Only when a traveler’s experience is accepted at least tentatively as legitimate can travel’s lessons—whether meant to be informative or entertaining—be learned.

The very fact of its fictionality is the most important reason to examine Witte’s Itinerarius: this book is evidence of the existence, or at least the nascence, of travel writing as a literary genre in the later Middle Ages. Witte’s fiction would be impossible without a public’s sense of the real thing. The issue is complicated and important. Surviving medieval European accounts of journeys—whether to Jerusalem or Cathay—vary greatly in style and content, taking forms that include itineraries, letters, histories, and geographical encyclopedias. In an attempt to lend exactitude to the discussion, several scholars have suggested different taxonomies. If travel books may be said to constitute a distinct style of writing at all in medieval Europe, Jean Richard argues, it is at best “un genre multiforme,” with at least seven different modes of expression: guidebooks, pilgrimage accounts, crusaders’ records, reports by ambassadors and missionaries, works by adventurers and explorers, descriptions by merchants, and imaginary voyage narratives. In any one text, the traveler’s perspective and circumstances are key matters that enable readers to distinguish among these modes, yet recognize a generic coherence, however tentative it may be.26

Gerd Tellenbach, taking a more topical approach to the problem, focuses on content rather than authorship. He catalogs common themes in travel writing, such as the measurement of distance, a delight in monstrosity or grotesquerie, fear of storms and shipwreck, and descriptions that seek to elucidate unfamiliar phenomena by comparing them to familiar things. Tellenbach’s analysis is somewhat distorted, however, by a preponderance of examples from the fifteenth century, by which time anecdote and autobiographical detail had become relatively common features in texts as varied as Hans Schiltberger’s captivity narrative and Felix Fabri’s pilgrimage accounts.27

Mary B. Campbell applies the term “exotic travel writing” equally to a letter about the Holy Land and a report from the New World; for her the difference between the pilgrim Egeria (in the late fourth century) and the explorer Ralegh (in the late sixteenth century) is a matter of rhetorical strategy. Admitting that each of the eight texts she examines in depth “could be said to represent a subgenre of the corpus” of travel writing, Campbell nevertheless argues that they share common linguistic features. Narrators reveal their subconscious attitudes toward “self and other, Home and the Other World” in the words they use to “[bear] witness to an alienated experience.” Individuals writing over a period of twelve centuries necessarily employ different language to describe their confrontations with grotesquerie, geographical margins, marvels, and other characteristics of “the eastern Elsewhere,” but they all must make certain rhetorical choices, which may include silence, and this fact unites them.28 The distinctly different taxonomies proposed by Richard, Tellenbach, and Campbell underscore how various are medieval travel writings and, as a result, how difficult it is to treat them as generic.29

In a study of twenty-three first-hand descriptions of Mongol Asia written between 1238 and 1360, Michèle Guéret-Laferté attempts to demonstrate
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how they all may be considered examples of travel narratives (“récits de voyage”) despite their differences in length, intended audience, language, purpose, method of composition, and point of view.30 Her careful analysis of these texts enables her to argue that they share (in varying degrees) characteristic rhetorical strategies consistent with a literary genre, or at least of a “form of discourse.”31

For example, travelers organize their accounts along two lines of development: one is progressive, consisting of spatial and temporal markers; the other is digressive, interrupting the record of movement with geographical, historical, and ethnographic information, as well as with anecdotes (“micro-récits”) gained first- or second-hand.32 Both progression and digression give the narrator—even if not identical with the traveler—opportunities to underscore the verity of the text by recounting specific instances of witness (“témoignage”): things seen, heard, or otherwise experienced (or, indeed, not experienced, since such “lapses” reinforce the legitimacy of all other claims).33 The need to establish credibility is fundamental for the medieval traveler who has been to Asia and who therefore faces the problem of presenting a radically different world to his audience at home. Writers “speak of the Other,” as Guéret-Laferté identifies this problem, by employing a specific vocabulary, including specific language to denote marvels (“mirabile/mirabilia”) and a “rhetoric of alterity,” which consists of at least eight features: ellipsis (signaling the omission of information), negation (emphasizing the absence abroad of something familiar at home), inversion (ascribing to foreigners a set of values that reverses what is familiar), comparison (establishing a commonality that makes what is odd seem customary), parallelism (describing a foreign practice in light of a familiar one), superlatives (privileging a particular over everything else in its category), numerical measurements (offering an assessment that, even
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when hyperbolic, is a finite tally), and exotic vocabulary (employing foreign words, with familiar equivalents).34 These rhetorical practices are only the tools with which medieval travel writers make a larger, intellectual maneuver—a “rationalization of the marvelous”—appropriating and integrating what is novel (strange humans, strange customs and beliefs, strange nature) into the existing body of Christian tradition and revelation. By applying to the East a historiography that spans from Adam to Antichrist, both of whom are Asians, Europeans prepare themselves to accept whatever majesty or monstrosity they may find there.35

Guéret-Laferté means not to scold medieval travelers but, rather, to identify organizational practices, stylistic features, and rhetorical strategies that characterize the narratives they wrote or dictated. The fact that many of these characteristics can also be found in the fictional Itinerarius indicates that, by around 1400, a writer and, presumably, some readers had a sense of what “belongs” in a travel book, such that they form a kind of “textual community” with an implicit understanding of genre.36 To employ Guéret-Laferté’s taxonomy, Witte’s narrative development alternates between “horizontal” progression (“And sailing farther . . . ” [Et ulterius navigando]) and “vertical” digression (“And there . . .” [Et ibidem]). The former extends along a series of place-names and idealized units of time; the latter punctuates movement with (usually brief) observations about local zoology, nature, ethnography, architecture, and liturgy. The integrity of authorial witness in the Itinerarius rests on the general experience of the
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entire voyage, reinforced by a few deliberate assertions.37 Perhaps more important, Witte evokes the alterity of Asia with much the same rhetoric found in authentic travel accounts. He stresses the region’s “marvelous” qualities.38 He employs ellipsis (“in [Prester John’s palace] there are yet more marvels and wonders that I do not recollect just now” [264-66]); negation (“they have no houses . . . [or] bread” [79-81]); inversion (“[The Monoculi] eat other humans. . . . And they always work at night” [96, 98]); comparison (“[Edissa] is more than twenty-four times the size of the city of Cologne” [150-51] and “sheep and goats in that place are as big as oxen [here] [412-13]); parallelism (“Prester John goes around . . . like a pope” [274-75]); superlatives (“a very high mountain” [“mons altissimus”] [364]); and numerical measurement (“[Prester John’s palace is] two German miles long and the same in width as well. . . . And it stands atop [900] columns” [152-55]). The only feature of Guéret-Laferté’s “rhetoric of alterity” missing from the Itinerarius is a word, other than a toponym, in any Asian language.39

This absence is suggestive, for Witte’s fictional Itinerarius translates Asia into Latin more fully than does any one of the factual works Guéret-Laferté examines to develop her taxonomy. Prester John’s palace is measured in German miles, Indian pepper is harvested and amazonian women come to Edissa to be impregnated on schedules that follow the Roman church’s ecclesiastical calendar, the sequence of masses on the feast of Saint Thomas recalls liturgical practice at the cathedral of Cologne (adding only a patriarch and the relic), and almost nowhere does Witte seem to be in territory outside the bounds of Christendom. When he reaches Middle India, “where Grandicanis rules,” he is surrounded by Christians, lay and clerical.40 The effect is to subdue the alienating effect one might expect the East to have on this priest and his audience in the West.

At the same time, the Itinerarius begins and ends on the border of exoticism. Already in his second sentence Witte is watching weird fish flying over the surface of the Red Sea, and in his final glimpse of Asian landscape before his return to Jerusalem he sees Janus-faced people “mirabiliter dispositi” (437). Prester John may dress up like the pope, but his people wear “fabrics made of silk” and leather garments rather than wool “as we do” (274-75, 280-82), a distinction of consequence to medieval readers, for whom clothes truly made the man. On his unusual pilgrimage, Witte sees one-eyed cannibals, towers that would dwarf modern skyscrapers, and gargantuan sheep. His “India”—so vast a territory that it must be divided into three parts for him to speak of it—may boast Franciscan monasteries, but it is also alien space.41 If he concludes by refusing to describe Jerusalem because the city is a matter of public knowledge, by implication the rest of the Itinerarius conveys privileged information.

Medieval Europeans would have learned nothing new from this fictional travel book, but in it they would have found many of their assumptions about Asia confirmed.42 Describing “India” in his widely disseminated Imago mundi (ca. 1110), Honorius Augustodunensis writes:

Next comes India, named for the Indus river, which has its source in the north on Mount Caucasus and, flowing to the south, empties into the Red [recte Arabian] Sea; it closes off India in the west, and from it the Indicus Ocean gets its name. . . . In it is the island Taprobanes, celebrated for its ten cities. Here there are two summers and two winters each year, and it is always green. . . . There are also mountains of gold here, which are inaccessible because of dragons and griffins. Mount Caspius, after which the Caspium Sea is named, is in India; here the terribly ferocious nations of Gog and Magog, who eat human flesh and uncooked animals, are said to have been imprisoned by Alexander the Great. India has forty-four provinces with many races of people—the Garmanos, the Orestas, and the Coathras, whose trees touch the sky [tangunt ethera]. In the mountains are the Pigmeos, people two cubits tall, who fight constantly with cranes, and who give birth at age three and are old at eight. In their territory grows a very white pepper, but when they use fire to drive away the poisonous snakes that live there, the flames turn the pepper black. In addition, here are the Macrobios, who are twelve cubits tall and fight against griffins, which have the body of a lion and the wings
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and talons of an eagle. . . . In addition, other people here kill their parents when they get old, cut them up, and serve their flesh at a banquet, regarding as impious all those who do not do this. There are others who eat raw fish and drink from the salty sea.43

India so teems with oddity that Honorius can hardly focus his attention. Although he begins with an etymology, some cardinal directions, and a reference to famous cities—thus giving his readers a sense of origins, orientation, and history—he cannot fix his eye on the landscape for its many intrusive monsters, and when he starts to enumerate the various peoples of India, he gets distracted by enormous trees. From the European perspective this is a land of extremes: it is always summer or winter, humans may be tiny or huge, their eating habits range from the disgusting to the forbidden, and their difference is emphasized by their scorn for anyone who does not behave as they do, an inversion that leaves the reader, who may have begun the paragraph drawing a mental map, quite disoriented. Time’s extremities are here as well: Alexander, the hero who centuries before had effected the translatio imperii—the movement of the center of divinely ordained world power—from Asia to Europe, has allegedly confined Gog and Magog near the Caspian Sea, from which they will emerge to join Antichrist in the days preceding the apocalypse, according to Rev. 20:8.44

Witte imposes a kind of order on the wonders of his India—several of which occur in the passage from Honorius—by subjugating them to the schedule of his itinerary or by locating them on different levels of Prester John’s palace. Neither his assimilationist tendencies to “translate” this foreign territory nor his tone of restraint can completely tame Asia, however.
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It would not be in the nature of things for him to do so.45 In his scriptorium, the writer of the Itinerarius, like Honorius Augustodunensis, mentally approaches the East. As Todorov puts it:

he knows in advance that he will encounter Cyclopes, men with tails, and Amazons. . . . [He] performs a “finalist” strategy of interpretation, in the same manner in which the Church Fathers interpreted the Bible: the ultimate meaning is given from the start (this is Christian doctrine); what is sought is the path linking the initial meaning (the apparent signification of the words of the biblical text) with this ultimate meaning.

If Witte overexerts his imagination, his book still offers a valuable medieval witness to the other world, one that shares a “strategy of interpretation” with Todorov’s subject: “he,” of course, is Christopher Columbus, who also imagined himself in Asia.46

4. Sources for Exoticism in the Itinerarius

Approaching Asia in that scriptorium, Witte weaves together bits of information and stories that circulated in the literature of northern Europe
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during the fourteenth century, but he seldom appears to be copying from an open book. His journey’s goal is also his text’s principal achievement: he sets out to report on both Prester John and Saint Thomas, whose names were analogous with India in medieval Europe. As temporal and sacerdotal emblems of God’s power, they attained legendary status by separate routes and were the subjects of independent traditions brought together coherently, if fantastically, for the first time in the Itinerarius.47 Both traditions, which circulated in written (and almost certainly in oral) form, perpetuate an image of Asia that emphasizes the exoticism detailed above. Witte manages to combine them with yet a third tradition, one that has its roots in hagiography and that locates wonders north and west of Europe, in India’s antipodes. This is the literary “matter” of Saint Brendan, whose name does not appear in the Itinerarius and whose adventures Witte claims for himself. Each of these three textual traditions warrants at least brief discussion.

Prester John first appears in European literature in the Historia de duabus civitatibus (ca. 1147), Otto of Freising’s chronicle of universal history. Otto witnessed a meeting on 18 November 1145 at Viterbo between Pope Eugenius III (1145-53) and Bishop Hugh of Jabala, a small town on the Syrian coast (modern Jebele). Hugh informed the pope that, not long before, a Nestorian Christian and descendant of the magi named “Presbyter Johannes,” after defeating an army in Persia, had been on his way to assist crusaders at Jerusalem but found himself unable to cross the Tigris and returned home. (Hugh’s report was meant to emphasize the vulnerability of Eastern Christians and to convince the pope to call a crusade, as indeed Eugenius did in 1147.)48 Otto’s chronicle, although it had a respectable circulation and reception, never would have brought Prester John to the attention of Europe; it was the delivery, sometime around the year 1160, of a letter “to various Christian kings” that did that.

The origin of the Epistola Presbyteri Johannis (Letter of Prester John) remains a mystery despite efforts of scholars who have scrutinized the text and other sources for linguistic, literary, and historical clues. It is addressed to the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Comnenos (1143-80), but references to his authority and the Greek Church do not exude respect; later versions of the Letter include the Holy Roman emperor, Frederick I Barbarossa (1152-90), in the salutation only. In one respect the Letter was effective: it provoked a response from Pope Alexander III (1159-81), although nothing is known of the fate of the embassy of “magister Philippus,” who left Venice in the 1170s with correspondence to Prester John, among other things an invitation for him to join all the world’s Christian authorities at a Lateran council in 1178. This council, which took place in 1179, consolidated
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papal authority and enacted ecclesiastical legislation mandating excommunication for any Christian who traded with Muslims. Philip, whom Leonardo Olschki reckons as Marco Polo’s first precursor, made the earliest recorded attempt to establish a West/East contact, traveling out of an “inspiration drawn from literature and from imagination” rather than any mercantile interest.49

In his study of some one hundred Latin manuscripts of the Letter, Friedrich Zarncke isolated an original and five interpolated versions.50 Although earlier scholars argued that the work was composed in Greek, Vsevolod Slessarev notes that its Hellenic elements are found exclusively in loanwords and titles. He believes the Letter to be the Latin composition of “a twelfth-century West European who must have spent at least part of his life in the Near East where he became imbued with vague notions about India, the Christians of St. Thomas, and Prester John.” Slessarev further contends that the Letter does not belong to the genre of utopian literature, as some have claimed, but is an attempt to give “scanty and fragmentary material” a traditionally acceptable form by casting it in the form of a letter, like the pseudonymous epistles of Alexander to Aristotle.51

Witte carries over a general sense of Prester John’s wealth, piety, and munificence into the Itinerarius, but he borrows few details. Whereas the Letter enumerates the rare woods, precious metals, and spectacular gems found in the imperial palace, specifically describing lavish processions in war and peace, Witte is more interested in the building’s floor plan than its materials, and his Prester John is a rather anemic public personality. The landscape, too, is different: a new Canaan, flowing in milk and honey, free of crime, poverty, and snakes in the Letter, becomes an urban space with lions guarding the steps of a four-square-mile palace in the Itinerarius. Witte may get ideas for his pygmies, Sandy Sea, pepper fields, and Land of Females
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from the Letter, but what he says about them is uniquely his.52 In a sense, he adopts more of his source’s methodology than its content: like the writer of the Letter in Slessarev’s view, Witte has brought organization to shards of information by giving them coherent literary form in a travel report.

At approximately the same time that the Letter of Prester John appeared, a treatise known as De adventu patriarche Indorum ad Urbem sub Calixto papa secundo (On the Arrival of the Patriarch of the Indians at Rome under Pope Calixtus II) began to circulate in Europe. The anonymous author of this brief account alleges that a certain “Patriarch John” of India, having made his way to Constantinople to be invested with the pallium, asked to accompany an entourage of emissaries to Calixtus II (1119-24), arriving at Rome in 1122 or early 1123. To the assembled curia, John described the city of Hulna, the extraordinary capital of India and seat of his patriarchate, and the nearby church of Saint Thomas, located atop a mountain in the middle of a lake whose waters part once a year to allow pilgrims to visit the shrine. In the text based on this “description,” considerable attention is devoted to liturgical ceremony surrounding the pristine body of the saint, especially to the administration of the Eucharist with Thomas’s right hand, which retracts from sinners, who either repent or fall down dead. The treatise concludes abruptly.53

This news about Saint Thomas was welcome, if not entirely surprising. As early as the fourth century, in the apocryphal Acts of St. Thomas, the apostle was credited with having brought the Gospel to India; at about this time, Egeria observed that few visitors to Jerusalem neglected to make the relatively short journey to Thomas’s burial site at Edessa.54 Despite this early popularity, almost no pilgrim mentions Saint Thomas again for a millennium, nor does he seem to have excited much interest in Europe until the mid-1100s, when De adventu (and the Letter of Prester John) appeared. It was at about this time, between 1127 and 1143, that Sigelmus, bishop of Sherburn, reportedly visited the saint’s shrine in India and returned with reports of that region’s splendid exotica, a matter that William of Malmesbury thought worth recording.55

By the time the Itinerarius was written, travel between Europe and India, though uncommon, was hardly unprecedented. When separate delegations of priests claiming to be Saint Thomas Christians arrived at the papal curia in 1403 and 1407, they were received suspiciously not because anyone questioned the possibility of such a journey but because earlier visitors had misrepresented themselves as having come from distant places.56 During the century before the Itinerarius was written, Marco Polo, Odoric of Pordenone, several Franciscan missionaries in China, and The Book of John Mandeville all reported on the church of Saint Thomas, but Witte is demonstrably familiar only with the much older De adventu, from which he generally derives his description of pilgrims’ access to the shrine and the liturgy of the Mass. As is the case with his use of the Letter of Prester John, his borrowings echo rather than quote their source.57

Episodes in the last quarter of the Itinerarius show that Witte also knew the Navigatio Sancti Brendani (Voyage of St. Brendan), although here again his use of the text is tentative and occasional.58 The island of giant sheep, the deceptive whale Jasconius, a florid corner of Paradise where it is never night and time nearly stands still—these places are common to Brendan’s and Witte’s voyages, but they could hardly be located in more contrary worlds. They are not necessarily geographical opposites, since
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Witte has been sailing east for so long when he enters Brendan-territory that he may indeed imagine himself in the western Atlantic (he continues to sail east to Jerusalem). But every location and movement in the Navigatio has a spiritual significance: Brendan reaches a harbor where he finds flocks of sheep just in time for Maundy Thursday dinner, Jasconius plays his devilish trick on Holy Saturday, the sailors spend Easter in the Paradise of Birds, and the gorgeous island that appears near the end of the seven-year voyage is a sign of what God has promised faithful Christians. Brendan follows the cycles of the ecclesiastical year. What he sees is important only for what it means, not for what it is; indeed, he himself admits that he is traveling because God wants to show him things. For Witte, on the other hand, islands are chance landfalls. He is on a trip around a world in which things, however outlandish, are what they seem, and the one place where allegory would be most appropriate—Jerusalem—is the single location he refuses to describe. In addition, the persona of the traveler undergoes a seachange when the abbot of Clonfert becomes a cleric from the diocese of Utrecht. Whereas Brendan is the hero of the story, blessed with foresight (he knows better than to disembark on a great fish) and deserving of unusual counselors (a talking bird or an old hermit), Witte is an observer—and the narrator—who must make whatever sense he can of passing scenery. In the Navigatio, a saint is at the helm; in the Itinerarius, one of us climbs into the crow’s nest.

5. The Itinerarius in the Context of Western Travel Literature 59

There is good reason to believe that Aglaus of Psophis’s contentment would have impressed Pliny’s original audience no more than it does many readers today (particularly since they and we encounter Aglaus amid a catalog of the wonders of “India and Africa”60). According to Lionel Casson, human beings have been actively involved in marine travel since the construction of the first reliable boats around 3000 B.C. Tourism to established “places of interest” in the eastern Mediterranean and Red Sea areas was common by 1500 B.C., when visitors to Egyptian buildings that were already one thousand years old left graffiti records of their names, hometowns, and experiences on the road. By the second century B.C., according to Greek sources, travelers and traders provided a steady enough source of income to sufficient numbers of robbers and pirates that the tourists of the
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day, on their way to see sites associated with Plato and Alexander, were forced to go in groups.61

Descriptions of remote places fueled a small literary industry. Some writers, especially those interested in the East, eschewed the potential contributions of eyewitnesses in acquiring information, emphasizing the fantastic instead. Hellenistic literature had what James S. Romm calls a genre of “paradoxography or ‘marvel-writing,’ a pseudoscientific precursor of our own ‘believe-it-or-not’ collections,” which grew out of the wealth of geographical data brought back to Greece after Alexander’s campaign in Asia.62 Alexander’s own admirals were criticized for doctoring their observations with lurid, albeit popular, tales. By comparison, Strabo (ca. 63 B.C.-A.D. 21), for all the cartographical sophistication he displays in his Geography, was hardly the world traveler he claimed to be. In his description of Asia he ignored facts any experienced person would have known; according to Donald F. Lach, he did not even “deign to learn from the merchants about distant places,” relying instead on such literary sources as Homer.63 Around A.D. 40, Pomponius Mela finished his Chorographia—it is the first world geography known to have been written in Latin—in which he finds homes for pygmy-stealing griffons, Amazons, and headless people. An anonymous handbook for merchants known as Periplus of the Erythraean Sea appeared at the end of the first century, describing wonders along the Indian coast and concluding with a glance at the unexplored regions of the Far East.64 Casson contends that Herodotus, in the fifth century B.C., set an enduring standard for the travel writer in the classical world: “to be articulate, well-informed, a skilled raconteur; to include in what he tells a fair share of the unusual with a dash of the exotic; to tell it all with infinite zest.”65

Sacred sites in the eastern Mediterranean continued to attract the pious and curious during this same period; guidebooks to shrines constituted an altogether different form of literary expression from the more fabulous descriptions of the Far East. Pausanias (fl. A.D. 160-80) wrote a Baedeker to Greece in which he paid particular attention to temples and other monuments.
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Eusebius of Caesarea66 (ca. 260-ca. 339) did much the same in his Vita Constantini for churches erected in the Holy Land under imperial patronage; his Onomasticon, translated and revised in Saint Jerome’s De situ et nominibus locorum Hebraicorum one century later, is a digest of biblical place-names that connects specific locations with the events of spiritual significance that happened there. The hundreds of pilgrimage accounts written over the course of a millennium after Egeria’s epistolary peregrinatio of the late 300s traditionally identify loci where faith becomes evident because of sites seen. Journeys on which places are made to fit the verbal contours of a sacred text turned the Holy Land, in Mary B. Campbell’s exact formulation, into “a spectacularly effective rosary,” whose every bead urges the pilgrim to recite a prayer or a passage of Scripture, thereby to raise “raw sense experience into a form of communion” with the world of the spirit.67

In both descriptions of the Far East and accounts of the Holy Land, then, an individual’s observation was subordinated to traditional subject matter. Most people who had been to Asia during the Middle Ages, Lach contends, “brought little information to Europe besides fables and idle stories”—indeed, like everyone at home, “merchants and mariners learned much of their oriental lore from the legends and stories told or read aloud in the public square.”68 Pilgrims, for their part, balanced the need to assert their own authority as eye-witnesses in time against the necessity of focusing on the eternal significance of the Terra Promissionis, suppressing in their itineraries almost any autobiographical detail.

Certainly for much of the Middle Ages, however, Asia and Jerusalem—what Campbell calls the Matter of the East and the Matter of the Holy Land69—remained separate concerns. Their merger first may have been anticipated in the early 1200s by Jacques de Vitry in his significant historical works. Thought to have been a master at the University of Paris, Jacques preached the Fifth Crusade and, as the resident bishop of Acre, attended the Christian army at Damietta from 1218 to 1221. He was the author of companion histories of what he called the eastern and western worlds; an intended third volume, about events after 1179, never materialized. The first book, Historia Orientalis (also known as Historia Hierosolymitanae), opens with an elegy for territories in Palestine that Christians recently had lost to the Muslims, then paints an unfavorable picture of
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Islam before achieving its principal goal: a description of the cities, shrines, and religious groups of the Holy Land. Like many writers of the period, Jacques believed that the immorality of Latin Christians was responsible for the loss of Jerusalem, and in his second book, Historia Occidentalis, he offers a severe review of Western behavior before treating the religious orders and sacraments of the Roman Church, including its new, invigorating spiritual movements. This expansive work’s most remarkable moment, however, comes in its middle, when the focus is about to shift from Orient to Occident. After Jacques treats some of the Levant’s peculiar animals—such as the basilisk and the amphisbaena—he points to lands located even more remotely in Asia and enumerates societies that are not mentioned in pilgrimage accounts, moving from Amazons and Gymnosophists, humans whose social customs were foreign enough for a medieval European, to a stunning array of “monstruosi populi,” humanoids whose peculiar physiques stretched to the limit the idea of creation in the image of God. Readers who could not believe in the literal existence of these races were asked at least to accept their potentiality as a sign of God’s power. Jacques’s argument is academic and old-fashioned; his information comes from Pliny and Solinus, Augustine and Isidore, historical accounts and a map of the world—but not from his own experience in the East.70 Still, by casting his vision beyond Jerusalem, using an account of the Holy Places to segue to the weird and wondrous parts of Asia, Jacques suggested a means by which travelers could write with new scope.

When he died in 1240, Jacques de Vitry had been living for over a decade at Rome. Fearing that Jerusalem might never be recovered, he had left the Holy Land in 1225 and resigned his episcopal office three years later. His death, however, occurred at a time when the West was utterly unable to forget about the East—indeed, it was facing one of the most formidable, direct attacks ever to come from the outside. Unrest in Asia had been commanding Europe’s attention some years before Mongol incursions into Poland and Hungary in 1241. At St. Albans the chronicler Matthew Paris blamed an economic disaster in the local fishing industry on the fall of cities in northern Russia: with the Frisian and Swedish competition
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too frightened to leave home in 1238, the year’s enormous herring catch went entirely to markets in England, causing prices there to fall to ruinous levels.71 Jacques, in his encyclopedic register of worlds orientalis and occidentalis, had overlooked the skilled equestrians whose crushing attacks would shortly thereafter devastate Russia and cripple eastern Europe so rapidly that they seemed loosed from hell, or Tartarus, itself. The medieval West had its first serious encounter with the Far East—with people who were called “Tartars”—willy nilly.72

Uncertainty characterized European politics. The Mongols were victorious at Legnica in Silesia (9 April 1241) and, two days later, they defeated Hungarian King Béla IV (1235-70); he later dispatched Dominican emissaries to the unknown enemy. Kraków and Pest were burned, and the enemy assembled near Vienna by midsummer. Meanwhile, Frederick II (1192-1250) was engaged in a campaign in Lombardy, and the papal see stood vacant for more than a year after the death of Gregory IX on 21 August, except for the ensuing three-week reign of Celestine IV. When Innocent IV became pope on 25 June 1243, the Mongol prince Batu, general of the Western armies, already had retreated a year before, after the death of Ögedei khan threatened to lead to factional squabbles at home. In addition, Batu’s forces, which numbered only around four thousand, were exhausted after years of warfare and hardly could hope to exercise control over yet another continent.73

Innocent (1243-54) convoked the Council of Lyons in 1245, the principal items on his agenda being the imperial question (he deposed Frederick II), Church unity (he sought to improve relations with the Eastern Church), and the Mongol threat. In an effort to learn more about this unknown antagonist, and if possible to convert the khan to Christianity, the new pope commissioned two embassies to undertake a “Mongol mission.” He sent the Franciscan John of Plano Carpini on Easter Sunday (16 April) and—probably around the same time—the Dominican Ascelin of Lombardy to the court of the great khan, in George Painter’s estimation, “to urge the merits of baptism, but primarily to spy upon [Mongol] resources and intentions.”74

Ascelin and his companion, Simon of Saint-Quentin, never even made it to the Caspian Sea,75 but John returned to the curia in November 1247 and almost immediately thereafter circulated his Ystoria Mongalorum, compiled from notes he took during his thirty-month-long journey from France to the khan’s capital at Karakorum. John’s unflattering picture of Mongol society was intended to sound a clear warning about an evil empire’s determination to conquer the world, posing an obvious threat to Christian society, but he also seems eager to debunk the assumption that this enemy force was insurmountable. Unlike most travel reports, which are arranged chronologically, the Ystoria proceeds topically, covering, in order, Mongol geography, sociology, ethnology, religion, ethics, politics, and military might (and vulnerability). John evidently wrote his book on the road, because he read parts of it to eager audiences on the way home from Kiev; according to Salimbene, he was a popular and garrulous dinner guest after his return to France.76 Sometime before his death in 1252, John produced a second edition of the Ystoria, changing little of the original text but expanding the final chapter to include information about the routes, conditions, and hardships of the journey. Even in this revised version of the book, however, the traveler, while himself observant, is largely invisible.77

In May of 1253 another Franciscan set out for Karakorum. Although some of his contemporaries—and many scholars since then—believed William of Rubruck to be an ambassador from France’s King Louis IX (1226-70), by his own report he was a missionary who traveled with royal blessing in order to minister to Christians whom the Mongols had displaced. While in Asia he hoped to preach the Gospel, perhaps even to Möngke khan himself, but he was discouraged by the political and religious chicanery he encountered. Unable to muster enough diplomacy to mask his antagonism, he asked the khan for permission to go home, a request that was immediately—one gathers happily—granted. Having weathered a 4,000-mile return journey to Acre, only to be detained by a Franciscan minister who wanted to capitalize on his rare knowledge, William wrote King Louis a long letter describing his adventures and petitioning to return to Paris.78 Although they are products of similar experiences within a decade of each other, William’s Itinerarium could hardly be more different from John’s Ystoria. The letter is replete with poignant vignettes: a gloomy crossing of Asia in alien company, a nervous tasting of Mongol alcohol, assiduous care for a sick traveling companion, the vehement denunciation of a mountebank masquerading as an Armenian monk, an attempted theological debate with Muslims and Buddhists. These pictures bring to this account a keener sense of the observations and persona of a traveler than can be found in any other book written in Europe before 1400. William was clearly a man who forged his own way; no wonder he disliked the caravan journey east. In his letter he not only refuses to cater to a Western taste for Oriental exoticism but also unhesitatingly contradicts prevailing opinion, questioning Isidore’s and Solinus’s catalogs of monstrous humans, reducing the legendary Prester John to the status of a political footnote, and portraying the Mongols as crude bullies who could be beaten easily if only the king, captured at El Mansûra during the Sixth Crusade just a few years before, would take up the cross against them.79 William’s opinionated and strident
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account demonstrates the strength that an insightful guide with intriguing stories can bring to a travel narrative.

Intrepid and articulate as they were, these mendicant travelers never achieved the fame or notoriety enjoyed in his own day and since by the Venetian merchant Marco Polo, who reportedly spent twenty-six years in Asia. The knowledge he gained during this time is what he “caused . . . to be recorded” in 1298 by Rustichello of Pisa, a professional writer of French romances who was in prison with Marco at Genoa and who assumes the role of narrator in this “description of the world” (the book’s original title, Divisament dou monde, more accurately reflects this subject than does the more popular Travels). The work, composed in an Italianate French, begins with a succinct summary of two mercantile ventures to the court of Kubilai khan undertaken (between 1260 and 1269, and 1271 and 1295) by Maffeo Polo, his brother Niccolò, and Niccolò’s son Marco, who accompanied them on the second journey. This summary, which forms a prologue to the Divisament, has entered the Western imagination; it is hard to imagine that those who praise the book for its verve or adventure have read much beyond it (Ronald Latham noted regretfully that neither Marco nor Rustichello “was a literary genius”). According to the prologue, however, Marco is a gifted young man—a keen observer, a master of Asian languages, a skilled raconteur—and he manages to impress Kubilai himself, who anticipates the boy’s development into a “man of experience and discretion.”80

The three Polos depart for China from the Holy Land, where Kubilai has allegedly asked them to obtain oil for him from the great lamp in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Despite this pious detail, the Divisament bears no resemblance to a pilgrimage account but instead focuses the reader’s attention almost immediately on lands far to the east of Jerusalem,
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beyond Jacques de Vitry’s wildest imagination. Nor is this work a saga of the Polo family or of Marco himself. Following the brief prologue, the Divisament is structured as several lengthy itineraries, permitting the narrator to describe sequentially the political allegiance, religious persuasion, and economic base of hundreds of Asian towns and regions.81 The encyclopedic quality of the Divisament stresses the East’s plenitude; it abounds with bridges, fabrics, intrigues, metals, women, spices, macho fighters, and animal life, but monstrous humans and zoomorphic beasts are almost nowhere to be found. Despite an occasional comment about Marco’s success as a trader, linguist, or administrator, he is generally absent from the work as well. Hundreds of first-person singular pronouns and verbs apply to the narrator, Rustichello, rather than to Marco, and some of the book’s truth-claims are interpolations added by scribes and translators over the course of its complicated textual history. Still, less than half a century after the Franciscans returned unimpressed from Karakorum, the Divisament extolled Asian splendor while it implicitly honored the experience of an non-aristocratic, secular man of the road. Moreover, the Divisament’s relatively wide diffusion—over one hundred manuscripts survive in several medieval European languages—helped, in Pierre Chaunu’s words, “to fix in the minds of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Christendom the obsolete picture of Asia as it had been at the precarious peak of the great Mongol empire.”82

Meanwhile, accounts of pilgrimages to the Holy Land proliferated.83 The last European to write about actual Latin Christian possessions in Palestine was Burchard of Mount Zion, who composed what he called a descriptio in ca. 1283. A German who probably lived for several years in or near Jerusalem, he possessed the inquisitive discrimination of William of Rubruck and a system of locating places conceptually superior to Marco Polo’s. Rather than describe towns and regions sequentially, as one might find them along a road or coastline, Burchard divides the Holy Land into four discrete regions. He then moves mentally over the territory, quarter
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by quarter, identifying important towns and topographical features from Dan to Beersheba; in fact, he refuses to describe any place outside these traditional boundaries of Palestine, although he mentions having traveled to Armenia and Egypt. Burchard’s system grows unwieldy in the area of Jerusalem (despite his subdivision of this fourth quarter into smaller units), but still, by requiring the reader to formulate a mental map, it constitutes an important innovation in the literary treatment of space.84 Burchard’s learned empiricism is also notable. He emphasizes how carefully he has performed his research, inspecting everything from mountain summits to sewer systems to relevant books in his attempt to establish, as Witte puts it in the last words of the Itinerarius, “how things [are] laid out there.” He resolves rival claims to a historical site and does not hesitate to question authority, in one case even disputing a passage in the Book of Isaiah. Unafraid to wade in a marsh inhabited by crocodiles and unashamed to use iron tools to chip off a piece of rock where Jesus prayed in Gethsemane, Burchard brings to the pilgrimage account the voice of a confident, courageous guide.85

During the spring and summer of 1291, not long after Burchard finished his Descriptio, the Egyptian sultan al-Ashraf conquered Acre and adjacent coastal areas, leaving the West without a share in the Land of Promise. One century later, according to Steven Runciman, women in the eastern Mediterranean were still wearing mourning black for the lost Latin kingdom once known as Outremer.86 A papal ban on transportation from Cyprus to any port in Palestine effectively halted travel to Jerusalem, or at
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least publications about it, for a generation.87 Pilgrims went instead to the city of St. Peter, where, in 1300, Boniface VIII guaranteed these “romers” the same plenary indulgence that had once applied to those who visited Jerusalem. The crush of people during Holy Week of this Jubilee year, we know from the poetic masterpiece it temporally defines, led to what may be the first instance of organized one-way traffic in western Europe.88

Conditions in the Holy Land remained tense in the 1330s, judging from the pilgrimage accounts of Jacopo of Verona,89 William of Boldensele,90 and Ludolph of Suchen.91 When they include autobiographical detail, it often emphasizes the dangers or vagaries of travel: a frightening sea squall, access denied or graciously granted to a holy shrine, an encounter with Europeans who had been held hostage for forty years. These writers, like Jacques de Vitry, pause on their pilgrimages to glance eastward; William and Ludolph compute the time it would take to travel from Cairo to the il-khan of Persia.92

At about this same time, near the middle of the fourteenth century, two men claim to have traversed this distance and returned to tell the tale.
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If the number of manuscripts known today is a reliable indicator of a text’s popularity during the Middle Ages, the most successful travel books of the period describe the journeys of a friar and a knight, each of which combines sacred and secular lore. In an account dictated in May of 1330, not long before he died, Odoric of Pordenone—also known as Odoric of Foro Julii or Friuli—recounts his experiences as a Franciscan missionary for perhaps as many as sixteen years in east Asia. His narrative combines faith and the fabulous. At first, Odoric seems to be writing hagiography, for early in his book he relates the martyrdom in 1321 of four minorite friars in India and his own role in transporting their relics to China. Language and vignettes throughout the account borrow from the register of romance, however, as his journey takes him to an island on whose shores fish beach themselves in homage to the local potentate, through a perilous valley of dead souls, and into the magnificent presence of the khan. Like Marco Polo in the Divisament dou monde—and Witte in the Itinerarius—Odoric fits the Orient into paragraph capsules. While the merchant assesses a region’s value based on its commodities, however, the Franciscan fingers each locale as if it were itself a pearl, admiring its curious inexplicability. With his other hand he clutches a cross, which he often uses as a weapon after recounting a society’s peculiar behavior, branding a place abominable or calling a people pestiferous. The cross, too, emblematizes the accuracy of his word, which was taken seriously and widely disseminated. Odoric has the distinction of being one of only two medieval travelers recommended for sainthood.93

Jerusalem and Xanadu are also on the same road for the traveler known as Sir John Mandeville, although he probably did not ride out of the gates of St. Albans in England, as we are told, but sprang from the imagination of a cleric who had covered considerable territory in books. The Book of John Mandeville is a geographical and ethnographical encyclopedia, a collection of information about Christian shrines in the Holy Land and life at the court of the great khan, as well as much in between and beyond, purportedly assembled by an adventuresome Englishman who left Europe in 1322 on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Overcome by a desire to see the world’s diversity, “John Mandeville, . . . knight,” as he styles himself
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in his prologue, did not return for thirty-four years, by which time he was a veteran of the armies of the Egyptian sultan, the great khan, and (in some manuscripts) Prester John.94

As is now well known, the writer of the Book borrows literally and carefully from many sources, among them Jacques de Vitry’s Historia, William of Boldensele’s Liber, Odoric of Pordenone’s Relatio, and several scientific, theological, and historical texts. Accusations that the product is a fraud or a plagiarism, however, overlook the sophistication of its assembly: its compiler was a master at gathering, emending, recasting, and presenting information. Although John Mandevilles appear in fourteenth-century English sources, attempts to link any one of them to the Book have been unsuccessful. He never fought with the khan against the king of Manzi, as he says he did, because those wars were over by the end of the 1200s; he was not the father of English prose, as Dr. Johnson says he was, because the book was composed in French (although in Anglo-Norman rather than Continental French). The Mandeville of the Book is a curious knight whose heroism in battle is never recounted; instead, his valor is undercut by an Egyptian sultan who hectors him for the sins of Europe, by companions who refuse to circumnavigate the globe with him, even by our last glimpse of him, surrendering to gout and old age. In the end, Mandeville is an affable fiction, his persona that of an agreeable Latin Christian whose tolerance for other societies was unusual in a medieval European, although his intense and frequently articulated dislike of Jews made him more typical. Not the digest of personal witness it claims to be, the Book made such literary sense that hardly a European language and, in some parts of England and Germany, hardly a library, it seems, could be without it. Mandeville’s identity, nationality, and the extent of his travels may never be certain, but he is, recalling Mistress Quickly’s epitaph for another fine fiction, “in Arthur’s bosom, if ever man went to Arthur’s bosom.”95

If the compiler of The Book of John Mandeville could offer a picture of Asia not based on personal experience, another author who wrote at first hand about Asia did so almost without self-reference. Jordanus Catalani (Cathala), also known as Jordan of Sévérac, served as a Dominican missionary in India during the 1320s; in August 1329 he was named Bishop of Quilon, a see that comprised all of southern India and that was created for him. At about that same time, after a decade or so in the subcontinent,
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Jordan wrote an exuberant, if rather hectic, account of Asian wonders, appropriately known as Mirabilia descripta. He immediately makes clear his interest in marvels rather than geography; in fact, he begins his book in Europe, describing a whirlpool in the Straits of Messina, before turning his attention to Greece and Armenia. It is not long before he reaches India, whose three divisions (Inferior, Superior, and Tercia) offer ample grist for his mill. Jordan’s marvels tumble from the page as brief paragraph items with little connection to each other; in one short section he moves, in order, from five-headed serpents to the cockatrice, parrots, the childlike fighting behavior of Indian soldiers, precious gems, and the practice of suttee. However scattered Jordan’s approach may be, his Asia is certainly “wonderful,” to use his favorite word.96

As this sketch indicates, medieval travel reports vary greatly in style. No wonder scholars like Richard, Tellenbach, Campbell, and Guéret-Laferté have found the issue of genre so interesting and vexing. As texts, most are unprecedented surprises, like the historical circumstances that led to their composition in the first place. This is true of Johannes Witte de Hese’s Itinerarius, which recounts both a pilgrimage and a voyage to Asia, yet refuses to speak of Jerusalem and never mentions Cathay. Like John of Plano Carpini and Marco Polo, Witte is a narrator given more to observation than self-reference. As is the case with any visitor to holy places, Witte seems motivated by piety, but he deviates considerably from the regular pilgrimage route. Like Mandeville, he does not write from carefully digested experience but derives his information from a variety of literary works—though his borrowings are far more paraphrases than citations. In contrast to the breathless Jordanus, Witte writes about the wonders he sees at the church of Saint Thomas with the same matter-of-factness with which he recounts how two archbishops hold the patens during High Mass. Finally, like most medieval travelers (and as the next chapter will demonstrate), Johannes Witte de Hese has a name that is not unusual for his time or home country, but the only word we have confirming his existence is his own.

In a letter sent to Augustine of Canterbury soon after his arrival in England in 597, Pope Gregory I, cautioning the missionary that ecclesiastical custom could become stale, encouraged him to adopt practices he had witnessed at various churches during his journey through Europe. Things, wrote the pope, “should not be loved for the sake of places, but places for the sake of good things.”97 In a sense, Gregory was articulating the idea of space found in the story of Saint Brendan’s voyage. Writing over 650 years
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later and in quite another context, Roger Bacon urged the study of geography because “the things of the world cannot be known except through a knowledge of the places in which they are contained.”98 Despite its geographical inaccuracies and unremarkable Latin, Johannes Witte de Hese’s Itinerarius, in purporting to relate how one man learned about remote places and by implying that such knowledge is valuable, navigates Bacon’s new world.

1. What’s in the Name *

Except for an occasional item in a surviving record—court rolls, lists of university students or members of a monastic community, manuscript colophons—details about medieval authors, including matters that seem so basic today as year of birth or date of death, are frequently unknowable.1

This lack of information is especially frustrating in the case of travel literature, in which the personality of the narrator contributes vitally to the substance and success of a text. Playing the key role of guide to an unknown place—whether it be the Sinai desert, Mongol Karakorum, or Brobdingnag—the narrator must sound experienced and reliable. Medieval travelers underscored their experience and reliability by means of the detail, the aside, the anecdote that has the air of spontaneity and thus validity. Yet these moments of personal witness do not originate or function similarly. A pilgrim, while taking pains to rivet attention on sacred shrines, nevertheless operates as the reader’s route of access to blessing and may justifiably, if humbly, mention a mass celebrated at Nazareth or graffiti left behind in the church of the Holy Sepulcher.2 A traveler with more secular concerns must find other means to establish credibility. Sometimes this comes at the expense of pitting actual observation against erroneous but widely accepted authority.3 The burden of establishing a credible narrative voice rests equally on writers of real and fictional travel: on Burchard of Mount Zion as on John Bunyan, on William of Rubruck as on Johannes Witte de Hese.4 Thus, although pilgrimage accounts and travel narratives have different contents and purposes, both depend for their textual lives on the voice of someone who pauses occasionally to assert: Et hoc vidi.

Most medieval travelers—pilgrims, missionaries, envoys, merchants—have relatively unremarkable backgrounds; while unusual in being literate, they generally do not seem to be deeply learned or particularly literary. As a result, the account each wrote—in almost every case, that individual’s only known work—is often the only direct witness we have of the author’s existence. Some travelers apparently were unable to exercise final control
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over their story because they dictated it, at times under inconvenient circumstances: Marco Polo allegedly sat in prison, for example, and Odoric of Pordenone lay on his deathbed (although for these very “facts” we are, again, dependent on the works themselves). The lack of independent documentary evidence and the presence of a narrative voice that relates unusual personal experience renders both understandable and perilous the reader’s temptation to build an identity for the traveler based on claims found exclusively in that person’s book.5

The first sentence of the Itinerarius furnishes about as much autobiography as can be expected from any medieval text: the narrator supplies his full name, area of origin, vocation and place of work, and a specific date of departure on his adventure. Although the Middle Dutch translation transforms Johannes Witte de Hese into Johan/Jan Voet and delays his departure from 1389 to 1398, this version also accomplishes the important function of recording the voice of a credible informant. Even when the narrative moves from first to third person in two later manuscripts and the first printed edition, the text asserts its reliability.6 In either language and from either perspective, this itinerary’s beginning is so matter of fact that the reader of the opening sentence has no reason to suspect that the pious priest being introduced will, before very long, try to cook dinner on the dorsal side of a whale. Moreover, although it has proved impossible to corroborate that a Johannes Witte de Hese (or a Jan Voet) ever lived, this absence of information proves nothing—no more, in fact, than if a necrology in Gelderland recorded the name without mentioning any literary accomplishment. The search for a flesh-and-blood Johannes Witte de Hese can become a Mare Iecoreum—the sea with the magnetic bottom that mires iron-bearing ships—since pursuing the question of authorship can be a
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kind of trap.7 At the same time, the search for Witte may yield clues that explain why early readers apparently accepted the Itinerarius as truthful. In any event, it offers an opportunity to correct some longstanding errors in the scholarship.

The fact that Witte can almost be identified befits the Itinerarius, which makes such an effort to sound true. As Josephine Waters Bennett showed almost reluctantly in looking for the real Sir John Mandeville of St. Alban’s, a writer whose chief mode of travel is the imagination needs first to assume a local habitation and a name.8 Anyone attempting to find Johannes Witte de Hese must first reckon with a babel of nomenclature that manuscript scribes, printers, bibliographers, and literary historians have introduced into the discussion, making him seem ubiquitous and nowhere at the same time. Encyclopedias and library data bases list him under Esius, Hees, Hese, Hesius, Hess, Hesse, Heze, Jean, Joannes, Johannes (sometimes alphabetized under I), and Voet. In the National Union Catalog his entry appears under Hese; the British Library prefers Joannes. The surname “Witte” appears exclusively in the three manuscript copies of the Itinerarius that are closest to the original state of the text (ABC). The other Latin manuscripts and all the printed editions attribute the book to “Johannes de Hese” or some orthographic version of that name.9 The Middle Dutch translator of the Itinerarius may have mistaken the name “Witte” for a Latinism: he has the traveler introduce himself as Jan Voet, admittedly a fitting name for a peripatetic priest.10

Several localities named Hees, Hese, and Heze existed in the Lower Rhine area during the Middle Ages. Since in his opening sentence Witte calls himself a cleric “in the diocese of Utrecht” (“presbyter Traiectensis dyocesis”), his name most likely refers to a place identified as Hees in the parish of Soest, near Utrecht.11 An eighteenth-century history of the prominent citizens of Utrecht includes at least nine different men named “de Wit,” “de Witte,” or “Witte” who had various civic responsibilities between 1402 and 1412. The name, in its various spellings, was fairly common—enough so that a Witte who was active in local politics might append his father’s name to be more specifically identified. In the first year of record, both “Jan de Wit” and “Jan de Wit Gysberts zoen” are listed as councilmen. These lists display the flexible orthography of the time; they also indicate that “Wit(te)” could be treated as a location, and that Jan was regularly used in vernacular records for the Latin “Johannes.”12 Johannes Witte was a canon of the cathedral at Utrecht who played a significant role in 1393 in the choice of Frederik of Blankenheim to be bishop of Utrecht.13 Although the general piety of the Itinerarius befits a cleric, so distinguished a man is unlikely to have written in such rudimentary Latin or to have
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styled himself merely “presbyter.” “Jo. Witte” was the scribe of one of four theological works in a manuscript of unknown provenance that dates from around 1426 or 1427.14

An intelligent young man from the Low Countries probably would have been educated at Cologne, which had long been a center of learning. Utrecht and Cologne also were closely united in ecclesiastical politics and enjoyed a flourishing economic relationship as towns linked by the Rhine. Lists of the matricula of the University of Cologne survive from the time of its founding, in 1388; they provide more evidence that Wit(te) and Hese/Hees were name elements in circulation during the late 1300s, although they offer no record of a Johannes Witte de Hese.15 This silence is inconclusive, since even if the author of the Itinerarius had used his actual name and not a pseudonym, and even if he had studied at Cologne, he presumably would have completed his education before 1389, the date of his putative pilgrimage to Jerusalem (assuming that the work is not a schoolboy effort). A considerable percentage of the university population was engaged in religious study and, like Witte, is identified in the matricula as “presbyter.”16

2. Misidentifying Johannes Witte de Hese

Little attention has ever been paid to Johannes Witte de Hese or his Itinerarius. Since 1500, notices—generally brief—have appeared first in the catalogs of libraries assembled by Renaissance humanists and then in encyclopedias and literary histories; patterns of misunderstanding or error in these notices prove that scholars generally have copied from each other and only rarely consulted the book itself. Biographical information advanced about Witte has generated more confusion than light: his name, the date of his pilgrimage, and his place of origin have been incompletely or erroneously reported. Differences in the name—as noted above, they range from Johannes Witte de Hese to Ioannes Hesius to Jan Voet—result from the absence of a stable spelling system during the Middle Ages, the loss of the surname early in the manuscript tradition, and, evidently, a misunderstanding of the Latin text by the Dutch translator.17 A mistake in the first sentence of printed editions ghj—changing the date of Witte’s presence in Jerusalem from 1389 to 1489—underlies repeated misrepresentation of the Itinerarius as a book written in the late fifteenth century (the Middle Dutch translation has him begin his journey in 1398, an error that also has been consequential).18 Sixteenth-century bibliographers probably initially were misled by one of the three editions with the wrong date; they may in turn be the source of mistakes made by later scholars who consulted reference works and not the Itinerarius and who have misdated the journey (or the book’s publication) to 1489.19

A third significant mistake concerns Witte’s origin. All the Latin manuscripts and printed editions describe the narrator of the Itinerarius as a “presbyter Traiectensis dyocesis”—a cleric from the diocese of Utrecht [emphasis mine]—and the Dutch translation appears originally to have employed an equivalent toponym.20 It should first be noted that the word “presbyter” does not necessarily mean that he was a parish priest: Benedictines called each other “presbyter” rather than “monachus,” for example, although a religious might be expected to identify his specific order or monastery (and perhaps to explain what he was doing away from it).21 The more significant words in this phrase, however, are Traiectensis dyocesis, a medieval ecclesiastical territory that was coterminous with nearly all of what is today the Netherlands (except, of course, for land since reclaimed from the sea). Thus, this toponym describes much more than just the city of Utrecht, which was its principal urban center. The geographical spread of the diocese of Utrecht and adjacent territory (ca. 1400) is shown on the map in Figure 1.

The earliest references to the Itinerarius tend to overlook the significant word diocese, however, and almost everyone who refers to Johannes Witte de Hese associates him with a city. By the early nineteenth century, some scholars had shifted his home to Maastricht, a mistake that presumably arose out of linguistic confusion, since both cities are known in Latin as “Traiectum,” Maastricht usually designated as “Traiectum ad Mosam” [on the Maas/Meuse] and Utrecht as “Traiectum ad Rhenum” [on the Rhine].22 The church of Saint Servatius at Maastricht possessed a relic of Saint Thomas, which also may have encouraged people to think that Witte left from this town on a pilgrimage whose goal was the apostle’s shrine in India.23 Local pride probably influenced scholarship as well.

Figure 1. Map of the diocese of Utrecht and adjacent territory around the year 1400.

In 1836, Hamal de Becdelièvre, using unspecified sources, noted the death in 1396 of “Jean Hésius,” a Maastricht-born canon at the collegiate church of Saint Servatius, whom he identified as the writer of an autobiographical “account in Latin” of travel, begun in 1389, to Jerusalem, Arabia [sic], Ethiopia, and even more remote places.24 The connection was reiterated in 1845—this time more influentially—by Mathias de Vries, later a distinguished professor at the University of Leiden. In the introduction to his edition of the Middle Dutch translation of the Itinerarius, de Vries argues that the author could not have come from “the diocese of Utrecht” but rather “of Maastricht.”25 De Becdelièvre’s brief biography was developed in 1911 by P. M. H. Doppler, the archivist for the Dutch province of Limburg, whose capital is Maastricht. In his catalog of the canons of Saint Servatius, Doppler traces to 1368 the first mention of “Johannes Hesius (de Heze),” described as the offspring of a patrician family from the village of Hees in Belgian Limburg and the author of a Latin book of “impressions” gathered on “a journey to Palestine in 1389”; this work was “translated into Dutch, probably in 1398, by a certain Father Johan Voet.”26 Both de
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Becdelièvre and Doppler contradict the text of the Itinerarius, to say nothing of late medieval ecclesiastical hierarchy and geography. Witte introduces himself as “presbyter,” not “canonicus,” a title he certainly would have used after holding it for over twenty years. Moreover, had a canon from the cathedral at Maastricht ventured as far as India or even been associated with an account alleging as much, it is unlikely that the rather ample surviving church records about him would be silent about such an unusual exploit (the connection between the canon at Saint Servatius and the author of the Itinerarius was first made by de Becdelièvre). A canon also would probably have been a more accomplished writer of Latin.27 In point of fact, Maastricht can be ruled out for the simple reason that the city belonged to the diocese of Liège until the mid-1500s, only then becoming an episcopal center in its own right. Any attempt to connect Johannes Witte de Hese (or Jan Voet) to Maastricht ignores the specific political meaning of “Traiectensis dyocesis” during the later Middle Ages.28

3. Evidence from the Book and Its Reception

Surviving manuscripts and copies of early printed editions provide no specific biographical information about Johannes Witte de Hese, but they do offer historical evidence of some value. His book apparently began to circulate with no title or identifying rubric; its earliest readers thus would have had no extratextual preparation for what they were about to read, depending on context alone for a sense of its “identity.” The work’s first publisher, Johann Guldenschaff, was probably the first to style it the Itinerarius: the pragmatic demand of the printed book’s title page called for more than what a manuscript required.29 Although Nicholas Mameranus used Peregrinatio Ioannis Hesei in his edition of 1565 (k), the title apparently invented by Guldenschaff has been adopted by almost all scholars and bibliographers.

The Itinerarius first circulated in the Lower Rhine region, where its Dutch protagonist presumably generated local interest. Manuscript A (probably 1424), the oldest copy of the text, was copied by Johannes of
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Purmerend, and by mid-century it was at the Benedictine abbey of Saint Heribert at Deutz.30 The work was circulating in the vernacular in Holland by around 1450.31 By 1473 the Itinerarius had reached southern Bavaria. Its original audience appears to have been monastic, but as a book printed at Cologne, Antwerp, Deventer, and Paris it reached other readers.32

Scribes and early readers left little indication of their responses to the book. Marginalia (except for corrections) are rare or absent in all manuscripts except E which has fairly frequent notations that generally are restricted to textual summary, although the scribe directs specific attention [“Nota . . .”] to the layout of the palace of Prester John, the description of Hulna, the unveiling of the face of Saint Thomas on his feast day, the healings that occur on this occasion, and Jasconius the whale.33 Oswald Nott, the scribe of D urges readers to “note well” the entire description of Prester John’s capital of Edissa.34 In G an index finger points to the passage on the women of Terra Feminarum.35 The lack of any pejorative comments suggests—but certainly does not prove—that literate audiences generally took the work seriously. This suggestion is strengthened by the fact that when the Itinerarius was gathered before 1550 in a single codex with other texts, it joined chronicles, theological manuals, geographical treatises, and other travel accounts that were accepted as true at the time. Exemplars of the eleven printed editions show a similar regard, although
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at least two late sixteenth-century readers entered hostile judgments into the book itself: one wrote “This author was a downright fabulist” on a title page, while another left bilingual repudiation (“Note well! Reader, watch out for shameless lies,” “oh, go on,” and “pure nonsense”) in the margin adjacent to the description of Prester John’s palace.36 I know of no manuscript or printed copy of the Itinerarius bound before 1600 that was conjoined with works then generally believed to be fictional.

Since some of Witte’s experiences and observations are taken silently from other books, it perhaps is fitting that the first writer to borrow from the Itinerarius should do so without attribution. More important, the context of this “loan” indicates that the book was accepted as factual. A Dutch sailor who accompanied Vasco da Gama on his second voyage to India (1502-3) published an account of his adventure a year after returning home. His descriptions of flying fish at the equator and of the shrine of Saint Thomas in India closely follow passages in Witte’s work.37 The first scholarly notice of Witte’s book gives it considerable credit. In prefatory material to his edition of the work, published in 1565, Nicholas Mameranus, who had been poet laureate at the court of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1519-58), recalls learning about the Itinerarius while himself on a journey.38 He reports that the text contains things “unknown and unheard-of in these parts,” but in preparing it for publication he felt a need to eradicate certain Latin barbarisms that the “good priest” had committed. Indeed, in a poem accompanying his preface, Mameranus salutes “the priest of Christ / Who had such great love of traveling” for wanting to see so much of the world, judging the report worthy of a wider audience, which might find inspiration in it.39

Other readers were less enthusiastic. In a discussion of the unicorn written in the early 1600s, the Spanish naturalist Francisco Fernández de Córdova quotes Witte’s claim that he saw the splendid beast purifying a
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stream in the Sinai, then dismisses it along with the rest of what he calls the book’s innumerable wild lies and fables.40 More commonly, however, the Itinerarius appears in a neutral or benign context, perhaps due to the fact that it seldom was the subject of extended critical study. Indeed, it may have been read less frequently than it was mentioned: any one scholar’s reference to, or judgment of, the Itinerarius is likely to reappear in the work of several others, a pattern of copying information and misinformation that continues to the present day.

Josiah Simler mentions without comment a copy of the Itinerarius (dated 1489) in his catalog of the library of the Zurich bibliophile and “father of zoology” Konrad Gesner (1516-65), published after Gesner’s death. Simler’s aim was not to evaluate books but simply “to record their titles as an aid to people with libraries.”41 Similarly, Franciscus Sweertius included “Ioannes de Hese, siue Hesivs, Presbyter Traiectensis” in a list of Dutch writers, adding only that the book described “the wondrous things of all India.”42 Valerius Andreas, in another bibliographical encyclopedia, identified “Ioannes Hesivs, Presbyter Trajectensis” as the author of a book
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about travel in 1389 to Arabia [sic], India, Ethiopia, and other remote regions of the world, “in which many things are related that far exceed the truth, owing to the credulity of that age.”43 While these scholars give little indication of having read past the title page of the Itinerarius, Gerard Joannes Vossius seems to have concentrated on the book’s last sentence: noting that Witte observed the marvels of the Indies, he continues: “he returned from there to Jerusalem, but about Jerusalem, in fact, he refused to write because many others had already taken it upon themselves to do so.”44

The important contributions these men made to the new science of bibliography benefited writers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who inherited facts and misinformation as well as prejudice. In 1629, Pierre Bergeron published an introduction to his edition of travel narratives written between 1100 and 1500, which ranks as one of the earliest scholarly essays about medieval European accounts of Asia. Bergeron groups Witte with Odoric of Pordenone and John Mandeville, accusing them all of writing accounts that were full of fables owing to their inability to distinguish between what they had heard and what they had actually seen for themselves, something he considered a common failing during the Middle Ages. He is especially critical of the Itinerarius for including stories for their entertainment value, to say nothing of its many geographical absurdities and errors.45

Another early study of travel narratives, considerably more extensive than Bergeron’s, was undertaken in the early nineteenth century by Johann Beckmann, a professor of economics at the University of Göttingen. In his two-volume Litteratur der älteren Reisebeschreibungen, Beckmann summarizes and analyzes selected narratives, describes different editions, offers information about the travelers, and provides valuable chronological and geographical indices. It is an impressive, if largely forgotten, work of scholarship. Beckmann was the first person to recognize several problems in the reception of the Itinerarius that have been rehearsed here. He faults Nicholas Mameranus not so much for “improving” the text’s Latin in his edition of 1565 as for failing to provide a critical apparatus with original readings. He attempts, albeit unsuccessfully, to unravel the interrelationship of the printed editions, and he recognizes variants in the spelling of “Hese” (he never mentions “Witte”) and the writer’s departure date from Jerusalem (he recognizes 1489 to be a misprint).46 For all the attention he devotes to the Itinerarius, however, Beckmann sees it primarily as a bibliographical curiosity. “Other than its venerable age,” he writes, “I know of nothing that could lend this little travel narrative any value.” He complains about the text’s brevity, its garbled topography, and its stock of “old fables.”47

Beckmann’s judgment was echoed by other nineteenth-century writers, who repeated the charge, now two hundred years old, that Witte was guilty of typical medieval gullibility and worthy more of neglect than attention.48 In his historical survey of travelers from the Low Countries, Jules de Saint-Génois calls the Itinerarius one of the more curious journey narratives in existence, but he ultimately dismisses it as a collection of naïve tales, marvelous legends, and popular stories—a sign of how credulous literate people remained “at the end of the fifteenth [sic] century.”49 The Baron de Reiffenberg, in a rambling and mostly irrelevant explanatory note to a passage in M. de Barante’s Histoire des Ducs de Bourgogne de la Maison de Valois, appreciates that the pilgrimage described in the Itinerarius (dated 1489) was occasioned by piety, but he goes on to cite scholars who dispute the work’s extravagant claims. He begins a French translation of the text but abandons it less than a quarter of the way through, leaving Witte facing the cannibalistic Monoculi in the Sandy Sea (98).50 Joseph J. C. Nève sounds a rather sinister note in his fairly lengthy treatment of the Itinerarius: he contends that the marvels “Jean de Hese . . . claims to have seen are so extraordinary, and the fables he relates so very absurd, that one cannot attribute it all to his extreme naïvete.” Indeed, while “Jean” may “embellish his subject a little” in claiming to have eaten flying fish from the Red Sea, he is no longer just an “incredibly credulous traveler” when he describes Prester John’s palace or the island of Gog and Magog. Nève ends on a happier note, wondering whether the book is not just a fantasy from beginning to end, and whether the author, in writing it, would ever have had need to leave his own back yard.51

Dutch literary historians have treated the Itinerarius more charitably, noting its imaginative content and laconic style.52 Philippus Christianus Molhuysen (1852) calls the travel narrative of “Jan de Hese” a “rare and peculiar book” full of “unbelievable things,” reminiscent of A Thousand and One Nights, but he speculates that the work may have influenced late fifteenth-century Portuguese exploration with its description of the land of Prester John, the oddities of which no other writer had described so nicely and amusingly.53 A. J. van der Aa’s contemporaneous and nonjudgmental estimation of “Johannes Hesius or Hees, . . . famous for his travels
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in 1398 [sic],” entered an encyclopedia that was frequently reprinted.54 Jan te Winkel believes much of the narrative to be imaginary and calls the author’s occasional claims to have seen (or not to have seen) something odd rather intrusive; still, he defends the Itinerarius against charges of mendacity by insisting that it only repeats what other writers had (or might have) said—after all, India was a wonderland generally for medieval Europeans. To bolster this claim but also to enlarge the stature of the Itinerarius, te Winkel cites several sources, including Honorius Augustodunensis and a German version of Marco Polo.55 W. J. A. Jonckbloet was the first scholar to compare the Itinerarius and the Book of John Mandeville on literary grounds (te Winkel treated them in succession, referring to the Dutch Reysen . . . van ridder Jan van Mandeville that circulated in late medieval Holland). According to Jonckbloet, since Witte’s clipped stories form an “itinerary” rather than a coherent narrative, his book has an appropriate title (Jonckbloet was unaware that the name Itinerarius is evidently not authorial). Nevertheless, he wryly concludes that Witte, despite his brevity, concedes nothing to the more garrulous Mandeville in churning out wonders.56The complaints and the comparisons are justified. Witte’s text—in Latin or in Middle Dutch—seldom describes landscapes or actions in vibrant, appealing language. Its stylistic strengths include a terseness that steers the narrative clear of breathless enthusiasm and a vagueness that
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leaves some of the narrator’s claims—of having seen Eden or Gog and Magog, for example—tantalizingly ambiguous. While the Book achieved much greater literary distinction than did the Itinerarius, John Mandeville and Johannes Witte de Hese are both, in all likelihood, figments of the imagination of two anonymous authors who managed to fashion a traveler with a name, a vocation, and a set of experiences that sounded authentic enough for readers to credit his words, at least for a time.

1. The Threatened Text

In addition to occupying a key position in the history of Western travel literature, Witte’s Itinerarius underwent a complicated textual development and dissemination, which deserves attention for the light it sheds on what could happen to a book written in northern Europe around 1400. The Latin text is found in eight recovered manuscripts, of which the oldest, A (probably copied in 1424), is closest in content to the original and serves as the basis for the critical edition printed here.1 Seven incunable editions and four other early publications of the Latin text appeared between ca. 1490 and 1565, found today in at least ninety-five exemplars; three of the recovered manuscripts are, in fact, copies of one of these printed books. By the second half of the fifteenth century, the Itinerarius also was circulating in Middle Dutch, as records of three exemplars of a single translation testify. Comparison of all these versions of the book indicates that at least five additional manuscripts—three in Latin and two in Dutch—are unrecovered at present (see Figure 2 for a hypothetical stemma). Witte’s Itinerarius, in other words, reached a modest audience during the 1400s and early 1500s.2

Figure 2. A stemma for Latin manuscripts and printed editions and for Middle Dutch manuscripts of the Itinerarius.

What readers and auditors confronted was by no means a stable text—not that any work produced during the Middle Ages was verbally “fixed”—and the history of the transmission of the Itinerarius brings other intriguing contours to a study of the work. In her survey of the records left by twenty-three men who claim to have journeyed within Asia between 1238 and 1360, Michèle Guéret-Laferté maintains that “the purity and integrity of the [travel book] text are continually threatened” by a series of factors, including scribal errors, editorial decisions, and the formation of manuscript codices, in which the way one work is read may be partly determined by the material that accompanies it.3

The Itinerarius is an excellent example of the threatened text. First, the original Latin version was distinctly and successively revised three times, effecting marked changes in narrative voice and style. Substantive changes are not frequent, but they include interpolated assurances by the “narrator” that his account is reliable, as well as shifts of verb forms to the subjunctive mood that enable scribes or printers to distance themselves somewhat from certain textual claims. At least one major revision was made while the work was still in manuscript form; its first two printers probably were responsible for the third and fourth stages of the text. Second, scribes worked with the fifteenth-century Middle Dutch translation in a different way, producing orthographically and syntactically dissimilar versions of the vernacular, in part to accommodate their own dialectal preferences. The translator evidently was more relaxed about additions—and scribes about omissions—than were copyists and printers of the Latin text. Third, a direct line of descent can be traced from the first to the eleventh printed edition, and no publisher either credited his source or disguised his appropriation of it. Some evidence indicates competition or collaboration in getting the text into circulation. Fourth, although the content and style of the Itinerarius may not impress many modern readers, its early audiences appear to have taken it seriously, given the frequency with which it was joined, before the mid-sixteenth century, to theological works, chronicles,
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and geographies in manuscript codices and bound collections of printed books. Finally, as the printing press introduced many texts with a regional appeal to larger audiences, the Itinerarius, which initially circulated in Germanic-speaking areas (almost exclusively in the Rhineland), began to appear throughout Europe. Editions were published in Antwerp (between 1497 and 1499) and Paris (ca. 1507), and Renaissance humanists and scientists from the Low Countries to Switzerland to Spain cite the book, though not always approvingly.4

This chapter’s delineation of the textual transmission of the Itinerarius demonstrates that, of all the recovered copies of the book, manuscript A is lexically closest to the unrecovered autograph version. Variants in other manuscripts and printed editions—omissions, interpolations, changes in substance and style—place them successively farther away from the original. Yet A does not represent what is often called a “best text”: a composition teacher in fact might rank it the worst. Moreover, it is not a “best text” in the more traditional sense that it preserves an author’s—and therefore an authoritative—intended set of words. As Ralph Hanna III trenchantly has argued, the belief in and quest for a “best text” may lead to either “mystified nostalgia” or “overly sophisticated [editing] habits.” Thus, A is not the basis for the edition printed here either to provide modern readers with “at least as good a text as any medieval reader had” or to facilitate “the creation of a non-medieval text corrected on the basis of [compared readings in] all manuscripts”—two separate, if not always conscious, aims of modern editors who strive to reestablish a work’s “original audience.”5

The textual history of the Itinerarius turns some editorial assumptions on their head, since more difficult or more trenchant readings, usually considered to be a writer’s “intended”—and therefore “truer”—expressions, are in the case of this book often signals of emendation. The conventional treatment of variants as constituting “a vocabulary of degeneration” does not apply to the Itinerarius, a work in which at times “the scribe [or printer] seems to have participated on a footing nearly equal to that of the author,” if not, in terms of Latin competence, actually superior to him.6 Witte is
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seldom responsible for the lectio difficilior or durior in any sense, and what in another case might be called textual corruption is here frequently literary improvement. Moreover, if the Itinerarius exerted an “influence” over an audience—by conveying knowledge, however flawed, or stimulating readers to undertake their own journeys—it no doubt did so with greater success in its later, stylistically more sophisticated stage as a printed book (the five early manuscripts were originally most likely in monastic libraries). Manuscript A is the basis for this edition because of all the recovered copies of the Itinerarius, it represents the earliest state of a text that underwent considerable change, and that change is best described and measured by presenting it in discrete variants.7

As the number and substance of these variants testifies, Witte’s original narrative was “threatened,” as Guéret-Laferté would say, most directly by the impulse of its transmitters to improve it. Manuscripts A and B (ca. 1460) present similar versions of the Itinerarius, in repetitious and prolix Latin that seldom rises above the sophomoric (an exception is lines 26-30). Since other texts—they happen also to be later—record the narrative in increasingly more stylish language, AB must represent most closely its autograph version. Manuscript C (ca. 1470) contains several readings that otherwise are found only in A, and it preserves much of the redundancy of the original. Many of its variants, however—changes in vocabulary, interpolated truth claims, and incoherent readings—threaten the narrative not just by garbling it but also by intruding on it in several passages that affect Witte’s voice. The nearly contemporaneous manuscripts D (1473) and E (ca. 1480) are independent copies of an unrecovered manuscript (or two very similar ones) that had brought the Itinerarius to a second stage of development by revising the beginnings of some independent clauses to reduce tedious polysyndeton, by placing much of the narrative in the third person, and by reordering one extended sequence of events for better dramatic effect. The first printed edition of the work (a), published by Johann Guldenschaff at Cologne around 1490, shares these features, adding to them a thorough revision of vocabulary and syntax that fundamentally alters the text for a second time. Manuscripts F and G are copies of printed edition a, which Curt Bühler points out was common practice; their accurate renderings of Guldenschaff’s published book reveals an exactitude
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that no other scribe, except perhaps for Johannes of Purmerend in A, shows for a manuscript copy text.8

Cornelius of Zyrickzee’s first printed edition (b), also produced at Cologne (ca. 1497), is an elegant revision of a that returns the entire narrative to the first person and continues Guldenschaff’s skilful editorial work, although it is marred by dozens of typographical errors. The Itinerarius here reaches its fourth and final stage of development: the nine subsequent printed editions (c through k) follow a clear linear descent even as they appear on presses away from Cologne—at Antwerp, Deventer, and Paris. An eighth recovered manuscript (H [ca. 1500]) is a careful copy of e (which itself almost exactly reproduces Zyrickzee’s second edition [c]). Three publications, g (1499), h (1504), and j (ca. 1507), erroneously—and at first, it seems, intentionally—give the date of Witte’s departure from Jerusalem as 1489. Edition k (1565) omits the year entirely and introduces many semantic and syntactical emendations. The text of this last premodern publication of the Itinerarius, at the far end of the series of revisions, at times departs so radically in vocabulary and style from that of A as to seem a completely different narrative.

2. The Autograph Text, Manuscript , and Unrecovered Manuscripts A

The autograph copy of the Itinerarius presented Johannes Witte de Hese as an unusually experienced traveler but an unremarkable writer. His Latin is capable of getting him from Jerusalem to Paradise and back, but it does so by means of almost chronic repetition, a limited vocabulary, dangling gerundives, infrequent use of subordinate clauses, and unimaginative transitions (many beginning “Et ulterius” or “Item”). These stylistic characteristics, found in ABC and the Middle Dutch translation, appear less and less often in the series of texts running DEa[FG]bc[e{H}]df[i]gh[jk] (bracketed sigla are copies of their immediate predecessor in this list), which successively introduce more sophisticated syntactical and grammatical forms. Thus, the quality of any one text’s Latin is a measure of its relative distance from the original. In the manuscripts that preserve the Itinerarius in its earliest state, omission, interpolation, and garbled readings are also important markers, proving that B and C are less accurate versions of the autograph text than is A, which thus serves as the basis for the critical edition presented here. At the same time, variants in BC bring to each manuscript intriguing—rather than “inferior” or “corrupt”—readings that
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warrant attention for what they reveal about the production and dissemination of a medieval text. This attention deservedly extends to all the manuscripts and early printings that preserve versions of the Itinerarius.

Of all the recovered texts of the Itinerarius, manuscript A in the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota, both records the narrative in its most original state and presents it in what students of medieval travel and geography likely will find to be its most interesting context. The manuscript is a remarkable anthology of works, almost all of which treat the matter of Asia, especially pilgrims’ and crusaders’ activities in the Holy Land. These include Theoderic’s Libellus de locis sanctis (1169-74), Hayton of Armenia’s Flos historiarum terre orientis (dictated in French in 1307 to Nicholas Falcon, who that same year prepared this Latin translation), Jacopo of Verona’s Liber peregrinationis (ca. 1335/1340), William of Boldensele’s Liber de quibusdam ultramarinis partibus (1336), and two copies of The Book of John Mandeville in Latin (composed in French, ca. 1360; these preserve the “Vulgate” version, which appeared after 1396). One copy of the Book and Jacopo’s Liber, each signed and dated 1424 by Johannes of Purmerend, precede Witte’s Itinerarius, which is written in Johannes’s neat, distinctive hand but lacks a colophon.9 The manuscript was in the monastery of Saint Heribert at Deutz, across the Rhine from Cologne, by the mid-1400s. A copy of the Itinerarius thus can be located in the Rhineland a generation or so after the purported journey it describes, in a state close to that of the original and in the context of other travel books.

Johannes of Purmerend appears to have been a careful scribe, despite one scholar’s tepid assessment of his abilities.10 He made few certain errors, neatly correcting those he noticed. In this critical edition I have felt obligated to make only seven emendations: four to correct obvious orthographical mistakes, one to improve grammar, and two to add a word that is crucial
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to the meaning of a sentence.11 All the other Latin texts differ from A on ten additional occasions. Some of these seem to offer “better” readings in terms of clarity and sense, but a central argument of this chapter is that clearer or more sensible constructions often indicate textual revision in the Itinerarius. Moreover, since my aim is not to present confidently a reconstructed “original,” I have not emended A. The ten instances are quite minimal: 1) in a reference to “good [animals]” A omits animalia (it is present in the previous sentence and thus may be understood in this one, a style followed in reverse by printed editions b-k [lemma 165]); 2) A omits nos in a sentence in which the word is not crucial but would be in keeping with four other first-person plural pronouns or verbs in a fairly brief paragraph; 3) A omits tantum in a sentence to which the word brings nice, but not necessary, balance; 4) A refers to a statue being fashioned at “a certain” (quamdam) rather than at “any old” (quamlibet) column, neither reading being demonstrably more sensible and either likely to have been caused by a mistaken reading of an abbreviation; 5) A notes that lamps burn in Prester John’s palace “at night” (de nocte) instead of “by day, as well as night” (die ac nocte), either of which could be original; 6) A locates Saint Thomas’s reliquary “in front of” (ante) and not “at” (ad) a particular tower, neither of which is necessarily more precise; 7) A fails to number the lamps that burn at this same site (all other Latin texts stipulate that there are twelve, but nothing requires enumeration); 8) A claims that the distance from Eden to Purgatory is a sailing distance of thirty-four days (the numeral is arabic), and not twenty-four, the latter being more in keeping with the metaphorical numbers (three, four, seven, twelve, twenty-four) used elsewhere; 9) A refers to “wild, hairy people” and various “other” animals, the latter word being omitted in the other texts, which thus maintain a distinctly human category for the wildman; and 10) A employs the subjunctive voice to place two-faced people in Amosona, which links them to Gog and Magog as people “said” to inhabit the region.12

Since the readings in A are plausible and at least one is found in the Middle Dutch translation, variants common to BCDEa-k cannot definitively be regarded as original to the Itinerarius: they may accurately preserve readings in the autograph copy or they may all record variants that entered the text in an unrecovered manuscript—one that is farther removed from the autograph than A—from which they all descend. How many unrecovered manuscripts there may be is impossible to ascertain: DEa certainly share (ultimately) a common ancestor, but other clusters of texts emerge from the variant readings that cannot all be explained by hypothesizing lost manuscripts.13

3. Manuscript B

The version of Witte’s Itinerarius preserved in B is close to that of A, but its variants and its scribe’s occasional sloppiness place it at a farther remove from the original and rule it out as the (sole) source for any other known text in Latin or Middle Dutch.14 Its similarities to A are not only textual: B probably was copied (ca. 1460) in the Rhineland, perhaps at Cologne, and it combines the Itinerarius with two thematically related works, The Letter of Prester John and a brief treatise on territories held by the Sultan of Egypt, written during the pontificate of John XXII (1316-34).15

Differences between A and B are relatively minor. Indeed, the two manuscripts share key pieces of information missing elsewhere, including the full name of the author (although B lacks the emphatic autobiographical ego of the first sentence) and a date that authenticates Witte’s presence at
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the church of Saint Thomas (although they disagree on the year).16 Several substantive omissions in B are the most obvious proof of its textual isolation.17 Additions to the narrative are relatively few, are limited to one or two words, and generally supply a preposition or information that clarifies a reading in A: stipulating that the women of Terra Feminarum join the men of Edissa “three times per year” or that the inhabitants of the native land of the magi fight “serpents and other poisonous animals” slightly improve sense but for this very reason seem markers of scribal emendation.18

Differences in vocabulary generally lead either to synonymous readings of equal sense (lucidum for nitidum) or to less apt ones (the children of Israel “come together” (convenerunt) rather than “rest” (quieverunt) at Elim, the Cyclopes have “eyes” rather than one dreadful oculum, and a numerable “twelve” evil spirits flee the bell of Saint Thomas).19 Grammatical
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variants largely are restricted to verb forms, but they show no pattern of change, such as a preference for the subjunctive over the indicative mood: some may arise because the scribe has misunderstood abbreviatory marks in the copy text.20 The syntax of A is virtually unchanged in B which has only six instances of word transposition.21 Non-substantive omissions unique to B although rather numerous, are by and large trivial.22 One missing word is consequential, however: the absence of non in a passage about Grandicanis (the great khan) places him at home, rather than away, when Witte and his companions are imprisoned after arriving in his kingdom.23

The more principled revisions—semantic and syntactical—found in other Latin texts (discussed below) do not characterize B. The beginnings of only eight independent clauses are reworded, four times excising the word item.24 One usage of unum as an indefinite article is deleted.25 The B-scribe lacked Johannes of Purmerend’s scribal skills—misspellings, careless use of abbreviatory marks, and corrections written over mistakes occur throughout B—but attempts to make the narrative more accessible include a rubric found in no other text drawing attention to the description of Mt. Sinai. Large initials in the last third of the narrative identify paragraph units.26

4. Manuscript C

Lambertus Brocker, probably a lector at the Dominican monastery at Soest in Westphalia, copied the mostly theological and historical texts that make up C around 1470 (brief additions came later). The codex as a whole has an unruly quality. Excerpts from four works by Jacobus of Jüterbog, for example, are jumbled together on fols. 26ra-99vb, with two separate chapters from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History included at fols. 81rb-82vb. Parts of the manuscript have the character of a commonplace book. The Itinerarius appears, disjointed, approximately halfway through a series of generally brief passages from Gobelinus Person’s Cosmidromius (fols. 177ra-214va): it begins on fol. 198ra and continues to the end of fol. 200vb (near the end of the description of the pilgrimage to Saint Thomas), at which point readers are told to “go back six folia” to the place (following the third line of fol. 194vb) where a special symbol designates the text’s continuation. At the foot of this column another notation indicates that that “more on this subject” can be found following another symbol in the “second column to follow”; it appears at the top of fol. 195rb, at the bottom of which a third instruction (“turn the page and where you will find this sign——there read [and so forth]”) sends readers to the middle of fol. 196ra for the remainder of the work, which concludes, without a formal explicit, eight lines from the end of the next column.27 Approaching the text sequentially, then, readers of manuscript C learn first about the beacons that shine atop the church of Saint Thomas and Witte’s experience at the “Root of Paradise,” then, on the next folio, about the voyage from Eden to Jasconius; they move on, three columns later, to the murky landfalls that precede the voyage’s conclusion at Jerusalem, and must skip three full pages before reaching the first line of the account, which begins without any rubric identifying “Anno domini M^o ccc^o 89” as the incipit of a new text.

The version of the Itinerarius found in C shares some of the idiosyncratic, cobbled-together quality of Brocker’s presentation of it. The first sentence, for example, departs six times from that in A, and these variants characterize the ways in which the narrative in C differs from that in the earlier manuscript. Out of sequence, but in order of significance, the variants, each unique to C, are as follows: 1) the addition of the phrase veni et cetera (“I came, and so forth”) after Witte’s arrival in Egypt, one of several interpolations apparently intended to underscore the truthfulness of the account (its very spuriousness suggested by the perfunctory et cetera); 2) the omission of the phrase et per Jordanem (“and along the Jordan”) from Witte’s description of his route to Egypt, which is both an informational
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and a geographical loss; 3) the omission of fui (“I was”), which leaves the text without a crucial word and prompts a kind of dissonance that is not resolved satisfactorily by the addition of veni, noted above; 4) the replacement of vocatam (“called”) with the nearly synonymous nominatam (“named”); 5) the syntactical revision from de Hese presbyter Traiectensis dyocesis to presbiter de hese dyocesis traiectensis, which may simply be a transposition within a cluster of words or may significantly alter the content of Witte’s self-identification (this is discussed below); and 6) the addition of the words ihesu christo (“Jesus Christ”) after Domino nostro (“our Lord”), which contributes little except an air of piety and arguably some redundancy to the account.28 The three latter variants are instances of an apparent scribal tendency to make changes for their own sake without clear or consistent editorial policy, such as can be discerned in DEa-k. Many changes in vocabulary are not so trivial as that in the fourth variant discussed above, considerably confusing or distorting the text as we know it from all other recovered versions.29

The several additions to the Itinerarius found in C, particularly those in which Witte speaks in the first person, are more significant than the manuscript’s hundreds of other variants. Found nowhere else, they are one indication of C’s relative isolation, and they aid in constructing a textual stemma. More consequentially, they constitute attempts to ensure that the Itinerarius be read as the true record of an individual’s exotic experience. As such these interpolated truth claims deserve special attention since they may mark moments in the text that prompted a scribe to want to reassert Witte’s reliability. (They also should caution readers against assuming that first-person claims in other travel books are necessarily authorial.) To be sure, in some instances (such as the insertion of veni [lemma 14]), the added claim is unemphatic, amounting to the simple introduction of a first-person verb or an apparently minor grammatical variation.30 On three occasions, however, the interpolation in C is a deliberate endorsement of Witte as trustworthy witness. His description of Prester John’s gargantuan and
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wonder-filled palace concludes with a sentence in which he insists that “everything written above I expressly saw myself, and [so did] that party of nobles we were in league with on the pilgrimage to St. Thomas”; he elaborates on the sensory delight he experienced at the “Root of Paradise”; and he testifies that he learned the truth about the island-whale Jasconius from “those who have information about this matter.”31 It is difficult to imagine that the architectural, natural, and zoological spectacles preceding these interpolations did not encourage a scribe to insert a claim of truth where the ring was less audible. Other additions more subtly use Witte’s voice to impart information that is found in no other Latin or Middle Dutch version: Prester John is the best of all Christians, part of his palace is a marvelous architectural model of the heavens, and Gog and Magog “were and are” imprisoned in Amosona.32

As is the case with interpolations, omissions in C demonstrate that this version of the Itinerarius varies considerably from the other known texts. Several of these entail the loss of more than just a few words or a phrase: C lacks two sentences about the field of “helim” [Elim], most of the sentence describing the twenty-cubit plummet at the exit of a dangerous marine passageway near the Indian pepper fields, Witte’s admission of bafflement over the working of a marvelous clock in Prester John’s palace, his note that the palace contains many wonders that he has not recorded, the entire description of the individual rivers of Paradise, two sentences on the fecundity of animals and the limit of inhabited territory in India, a sentence on the liturgical role played by archbishops at the feast of Saint Thomas, and the assertion that night never falls at the “Root of Paradise.”33 Some apparently minor omissions nevertheless alter the narrative: C leaves out Witte’s observations that lepers are healed in the balsam garden in Egypt, that pygmies are small, that evil spirits flee the sound of the marvelous bell
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commissioned by Saint Thomas, that the altar in Prester John’s chapel is made of ivory, that apostles figure in a complicated sculptural program, and that the two archbishops who hold the hand of Saint Thomas do not govern its movements (in this version, they do).34 Several dozen other lapses in C affect the meaning of the Itinerarius less consequentially; many of them appear to reflect scribal attempts to purge the text of what late fifteenth-century scholars were calling the barbarisms of medieval Latin.35 Deletions include several usages of unus/una/unum employed as an indefinite article,36 multiple verbs or nouns in instances where one might serve,37 and pleonastic or other arguably verbose constructions.38

The omission of fui in the first sentence is only the first example of a missing word that leaves C with puzzling or even nonsensical readings. The cannibals along the Ethiopian coast have their single eye “in the middle of [a?] carbuncle” rather than “in the middle of their forehead, shining like a carbuncle”; the great khan reigns under an emperor whose name is not supplied; and the huge sheep and goats of a remote island “are as large as”—but the comparison stops there.39

Changes in the vocabulary or syntax of the Itinerarius—not additions or omissions but rewordings—make the text of C unique in another way.
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Many of these alterations seem innocuous—the reading nominatam for vocatam, noted above, for example—and amount to little more than the substitution of a synonym40 or a minor change in grammar, such as an alternative noun/verb form or a preposition.41 In a fair number of cases, the narrative’s style profits from the introduction of a more exact word, although occasionally the effect is pedantic: according to C the body of Saint Catherine once emitted oil in great “quantity” (quantitate) not “abundance” or “fulness” (copia), the first level of Prester John’s palace is illuminated at night by “little torches” (faculis) rather than “lanterns” (lanternis), that a multitude feasts every day in the palace refectory is “written” (scriptum) instead of “indicated” (signatum) outside the building, during the morning Prester John “processes” (incedit) rather than “goes around” (transit) like a pope, the women of the Land of Females do not “send” (mittunt) but “direct” (dirigunt) little boys to their fathers, and Witte and his colleagues “took a walk” (ambulavimus) on a paradisal island that according to other texts they “passed through” (transivimus).42 On occasion, the revision improves the sense as well, such as when Prester John’s afternoon apparel is described as that of an “emperor” rather than a mere “king” or when the narrator seeks to establish the “cause” and not the “reason” of a marvel.43

More frequently, however, C distinctly alters—sometimes completely distorts—the text as it appears elsewhere: Moses is himself a “lord” rather the builder of an altar to “the Lord,” a “diverse” and not the “Divine” office is held daily before Prester John, food placed on the emperor’s dining table remains fresh for a full month and not just a day, the Mass of the Blessed Virgin is said “before” rather than “after” sunrise, and a black monk does not question Witte and his companions about Saint Thomas but, like a professor, “examine[s]” them “on a variety of matters.”44 In all its versions the Itinerarius reveals considerable authorial naïvete in matters of geography, but the situation is aggravated in C, where place-names and terminology are at times corrupt, uncertain, or illegible.45 Similarly, several quantitative variants are found only here, and there is some evidence of scribal difficulty reading either roman or arabic numerals.46 On a few occasions, changes may be owing to some difficulty reading a copy text.47

Finally, two other readings in the first sentence of the Itinerarius that are found uniquely in C suggest that many variants in this manuscript result from a scribal decision to effect change for its own sake. First, the syntactical revision recorded in lemma 6 is only one of many rearrangements of words, most of which leave the meaning of the text unchanged and its style
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unimproved.48 Changes at the beginnings of independent clauses are infrequent—this characteristic of the printed editions is not evident in C—and they are often alterations in word order and/or minor omissions (usually of et or item).49 Second, the occasional addition of a pious adjective or name in a reference to a holy person further exemplifies the degree to which the text of the Itinerarius presented in C had undergone scribal tinkering.50

People who read or heard Lambertus Brocker’s copy of the Itinerarius encountered a text that preserved key features of the book as we know it from its earlier Latin versions (AB) and the Middle Dutch translation: the first-person narrator and his full name, a date for the visit to Hulna, and sentence order in the description of the feast of Saint Thomas. At the same time, the many differences in C—from interpolations attesting to the narrator’s truthfulness to pervasive, sometimes distorting revisions in vocabulary and syntax—reveal that its audiences would have formed an impression of Witte’s account they could not have obtained from any other recovered manuscript or printed copy.

5. Manuscripts and and the Early Printed Editions D E

Manuscripts D and E record versions of the Itinerarius that vary from A in many fewer instances than does C; their changes appear much more deliberate than do most in B. Nevertheless, these extremely similar texts—possibly copies of the same unrecovered exemplar—alter the original narrative in ways so significant that it is accurate to speak of DE as representing the first major revision of the Itinerarius. Their most significant change is the near removal of Witte from the account: his surname is omitted (all
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subsequent Latin texts refer to “Johannes de Hese”), but this is a minor matter compared to the recasting of most of the account in the third person. A second major alteration reorganizes the passage describing the celebration of the feast of Saint Thomas (lines 330-46), in which an editor has brought greater dramatic force to a somewhat jumbled scene in the original. Both changes are carried over into the book’s first printed edition, a, although neither D nor E was Johann Guldenschaff’s copy text.

DE, while they preserve similar versions of the Itinerarius, differ considerably as manuscript codices. The former is a miscellany of works, written by at least twelve scribes, on German history, ecclesiastical administration, the volatile political situation in the eastern Mediterranean in the mid-1400s, Asian geography, astronomy, and miracles of the Virgin Mary. By 1473 the manuscript was in the Benedictine monastery at Tegernsee, near Munich, a major center of book production in fifteenth-century Europe (it was most likely produced here). In the library’s catalog, completed in 1484, the Itinerarius appears under the title Narraciones . . . de transmarinis partibus by “Iohannis Hess presbiteri.” It is one of eight texts in the manuscript copied by a prolific scribe, Oswald Nott of Tittmannig, whose other contributions in D include a letter describing the destruction of Constantinople in 1453, Marco Polo’s description of Asia (given a title nearly identical to Witte’s narrative), and a treatise on a comet that appeared in 1472. Nott’s work is careful: he makes a deliberate effort to correct mistakes, several times entering a preferred reading in an adjacent margin. His single marginal gloss suggests a particular interest in Witte’s description of Prester John’s palace.51

The works collected in manuscript E treat mostly theological subjects—from a commentary on Raymond of Pennaforte’s Summa de casibus to a manual for priests printed at Mainz in 1476—although the last third of the 200-folia codex consists of more dramatic fare in the Gesta Romanorum moralisata followed by Witte’s Itinerarius, copied by the same scribe, who produced two other texts in E, probably around 1480. The manuscript was once at the monastery of Saint Mark at Butzbach, near Giessen, a Benedictine foundation run by the Brethren of the Common Life after 1483. Although E predates their arrival, the carefully formed words and approachable format of the Itinerarius text exemplifies the kind of book the Brethren produced.52

As noted above, in making most of the Itinerarius a third-person rather than a first-person narrative, DE change the text significantly. This revision also characterizes edition a, constituting one piece of firm evidence that the person who set the print worked from a text close to DE. The move does not entail many variants—only eighteen verbs and two pronouns are affected—nor is it consistent, since the first person is retained for the captivity scene and frightening tunnel voyage (lines 120-35), and the final one-fifth of the book, recounting the return from India to Jerusalem (lines 367-442). This latter change in narration prompted Oswald Nott to add in D: “Next item: the honorable Johannes de Hese says these [following] words in his own person, namely. . . . ”53

The printed editions also follow DE in restructuring Witte’s dramatic account of the distribution of the eucharist at the church of Saint Thomas. The original version of the story is doubtless the one found in ABC, which relate information in this order:

• 1)  The hand of the apostle Thomas is half closed and partly raised.
• 2)  Christians receive the sacrament from the hand, which opens up to the worthy and withdraws from sinners.
• 3)  Everyone approaches the sacrament with devotion and fear.
• 4)  Witte himself saw the hand deny the sacrament to three men, who did penance and ultimately received the host.
• 5)  Two archbishops hold Thomas’s hand but do not control it.
• 6)  Thomas looks just as he did when alive.
• 7)  Two other archbishops hold the patens beneath Thomas’s hand.
• 8)  Two more archbishops hold a priceless napkin.

DE adopt a more logical sequence of events by beginning with a general statement about the apostle’s hand and its miraculous ability to assess each communicant’s state of grace (2), then describing the congregation’s move to the altar (3), the position of the hand (1) and the appearance of the body as well as the roles played by various prelates (5-8), before completing the vignette with Witte’s personal witness of the hand’s omniscience (4), which is rendered more effective by its placement at the end of the story rather than its middle. In edition a Guldenschaff revised the second sentence and omitted the third but otherwise retained the order in DE.54

Many minor variants further demonstrate the textual similarity between DE and the printed editions. Some common omissions, such as usages of unum as an indefinite article or blatant redundancies, may result from editorial decisions made independently by an alert scribe and a printer.55 Other deletions in DEa-k—such as the specific mention (in ABC) of Christian “pilgrims” being buried at Andranopolis or the exact date of Witte’s visit to Hulna—suggest that these texts are related.56 Further evidence is found in interpolations underscoring the fact that “the aforementioned priest Johannes [de Hese]” sampled flying fish from the Red Sea and visited the church of Saint Thomas,57 and in several minor additions.58 Some changes in vocabulary probably reflect a scribe’s decision (recorded in the common source text for DEa) to replace one word with a synonym, but others constitute quite different readings, such as Witte’s saying masses for the dead “in the sea” (in mari) rather than “in the boat” (in navi) off the shore of Purgatory, or the stipulation that the Indian patriarch gives the sacrament to the apostle Thomas and not to himself.59 Revisions in phrasing and syntax are relatively uncommon.60

Despite these many similarities, however, neither D nor E was Guldenschaff’s copy text when he prepared a for publication, as readings found exclusively in these two manuscripts prove. Their common omissions include a sentence stating that the authorities of Andranopolis convene in the town lighthouse and a phrase explaining how Witte escaped being becalmed in a gloomy gulf. Others involve less substantial but meaningful losses of text.61 Their shared additions alter the narrative very little (except for the
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stipulation that only “three” devout men live in the monastery at Andranopolis); indeed, some may be said to contribute to the account’s verbosity.62 DE both record some thirty unique readings in vocabulary and grammar, although few of these alter the narrative considerably.63 They also begin the anecdote about the water-purifying unicorn by establishing sentence boundaries that obscure the sense of the original.64 DE largely preserve the syntax of A: simple transpositions and changes of word order (occasionally with revised vocabulary) are relatively rare.65 Three geographical variants common to DE further prove that they are closely related copies of a common source: the place-names badde for gadde, ulna or ulua for hulna, and goch et magoch for gog and magog.66

Despite these similarities D and E each exhibits unique readings that rule out either one as the copy text for the other or for edition a. These are fewer and less significant in D than in E.67 Of twelve omissions in D, a couple seem intended to make the text less prolix, but several generate confusion and are probably Oswald Nott’s mistakes.68 Four minor additions
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to the text are unnecessary.69 Several changes in vocabulary are recorded, some semantic70 and others grammatical.71 Four minor word transpositions72 and two emended beginnings of independent clauses also distinguish D from other Itinerarius texts.73

Variants unique to E, slightly more numerous than those found only in D, indicate both scribal lapses and interventions in the text. Four omissions result in the absence of an important sentence element, but several others improve the text slightly by reducing wordiness.74 However, except for the clarification that the Monoculi are “human,” three additions in E seem superfluous.75 Most changes in vocabulary simply replace a word with its synonym, but several suggest scribal difficulty reading the copy text or understanding abbreviations.76 Except for having Prester John attend “patriarchs,” rather than a single supreme prelate, and placing two present-tense verb forms rather incongruously in the future tense, E exhibits few unique differences in grammar.77 The same is true of syntax.78

6. Edition and Manuscripts and a F G

Edition a

Johann Guldenschaff’s publication of the Itinerarius at Cologne around 1490 was a signal event in the history of this travel narrative. Although the first printed version of the account contains essentially the same information found in manuscripts ABCDE and follows DE in relating most of the pilgrim’s adventures in the third person, the text has undergone a thorough stylistic revision, reaching its third distinct stage of development.79 The following example—from the description of a marvelous alarm clock in Prester John’s palace (lines 185-88)—shows in parallel text how the text of A has been revised in Guldenschaff’s a, where livelier vocabulary, two added participles, and revised syntax present the wonder with heightened drama:

The release of edition a has more than just textual significance. As a book purporting to relate first-hand information about the Indies, the Itinerarius no doubt had more immediate appeal to readers a century after its composition. Some market for it clearly existed, since Guldenschaff’s edition served as the basis, directly or indirectly, for nine more publications by five different printers within approximately seventeen years. Even as a fictional narrative the book may have served a practical purpose in Europe’s expanding knowledge of world geography. In a lucid discussion of mappaemundi in early printed books, Elizabeth L. Eisenstein has observed that “[b]efore the outlines of a comprehensive and uniform world picture could emerge, incongruous images had to be duplicated in sufficient quantities to be brought into contact, compared and contrasted.”80 As Witte’s depiction of Asia circulated at the turn of the sixteenth century, his incongruities
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would only have underscored the value of data in contemporaneous accounts based on actual experience.

Several practical matters related to the production of printed books changed the text in significant ways. The need for a title page may have driven Guldenschaff to identify the narrative as the Itinerarius, a word first recorded in a. In addition, the account here is divided distinctly into three parts, with rubrics introducing the description of Prester John’s palace and the pilgrimage to Hulna, bringing the central concerns of the work into clearer focus.81 Guldenschaff also made the Itinerarius part of an anthology of works about the East, linking it with a treatise on the ten sectarian units (or “nations”) of Christianity, a letter from a putative “Sultan John” to Pope Pius II (1458-64), and a brief papal response to that letter, thereby creating what Francis Rogers called “a chain of truly remarkable documents.”82 All subsequent printers adopted Guldenschaff’s choice of material, which was expanded slightly in bcdefghij and again in k to include two other treatises that purportedly offered readers a true picture of Asia at the dawn of Europe’s “age of reconnaissance.” In all eleven early printed editions, the Itinerarius is the lead text and dominates the title page.

Born into a patrician family at Mainz, Guldenschaff served as apprentice to the printer Ulrich Zell there before establishing his own printing press at Cologne, where city records and evidence from type fonts show him to have been active from 30 April 1477 until at least 1494. He published several works closely connected to the city of Cologne, including three editions each of the Historia 11000 Virginum and Johannes of Hildesheim’s Historia Trium Regum (Witte shows some awareness of the latter book, and he estimates Prester John’s capital city to be twenty-four times larger than Cologne).83 Guldenschaff’s edition of the Itinerarius evidently enjoyed some commercial success since manuscript copies of it were produced in central Europe (probably in Austria and Bohemia) around 1500, and it survives in more exemplars than have been located of any other printing.

The several hundred variants that distinguish printed edition a from manuscripts ABCDE reveal a coherent plan for revising the text that was perhaps carried out in Guldenschaff’s printing shop.84 The editor’s foremost goal was to eliminate the polysyndeton and pleonastic constructions
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that characterize the Itinerarius in its original form, in which sentences repeatedly begin with Et or Item, resulting in whole paragraphs that consist of relatively brief independent clauses relentlessly linked by coordinating conjunctions. This lackluster Latin would not have appealed to educated readers in the late fifteenth century, so it is unsurprising that the editor responsible for a brings considerable variation to the text by revising the beginnings of more than half of the work’s sentences.

For example, the passage that extends from Witte’s arrival at Gadde to his first mention of Prester John’s palace at Edissa (lines 145-54) consists of eight independent clauses, each beginning with the word Et, in the early manuscripts. Emendations in a exemplify the editor’s procedure and techniques. In the first sentence, which begins Et ulterius navigando—a phrase that has become a cliché by this point in the narrative—he simply omits the first word. Then he establishes a subtler linkage to the detail of the second sentence by using an enclitic to change Et ibi stat castrum to Ibique stat castrum. Starting the description of his ensuing voyage to Edissa, Witte repeats Et ulterius navigando, which in a becomes the more graceful transitional De predicto portu ulterius navigando. The next independent clause, starting Et illa civitas, remains unchanged, but its successor, et est sita, is trimmed to sita, thus subordinating Edissa’s location to its status as Prester John’s capital city. The subsequent sentence’s opening, Et illa civitas, also stands unemended, but the move to the topic of the imperial palace—Et habitacio—acquires greater rhetorical force when the coordinating conjunction is replaced by a corroborating adverb to read Habitatio vero (the editor frequently employs particles both to reduce the account’s redundancy and to underscore its veracity, other added words being autem, igitur, itaque, and namque). The last of these eight independent clauses, describing the palace’s size, is made subordinate to the previous one, which first mentions the structure, by substituting the participle habens for Et habet bene.85 Examined individually, these emendations—a simple omission, an added enclitic or particle, a verb form altered to link two independent clauses86—appear to be minor, even trivial, but the collective effect of more than 150 revised independent clauses throughout the Itinerarius is considerable.87

The editor responsible for a took other steps to make Witte’s narrative more economical. Many omissions delete unnecessary words or phrases: Where else but “over the water” can fish fly? If two rocks are said to be found on either bank of the Red Sea marking the exodus of the Israelites, why stipulate that there are “four” of them? What reason is there to repeat altar when an existing relative pronoun sufficiently conveys the meaning of the word?88 On occasion, however, a omits significant information, including notations that Witte did not witness storks killing pygmy boys, that the Monoculi are subservient to Grandicanis, that a marvelous mechanism may be found among the columns that support Prester John’s palace, that Indian animals have two litters annually, that the Saint Thomas Christians receive the eucharist with devotion and fear, and that the queen of Amosona bears her land’s name.89 It is impossible to know whether deletions were accidental or intentional. Some may be evidence of the editor’s eagerness to make changes for their own sake, since most of the additions in a are the very same words and phrases that are omitted elsewhere.90
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Edition a also interpolates a truth-claim that “the aforementioned priest Iohannes” (“iohannes presbiter predictus”) saw a hermit in the Sinai desert.91 Similarly, emendations in vocabulary—such as dictam for vocatam, ideo for propterea, or apostoli for sancti Thome—often seem more capricious than improving.92

Other semantic changes are more consequential. These range from word substitutions (“merchants” rather than “people” from around the world attend fairs in Edissa) to more nuanced revisions (scholars at Prester John’s court do not “gaze” into a mirror and “see” everything occurring around them (“inspiciendo speculum vident omnia”) but “contemplate” it and “know” all (“intuendo ipsum omnia sciunt”), the stress on cognition in a making the marvelous object seem less like a gimmick.93 The number of elders in a sculpted scene of Christ in Majesty, of revolving rooms in the palace at Edissa, and of kings enfeoffed to Prester John are reduced (the first two from twenty-four to nine, the last from seventy-two to eighteen).94

Dozens of syntactical variations appear in a, often in combination with semantic revision, and they presumably were intended to bring a more
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graceful style to the Itinerarius. The editor clearly preferred adjectives and pronouns to precede the nouns they modify, and verbs to follow their objects, although these preferences are not consistently or slavishly put into practice.95 While many other manipulations of word order seem arbitrary,96 several introduce clarity or elegance to the text.97 Twice the order of sentences is reversed, and to good effect: in one, information about a miraculous parting of the sea is made to precede the claim that the Saint Thomas Christians walk to the island of Hulna with dry feet; in the second, a general description of Mount Edom comes before the focus on the Terrestrial Paradise at its summit.98 Changes in grammar by and large seem to be stylistic niceties; the editor has an obvious distaste for the author’s frequent use of gerundives and verbs in the imperfect tense.99 One of the more interesting grammatical emendations in a is the subjunctive form given to several verbs that the early manuscripts record in the indicative mood, resulting in readings that distance the narrative voice from such claims as the curative power of the waters at Elim and the capacity of Prester John’s dining table to emit sparks.100 In sum, the stylistic overhaul of the Itinerarius that is evident in Guldenschaff’s edition is so thorough that it is fair to say that readers who encountered the work in a printed book read a text that was very different from the one its author wrote.

Manuscripts F and G

Two manuscripts, both almost certainly produced in central Europe and dating from around 1500, are copies of edition a, providing evidence that Guldenschaff’s publication circulated well beyond the Rhineland, where Witte’s book had its origins and first audience. While variants in manuscripts CDE and edition a demonstrate that some transmitters of the Itinerarius felt free to make sometimes consequential changes as they worked, the scribes of manuscripts F and G reproduced their copy text almost exactly, even carrying over Latin abbreviations and punctuation from the printed page.101

Manuscript F is a collection of theological treatises copied by one scribe who mostly worked from incunable editions. The Itinerarius and the three other works that comprise edition a are found in a single gathering (fols. 140r-51v); they are somewhat anomalous among texts that address spiritual and practical matters relevant to the daily life of clerics.102 Produced in the early sixteenth century—perhaps as late as 1513—F was in the Austrian Court Library (which later became the Nationalbibliothek) by 1576.

Discrepancies between a and F prove that the manuscript was copied from the printed book rather than the reverse. Four minor omissions are probably scribal oversights (two result in confused readings), and two additions are inconsequential.103 Five alterations in vocabulary may reflect flashes of scribal independence, as may the change of two verbs from the subjunctive to the indicative mood.104 In general, however, the scribe produced an extremely careful copy of Guldenschaff’s printed edition.

The scribe of G was responsible for a similarly exact reproduction of a, whose four constituent texts make up the whole of this manuscript,
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which itself was copied ca. 1500 in a distinctly humanist hand and rebound some three hundred years later. It may have belonged to a monastic library, because when it was catalogued in the early nineteenth century at the Royal Academic Library of Prague (today the National Library of the Czech Republic), it was grouped with manuscripts acquired from secularized religious houses in Bohemia.

Only one variant in G alters the text of a in any consequential way: the precious “stones” (lapides) found in Prester John’s wondrous, all-revealing mirror are here “lamps” (lampades), an error that is easy to explain. Otherwise, the scribe once adds a word (ibi [returning the text to its reading in A]), twice substitutes fit for sit and bulna[m] for hulna[m] (doubtless misled by characters in Guldenschaff’s type font), turns que into quedam and regnant into regnantur, and makes two other minor grammatical changes.105

7. Editions bcd

Edition b

When the second printed version of the Itinerarius appeared at Cologne in the mid-to-late 1490s, the narrative reached a fourth stage of development: the text once again had been significantly altered, and its context was also different, the popular twelfth-century Letter of Prester John and a geographical treatise on India being added to the four works published together in a. Just as the extensive revisions in a cannot be definitively attributed to Johann Guldenschaff, changes in b are not known with certainty to have been introduced by its printer, Cornelius of Zyrickzee, or someone in his shop, although evidence of several kinds points strongly in this direction. First, Zyrickzee’s Itinerarius is indisputably based on edition a, but the narrative has returned to the first person, with several awkward passages suggesting that the text was being revised as the type was set.106 Moreover, Zyrickzee published the book three times, and variants in his second and third printings (c and d) follow the same editorial principles
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that are evident in b.107 Two characteristics of b deserve particular attention because they offer important insight into how Zyrickzee worked. The text is riddled with typographical errors—it may have been prepared for publication either with great haste or by a novice typesetter—and revisions in edition c indicate that Zyrickzee did not check his mistakes against a when he made corrections. In addition, over twenty changes in b restore textual readings found in the early manuscripts but emended in a; the revisions are so minor, however, that they offer no reliable evidence that Zyrickzee had access to any copy of the Itinerarius besides Guldenschaff’s printed book.108

Cornelius of Zyrickzee, a native of a town on the island of Schouwen in Zeeland (modern Zierikzee), founded a printing shop in around 1497 at Cologne, across from the Dominican cloister in the Stolkgasse. He enjoyed a prolific and varied career, producing some fifty books in just over a decade on subjects from theology to classical poetry to witchcraft; his Latin edition of The Book of John Mandeville appeared before 1501. In all likelihood, the Itinerarius was one of Zyrickzee’s first publications because his third edition of the book (d) was the copy text for edition f, which has a colophon dated 1499. He remained active at Cologne until 1509, when he returned to Zeeland, where he died, at Middelburg, on 11 August 1516.109

The editorial principles that characterize edition b recall those already observed in a. The beginnings of independent clauses continue to be revised in an ongoing effort to invest the narrative with a more elegant style, especially
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by reducing even further the repetitious usage of et and item.110 Approximately forty words or phrases are omitted, almost all of them presumably judged to be verbose.111 The few additions in b are by and large minimal and insubstantial.112 Changes in vocabulary recall those in a: some improve the diction marginally (such as iterum for econverso or longinquis for remotis), but most seem the product of whimsy (such as vocatur for dicitur or dicitur for vocatur) or formality (ad parvam ab illo loco distantiam for ibi prope).113 One substitution alters the text slightly but notably: Prester John’s magic mirror, with its three inlaid stones fostering three different kinds of perception, is now attended by an additional, fourth scholar.114 In contrast to the many changes in sentence structure that appear in the first printed edition, b introduces no changes in the syntax of a
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beyond twenty-four transposed word units.115 Similarly, grammar is little affected, although the shift of five verbs from the subjunctive to the indicative mood removes some of the sense of contingency in edition a.116

As noted above, the text of b contains a remarkable number of typographical errors: there are nearly seventy in the Itinerarius alone, and the nine mistakes on the title page forced Zyrickzee to print a second version of it (making only six corrections). An entire sentence is set twice, the repeated one including a misspelling.117 Why the text should be so flawed is unclear. Zyrickzee may have rushed to get the book into print at a time when several European nations were eagerly seeking a route to Asia, creating an interested audience for the kind of material he gathered in this volume. He and Johann Guldenschaff appear not to have been simultaneously active in the Cologne printing trade, so competition was evidently not a factor. Inexperience might have played some role, although Zyrickzee’s two subsequent editions, each with type completely reset, appeared within a year or two of b, and they were more carefully proofread. In preparing the text of c he shows no sign of having checked puzzling readings against Guldenschaff’s edition, as the evolving reading of this passage (at lines 115-16) indicates:

In edition b Zyrickzee restored the first-person narrative to the Itinerarius, and he continued Guldenschaff’s efforts to achieve a more elegant style. His subsequent versions, c and d, both introduce additional changes, as do the seven later publications by other printers, making it possible to demonstrate a direct line of descent in the textual tradition. Although some of these changes are significant—three editions move the action of the
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Itinerarius ahead one century to 1489, and Nicholas Mameranus made additional stylistic revisions in k—the text of Witte’s narrative effectively had reached its final stage of development around 1497 in Cornelius of Zyrickzee’s printing shop at Cologne.

Editions c and d

When he printed the Itinerarius a second time (c), Zyrickzee made close to thirty changes, most of them minor. Almost all these emendations are carried over into the subsequent editions, including one omission,119 six additions (including ego, twice),120 two misguided changes in vocabulary,121 four replacements of ibidem with ibi,122 seven word transpositions,123 and three alterations in grammar.124 Five readings raise difficulties in sense or grammar that later editions attempted to correct.125 The preposition in, restored to a sentence from which it had been omitted in b, is not found in any edition published after c.126 Zyrickzee evidently did not wish to release another book replete with mistakes: edition c has a total of three typographical errors in the text of the Itinerarius.127

Emendations in edition d, more so than those in c, recall Zyrickzee’s practice as the presumed editor of the text in b. The beginnings of six more independent clauses are revised, reducing further the number of sentences opening with et.128 Two minor omissions may be said to trim the text efficiently,129 although two others delete a word that is required for sense.130 The addition of et twice brings greater coherence to a sentence.131 Two
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changes in vocabulary are consequential, several others less so.132 Two grammatical emendations seem stylistic niceties.133 A pair of words is transposed in three sentences.134 Zyrickzee’s third publication of the Itinerarius contains seventeen typographical errors—not so many as b but more than in c—suggesting that this third printing escaped his closest scrutiny.135

8. Edition and Manuscript e H

Edition e

The fifth printed edition of the Itinerarius—and the first to be published outside of Cologne—appeared at Antwerp between 1497 and 1499. This work of Govaert Bac reproduces almost exactly the text of Zyrickzee’s edition c and was itself the copy text for an elegant manuscript assembled for an influential cleric at Gent around 1500.

Bac was among the first printers to establish himself at Antwerp, which in the late fifteenth century was beginning to rival Cologne in size, distinction, and cultural richness; by the 1520s, it had become the center of book production in the Low Countries. Bac married the widow of Mathias van der Goes, an Antwerp printer who died in 1492, taking over his shop with its precious fonts and launching a “long and brilliant career” with the production of a grammar in July 1493, the year that he was admitted to the printer’s guild of Saint Luke. Linguistically versatile and interested in geography and history, he published a Latin edition of The Book of John Mandeville on 19 June 1494, a French version of Aristotle’s Secretum Secretorum before 16 January 1495, and many Dutch texts.136 He lived and worked out of “The Bird House” (“tVogelhuys”), and most of the nine
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printer’s devices found in his publications feature a bird cage similar to the one in e on sig. D4v, an identifying emblem he is known to have used after 3 July 1496. Bac maintained his business until 1511, when he apparently quit after his wife’s death; he remarried in 1514 and died three years later.137

Manuscript H

Edition e changes the text of c only seven times; each of these variants is also found in H, which must therefore be a copy of Bac’s publication, not Zyrickzee’s. These discrepant readings comprise one minor omission, one minor addition (of etiam, frequently omitted in other texts), three changes in vocabulary, one transposition of a word pair, and one grammatical emendation.138

Manuscript H was prepared by two scribes for the remarkable library of Raphael de Marcatellis (1437-1508), abbot of the monastery of Saint Bavon at Gent. Its lovely, traditional orthography and decoration make H the most visually impressive text of the Itinerarius. The codex is an anthology of works related to travel and geography, including Ludolph of Suchen’s pilgrimage account, Marco Polo’s description of the world (in Latin), and a table of distances between cities on important trade routes originating at Bruges. Despite the antique appearance of H, however, its contents largely were copied from incunable editions, and the text of the Itinerarius suggests that its scribe had a better hand than head for Latin.139 Two of three omissions were very likely caused by an eye-slip, two minor additions are sensible but not strictly necessary, and a pair of words is
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transposed so that the verb follows its object.140 The scribe strengthens Witte’s claim to have witnessed the feast of Saint Thomas by replacing ipse Johannes de hese with ego Johannes de hesen, but in so doing he evidently turns the Dutch traveler into a German.141

9. Editions fghi

Edition f

Although Witte claimed to have come from the diocese of Utrecht, the first version of the Itinerarius known to have been produced on what is today Dutch soil did not appear until about one century after the book was written. It was published at Deventer four times in nearly eight years by two printers who patently borrowed each other’s work and whose relationship appears to have been collegial. The first of these editions (f) was released sometime after 10 April 1497 by Jacob de Breda, who copied Zyrickzee’s edition d with minor changes; in 1499, de Breda’s text was in turn used by Richard Pafraet to bring out his own version of the work (g), which gives Witte’s adventures a greater sense of immediacy for the original reading public by changing the date of his departure for India from 1389 to 1489. De Breda printed the Itinerarius again in 1504 (h), this time incorporating readings that had been introduced by Pafraet, including the later date. One year later, Pafraet also republished the text (i), once again basing it on de Breda’s first printing and restoring the original date. The last two links in the concatenation of texts of the Itinerarius—editions j and k—are separate copies of de Breda’s edition h.

Although Deventer never enjoyed the commercial success of Antwerp, by the late 1400s it was “one of the three cultural centres in [the northern Rhineland], the other two being Cologne and Münster.”142 Famous for its school and monastery operated by the Brethren of the Common Life, the town attracted Pafraet from Cologne, who brought type fonts and capital with him and who helped to establish the Deventer printing trade with the stunning publication in 1477 of Pierre Bersuire’s Liber Bibliae moralis, a text running nearly one thousand pages. He legally established himself at Deventer in 1481, and in 1485 he employed as an accountant Jacob de Breda, who had become a citizen there two years earlier. Almost immediately de Breda began publishing under his own name but with Pafraet’s type fonts; the two printers maintained separate shops, but
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both were near the school. Neither ever developed a type font of his own, but, after 1489, each began making changes in format and letter styles that the other soon copied. Their contributions to the market were more various. According to Wytze and Lotte Hellinga, Pafraet “was guided in his choice [of texts] by the publishers of Cologne,” and he brought out many classics as well as works by medieval theologians and philosophers. De Breda printed on a more modest scale, preferring smaller quarto editions, and thus “introduced into Deventer a type of book that was to characterize this town’s whole printed output.”143 The degree to which the two printers worked together—or competed—remains somewhat uncertain, but the Hellingas conclude that they were collaborators, at least to some degree.144 While the four editions of the Itinerarius printed at Deventer are, in both size and subject matter, more representative of de Breda’s marketing strategies than Pafraet’s, the interconnections among fghi offer textual support to the Hellingas’ claims, which are based on mechanical evidence.145 Indeed, the two printers appear to have taken turns publishing the book.

In printing the Itinerarius for the first time, de Breda worked directly from a copy of Zyrickzee’s third edition of the work: not only do the variants introduced in d also appear in f but also at least two changes in the latter come about because of obscurity on the printed page of the copy text.146 Three words are omitted in f (and all subsequent editions).147 De Breda makes Ethiopia a region of interior, not inferior, India, and he increases the distance from Gadde to Edissa (now a journey of twenty-four
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rather than fourteen days); his other changes in vocabulary appear to be either mistakes or attempts to clarify a puzzling reading in edition d.148 Deventer’s humanist atmosphere registers itself in the more classical spellings of Latin words that enter the printed text in f, such as hortus (for ortus), idola (for ydola), and imagines (for ymagines or himagines).149

Edition g

Pafraet changed the text of edition f very little when he used it to print g, with one notable exception. Minor changes include an omission of et (leading to some incoherence), the addition of three words (signa, et, and autem [the first with semantic consequence, the second making better sense]), and two minor changes in vocabulary (not including numerals).150 Three emendations attempt to make sense of obscure passages in f—Pafraet clearly did not attempt to resolve them by examining a copy of d—while several others introduce ungrammatical or incoherent readings.151

What seems a series of unremarkable revisions may in fact shed light on the most significant change Pafraet makes in g. The number of palm trees reportedly growing on the plain of Elim is reduced from seventy-two (lxxii) to seventy (septuaginta), bringing Witte’s observation into line with Holy Scripture (Exod. 15:27); Prester John’s eighteen vassal kings are counted even more deliberately (decem et octo for octodecim or xviii); and in almost every instance numbers are spelled out as Latin words rather than given as roman numerals.152 Given Pafraet’s general meticulousness and his unusual attention to matters of measurement, the postdating of this pilgrimage, from 1389 (M.ccc.lxxxix) to 1489 (M.cccc.lxxxix), in the first line of the narrative is unlikely to be an innocent oversight.153 It cannot be known whether Pafraet changed the date, in 1499, out of a sincere belief that a European only recently could have succeeded in reaching India by
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boat (thus concluding that the date in f was incorrect) or out of hope that a journey purportedly begun only a decade before his edition appeared would seem more newsworthy (thus meaning to achieve greater commercial success). Whatever the case, de Breda’s desire to retain this later date in his edition h is less surprising than Pafraet’s decision to return the narrative to the fourteenth century when he reprinted it in 1505.154

Edition h

In preparing h, his second edition of the Itinerarius, published on 24 January 1504, de Breda relied entirely on the text printed by Pafraet in 1499, ignoring his own first edition (f) and the copy text he had used to produce it (d). He emended the text of g only eight times—not always improving it—omitting one word, changing five others, slightly altering the spelling of one place-name, and moving one verb from the subjunctive into the indicative mood.155 All of these variants recur in edition j, and most are found in k, proving that h was the source for those later publications.

Edition i

On 26 April 1505 Pafraet published the Itinerarius for a second time (i), using de Breda’s first edition (f) as his copy text. Except for one grammatical correction, no changes introduced in g and h are found in i—the pilgrimage occurs once again in the late 1300s—and other emendations are minimal, comprising two omissions, one addition, three changes in vocabulary, one transposition of a word pair, and one alteration in grammar.156 Although only two copies of edition i have been located today, it was known to Gottlieb Heinrich Stuck, who recorded it in his late eighteenth-century index to travel narratives once under the heading, “HESE (I. de)
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Itinerarium hierosolymitanum &c. Daventriae 1505. 4°.” and later as “HELT (Io. de) itinerarius in Hierusalem. Daventr. 1505. 4°.” As a result of Stuck’s error, the doubly-fictitious pilgrim “Johannes de Helt” has gained a place in several scholarly studies.157

10. Edition j

Robert Gourmont, who brought out the Itinerarius at Paris around 1507 using de Breda’s edition h as his copy text, appears to have been the last person to treat this travel narrative as a relatively contemporary book. When Nicholas Mameranus edited it some sixty years later, he presented an ancient document, more valuable for its age than its information. Gourmont was active in the Parisian printing trade between 1499 and 1518, working on assignment for Oliver Senant, who operated between 1505 and 1526 out of a shop in the rue Riche-Jacques under the sign of Saint Barbara. Two different title pages for j exist, one with a line break and no hyphen after “Oli” of Senant’s first name, the other (presumably later) one with the name kept integral. In 1507 Senant first used the printer’s device found in edition j on sig. D4v; filling a page that follows six generally fanciful treatises about the world from Egypt to Eden, its motto—“En le monde fault bien tirer / Qui en paradis veult monter”—offers a slightly ironic valediction to the reader.

In a sense, Gourmont’s edition marks the transition of Witte’s narrative from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The Itinerarius appears here for the first time in roman type with printed initials; the nine previous publications were in Gothic fonts, with the first letter of three key sentences—the very first one, the one beginning the description of Prester John’s palace, and the transition to the church of Saint Thomas—left blank for possible decoration by hand. The typesetter may not have had much Latin, since several perplexing emendations introduced in h go uncorrected here—even the typographical error claditur for clauditur is reproduced, with more than thirty added—and changes that enter the text in j generally lead to less coherent readings.158 Three omissions (two of et and one of
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directe), two changes in vocabulary, and the use of a singular verb with “Gog and Magog” are more defensible, if not improving. A defective printing of facte in h appears sacre in j, indicating that Gourmont set his text directly from de Breda’s printed page.159

11. Edition k

After Gourmont’s edition appeared around 1507, the Itinerarius and its associated texts, having been printed ten times within some fifteen years, were not published again for nearly six decades. By the early sixteenth century, eyewitness accounts by European explorers, sailors, and missionaries—quite a few in a European vernacular rather than in Latin—were coming off presses from Rome to Copenhagen and from Lisbon to Dresden. Some, though not all, called into question Johannes Witte de Hese’s claims about the inhabitants of east Africa, the splendor of Prester John’s empire, and the terrestrial location of Eden and Purgatory. Readers in northern Europe, where the Itinerarius enjoyed its principal success, had other reasons to find it a suspect text by the early 1500s. The religious climate had changed significantly during the previous century, and a book whose narrator is a priest and whose subject is a pilgrimage, however bizarre, would have struck many as theologically, not just geographically, unreliable. Josephine Waters Bennett offers this as an explanation of a simultaneous torpor in the publishing history of The Book of John Mandeville:

In England and Germany the Reformation seems to have brought the [Book], for a time, into disrepute. The scarcity of English editions between 1510 and 1568 is matched by a similar gap in the sequence of German editions between 1507 and 1580. Mandeville’s accounts of saints and relics, his reminiscences of the Crusades, and concern with pilgrimages and miracles would naturally bring him into disfavor in the Protestant countries.160

The Itinerarius returned to public attention in Nicholas Mameranus’s edition k. Alone among the early scribes and printers who copied, and sometimes revised, the book, Mameranus wrote a prefatory account, dated 19 January 1565 (“14. Calend. Februarij”), explaining how he discovered the text and why he thought it merited its publication, by Johannes Withagius at Antwerp. In a thirty-line poem and five pages of prose that offer an introduction to the same set of works that appear in editions b-j (plus an appended treatise on world geography), Mameranus focuses almost exclusively on Witte’s narrative. He reveals his own acquaintance with the ordeal and loneliness of travel by describing a journey of his own through the bitter snow and ice of the Ardennes forest in December 1563. En route he spent Christmas cheered by friends, one of whom tells him about an old book: the autobiographical record by “Ioannes de Hese, a priest from Utrecht” of the “great marvels and stupendous, almost unbelievable things” he saw while on a pilgrimage that took him throughout “Arabia, Egypt, India, and Ethiopia.” Mameranus, a cross between Edmund Spenser and the Gawain-poet’s King Arthur, claims to have developed a yearning for things old and unusual rather than modern and familiar. Furthermore, he delightedly reports, in the Itinerarius he has found an ancient text that offers an auspicious beginning to a new year: it is “A new portent for this time, recently dug up from the past,” the work of a cleric who “seeks diverse shores / And strives to see much of the world.”161 Witte has become an inspiration.

The book’s reverend age presents the single problem of its style. Living in a “barbaric time,” the “good priest” who wrote it could not purge his Latin of barbarism, so Mameranus has taken it upon himself to clarify absurd and abstruse passages in the Itinerarius. He shows no sign of having seen any version of the narrative except for de Breda’s edition h, in which the style recorded in the early manuscripts had already been vastly improved; one can only speculate what he would have thought of the Latin text in A. Mameranus’s idea of barbarism may extend to appearances: he employs a “modern” Roman typestyle in place of de Breda’s Gothic, which he may have considered quaint, and he expands almost all
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abbreviations, adds printed initials, and uses diacritical marks and the digraph æ.162

Mameranus leaves his mark on the text in other ways as well, although half of his approximately 150 revisions are variations in vocabulary that affect the book’s content relatively little. Johann Guldenschaff and Cornelius de Zyrickzee—if they were responsible for the changes in editions a and b—were far more consequential editors. Despite several references in his introductory poem and essay to the antiquity of the Itinerarius, Mameranus neglects to give any date for the journey of “Ioannes de Hese.” The resulting temporal vagueness is the most telling effect on the text that any of his omissions have.163 His meaningful additions are also few, although like interpolations in CDE they endorse the text’s verity: he has the narrator stipulate that precisely four candles burn in the lighthouse towers at Andranopolis, describe more explicitly the parting of the ocean that enables pilgrims to reach the church of Saint Thomas, give plausibility to this miracle by comparing it to the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, and point out that the Indian patriarch personally offers the eucharist to Prester John.164 Changes in vocabulary, in contrast, are abundant, yet they also amount to little more than the replacement of one word or phrase with a close synonym: exchanging multiplicantur for quotificantur, honorat for adorat, or altissimus for nimis altus only minimally affects meaning.165
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Grammatical revisions are usually more subtle than substantial.166

Mameranus’s manipulation of syntax in the Itinerarius recalls editorial interventions already described, particularly in editions ab. The beginnings of another eleven independent clauses undergo rewording; five of these involve the deletion of the word et.167 Seven word pairs are simply transposed.168 Somewhat more extensive revisions occur in another six sentences, but they further demonstrate that Mameranus concerned himself with matters of style much more than with content in what would become the narrative’s last publication for some three hundred years.169

12. Variations in the Latin Textual Tradition

A peculiar and often threatening animal population inhabits the Asia of Witte’s Itinerarius. He claims to have seen poisonous fish flying over the Red Sea and, even more outlandishly, to have mistaken a whale for an island, gone ashore to prepare dinner, and nearly drowned when his port of call submerged after he lit a cooking fire. Descriptions of these two perils—they come near the beginning and the end of Witte’s journey—appear without meaningful omission in every Latin manuscript and printed edition of the narrative, but variants that enter a couple of sentences in each episode characterize the ways in which scribes and printers produced different versions of the Itinerarius. That this book’s early audiences did not all read or hear the same story is evident in the following comparison of these sentences as they appear in manuscripts AB, with their simple, often
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pleonastic formulations; in C, with its interpolated truth-claims and gratuitous revisions; in DE, with their third-person narrative and occasional stylistic improvements; and in the printed editions from a to k, with their considerable, successive changes in vocabulary and syntax, and with the return of a first-person narrative voice in b.170

13. Editions O and Z

Two nineteeth-century German scholars printed versions of the Itinerarius, which they included as a kind of appendix to studies of the legend of Prester John. In 1864 Gustav Oppert reproduced, almost without error, de Breda’s second edition (h); he made no changes in the text of the Itinerarius in the second edition of his work (1870). In 1883 Friedrich Zarncke printed the text of manuscript B, which he called a “trustworthy” and complete version of the original, along with notes that identify some of his emendations and offer occasional alternative readings in “the printed editions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,” although there is little evidence that he compared B to anything but h as printed by Oppert. Zarncke silently normalizes many orthographical variants in B. In a brief introduction, he dismisses the Itinerarius as “fiction from beginning to end” and focuses his attention on its borrowings from the Letter of Prester John. Aware that the printed editions revise the original text in “nearly every sentence,” Zarncke is content to give five sample comparisons since his principal purpose is to present the text of B, and thus “das Küchenlatein des Originals.” Neither Oppert nor Zarncke examined Witte’s book in the
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context of travel narratives, analyzed it as a text in its own right, or presented it in even a limited critical edition.172

14. Manuscripts KLM

By the mid-1400s, the Itinerarius was circulating in a Middle Dutch translation. This is unsurprising: the narrative concerns a priest from the Netherlands, and for two centuries it interested scribes and printers in the Lower Rhine region where, according to Walter Hoffmann, the vernacular had already taken hold as a written language by the late fourteenth century. Hartmut Beckers notes a burgeoning interest, starting around 1350 in the vicinity of Cologne, for works in German about Asian geography and culture.173

Records exist of three versions of this translation: a transcription from around 1690 (K), an edition published in 1845 (L), and notes written as recently as 1961 describing a manuscript in a private collection (M), although no fifteenth- or sixteenth-century exemplar has been located for this study. At one remove from actual medieval artifacts, these records nevertheless offer insight into the methods of a late medieval translator, reinforce several conclusions about the development of the Latin text, and provide linguistic data.174 They demonstrate that the Itinerarius was composed in Latin and translated into Middle Dutch rather than the reverse. This translation is based on a text very similar but not identical to A, and thus it must have been produced from an unrecovered Latin manuscript whose existence cannot be hypothesized from the evidence of BCDEa-k. Finally, at least two Middle Dutch manuscripts must once have been in circulation in addition to the three for which there are records: the autograph version of the translation and the copy text for the transcription (K).
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The considerable differences among the Middle Dutch texts make it unlikely that each was copied directly from the original, indicating that yet more manuscripts in the vernacular must once have been in circulation. These differences do not prove that the Itinerarius was translated into Middle Dutch more than once; on the contrary, orthographic, semantic, and syntactical variants result from scribal editorializing (as in the Latin tradition), the unestablished state of late medieval vernacular languages, and the power of dialect.

Of the three records of the Middle Dutch translation, only K offers a complete text (albeit with significant omissions); it is the basis for the critical edition printed here. Currently in the Staatsbibliothek at Berlin, K is a transcription made around 1690 by Antonius Matthaeus (1635-1710), a lawyer and author of books on pilgrimages to the Holy Land and Dutch history. The amount of orthographical variation within K recommends it as a trustworthy copy of the unrecovered original, although Matthaeus seems not to have noticed that a date in the first sentence (1398) conflicts with one in the description of a later experience (1391), or that both make it impossible for an earlier copy text text to have been produced in 1373, as the colophon states. K, appropriately enough, once belonged to the library of a director of the Dutch East India Company in the 1700s.

The second record of the Itinerarius in Middle Dutch is L, an edition, published in 1845, of a fragmentary manuscript that breaks off before the description of Prester John’s capital concludes (Latin line 271). The manuscript was last recorded seen in 1864. Its editor, Mathias [Mathijs] de Vries, was at the beginning of a prolific career as an editor, linguist, and lexicographer. He claims to have produced his text faithfully from five sheets of paper, plainly written in a hand “approximately of the early fifteenth century.” The edition seems reliable, although its fairly consistent spellings and “standard,” dialectally muted Middle Dutch suggest some editorial manipulation.175

The pre-modern copy of the Middle Dutch translation that seems most likely to resurface is M. This manuscript, probably copied during the early 1500s, was owned by Dr. J. F. M. Sterck of Aardenhout at his death in 1941, and is known from a careful description of it made by a distinguished professor of paleography at the University of Leiden in 1936, with an additional note by his equally talented successor in 1961. Since then no record has been found despite the efforts of some of the finest contemporary Dutch paleographers and bibliophiles.

Striking similarities among these Middle Dutch texts indicate that they are all copies of a single translation, which was circulating by around 1450.176 All identify the traveler and narrator as Johan (or Jan) Voet, which rather curiously appears to translate the already Dutch name Witte, and they give 1398 (rather than 1389) as the date of his departure from Jerusalem, even though K and (in all probability) M place him subsequently in India in 1391.177 That the three texts descend from a single translation is also obvious from their concordant readings, exemplified in this description of Witte’s encounter with flying fish on the Red Sea (lines 7-10 [Latin]; 8-10 [Middle Dutch]):

In this passage, an occasional omission (such as that shared by KM in the second line) or a slight change in vocabulary (water for meer in KM in the third line) cannot distract from the fact that all three texts construe predicto to mean “near which the city lies,” translate the Latin in [the sea] twice, and reverse the order in which the flying distance and the color of the fish are described. KL also have several passages in common that are not found in any known Latin text: these further explicate the meaning of stones on the Red Sea coast, locate a single productive tree in the balsam garden, explain what happens to the olive branches birds bring to Mt. Sinai, embellish the story of the desert saints Anthony and Paul the Hermit, stipulate
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that storks kill young pygmies “with their long beaks,” tell more about Prester John’s veronica, place balsam-burning lamps at his bedside, and transform one of the imperial bodyguard giants into a hollow mechanical marvel.178

Several characteristics of medieval translation practice further show that Latin was the language of composition for the Itinerarius. These include synonymic pairs, Latinisms, and strained syntax that presumably reflects a translator’s difficulty with a foreign language.179 Representative examples are found in Table 1, in which Latin words and phrases, given in italics, correspond to Dutch renderings in K and L; at right are line numbers from the editions printed here, Latin first and Middle Dutch between brackets.

The Middle Dutch translation recalls the simple, sometimes monotonous style that characterizes the earliest stage of the Latin text: many sentences begin “Ende daer” or “Voert so wandert men [toe schepe],” echoing similar constructions with “Et ibidem” and “Ulterius [navigando]” in the original. This is the most obvious evidence that the translator worked from a version of the Itinerarius very similar to that in manuscripts AB, although neither of these can have been the copy text. Of the ten readings described earlier in this chapter (p. 68) as being unique to A, only one is definitely rendered into Middle Dutch, which in at least five of the cited passages reflects the wording of BCDEa-k; however, variants found in B (especially the omissions) seldom figure in the translation.180 In locating a plaza with sculptures of emperors above (boven) hundreds of columns at Edissa, the Middle Dutch follows B (super) or C (supra); A and all other

Latin texts read sub.181 The translated text thus testifies to the existence of an unrecovered Latin manuscript that cannot be hypothesized from ABCDEa-k, but it offers no definitive proof of which variant readings
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within the Latin tradition are original. In describing Prester John’s stone dining table as being “as [light as] if it were of gold,” KL mistakenly render the original, which compares its weight to a wooden object.182

Although KLM derive from a common source, their differences suggest that a vernacular text was especially vulnerable to change. Latin scribes and printers made many stylistic emendations in the Itinerarius, but copyists of the Middle Dutch translation omitted, added, and revised material in ways that cannot always be attributed to error, misunderstanding, or desire to improve the quality of presentation. To be sure, some differences between K and L—records of M being too fragmentary to include it in this discussion—recall the kind of editorializing that the Latin text underwent. Fourteen usages of Item to make a transition in L are canceled in K (two more disappear in lengthier omissions); K also trims many coordinating conjunctions (and, but), adverbs (there), and conventional pieties (blessed, holy, Saint), and on eighteen occasions it leaves out half of a synonymic pair found in L.183 In some twenty instances, however, four or more words that convey a substantial idea in L (and the Latin) are missing in K. Of these, six passages are lengthy: the descriptions of poisonous flying fish in the Red Sea (69 words), cannibalistic Cyclopes near Ethiopia (65 words), the astronomy tower at Adrianopolis (152 words), statuary outside the imperial palace at Edissa (204 words), Prester John’s magic mirror (56 words), and the palace’s twenty-four revolving towers (69 words). In addition, K lacks information found in the Latin text after L breaks off (at Latin line 271), regarding Terra Feminarum, fecundity in Asia, devotion among Indian Christians, the liturgy and miraculous healings on the feast of Saint Thomas, proscribed behavior on the insular Root of Paradise, and
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the whale Jasconius.184 The omissions in K reveal no clear editorial policy—they affect neither the most nor the least stupendous of Witte’s claims—but they do suggest that the transcriber Matthaeus or, more likely, an early scribe was not overly exercised to preserve the integrity of the Middle Dutch narrative.

Substantive lexical discrepancies between K and L reveal further complications. With unusual frequency the two disagree in reporting numbers—from the tally of lamps that burn at the monastery of Saint Catherine to the distance between Mt. Sinai and Elim. Some of these probably result from the misreading of roman numerals (confusing “IV” and “IX” or “VII” and “XII”); in any event, they indicate that measurements (including the year “1398” found in all three Middle Dutch texts) are especially vulnerable to copying errors in the translation.185 Other variants must result from mistakes in transcription, but they occur in both texts; thus the original Latin is closer to some readings in L:

and others in K:

At times, K records a Latinism that would logically be the more original translated reading:

but the reverse is also true:

A passage unique to K—emphasizing the ferocity of Prester John’s guardian lions, which tear apart any “Jews and heathens” who approach the imperial palace—is probably an interpolation.187

Not only does a comparison of these readings indicate, unsurprisingly, that the unrecovered autograph copy of the translation more accurately and more literally rendered the Latin than does K or L (or M) but also it rules out the choice of either text as the one more likely to record an original reading when variants are synonymous. Such variants may reflect lexical preferences or even caprice—both of which seem to characterize many emendations in the Latin tradition—but no pattern emerges that would allow K or L reliably to be privileged over the other. Representative examples of such different readings include:

In the second and third examples above, the two consistent readings—“children of Israel” in K or “people of Israel” in L—cannot both be original: at least one must be a “translation” by a Dutch scribe of volck to kinderen or vice versa. (Since the original most exactly would have rendered populum as volck and filii as kinderen, K and L may each record such a
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scribal “translation.”) In the fourth example, volet in L may represent a copyist’s effort to avoid repeating water, which appears in the previous sentence, but this parallel to a scribal practice in the Latin textual tradition is at best a surmise.189 Syntactical variants provide no evidence to prefer K to L or to do the opposite.

Most of the variants among the three Middle Dutch texts reflect not errors or editorializing by scribes but, rather, dialectal differences.190 This kind of linguistic variation posed a significant problem for late medieval and Renaissance translators. William Caxton, who in 1490 published his English version of the Aeneid, styled the Eneydos, recounted the difficulty of his task in prefatory remarks that attribute dialectal disparity—as others did the urge to travel—to stellar influence. His remarks highlight the kind of problem that faced both the Middle Dutch translator of the Itinerarius and the scribes who transmitted that work:

[My] lorde abbot of westmynster ded do shewe to me late certayn evydences wryton in olde englysshe, for to reduce it into our englysshe now usid. And certaynly it was wreton in suche a wyse that it was more lyke to dutche than englysshe. I coude not reduce ne brynge it to be understonden. And certaynly our langage now used varyeth ferre from that which was used and spoken whan I was borne. For we englysshe men ben borne under the domynacyon of the mone, whiche is never stedfaste, but ever waverynge, wexynge one season and waneth and dyscreaseth another season. And that comyn englysshe that is spoken in one shyre varyeth from another. . . .

[C]ertaynly it is harde to playse every man by cause of dyversite and chaunge of langage. For in these dayes every man that is in ony reputacyon in his countre wyll utter his comynycacyon and maters in suche maners and termes that fewe men shall understonde theym.191

Few readers who compare the Middle Dutch texts of the Itinerarius will fail to recognize their linguistic diversity. The Middle Dutch in K displays distinct markers of eastern Netherlandic (Oostnederlandsch), and Matthaeus’s transcription preserves the work of someone who was probably native to Gelderland in the later fifteenth century. Characteristic Oostnederlandsch words that appear in K but not in L include gegeten, stranck, syde (for neder, ‘low’), and woe (for wie or hoe, ‘how’).192 Vocabulary is less dialectally peculiar in L, but even allowing for some normalization of spelling by the editor Mathias de Vries, its orthography and grammar represent the Middle Dutch of the western province of Holland. At present, only the incipit and explicit of M are known, but this fragmentary evidence suggests that while the text resembles K in its content, its dialect is closer to that of L (it may also date from around a century later). Thus, while the precise linguistic character of the original Middle Dutch text remains uncertain, its manifestations in KLM reveal medieval scribes not merely copying a work but translating it into their individual dialects. Table 2 shows phonological, semantic, and grammatical markers of eastern and western dialects of Middle Dutch, as well as specific instances of their appearance in KL[M]. All numbers designate lines in the Middle Dutch critical edition printed here. While orthography varies in each text of the translation, the phenomena shown here are quite consistent throughout each one.193

This chapter has attempted to demonstrate how multifarious were the versions of Johannes Witte de Hese’s Itinerarius that reached audiences in two languages during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as readers who were more wary of Turks than of Mongols and more interested in trading with India than investing it with unapproachable exotica sought information about the East. Scribes and editors of the Latin text attempted to improve the work stylistically, even to underscore its reliability, although they did little actually to make substantive changes in detail. A translator with access to an early version of the Itinerarius rendered it faithfully into Middle Dutch, in which it circulated in different dialects and degrees of completeness. Despite some of Witte’s astonishing claims, however, none of his editors, even those who most actively manipulated his language, presented his pilgrimage account as imaginary.

1. A Critical Edition of the Latin Text

For reasons set out in chapter 3, the base text for the critical edition of the Itinerarius is University of Minnesota, James Bell Ford Library, MS 1424/Co, vol. 2, fols. 177r-187r (A). The following principles apply to the presentation of the text as it appears in A:

• • sentence and paragraph boundaries are editorially established;
• • all abbreviations are expanded;
• • modern punctuation is employed;
• • modern style is used in spelling words with the characters i/j and u/v;
• • numerals are represented in the format—roman, arabic, or spelled out—in which they appear in A;1
• • the foliation of A is given in the text between square brackets following two vertical lines (except in the first line);
• • corrections of misspellings and scribal errors appear between square brackets (see chapter 3 on emendations to the text).

The analysis in chapter 3 of the textual development of the Itinerarius focuses on the extensive revisions—substantive and stylistic—that scribes and printers introduced into the narrative. In order to facilitate that discussion and to identify particular passages or constructions that were successively or regularly changed—such as interpolations in C the use of third-person narrative in DEa, and the rewording of the beginnings of independent clauses in a-k—this edition displays all semantically and
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 122 ]] 
grammatically defensible variants in discrete, brief textual units. The following principles apply to their presentation:

• • superscripted numbers in the text, which are also given for each line in the right margin of each page, correspond to numbered lemmata at the foot of the page, which repeat a word or passage in the base text and give the different readings for that lexical unit found in other Latin manuscripts or early editions (thus, lemma 2 indicates that the word ego in manuscript A is omitted in manuscripts BDE and edition a; the reader can infer that the word is found in manuscript C and editions b-k);
• • some additions to the text are indicated by the statement that they come “after” a certain word (see 14-15);
• • changes in sentence order are specifically identified (see 835, 893, 1033);
• • orthography and punctuation in each lemma follow that found in the text, with i/j and u/v normalized and abbreviations expanded but without other change (see 6);2
• • multiple variants within a unit of text covered by a single lemma are recorded according to this hierarchy: ABCDEaFGbcdeHfghijk (see 426);
• • when the same variant occurs in more than one manuscript or edition, orthography and punctuation follow the reading in the first witness according to this same hierarchy (thus lemma 53 records the reading duxit moyses, the reading in C although Moyses is capitalized in hjk);
• • spelling variations in toponyms and personal names (but not i/j variants in Johannes) are recorded here (see 3-5, 8, 13, 184); all other orthographic variants are found in TN III;
• • each manuscript copied from an edition (FG from a and H from e) is so exact a reproduction of its copy text that the sigla FGH are included in a lemma only when they record readings not found in the copy text;
• • when readings in the closely related manuscripts DE or editions a-k (and manuscripts FGH, which are copied from a or e) differ only in a single word, that variant is indicated between square brackets immediately following the word affected (see 27, 311 [see also one transposition at 1027]);
• • some variants in two or more manuscripts or editions are more clearly recorded in multiple lemmata that present different portions of the
   [[ Print Edition Page No. 123 ]] 
  same unit of text; all such lemmata are cross-referenced (see 60-61, 304-8, and 893-930).

Scribal corrections, orthographical peculiarities (but not diacritical marks or digraphs in k), marginalia, and grammatical mistakes that a reader or copyist would likely have emended—as well as all typographical errors in the editions—are recorded in one of the seven categories of Textual Notes, which follow the Latin critical edition. A lemma that ends with an asterisk (*) contains a variant that is further described in the section on scribal corrections (TN II); one that ends with a dagger (†) has explanatory material in the list of typographical errors in the early printed editions (TN VII).

^[177r] Anno Domini Mccclxxxnono,1 ego2 Johannes3 Witte4 de Hese,5
presbyter Traiectensis dyocesis,6 fui7 in Jherusalem8 in Maio, visitando ibi-
dem9 sancta loca, peregrinando ulterius versus Jordanem, et per Jordanem10
ad mare Rubrum, ad partes Egipti, ad unam11 civitatem vocatam12 Her-
mopolis,135 que dicitur capitalis civitas Egipti,14 ubi beata Virgo septem annis
morabatur cum filio suo, Domino nostro.15

Et in mari16 Rubro predicto17 vidi18 pisces volantes super aquas19 ad
spacium tantum20 quantum21 balista posset sagittari;22 et illi pisces sunt rubei
coloris, habentes in longitudine ultra duos pedes,23 habentes eciam24 caput
10 rotundum ut25 cattus26 et rostrum ut27 aquila. De quibus piscibus28 comedi.29
Et sunt pisces30 grossi, propterea31 oportet ipsos32 diu bulire.33 Et vidi34
plura35 alia rara animalia de quibus36 non habeo37 memoriam.38

Eciam vidi39 in dicto mari40 Rubro41 serpentes volantes ad terram,42
revertentes econverso43 ad44 mare Rubrum. Et45 sunt valde nocivi homini-
bus,
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 125 ]] 
15eos intoxicando.46 Contra quos habetur cinis de palma combusta, cres-
cens47 ibidem et in Terra Sancta, et48 eciam49 herba quedam,50 choral51 nun-
cupata, crescens52 in mari Rubro in loco per quem Moyses perduxit53
populum Israeliticum. Et ille54 locus—seu via55—cognoscitur56 per qua-
tuor57 magnos lapides nigros stantes in ripa58 maris,59 duo ab una parte
20 maris60 et duo ab alia parte.61

Et62 in civitate Hermopolensi predicta63 || ^[177v] est ortus in quo mora-
batur beata Virgo,64 et in illo est fons in quo beata Virgo65 lavit sua66 ne-
cessaria. De cuius fontis67 aqua68 dicitur quod69 ceci vident ipsis accipien-
tibus, et infirmi sanantur,70 et leprosi sanantur.71 In quo orto eciam72 crescit
25 balsamum.73

Eciam in civitate predicta est74 una75 ecclesia mire magnitudinis, con-
structa76 in honore77 sancte Trinitatis et gloriose Virginis,78 que prius fuerat79
templum ydolorum, in quod,80 cum beata Virgo81 primo82 venit ex metu83
Herodis in Egiptum fugiendo,84 demones fugierunt et ceciderunt ydola in
30 templo, ut dicitur ibidem.85

Et de illa86 civitate Hermopolensi87 sunt viij diete usque ad civitatem
Amram,88 que iacet supra89 mare Rubrum.90 Et ibidem iterum transnavi-
gatur per directum per mare Rubrum,91 et transitur pedester septem die-
bus92 ad montem Synay, in quo iacet corpus beate Katherine virginis in
35 claustro canonicorum regularium devote93 vivencium et nisi94 semel in die95
comedencium. Quorum sunt96 13 in97 numero, et98 sunt eciam ibidem99 13100
lampades ardentes que numquam possunt extingwi, sed101 absque aliquo102
augmento semper vivunt.103 Sed cum unus104 canonicorum moritur, tunc
una105 seipso106 extingwitur tamdiu donec107 iterato ad locum alius108 eliga-
tur,10940 et tunc lampas seipso110 sine aliquo adiuvamento111 incenditur,112
econverso.113

Et illud claustrum114 est fortissime115 munitum propter animalia no-
civa.116 Et117 || ^[178r] de sepulchro118 sancte119 Katherine stillant in qualibet
[sep]timana nisi120 tres gutte olei quod olim121 in magna copia122 stillare con-
swevit.45 Et eciam ibidem est123 lapis quem Moyses percussit, et fluxerunt aque
filiis Israel. Et ibi sunt volucres portantes in ore124 ramos olivarum, ponen-
tes illos infra125 emunitatem126 claustri. Et sunt ille aves ut127 turtures in128

 [[ Print Edition Page No. 127 ]] 
magnitudine, habentes alba capita et colla.129

Item:130 De131 monte Synay sunt quatuor diete132 per desertum usque133
50 ad campum Helym,134 in quo Moyses construxit135 altare Domino, quod
altare136 iam137 corruit; et iacent adhuc lapides ibidem138 de illo. Et in eodem
campo quieverunt139 filii Israel per xl140 dies quando Moyses accepit141 le-
gem. Et142 in eodem campo sunt duodecim fontes de143 quibus si quis bi-
berit144 numquam excecantur eius oculi, ut dicitur.145 Et sunt eciam ibidem146
55 septuagintadue147 palme quas Moyses ibidem148 plantavit et cum quibus
semper149 obtinuit150 victoriam. Et ad illum151 campum non possunt venire
animalia venenosa. Et crescunt ibidem multe bone species.152

Et prope illum153 campum est154 unus155 fluvius qui dicitur156 Marach,157
valde amarus, in quem Moyses percussit virga et accepit dulcedinem;158 de159
60 quo filii Israel160 biberunt. Et adhuc hodiernis temporibus,161 ut dicitur,162
animalia venenosa intoxicant163 illam aquam post occasum solis,164 quod
bona animalia exinde165 bibere non possunt. Et || ^[178v] de mane166 post or-
tum solis venit unicornus,167 ponens cornu suum ad dictum168 fluvium,
expellendo venenum169 ex illo,170 sic quod bona de die171 accipiunt po-
tum.172
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 128 ]] 
65Et hoc vidi.173

Et ulterius174 per unum175 magnum miliare est habitacio unius176 sancti
heremite ubi sanctus Paulus, primus heremita, et sanctus Anthonius habi-
tabant. Et idem heremita177 adhuc178 hodiernis temporibus pascitur manna
celesti; quem heremitam vidi.179 Et dormit180 super lapidem, et est vestitus181
70 veste pilosa secundum182 modum beati183 Johannis baptiste.184

Et ulterius transeundo bene per quindenam185 per desertum et per
terram186 Urcaldeorum,187 ubi188 Rubei Judei189 habitant, veni190 ad fluvium
Nylus191 in quo navigavi192 per unum diem193 ad unum194 portum195 maris196
ad civitatem quandam197 vocatam Damiad. Et ibi intravi198 navem, navi-
gando75 per mare Occeanum bene199 per tres menses200 ad Ethiopiam, que
regio dicitur inferior201 India,202 ubi sanctus Bartholomeus predicabat. Et
ibi morantur203 Ethiopes,204 nigri homines.

Et205 ulterius navigando, veni206 ad Pigmeos. Et sunt parvi homines,207
habentes in longum208 longitudinem209 unius ulne,210 et sunt difformes. Et211

 [[ Print Edition Page No. 129 ]] 
80non utuntur domibus, sed morantur in cavernis moncium, et212 in speluncis,
et in conchis; nec213 utuntur pane214 sed herbis speciebus215 lacticiniis216 ut217
bruta. Et dicitur ibidem quod218 Pigmei219 pugnant contra syconias sepe,220
et syconie interficiunt pueros eorum aliquando;221 sed hoc non vidi.222 Et
vivunt ad maius duodecim annis, ut dicitur,223 et non224 ultra. || ^[179r]

85Et225 ulterius navigando de mari226 Ethiopie227 infra228 maria Ieco-
reum229 et Arenosum230 per quatuor dietas,231 veni232 ad terram Monoculo-
rum. Et mare Iecoreum233 est talis nature234 quod attrahit235 naves236 propter
ferrum in navibus,237 quia238 fundus illius maris dicitur quod sit239 lapideus
de lapide adamante,240 qui est attract[ivus].241 Et ex alia242 parte est mare
90 Arenosum,243 et est244 arena245 fluens, ut246 aqua crescens et decrescens. Et247
in illo mari248 capiuntur pisces per Monoculos, qui intrant pedestres.249 Et
iidem250 Monoculi transeunt eciam251 aliquando252 sub aqua, periclitando
naves. Et propter ista duo maria, infra253 que navigare oportet, est pericu-
losissimum
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 130 ]] 
navigare; 254et propterea255 necesse [est]256 quod257 habeatur bo-
nus95 et directus ventus si homo debet258 salvari. Et illi259 Monoculi sunt
breves,260 grossi, et fortes; et comedunt alios homines. Et habent261 ocu-
lum262 in medio frontis,263 nitidum264 ad265 modum266 carbunculi. Et sunt
sub dominio regis267 Grandicanis.268 Et laborant semper in nocte.

Et ulterius navigando269 ad mediam Indiam, ubi Grandicanis270 regnat
100 sub imperio Johannis Presbyteri,271 veni272 ad273 civitatem magnam que vo-
catur Andranopolis,274 quam sanctus Thomas primo ad fidem converte-
bat.275 Et in illa civitate morantur boni Christiani et multi religiosi. Et276 est
sita in277 litore maris, et ibidem est portus ubi278 multe279 naves de diversis
mundi partibus280 conveniunt. Et sunt ibidem domus multum281 alte, et282
105 platee sunt283 satis stricte sic284 quod homines [non]285 senciunt solem, ||
^[179v] neque habent in plateis.286 Et sunt in eadem civitate ultra287 quingenti
pontes lapidei288 sub quibus fluunt rivuli.289 Et ibidem est290 unum291 claus-
trum292 minorum, quorum ecclesia facta est293 de puro alabastro,294 et ibi-
dem295 sepeliuntur peregrini296 Christiani.297

110Et in eadem298 civitate prope litus maris est una299 turris magne300 al-
titudinis et pulchritudinis quam de nocte astronomi et301 litterati302 ascen-
dunt, futura prenosticando.303 Et de die304 domini civitatis305 et maiores306
habent eorum consilia.307 308 Et in summitate illius309 turris stant quinque
turres de lapidibus preciosis et de auro,310 quarum media est magis elevata311
115 quam relique312 quatuor, in qua stant candele313 et lampades314 ardentes in
nocte315 sic quod naute remotissime videntes316 lucem317 secundum hanc se
regunt,318 applicando se319 civitati predicte.320 Et prope illam321 civitatem est
unum claustrum322 appellat[u]m323 “Ad Sanctam Mariam,” ubi324 habitant
devoti325 homines.326 Et ibidem est327 peregrinacio magna peregrinorum.328

120Et ibi prope329 eramus capti per raptores Grandicanis,330 ipso331 non332
existente in partibus,333 et334 ducti ad335 castrum unum336 vocatum Compar-
dut,337
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 132 ]] 
ubi detenti eramus viij338 septimanis. Sed cum rex Grandicanis ve-
niebat339 ad partes,340 eramus liberati eo quod fueramus341 peregrini sancti
Thome, quos diligit quamvis ipse sit342 paganus, quia343 maxime timet vin-
dictam125 sancti Thome. Et cibavit nos344 vij345 diebus in eodem.346 Et postea
fecit347 nobis dari348 conductum per suos bene xij || ^[180r] diebus349 ad unam350
civitatem magnam,351 Eleap nuncupatam.352 Et ibi terminatur media India.353

Et ibidem354 intravimus navem355 navigando sub ducatu356 Grandi-
canis357 predicti viij diebus, veniendo358 ad unum359 montem altissimum pe-
trosum130 iacentem in mari, habentem360 subtus unum foramen361 per spa-
cium362 trium miliarium363 per quod364 nos365 transnavigare366 oportuit.367 Et
illud foramen368 est369 ita tenebrosum quod370 semper oportebat371 habere
candelas ardentes. Et in exitu foraminis oportebat372 navem descendere no-
biscum373 bene374 ad spacium viginti cubitorum, quia ibidem mare375 res-
pectu135 foraminis est ita bassum.376 Et377 maxime ibidem378 timebamus.

Et ibi379 prope in terra380 crescit piper inter381 duos montes. Et ibidem382
tot sunt383 serpentes quod384 piper colligi non potest385 absque igne,386 sed387
circa festum388 Michaelis incenditur389 ignis390 sic quod serpentes fugiunt,391
et tunc colligitur piper.392 Et isti duo montes in fine393 ubi terminantur prope
140 mare coadunantur.394 Et fit subtus unum395 foramen tenebrosum ad spacium
trium miliarium,396 et per illud397 foramen transit rivulus velocissime cur-
rens398 sic399 quod ducit secum magnos400 lapides. Et in illo foramine au-
diuntur horribiles soni,401 ut402 tonitrua et clamores diversi horribiles, sed
quid significet nescitur et nullus403 intelligit.404

145Et405 ulterius navigando406 per mensem, venitur ad unum407 portum
qui Gadde vocatur.408 || ^[180v] Et ibi409 stat castrum ubi mercatores dant theo-
lonium Presbytero Johanni.410

Et411 ulterius navigando412 per xiiij dies,413 venitur414 ad civitatem Ed-
issam ubi Presbyter Johannes moratur. Et illa civitas est415 capitalis tocius416
150 regni sui, et est417 sita in418 superiori India in fine419 terre habitabilis. Et illa

 [[ Print Edition Page No. 134 ]] 
civitas420 est maior quam essent421 xxiiij^or civitates Colonienses.

Et habitacio422 Presbyteri Johannis est sita in medio civitatis.423 Et ha-
bet bene424 in longitudine425 duo miliaria teutonica, et eciam bene426 in la-
titudine, quia est quadratum.427 Et428 stat supra429 columpnas, quarum430
155 sunt, ut dicitur,431 ix^c in numero.432 Et media inter istas columpnas433 est
maior434 aliis, et ad hanc435 sunt facti quatuor magni gygantes de lapidibus
preciosis et436 deauratis, stantes inclinatis capitibus437 subtus palacium ac si
portent438 totum palacium. Et ad quamdam439 aliam columpnam sunt eciam
facte440 ymagines: ad unam441 ymago regis et ad442 aliam ymago regine, ha-
bentes160 ludos et cyphos deauratos443 in manibus suis. Videlicet, cum444
ymago regis habet ludum in manibus suis,445 tunc446 ymago regine habet
cyphum aureum in manibus suis, sibi447 propinando, et sic448 econverso.449
Et iste ymagines sunt450 de lapidibus preciosis451 deauratis.

Et ita452 sub palacio est magnus453 transitus ad quem populi multitudo
165 convenit.454 Et ibidem455 fiunt iudicia spiritualia et secularia456 omni die, et457
consilia dominorum civitatis. Et ibidem458 est commune459 forum civitatis.460

 [[ Print Edition Page No. 135 ]] 
Et || ^[181r] in principio461 cuiuslibet mensis sunt ibidem462 nundine, sive ded-
icaciones,463 ad quas homines464 de diversis mundi partibus conveniunt,465
et precipue prima466 die Augusti.467 Item: Idem palacium custoditur omni
170 nocte mille viris armatis.468 469 Item: In palacio est unus pulcher470 ambitus
stans eciam471 sub columpnis472 ad quas473 sunt facte474 ymagines paparum
et imperatorum475 Romanorum qui fuerunt,476 et aliquarum reginarum—
scilicet Helene et cetera.477

Item:478 Ascendendo palacium sunt quingenti gradus veniendo ad pri-
mam175 habitacionem, et in quolibet gradu sunt479 duo vel plures leones vi-
ventes detenti ibidem.480 Et481 si aliqui hereticorum vel paganorum482 pre-
dictos gradus ascenderent, a leonibus interficerentur, u[t] dicitur.483 Et
istud484 palacium infimum vocatur palacium prophetarum, quia omnes pro-
phete sunt ibidem facti de485 lapidibus preciosis et deauratis. Et486 est or-
natum487180 pannis preciosissimis488 et lanternis489 de490 nocte ardentibus.

Item: Ascendendo491 secundum492 palacium493 sunt adhuc494 plures gra-
dus, quia quanto plus ascenditur tanto plus palacium ampliatur.495 Et is-
tud496
 [[ Print Edition Page No. 136 ]] 
palacium dicitur palacium patriarcharum, et dicitur quod ibi sit cor-
pus497 Abrahe. Et in isto498 palacio sunt plures499 camere et dormitoria
185 pulcherrime ornata.500 Et ibidem est501 orlogium mirabiliter factum, quia si
quis502 alienus ibidem503 intraverit, orlogium504 dat sonum horribilem, sic
quod ibi fit505 concursus506 populi videndo et507 apprehendendo508 illos
propter quos509 fit talis510 sonus. || ^[181v] Et qualiter hoc sit nescio.511 Item:512
Dicitur quod ibidem sit513 una514 magna liberia515 in516 una517 camera ad
190 quam doctores transeunt.518

Item: Ascendendo ad terciam519 habitacionem, ubi adhuc sunt plures
gradus,520 dicitur habitacio sanctarum virginum. Et ibidem521 est pulcher-
rima capella, et522 ibidem est523 refectorium laycorum et familiarium.

Item: Ascendendo quartam524 habitacionem,525 dicitur526 habitacio
195 sanctorum martyrum et confessorum.527 Et528 ibidem eciam est529 capella
530 et531 refectorium dominorum et dormitorium.532

Item: Ascendendo ad quintam habitacionem, ibi533 est534 chorus sanc-
torum535 apostolorum. Et ibi est ecclesia536 mire pulchritudinis, et ibi te-
nentur537 divina538 officia coram Presbytero Johanne. Et ibidem est539 refec-
torium200 Presbyteri Johannis,540 longum et latum541 ac mire542 pulchritudinis,
in quo sunt multe543 preciose ymagines de lapidibus preciosis et deauratis.544
Et ibi est545 mensa Presbyteri Johannis.546 Et est de lapide precioso facta,547
et tamen est ita levis548 ac si esset lignea. Et ita pulchra549 et lucida quod550
facies551 speculatur in eadem.552 Et habet talem virtutem553 quod si predicte
205 mense apponerentur cibaria venenosa554 nulli nocerent. Et si illa mensa fri-
catur digito aut alio instrumento, tunc555 scintille ardentes saltant ex
eadem.556

Et ibi eciam est557 fons largissime currens. Et ibidem eciam est558 cam-
pana quam sanctus Thomas fieri fecit, quam cum559 obsessi audiunt,560 cu-
rantur,561210 et562 spiritus maligni fugiunt,563 nec564 animalia venenosa possunt

 [[ Print Edition Page No. 138 ]] 
audire eandem.565 Et dicitur566 campana benedicta, et illa pulsatur567 ante
prandium Presbyteri Johannis, et in medio prandii, || ^[182r] et eciam568 facto
prandio. Et ibidem sedent569 in cathedris570 octo doctores qui legunt in pran-
dio Presbyteri Johannis571 diversas materias pulchras572 valde573 delectabiles.
215 Et habet574 in prandio vasa preciosissima575 aurea, argentea, et de lapidibus
preciosis576 in magna quantitate. Et ibidem sunt vasa quod,577 si578 cibaria
starent per unum579 diem et amplius in eisdem, numquam580 putrescerent
nec sapor mutaretur.581 Et ibidem est582 dormitorium patriarche,583 archi-
episcoporum,584 et aliorum prelatorum.

220Item:585 Ascendendo ad sextam habitacionem,586 que dicitur587 cho-
rus588 sancte Marie Virginis589 et angelorum.590 Ibidem est591 capella pul-
cherrima, et de592 mane omni die post593 ortum solis cantatur ibidem594 missa
de beata Virgine595 solempniter.596 Et ibi est597 speciale palacium Presbyteri
Johannis; et598 doctores ibi599 tenent consilia. Et illud potest volvi600 ad
225 modum rote, et est testudinatum ad modum celi. Et sunt ibidem601 multi

 [[ Print Edition Page No. 139 ]] 
lapides preciosi lucentes in nocte ac si esset clara dies. Et iste602 due ultime
habitaciones—scilicet quinta et sexta—sunt maiores et laciores603 aliis.

Item: Ulterius ascendendo604 habitacionem septimam,605 que est
summa,606 dicitur chorus607 sancte Trinitatis. Et ibi est capella608 pulcher-
rima609—pulchrior230 aliis610—et parva.611 Et ibi612 celebratur omni die613 missa
de sancta Trinitate mane614 ante ortum solis, quam615 semper audit Presbyter
Johannes, quia mane616 post mediam noctem surgit,617 et postea || ^[182v] audit
missam subtus618 de beata Virgine,619 et postea620 summam missam, que sem-
per celebratur621 in choro sanctorum622 apostolorum.623 Et ista capella624
235 est625 nimis626 alte testudinata,627 et est628 rotunda ad modum celi stellati,629
et transit circumeundo ad modum630 firmamenti. Et est631 pavimentata de
ebureo,632 et altare est factum633 de ebureo et de634 lapidibus preciosis. Et
ibi est una635 parva campana, quam quicumque audit non incurrit illo die636
surditatem, ut ibidem credunt.637 Et ibi est eciam638 facies veronice,639 quam

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240quicumque illo die videt640 non deficiet visu, ut dicunt.641

Et ibi642 prope est dormitorium Presbyteri Johannis mire pulchritu-
dinis et magnitudinis et643 testudinatum et644 stellatum ad modum firma-
menti.645 Et ibidem est646 sol et647 luna cum septem speris planetarum te-
nentes cursus suos ut in celo;648 et hoc649 est artificialiter factum.650 Item:
245 Ibi est651 speculum in quo sunt positi652 tres lapides preciosi,653 quorum654
unus dirigit et655 acuit visum, alter656 sensum, tercius experienciam. Ad quod
speculum657 sunt electi tres658 valentissimi659 doctores qui, inspiciendo spe-
culum, vident omnia660 que fiunt in mundo, ut ibidem dicitur.661

Item: Sunt ibidem662 artificialiter663 facti664 ix chori angelorum, et665 in
250 hiis choris666 sunt facte ymagines pulcherrime angelorum,667 patriarcharum,
prophetarum, apostolorum,668 martyrum, confessorum, Trium Regum,
atque virginum, de lapidibus preciosis || ^[183r] et de669 auro. Item:670 In su-
premo—scilicet throno671—sedet672 Maiestas, cui serviunt vigintiquatuor673
seniores et summi archangeli tenentes in manibus suis rotulos,674 tam-
quam675
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255cantantes, “Gloria in excelsis,”676 “Sanctus,”677 et similia.678

Item: Sunt ibi679 tres cruces preciosissime prope lectum680 quas Pres-
byter Johannes681 semper adorat.682 Et sunt ibi duo fontes, quorum unus
est683 frigidus, alter calidus.684 Item: Stat ibi685 magnus gygas fortiter arma-
tus, et dicitur quod si aliquis686 inimicus687 intraret post occasum solis quod
260 gygas illum688 interficeret.689

Item: Supra690 isto septimo et ultimo palacio sunt 20 turres mire alti-
tudinis et pulchritudinis691 deaurate,692 sub quibus totum palacium conclu-
ditur et tegitur.693 Et in isto ultimo694 palacio695 sunt eciam 24696 palacia—
seu697 camere—que possunt circumvolvi ad modum698 rote.699 Et ita istud
265 totum palacium habet septem habitaciones prius narratas in quibus700 adhuc
sunt701 plura mirabilia et rara,702 quibus iam703 non recordor.704

Item: Istud totum palacium705 est situm super uno706 flumine quod
dicitur Tigris,707 veniente708 de Paradiso709; de quo flumine710 proicitur711
aurum.712 Item:713 Extra civitatem714 sunt xij claustra que sanctus Thomas

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270suis temporibus fieri fecit in honore715 Christi et xij apostolorum.

Item: Ante palacium Presbyteri Johannis est signatum716 aureis lit-
teris717 quod omni die comedunt718 ibidem719 xxx^M hominum, exceptis in-
gredientibus et egredientibus.720 Item: Ibidem nisi semel in die comeditur.721

Item: Presbyter722 Johannes transit de mane723 ante prandium724 ut
275 papa—scilicet725 cappa || ^[183v] longa,726 rubea, et727 preciosissima. Et728 post
prandium transit729 ut730 rex,731 equitando et terram suam gubernando.732 Et
scribit se733 in litteris suis:734 “Johannes Presbyter, divina gracia dominus
dominancium omnium que735 sub celo sunt,736 ab ortu solis usque737 ad
Paradisum Terrestrem.” Item:738 Sub eo sunt et regnant739 septuagintaduo740
280 reges, quorum sunt undecim741 Christiani.742 Item:743 Homines non utuntur
ibidem vestibus de lanis factis744 ut nos, sed vestiuntur745 pannis factis de746
cerico et pelliculis rubicundis.

Item: Ibidem non morantur747 mulieres sed solummodo viri; sed748
mulieres morantur remote ultra mare per quatuor dietas navigando749 in750
285 una insula vocata751 Terra Feminarum, et752 est753 fortiter circummurata.754

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Et ille mulieres tribus vicibus veniunt755 ad viros pro756 prole generanda,
scilicet ante Septuagesimam, ante festum beati757 Johannis Baptiste, et ante
festum758 Michaelis. Et sunt simul759 tribus diebus et760 noctibus coeundo,761
et tunc762 non intrant ecclesias sed763 audiunt764 missas per fenestras. Et
290 eciam hiis765 diebus fiunt sponsalia inter ipsos.766 Et tunc quarta die767 re-
vertuntur ad terram suam. Et si pariunt filium768 nutriunt769 per triennium770
et tunc mittunt patri;771 si772 femellam tunc773 manet cum ipsis.774

Item: Sunt ibi775 quatuor flumina Paradisi,776 quorum777 Tigris dat au-
rum, ut dictum est; et secundum, scilicet778 Phison, emittit lapides precio-
sos;779295 et tercium, scilicet780 Gyon,781 dat dulcedinem aquarum; et quartum
flumen,782 scilicet783 Eufrates, dat fertilitatem terre784 || ^[184r] semel in quolibet
mense,785 et propterea786 colligunt ibidem787 fructum788 bis789 in anno.
Item:790 Animalia procurant bis791 fetum in anno.792 Et ibidem est793 finis
Indie et794 terre habitabilis.795 796

300Item: Ad visitandum797 sanctum Thomam,798 qui iacet799 quatuor die-
tis800 eundo pedester801 a civitate predicta802 in civitate v[o]cata803 Hulna,804
iacente805 per806 duo miliaria in mari807 in uno808 magno monte. Et antequam
fiat809 transitus ad sanctum Thomam,810 oportet quod811 homines se pre-
parent, ieiunando per quindenam, et abstinendo se812 a carnibus et piscibus,
305 et omni die confitendo, ieiunando,813 et devote vivendo.814 Et fit nisi815 semel
transitus in anno, viij diebus ante festum Thome816 et viij diebus post, et
per illam817 quindenam818 stat mare apertum819 per illa820 duo miliaria ante
predictam civitatem Hulnam,821 sic quod822 Christifideles per mare823 ad
civitatem824 transeunt siccis pedibus.825 Et tenet se mare ab utraque parte ut
310 duo parietes;826 per quod eciam mare pagani transire non possunt.827

Et intrando civitatem predictam,828 venitur829 ad ecclesiam sancti
Thome. Et in vigilia sancti Thome830 ponitur corpus suum ad cathedram

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magnam deauratam, factam de lapidibus preciosis,831 ante summum altare,
et stat832 ibidem833 a primis vesperis usque ad secundas vesperas.834 Et835
315 custoditur plusquam836 mille viris837 armatis illis quindecim diebus838 civitas
et ecclesia.839 Et convenit840 ibidem841 populi multitudo842 vigilantes843
nocte844 et orantes.845

In die846 sancti Thome venit Presbyter Johannes cum847 patriarcha,848
|| ^[184v] archiepiscopis, et849 episcopis ac850 prelatis851 ad cantandum divina
320 officia,852 et cantantur ibidem853 plures misse antequam summa854 incipiatur.
Et ad summam missam855 preparat se patriarcha illam cantando;856 et857 cum
venit ad canonem,858 discooperitur facies apostoli859 ita860 quod861 ab om-
nibus videtur.862 Et863 in elevacione864 facies ipsius865 triplicem habet866 ap-
parenciam: primo apparet867 facies868 pallida ut mortui hominis,869 2^o870 alba

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325et viva871 ut viventis hominis,872 et873 3^o874 rubicunda875 ut rosa. Et patriar-
cha876 conficit ibi877 sacramentum in878 magna copia.879