Sir John Mandeville's Travels is arguably one of the most
influential books of the Middle Ages. On St Michael's Day 1322,
Mandeville, a knight of St Albans, set sail for Jerusalem on a
pilgrimage. Nothing unusual about that. But this was the beginning
of a journey that would last for 34 years and take him not only to
the Holy Land but to India, China, Java and Sumatra. He also left
an account of his peregrination, which was far more extensive than
that of the more famous Marco Polo half a century before. In it he
displayed an infectious curiosity together with both an eye for
detail and an ear for gossip. He interspersed extraordinary and
humorous anecdotes of the everyday with more sober anthropological
observations, and his liberal, tolerant and humane attitude had an
attraction for contemporaries no less than for subsequent
generations. Milton uses the Travels to take us on a vivid quest
through 14th-century Constantinople, Cyprus, Syria, Jerusalem, the
Sinai Desert and on to the Far East, in the footsteps of the
intrepid knight. Moreover, as he points out, the significance of
this text has been enduring. It circulated throughout Christendom
in hundreds of manuscript copies which disseminated Mandeville's
central claim that the globe could be circumnavigated. Whether
Mandeville himself had achieved that feat remains as debatable now
as it was in former centuries, but, fact or fiction, his book
provided a goad and an inspiration to Columbus, Hakluyt, Raleigh
and all the subsequent pioneers of exploration. Milton has helped
to restore Mandeville's historical significance and provides a
engrossing travelogue of the late medieval world in the process.
(Kirkus UK)
In 1322 Sir John Mandeville left England on a pilgrimage to
Jerusalem. Thirty-four years later, he returned, claiming to have
visited not only Jerusalem, but India, China, Java, Sumatra and
Borneo as well. His book about that voyage, THE TRAVELS, was
heralded as the most important book of the Middle Ages as
Mandeville claimed his voyage proved it was possible to
circumnavigate the globe. In the nineteenth century sceptics
questioned his voyage, and even doubted he had left England. THE
RIDDLE AND THE KNIGHT sets out to discover whether Mandeville
really could have made his voyage or whether, as is claimed, THE
TRAVELS was a work of imaginative fiction. Bestselling historian
Giles Milton unearths clues about the journey and reveals that THE
TRAVELS is built upon a series of riddles which have, until now,
remained unsolved.
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