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3 "Choses Estranges" in Constantinople and the Eastern Mediterranean ONCE THE ~BOOK'S FORMAL EXORDIUM HAS called the work, Sir John, and the imagined Christian and noble audience into being, the text in the Continental and Insular Versions lingers no longer on further preliminaries than it takes to invoke God's name-"OI' orrez en nom de Dieu le glorieus" ("Now hear in the name of God the glorious") 1_ and gets down to the business of writing East: that is, to fulfilling Sir John's two promises about The Book's principal aims, subjects, and genres. According to the first and vaguer promise , the Knight will speak in due course about some of the diverse lands overseas and describe part of what exists there, while according to the second promise, he will describe the way to the .Holy Land especially for those wanting to travel there. By the Mandeville-author's own inaugural definition, then, The Book is projected as a description of the world like Polo's, but one that expands the latter's generic and geographical horizons to take in the closer and more familiar domain of the Palestine pilgrim. As such, as noted in the previous chapter, The Book represents a novel undertaking, an attempt at once bold and conservative to make a single work- an integrated textual world- out of the diverse geographical, religious, historical, and ethnographic material circulating in manuscript miscellanies devoted to both the biblical and the marvelous East.' The resulting composite work/world thus represents a kind of verbal analogue to the Catalan Atlas (1375), which combines and therefore redefines the practical portolan chart and the speculative Asian portion ofsuch circular mappaemundi as the Ebstorf and Hereford maps. The principal difference between the two expansive compositions is that The Book (in its authorial form) retains the theological geography of those mappaemundi that give pride of place to Jerusalem and Paradise. Chapter 3 The Mandeville-author's first step in fashioning his new old eastern world is to fulfillthe exordium's second promise by overwriting his textual analogue to the portolan chart: the German Dominican William of Boldensele's Liber de quibusdam ultramarinis partibus (1336), mostly in Jean le Long's slightly modified rendering, Un traictie de lestat de la terre sainte (1351). In a prefatory letter dated Michaelmas 1337, William calls this work "my little book ... on the condition of the Holy Land" ("libellum meum . . . de statu terrae sanctae"), which it is; but it is also more than this. Not only does it treat the notion of Holy Land somewhat loosely, recording facts about numerous places between Constantinople and Egypt, and turning its attention on occasion to novelties like plantains, a giraffe, and three "living" elephants; it also organizes the traditional impersonal treatise on the holy places as a firstperson narrative of the German pilgrim's own progress. Thus, in addition to being able to follow William's journey through such recurrent phrases as "after these things I sawjwent" ("post haec vidi/perveni"), one can sometimes catch sight of his public persona as he laments a ruined church, draws attention to his diligence as a pilgrim, or quotes his Saracen interpreter's rebuke when he wants to visit the Dead Sea into which Sodom and Gomorrah had sunk: "You have come as a pilgrim in order to visit places blessed by God; you ought not to approach those that have deserved the curse of the Most High" ("Pro locis, quibus Deus benedixit, peregrinus venisti; non debes ad loca accedere, quae maledictionem Altissimi meruerunt")," This pious, orderly, and sometimes personal narrative was used by the Mandeville-author as a template for roughly the first third of The Book, being overwritten in a fashion whose most striking results are examined in this and the next chapter. Working with a knowledge of William's entire "libellum" in mind (as the displacement of a few minor details reveals), Sir John's creator follows its itinerary step by step from Constantinople through Egypt and into the Holy Land, radically remaking it in two principal ways: by transforming the actual historical traveler into a generic pilgrim (the past-tense verbs of William's journey are all rendered in the present tense and the journey is depersonalized); and by splicing in so much material from other sources that the overwritten text is half as long again as the Liber, and thus qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from it.' The resulting augmented itinerary is anything but "Mandeville's travels...

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