By Nathan Morse
The medieval European conception of the world remained remarkably constant between 1165 and 1365; it accommodated new information, yet maintained its essential characteristics. Around 1250, western Christians met two civilizations that made their society appear militarily and culturally backward: the Mongols and the Chinese. Even though such a barrage of new data could have destroyed or at least modified their view of the world, most Europeans managed to interact with the new cultures without changing their fundamental ideas. Such consistency is probably best explained by the observation that Europeans knew that their religion was correct; therefore, their assessment of the world did not have to change.
How did
Europeans view the world in the twelfth century? John Tolan, in his recent book, Saracens,
drew a broad picture of medieval Europeans’ imagined geography and ethnology.[1] Essentially, European Christians inherited
from
River
x
x
x
x
x
The ‘O’ section of the T-O map refers to the circle drawn around the three land masses and bodies of water – proof enough that few, if any, medieval Europeans thought the earth was flat.[2] Richard Southern observed, the embellishment of this rough sketch by “Classical writers, of whom Pliny was chief, [who] handed down to the Middle Ages picturesque and distorted versions of the knowledge which had been gathered about these lands by the ancients.”[3] With these few tools, and their imaginations, Western Europeans filled in the considerable blanks.
This ‘us versus them’
mentality was exacerbated when the rise of Islam resulted in the spread of Arab
military power, which separated medieval Europeans from the neighboring
continents. As Tolan observed, Europeans recognized only four categories of
people, each group drawn from the Bible: Christians, pagans, Jews, and heretics.[4] Different authors placed Muslims into each of
the last three groups. Dante, for
example, described Muhammed as a heretic, while the unknown peoples of
Incidentally, these medieval Europeans, when they referred to themselves collectively, did not call themselves Europeans, but either Latinus, followers of the Latin rite, or a name first applied by the Greeks and Muslims to the early crusaders: franci, or Frank.[7] Each of the
Crusaders tended to maintain their ties to their homeland, as shown in the tendency to take their hometown as a surname, as, for example, Stephen the Fleming did. As one European chronicler observed, “the barbarians [i.e., Muslims] are accustomed to calling all westerners Franks.”[8] This was not used as a compliment by the non-Europeans, the name as they used it meant marauding barbarians, but the crusaders seized upon it as a symbol of their united faith and as a convenient way to refer to the various ethnic groups collectively. Both Latinus and Franci emphasized that the unity of their faith created their group identity; the Franci proclaimed their fighting prowess as a major aspect of that shared identity. Back home, the first name was much more common, as Frank originally had referred only to one of several Germanic tribes.
Another major aspect of the twelfth-century European view of the world was their assumption of the absolute superiority of Christianity to any other religion. Europeans inherited from Augustine and Isidore the belief that God chose the winners. Thus, when the unbeaten Muslims armies confronted the Europeans in the seventh and eighth centuries, Europeans had to wrestle with the appearance that God had chosen to back the non-Christians. After the Muslims had overrun Syria and North Africa, many Christians there apostatized because they saw God’s support for Muhammed, not Jesus. After the first Crusade, western Christians could view the rest of the world as morally and physically inferior. As Joseph Strayer observed, the church’s emphasis on teaching God’s love and power in the eleventh century had bred a generation of Europeans, clergy and laity, who believed that God would support their work.[9] That optimism contributed to the Crusade, to a belief in a united Christendom of western Europeans, to the popes and emperors competing to lead that Christendom, and to a feeling of superiority over whatever might be out there. Europeans knew that life could be hard, but they expected to win, and they believed that God would eventually spread their culture over the entire world.
The third major aspect of European perceptions of the world, as Tolan described it, was history. Medieval Europeans saw world history in terms of five major events: creation, the fall, redemption at the cross, the coming of the AntiChrist, and the end of the world, when God would come to rescue His faithful followers. These Christian authors knew that they were living in the era between the third and fourth events, and that the last two events had been prophesied, rendering them inevitable. The greatest impact this assumption had on their worldview was their belief that God was in charge of everything, and that He would win. The effects of this optimistic view motivated everything that adherents of this mindset set out to do.
This worldview proved all encompassing. The Hereford Mappamundi is excellent visual proof of this.[10] The artist envisaged God as ruler of both worlds (heaven and earth), with European Christians forming only a quarter of the human world – he used the familiar T-O format to show this division. This emphasized the need for Europeans to spread Christianity to the other two continents, and claimed to show how this evangelism would be physically possible. This religious view of the world, based on fixed interpretations of fixed texts, was not conducive to change.
Further
manifestations of this worldview can be observed in several texts that circulated
widely in 1165, after the second crusade.
The first, Fulcher of Chartres’s Chronicle of the First Crusade, exemplifies
the way in which Europeans dealt with new information.[11] Next is the Letter of Alexander, which
had been forged circa 200 AD, and demonstrated much of what western Europeans
of the twelfth century thought they knew of
Fulcher’s
chronicle demonstrates the unwillingness of twelfth-century Europeans to modify
their misconceptions. He had traveled to
the
What did
that view look like? We know from Mappamundi
that they knew the earth was round. We
know that they had Biblical place names, and a hazy idea of where those place
names lay in relation to
Europeans
filled in these gaps by imagining what
The author
began by claiming that his experience trumped all doubt felt by his reader: “I
would not have believed anyone who [reported such things] … if I had not first
[seen] … them lying right before my eyes.”[18] As Alexander in fact had invaded
In 1165, a
letter from an Asian monarch who called himself Prester John was circulated
throughout
The Prester
John letter is derived in large part from the forged Alexander letters. All the geographic terms used by the forger
were familiar to Europeans. Prester John
described his realm by claiming that he held the “Three Indias” which “extends
to the Farther India, where the body of St. Thomas the Apostle rests,” from
there “through the desert towards the place of the rising of the sun,” and back
towards Europe “through the valley of deserted Babylon close by the Tower of
Babel.”[22] By using the term “Three Indias,” the writer
was drawing on a European misconception (derived from the false Alexander) that
The random
wonders of
By 1170,
Europeans who thought about the world beyond the Muslim world expected to find
a Christian commonwealth dominating
Over the
next one hundred twenty years, the monarchs of
The first
two envoys from the western Europeans were John of Plano Carpini, sent out by
Pope Innocent IV in 1245, and William of Rubruck, sent out by King Louis IX of
Yes,
despite all of the travelers' reports, imagination remained an important part
of
The Prester
John letter evolved, as the modern philologist Friedrich Zarncke identified
five elements that were added in the centuries after 1165.[32] Most of the original information was still
found in the letter – Prester John’s realm was still divided up into five vague
sections, each known as
The
Europeans found themselves quite capable of overlooking facts to maintain
certain ideas about Prester John. The
most important of these ‘overlooked facts’ is that Prester John was supposed to
have written this letter around 1365, even though countless European travelers,
William of Rubruck and Marco Polo among them, had scoured Asia looking for him,
and had reported that he was either dead, in some other place, or had been
blown out of proportion. Thus, John of
Plano Carpini announced that Prester John had been king of Greater India, but
was dead by 1248.[34] William of Rubruck looked for the king who
the Nestorians assured him was Prester John, but all he found was pasture, so
he said that these Asian Christians "used to tell of him ten times more
than was the truth" and that "out of nothing they make a great
rumor."[35] Marco Polo decided that this Prester John was
actually the Khan George of Ung (a.k.a. Gog), a Christian and the descendant of
Genghis Khan's original overlord.[36] With all these conflicting reports from
eyewitnesses, it is not surprising that Europeans preferred to believe the
fantastic tales that were supposedly from Prester John himself.
By 1300,
Marco Polo had discovered many wondrous things in
join him in profiting from
Around
forty years after Marco Polo’s death in 1324, "Sir John Mandeville"
wrote an imaginary description of the world.
He may have done some traveling, but we know that he copied most of his
book, from some real and some counterfeit accounts of
This is
true of his ideas about religion.
Europeans knew that they were not living up to biblical ideals, and
while few of them were willing to change how they acted, they tended to buy
into the idea that their military defeats were the result of their collective
misbehavior. Thus, Mandeville, echoing
Fulcher, could say “those [holy] lands were lost through the sins of Christian
men” and expect to be believed, and also claim that, when God had judged those
sins to be repented of, the lands “shall be won again by Christians, with the
help of God.”[38] Mandeville, whether or not he traveled
anywhere, is significant because he preached this mindset fully to a European
audience that avidly read his book. Again, Mandeville followed cultural
expectations, but then spread those expectations throughout
From the
evolution of the Prester John letter, the fact that Marco Polo’s illustrators
ignored him, and especially the imaginary world of Mandeville, we can see that
The
European worldview remained consistent between 1165 and 1365. None of the basic ideas were discarded – the
only error that could be said to have been exploded was the idea that the
[1] Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the
Medieval European Imagination, (NY:
[2] The sketch here is partially based on the map found in Richard Southern’s The Making of the Middle Ages
(New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1953), 69. More information on T-O maps can be found in Naomi Reed Kline,
Maps of Medieval Thought: The Hereford Paradigm (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001).
[3] Southern, Making, 69.
[4] Tolan, Saracens, chapter one, pp. 1-20. esp. 12.
[5] Dante, Inferno, Canto XXVIII.
[6] Muslims were not Jewish, were not heretics, and did not worship Apollo, yet were depicted all three ways by various European artists.
[7] Robert Bartlett, The Making of
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993), 101-5.
[8] Ekkehard of Aura, Hiersolymita 16.2, Recueil des historiens des croisades, Historiens occidentaux, 5 vols.
(Paris, 1844-95), vol. 5, 25, quoted in Bartlett, Europe, 103.
[9] Strayer,
[10] Kline, Hereford Paradigm, especially the accompanying compact disk. This map was created in the late
thirteenth century, but its sources and viewpoint originated in the twelfth.
[11] The Chronicle of Fulcher of
(Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 1998), 47-101.
[12] Compiled from hundreds of versions, long and short, translated and edited by Lloyd Gunderson, in
Alexander's Letter to Aristotle about India (Meisenheim am Glam: Hain, 1980), 140-156.
[13] Compiled by Friedrich Zarncke, from "nearly one hundred surviving [Latin] manuscripts”, quoted from
Robert Silverberg, The Realm of Prester John, reprint (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1996) 41-45.
[14] Chronicle of Fulcher, 48.
[15] Chronicle of Fulcher, 73.
[16] Chronicle of Fulcher, 48, 73.
[17] Chronicle of Fulcher, 91, 73.
[18] Alexander’s Letter, 140.
[19] Alexander’s Letter, 144-5, 149, 155.
[20] Alexander’s Letter, 142, 141.
[21] Prester John’s Letter, 41-5.
[22] Prester John’s Letter, 42.
[23] Prester John’s Letter, 45.
[24] Alexander’s Letter, 142.
[25] J.R.S. Phillips, The Medieval
Expansion of
[26] John of Plano Carpini, History of the Mongols, in Mission to Asia, ed. Christopher Dawson, reprint
(Toronto: Toronto UP, 1980)
3-72, esp. 43-50. William of Rubruck, The
Journey, in
[27] Phillips, Expansion, 70-73.
[28] Guyuk Khan, Letter to Pope Innocent IV, in Dawson, Mission, 85-86.
[29] The later version of Prester John's
letter was compiled by Vsevolod Slessarev, Prester John: The Letter and
the Legend (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1959) 67-79.
[30] Marco Polo, The Travels, ed. and trans. Robert Latham (London: Penguin, 1958).
[31] Mandeville, The Travels, ed. and trans. C.W.R.D. Moseley (London: Penguin, 1983).
[32] Slessarev, Letter, 67-79.
[33] Slessarev, Letter, 69.
[34] Plano Carpini, History, 22-3.
[35] William, Journey, 122-3, and
141
[36] Polo, Travels, 93-6, 105-6, 165-7, and 315-7.
[37] This illustration is found in John Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World
(New Haven: Yale UP, 1999), on 130, plate #4.
[38] Mandeville, Travels, 79.
[39] Phillips, Expansion, 73.