John Mandeville (GBR)

"Jehan de Mandeville", translated as "Sir John Mandeville", is the name claimed by the compiler of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, a book account of his supposed travels, which probably first appeared in Anglo-Norman French, and first circulated between 1357 and 1371.

By aid of translations into many other languages it acquired extraordinary popularity. Despite the extremely unreliable and often fantastical nature of the travels it describes, it was used as a work of reference—Christopher Columbus, for example, was heavily influenced by both this work and Marco Polo's earlier Il Milione (Adams 1988, p. 53).

In his preface the compiler calls himself a knight, and states that he was born and bred in England, of the town of St Albans. Although the book is real, it is widely believed that 'Sir John Mandeville' himself was not. Common theories point to a Frenchman by the name of Jehan a la Barbe (or other possibilities discussed below).

The most recent scholarly work suggests that The Travels of Sir John Mandeville was “the work of Jan de Langhe, a Fleming who wrote in Latin under the name Johannes Longus and in French as Jean le Long.” Jan de Langhe was born in Ypres early in the 1300s and by 1334 had become a Benedictine monk at the abbey of Saint-Bertin in Saint-Omer which was about 20 miles from Calais. After studying law at the University of Paris, de Langhe returned to the abbey and was elected abbot in 1365. He was a prolific writer and avid collector of travelogues, right up to his death in 1383.

He crossed the sea on 1322; had traversed by way of Turkey (Asia Minor), Armenia the Little (Cilicia) and the Great, Tartary, Persia, Syria, Arabia, Egypt upper and lower, Libya, great part of Ethiopia, Chaldea, Amazonia, Indiathe Less, the Greater and the Middle, and many countries about India; had often been to Jerusalem, and had written in Romance as more generally understood than Latin.

In the body of the work, we hear that he had been at Paris and Constantinople; had served the Sultan of Egypt for a long time in his wars against the Bedouin, and had been offered, and declined, a princely marriage and a great estate on condition of renouncing Christianity, and had left Egypt under Sultan Melech Madabron (al-Muzaffar Sayf-ad-Din Hajji I who reigned in 1346-1347); had been at Mount Sinai, and had visited the Holy Land with letters under the great seal of the sultan, which gave him extraordinary facilities; had been in Russia, Livonia, Kraków, Lithuania, "en roialme daresten" (Dristra or Silistra in Bulgaria), and many other parts near Tartary, but not in Tartary itself; had drunk of the Well of Youth at Polombe (Quilon on the Malabar coast), and still seemed to feel the better for it; had taken astronomical observations on the way to Lamory (Sumatra), as well as in Brabant, Germany, Bohemia and still farther north; had been at an isle called Pathen in the Indian Ocean; had been at Cansay (Hangchow-fu) in China, and had served the emperor of China for fifteen months against the king ofMann[disambiguation needed]; had been among rocks of adamant in the Indian Ocean; had been through a haunted valley, which he places near "Milstorak" (i.e. Malasgird in Armenia); had been driven home against his will in 1357 by arthritic gout; and had written his book as a consolation for his "wretched rest". The paragraph which states that he had had his book confirmed at Rome by the Pope is an interpolation of the English version.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mandeville