WONDERS OF THE EAST, BY FRIAR JORDANIIS, CIRCA 1330.*
FRIAR JORDANIIS, a French monk of the Dominican Order, went out to India about the year 1321, and again in 1330 he returned thither as Bishop of Columburn. His episcopal career is un- known, and the very locality of his see is doubtful. Let us assume, with Colonel Yule, that it was on the south-western coast of the peninsula, and probably the same as Quilon in Travancore. The assumption can excite no rival jealousies, for there is no church or congregation that claims Jordanus as its founder. Many of his brethren, as simplepand earnest as himself, have been equally unsuccessful, and even more obscure; but it is mournfully ludicrous to reflect that the only tangible records of his mission are a few disjointed notes on the marvels of the East. They abound with those quaint outbursts of wonder and displays of credulity that never fail to amuse us at the expense of the mediteval traveller. Yet, before treating the bishop as a mere old gossip, it will be only fair to exhibit him, once for all, in a higher mood. At the end of. his chapter on Asiatic topography he indulges (p. 55) in the dream of christianizing India, with the aid of two or three hundred brethren, at the rate of 10,000 converts a year. But, as matters then stood, nearly the whole field lay open to the Mohammedans, or (as be calls them) " the perfidious and accursed Saracens." "For their preachers [he proceeds] run about, just as we do, here, there, and everywhere, over the whole Orient, in order to tuntall to their own miscreance. These be they who accuse us, who smite us, who cause us to be cast into durance, and who stone us ; as I, indeed, have experienced, having been four times cast into prison by them, I mean the Saracens. But how many times I have had my hair plucked out, and been scourged, and been stoned, God himself knoweth, and I, who had to bear all this for my sins, and yet have not attained to end my life as a martyr for the faith, as did four of my brethren. For what remaineth God's will be done ! Nay, five preaching friars and four minors were there in my time cruelly slain for theoCatholic faith. Wo is me that I was not with them there!" His expressions of rimpt were sincere, no doubt ; and they would have been mu clr rtronger, if he had foreseen that he would win nothing better than a very humble place, not among the Saints, but among antiquarian curiosities.
Jordanus was not by any means disposed to lie, like his con- temporary, our own mediteval Munchausen, Sir John Mandeville; whatever he professes to have known by personal experience he describes pretty correctly, such as the elephant, the cocoa-nut palm, and the tenets and modes of burial of the Parsees; but his writings perhaps mainly owe their preservation to the more piquant hearsay anecdotes of the roc that could fly away with an elephant, of the alchemical waters and the healing tree, and, above all, of the dog-faced islanders with their beautiful wives. In all ages and countries men have been eager to hear about fellow men with tails. When Cceur de Lion wintered in Sicily Messina was sacked by his followers because (they said) they were called the "tailed English." The Englishmen probably returned the compliment to the Messinese ; but after a few generations of intercourse the Europeans found that they must look further off for their favourite monstrosities, and their wonder- books (" Mirabilia Mundi," &c.) fixed the tailed races in Africa (where they still exist) and in Central Asia. There was a rage for these books in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The ugly Mongolian conquerors of Russia were at first described as absolute demi-devils; and although the monkish embassies from Rome
• Ifirabilia Descripta. The Wonders of the East. By Friar Jordanus, of the Order of Preachers and Bishop of Eolumbnm in India the Greater (circa 1330). Translated from the Latin original, as pub shed at Paris in 1839, in the " Recited de Voyages et de Mdmoires " of the Society of Geography, with the addition of a Com- mentary, by Colonel Henry Yule, 0.5., F.R.G.S.,late of the Royal Engineere(Bengal). London: Printed for the llaklnyt Society. 1883.
and France to the Grand Khan returned home without a single human horn or hoof to show, yet still the vulgar maintained that Tartary was only one floor higher than Tartarus. Even Marco Polo, while discrediting the reports about pigmies, admitted that (somewhere in Sumatra) there might be "hairy men with tails." The most popular passages in the works of Eastern travellers were those that told of "Antliropophagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders," and these, together with descriptions of strange plants and animals, were patched up into
various compilations under the titles of " Mirabilia &c. The little volume before us may be nothing but a somewhat similar compilation of "elegant extracts' from a lost work by Brother Jordanus. Such is the opinion of M. Coquebert-Mont- bret, who edited the original Latin text} in the "Becueil de Voyages" published at Paris in 1839, by the Societe de Geog,raphie. In support of this (says Colonel Yule, p. 17) he adduces the abrupt commencement, and the " but " with which he plunges in—" Inter Sieiliam caters et Calabriani." "But." continues our English editor, "he gives a fac-simile of the beginning of the MS., and the words seem to me (all inexpert I confess) almost certainly to be 'Inter Siciliam atque Calabriam,' so that this argument is null." Colonel Yule is so emphatically wrong that he makes us almost angry; any friend less " iuexpert " than himself would have pointed out to him the abbreviations, and assured him that the words are most undoubtedly " autem et." In other respects the Hakluyt Society appears to have selected a well-qualified editor ; though his translations are almost needlessly archaic; and, after all, we are rather surprised at their thinking it advisable to reprint such a trifle, which (as the English editor himself allows), "does not add anything to our knowledge," and of which the chief merit consists in the oddities of its Latin.
The " wonders " begin with the eddies in the straits between Sicily and Calabria and the whirlpool of Charybdis. Greece hardly detains the wonder-seeker for an instant. But in Armenia there is "a great marvel," even Mount Ararat, for Noah's Ark has made it a holy place, and nobody can climb it higher than the edge of the snow. "And (marvellous indeed !) even the beasts chased by the huntsmen, when they come to the snow, will liefer turn, will liefer yield them into the huntsmen's hands, than go farther up that mountain." What strikes the French traveller as-most noteworthy about the Persians is their habit of eating in company out of one dish,—" and that (he exclaims) with their hands and fingers ; big and little, male and female, all eat after this fashion. And after they have eaten, or even whilst in the 'middle of their eating, they lick their fingers with tongue and lips, and wipe them on their sleeves, and afterwards, if any grease still remains upon their hands, they wipe them on their
shoes. And thus do the folk over all those countries except the Hindus, who eat decently enough, though they too eat with their hands." This passage suggests, as Colonel Yule
• observes, "that forks were corlimon in Europe earlier than is generlillbrepresented to be the case ;" they were known, indeed, to have been used in Italy about 1330, but not so in France ; and as for England, Coryatt (in his "Crudities ") claims the merit of having introduced them here about 1008! But we must follow our leader, for be is hastening into the far East. After the fashion of his time, he divides India into three parts —Lesser India, or Scinde, and the coast down towards Malabar ; Greater India, embracing the rest of the peninsula; and "India Tertia;" and between the last division and Ethiopia (!) he places the ter- restrial Paradise. We have seen an old map that makes the coast line of Africa below the Red Sea run due east, and thus African Ethiopia is brought directly under India ; and this cer- tainly tells in favour of Colonel Yule's theory, that the "India Tertia" of Jordanus was on the coast of Africa. But it should not be forgotten that the ancients called the black races of India "the eastern Ethiopians ;" and Jordanus speaks elsewhere of Ethiopia and Cathay (or China proper) in the same breath ; and hence we conceive that Ms Ethiopia need not necessarily be any other than a very hazy vision of realms within the Asiatic horizon4 g• India Tertia" he never visited, and for him, there- fore, it was naturally a land of dragons, that 'fly about with great carbuncle-stones on their heads, "and these, by the judg- ment of God, being too heavy, they drop into a certain river which issues from Paradise, and perish there. But all the regions round about watch for the time of the dragons, and when they see that one has fallen they wait for L1%. days, and then go
From a MS. of the fourteenth century, which is now in the British Museum.
t Colonel Yule refers to 14 d'Avezac's remarks on Prester John and the eastern Ethiopia to the " Recueil de Voyages," iv., p. 546, as if they supported his own views; but, on turning to them, we find that they do just the contrary, and that, in fact, they bare (at mush greater length) anticipated our own. down and find the bare bones of the dragon, and take the car- buncle which is rooted in the top of his head and carry it to the Emperor of the .Ethiopians, whom you call Prestre Johan." But we like our author better when he is on safer ground, exulting in the mango, " a fruit so sweet and delicious as it is impossible to utter in words," or in the pillared shade of the banyan tree. Even the wild beast quod vocatur rinoverunta and the grinning coquod rile himself cannot be described without a thrill of horrible delight. The birds stir him into downright eloquence, "for there be some white all over as snow; some red as scarlet of the grain ; some green as grass ; some parti-coloured ; in such quantity and delectability as cannot be uttered. Parrots also, or popinjays, after their kind, of every possible colour except black, and also of mixed colours. The birds of this [the Greater] India seem really like creatures of Paradise." The poor preacher forgets his pains and disappointments when he looks out at night upon "a star of great size and ruddy splendour which is called Canopus," and he fancies that his eyes can follow the track of the planetary in- fluences—ibi videntur infiuentise oculo ad oculum, ita qua de nocte respicere set gaudiosunt. In short, his senses are acute, and in his leisure hours he is quite an innocent voluptuary. Yet his patriotic spirit rises at the end of his final suinmsry, and thus it breaks forth :—" One general remark I will make in conclusion ; to wit, that there is no better land or fairer, no people so honest, no victuals so good and savoury, dress so handsome, or manners so noble, as here in our own Christendom ; and, above all, we have the true faith, though ill it be kept. . I believe, moreover, that the King of France might subdue the whole world to his own dominion and to the Christian faith without the aid of any other." Our worthy gossip bad both his eyes fixed towards the East, and be forgot the weaker side of France; this one little Gallic crow of his was uttered (assuming the date to be 1330) in the very birth- year of the Black Prince.
More than half the value (as well as the bulk) of the present edition is due to the notes of Colonel Yule, who has illustrated the text from authors old and new. In Tartary and Thibet, for instance, Marco Polo is brought to corroborate the statements about the paper money of the "Great Tartar ;" and Hue and Gabet (among others) to enumerate the quasi-Catholic cere- monials of the red-caped and red-hatted cardinals of the Grand Lama. In India, again, the possibility of a man's performing self-sacrifice by cutting off his own head with a knife is main- tained by the testimony (about 1350) of an eye-witness of a similar feat, viz., Ibn Batuta, the Moorish traveller. Again, when Jordanus asserts that there "the Devil speaketh to men, many a time and oft, in the night season," his editor cites Sir Emerson Tennent's account of the devil-bird of Ceylon, which ends with comparing it to "a boy in torture whose screams are stopped by being strangled." And so on ad infinitum. We will wind up with a moral comment of our own upon the last line of these Mirabilia. It relates to the Turks. We hold them to be still, what they always have been, a good fighting people, and nothing more. We have never put much faith in their promises of progress ; and yet we have never thought that they deserved to be held up (as they were by Sir Benjamin Brodie, in a letter to the Times some years ago) as a frightful example of prema- ture decay occasioned by tobacco. Now let us see how Jordanus found them in their pure unsmoking youth. He says, "The country [of Asia Minor] is very fertile, but uncultivated ; for the Turks trouble not themselves" (quia Turd non =Ilium curant). It would seem, then, as if the Turks had always understood peace to mean inactivity ; and they must have had worse ways of killing time before they took to the pipe of consolation. And now we commend a whiff or two to our readers.
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