The Riddle and the Knight

by Giles Milton

  His reason for adding such a passage was easier to explain: the anti-papal criticisms in The Travels are rarely far from the surface, and it would provide a convenient explanation to anyone questioning why a monastic librar' owned such a subversive book.

  The story reminded me that I couldn't believe everything I read by Sir John—or about him . . .

  I uncovered a few other scraps of evidence about Mandeville, but the more I delved into them, the deeper the mysterv' became. It soon became apparent that someone, for some unknown but possibly sinister reason, had at one time had a vested interest in concealing Sir John's true identity. For while I myself had seen Sir John's epitaph in St. .Albans Abbey, I was surprised to discover that he had also had an epitaph in a church in Liege, Belgium, and that Liege claimed him as a citizen of their town. Unfortunately, this Belgian church was demolished at the time of the French Revolution, but not before the epitaph had been seen by many English travellers who reported what it said. Its words are of great importance, for virtually everyone has believed the following version of events over the last five centuries:

  Here lies Master John de Montevilla knight alias ad Barbam, Master of Compredi, born in England, professor of medicine

  The Riddle and the Knight

  and most devout in prayer and most liberal giver of his goods to the poor, who travelled over the whole world. He ended the last day of his life in a house in Liege, in the year of our Lord 1372, the seventeenth day of the month of November.

  This inscription clearly indicates that Sir John Mandeville died and was buried in Liege, not St. Albans, and it was supported by other evidence. English travellers who visited the tomb were also shown Man-deville's saddle, spurs, and bridle-bit, as well as the two knives he supposedly used on his travels. But the story has a twist in the tale. In the words of a local Liege chronicler and contemporary of Sir John:

  In 1372 died at Liege on the twelfth of November a man who was greatly distinguished for his birth. He was content to be known by the name of John of Burgundy, called With the Beard. He, however, opened his heart on his death-bed to Jean d'Outremeuse, his gossip, whom he appointed his executor. In truth, he entitled himself, in the deed of his last wall. Sir John Mandeville, knight, Earl of Montfort in England and lord of the isle of Campdi and of the castle Perouse. When dead at last, he was buried with the brethren Wilhelmites, in the suburb of Avroy.

  This chronicle brings a dramatic new element to the story. For while it agrees that Sir John died at Liege, it records that he had been living in secret and under the assumed name of John of Burgundy. Not only that—it gives him a string of new and distinguished titles which raises him from small-time provincial knight to the rank of a highly influential nobleman.

  This extraordinary story has been the basis for virtually every portrait of Sir John Mandeville from the sixteenth century to the present day. But there is one major problem with it. The only man who was party to the deathbed confession was, as this passage reveals, Jean d'Outremeuse. And the man who wrote the story? None other than Jean d'Outremeuse. This means that Outremeuse was the sole witness to the confession and therefore the only person who could make it public. If he was lying, the whole Liege story would come crashing down.

  I sat back and considered the evidence. I was now dealing with not

  A Second Sir John

  just one Sir John but two, whose Hves were similar but whose deaths were very different. The first Sir John had been born into a provincial St. Albans family, had travelled, and had been buried in his home town. The second Mandeville was a distinguished nobleman from the powerful Montfort clan who had lived under the assumed name John of Burgundy, had concealed his identity up to his dying breath, and had been interred in Liege.

  Further clues only confused matters more. The Liege Mandeville was apparently the author of a host of other books, including a manual about gemstones and a treatise on the magical properties of herbs. The more I sieved through the evidence, the more I suspected the hand of Jean d'Outremeuse in all this. He seemed to have a secret motive in pretending to have known Sir John Mandeville. What I couldn't figure out was why.

  Jean d'Outremeuse was a romancer who wrote fanciful tales using imaginary sources. His greatest work was Ly Myreur des Histors, an encyclopedic world history which mixed legend with fable. On the rare occasions he had reliable sources, he used them. When he didn't, he made them up.

  Outremeuse's story certainly sounds likely, for there was indeed a distinguished doctor called John of Burgundy who had settled in Liege late on in his life. He was an eminent scholar and an authority on the plague, and his 1365 treatise De Pestilentia was translated into several languages and circulated throughout the Mediterranean lands. But there is no evidence that this doctor ever travelled, nor do any of his writings show any knowledge of the dozens of books that the author of The Travels had read. To use the jargon of modern detectives, he simply does not match the psychological profile of the author of The Travels. But he was a particularly convenient person for Outremeuse to claim to have been Mandeville, for by the time people might want to question the doctor, it was too late: he was already dead.

  In making his Sir John the "Earl of Montfort in England," Outremeuse betrays his weakness in genealogy. Of all the dozens of English Mandevilles, not a single one ever held that title. The arms displayed on the Liege tomb, too, are suspect: according to early travellers, they depicted a silver lion with a crescent on its breast. No English Mandeville ever bore these arms.

  The Riddle and the Knight

  But none of this would have bothered Jean d'Outremeuse, for his object and obsession was to glorify the Montfort family. His Ly Myreur des Histors never stops talking about how wonderful they are. If his was the only book left about medieval history you could be forgiven for thinking the Montfort family the most illustrious in Europe.

  When Outremeuse wasn't inventing stories about the Montforts, he invented stories about himself. He frequently takes famous people and links them by invented genealogy to himself or, at the very least, to his home town of Liege. He had already done it many times before in his Geste de Liege, in which a succession of historical and mythical characters find themselves visiting the town. And since there is not a shred of evidence, apart from Outremeuse, to suggest Sir John died in Liege, but plenty—as I was later to discover—to show he returned to St. ^lbans, it seems certain that on this occasion Outremeuse went one step further. He connected the writer of The Travels (a man he was obsessed with) to the Montforts (a family he was devoted to) and placed all of them in Liege (his home town). It was a pack of lies, but it is testimony to his imaginative ability that he has been believed for more than 550 years.

  So much time has passed since his great voyage that it will probably never be possible to do more than guess about Sir John's life. Records have perished or been destroyed. The great monastery of St. Albans was sacked during the Reformation and its priceless treasures lost or carted off and never seen again.

  Despite this lack of evidence—or because of it—both the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Dictionary of National Biography have remained sceptical about Mandeville. The Britannica records that his Ufe is as mysterious as his travels, while the Dictionary of National Biography takes a less generous line: "Mandeville, Sir John, was the ostensible author of the book of travels bearing his name ... there are strong grounds for the belief that his name is as fictitious as his travels [for] no trace of him can be found in England [and] the legend of his burial at St. Albans was of late growth."

  While records of the Mandeville family are scant, none of us dies without leaving behind cuttings and papers, bills and letters. A few manuscripts have survived the centuries, and from these fading scraps and snippets, I hoped to build up a picture of this spirited knight who

  A Second Sir John

  forsook his home, his family, and his friends for more than three decades.

  According to the Rolls of Medieval England, there were a great many Man
devilles Hving in the St. Albans region in the fourteenth century, all of whom were ultimately descended from Geoffrey de Mandeville, a liegeman of William the Conqueror. Geoffrey must have been a loyal kinsman; William granted him vast estates amounting to 118 lordships scattered right across England, many of them in the wealthy St. Albans area.

  Yet by 1227, the Mandevilles had reached a point of crisis: the eldest line of the family had died out and the title passed by way of marriage to Humphrey de Bohun, the Earl of Hereford and Essex. From this point onwards all remaining Mandevilles looked towards the de Bohuns as the holders of the Honour of Mandeville, and—disastrously as it turned out—their fortunes were inextricably linked to those of the de Bohuns.

  My problem was in finding the Sir John who wrote The Travels, for I had soon unearthed dozens of records of a John Mandeville, Maun-deville, or Mandevil. By the early 1300s, there were John Mandevilles living in Dorset, Ulster, Devon, and Lincolnshire, and most could be dismissed immediately. The one in Dorset sounded promising, for he had gone on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and ended his days as a monk with the Hospitallers of St. John, but further investigation showed he had left England several decades before The Travels was written. The Sir John from North Antrim also sounded like a candidate; he had murdered his overlord, the Earl of Ulster, and then hastily fled overseas. But once again, the dates didn't match, and besides, there was no other evidence to link the Mandeville of The Travels with Ireland. It was a similar story with all the remaining Sir John Mandevilles. One by one I was able to strike them off my list.

  One scion of the Mandeville clan lived at the village of Black Not-ley in Essex—a headstrong family with a reputation for taking the law into their own hands. The head of this family was a certain Sir Thomas Mandeville, who had inherited Black Notley, along with other lands, in 1303. His eldest son was named Walter, and Sir Thomas transferred property into Walter's name some four years later. But there is a sec-

  The Riddle and the Knight

  ond name that keeps cropping up in these land records—a John Man-deville, who would appear to be Sir Thomas's younger son. If so, there is a strong possibility that he is the author of The Travels. As a younger son, he would be free from many of the obligations incumbent on his elder brother and therefore more able to travel. He would also have been the right age to have written the book; he appears to have left England for a long period of time; and he could quite feasibly have been educated at the abbey of St. Albans.

  By the 1320s, this John Mandeville was managing substantial amounts of property and land in the area around Black Notley—lands owned by Sir Thomas. Records show he held land in Borham, as well as in the neighbouring villages of Little and Great Waltham. Yet in 1321—^just months before the author of The Travels claimed to have left England—he sold everything he owned and disappears from all records for the next thirty-seven years. According to one of the few surviving land registries from that year, a "John de Mandeville and Agnes his wife" sold ten acres of land to Richard and Emma Filliol. Furthermore, "John atte Tye of Terlying and Alice his wife had a settlement with John Mandeville of Borham and Agnes his wife by which the former secured for twenty marks of silver one messuage, sixteen acres of land, and one and a half acres of wood in Borham."

  Men didn't dispose of land in the Middle Ages unless they had an extremely good reason. But it is entirely possible that Sir John did have a good reason. He was going abroad for a very long time, and needed a huge amount of cash to fund his voyage.

  After 1321 the records fall silent and John Mandeville disappears without a trace. The next mention of him is in 1358, when he pops up once again as the witness to a large amount of property.

  Slowly it was all beginning to fall into place: the inscription, the documents, the family, the sale of land. But even if this was the man I was after, one nagging question remained. Travel on the scale of Man-deville's voyage—while not unheard of—was far from common in the Middle Ages. What on earth would drive a well-educated and prosperous landowner to sell everything he owned in order to risk his life in unknown countries? Maybe he was simply hungry for fame, although there was every possibility he fled England because he had to.

  His own account of why he went abroad is straightforward: people,

  A Second Sir John

  he says, always enjoy reading yarns from foreign lands. But the terrible events of 1322 present a far more compelling reason to explain his departure.

  Humphrey de Bohun—the Mandevilles' overlord—had turned against the king. Furious with Edward II's favouritism and incompetence, he, along with a handful of other headstrong barons, challenged the king to do battle, and within months the two armies were marching northwards towards Boroughbridge. But scarcely had the fighting begun before the rebels were overtaken by catastrophe. Humphrey de Bohun was killed in a surprise ambush, the rebel army lost its nerve, and the troops surrendered to the king.

  It was a fait accompli, and King Edward was in no mood for clemency. Hundreds of rebel soldiers were massacred as they fled from the battlefield, while those lucky enough to escape with their lives were thrown into prison. Things had never looked so bleak for the Mande-ville family, for—as liegemen of the de Bohuns—they shared in the treason of their overlord. Worse still. King Edward was determined to have his bloody revenge. All leading members of the de Bohun family were jailed and their tenants heavily fined. Those who had money fled overseas, for rumours abounded of royalist soldiers lusting after the rebels' blood. If ever there was a time for a Mandeville to flee St. Albans, it was in 1322.

  ^yrta

  It is very certain that many things in his book which were looked upon as fabulous for a long time, have been since verified beyond all doubt. We give up his men of fifty feet high, but his hens that bore wool are at this day very well known, under the name of Japan and silky fowls, &c. Upon the whole, there does not appear to be any very good reason why Sir John Mandevile should not be believed in any thing that he relates on his own observation.

  The General Biographical Dictionary, Alexander Chalmers, 1815

  Shere v^as confusion v^hen I landed at Damascus Airport. As I w^alked into the arrivals hall, I was greeted by the sight of two men each holding a placard bearing the w^ords ''Mr. Milton." I w^alked up to one and he smiled as he shook my hand. "Mr. Milton?" he said. "I'm from the Meridien. Welcome to Damascus." I sav^ the other man approaching, but before I could say anything, he said, w^ith a note of surprise: "Mr. Milton, I'm from the Sheraton. Welcome to Damascus." The tv^o men looked at each other and then looked at me. I v^as surprised to have been met by anyone at all, for I'd been expecting to take a bus to my hotel. Both men pointed tow^ards their black Mercedes outside. They both told me they had driven all the v^ay from the centre of town. And then the one from the Sheraton, who was beginning to grow suspicious of an unshaven backpacker being accorded the privilege of not just one Mercedes but two, asked what I was doing here.

  "I work in tourism," I said casually. I had to be careful what I told him, for I had lied in order to get a visa—a dangerous thing to admit in Syria.

  Syria

  He looked at me suspiciously. "Tourism, eh?" he said with a mischievous glint in his eyes. "And what exactly do you do in this tourism business?"

  "Well . . . ," I said, "I sort of write up reports on places." At this he nonchalantly tossed back his head and made an expression that told me he knew exactly why I was here.

  "Aha . . . /' he said slowly. "I think what you're trying to tell me is that you're a journalist, Mr. Milton. That's what you are. A journalist." And with that he took me by the hand and led me away from the crowd of people standing nearby. "And do you have a journalist's visa?" he whispered. "Or did you, er, how shall we put this . . . did you perhaps pretend that you were something other than a journalist?"

  I confessed to the latter, and he let out a long, low whistle through his teeth. "Veeeery dangerous," he said. "Very, very dangerous. But, Mr. Milton," he said, "I assure you my lips are sealed
. It can be our little secret. You know, just between the two of us."

  I smiled nervously and he smiled back. He said he would allow me to stay at the Meridien and forgive my travel agent for booking two hotels. But he warned me to be careful. "Don't tell anyone else," he said. "Keep it a secret."

  I thanked him and left with the other driver. It was an inauspicious start to my stay in Syria.

  Perhaps I had been foolish to lie about my visa, but I'd been warned by a specialist travel agent in England that it was extremely difficult for writers and journalists to get permission to enter Syria. My visa would have to be processed in Damascus and be personally approved by the Minister of Information. It could take nine months, and there was every chance that my application would be refused. If that happened, I would never be granted a visa and all my Syrian plans would be brought to an untimely end. So when I headed off to the Syrian Embassy in Belgrave Square, I told them I was a student of English Literature and arrived with all the necessary documents and letters.

  I was surprised to discover that Sir lohn had faced similar difficulties. At the time when he was travelling, Syria was a difficult country to visit, especially if you were Christian. The crusaders had lost their last stronghold in the Middle East just two decades earlier, and the great stream of pilgrims who once flocked here from Europe had all but

  The Riddle and the Knight

  dried up. There was great suspicion of any western traveller who suddenly turned up unannounced in a land that still had vivid and bloody memories of crusader rule.