CHAPTER FIVE
Accounts of the “Other” through Words and Images: The Squire’s Tale and The
Book of John Mandeville
The flower of chivalry, Chaucer’s Squire seems to be depicted in opposition to the type of fool embodied by both the Miller and the Cook. In the Ellesmere miniature (Fig. 5.1), his fashionable upper-class attire emphasises his high social and economic status. He wears a short green gown embroidered with “fresshe floures, whyte and reede” (I, 90). The wide sleeves of the gown are trimmed with expensive ermine. His shoes with long tips, of the type called poulaines or
crackowes, were very popular in the fifteenth century and constituted a means of reinforcing class
distinction as can be evinced from sumptuary laws which regulated their length. Moreover, the belt with bells hanging by chains, of the type worn by Richard II in the last decade of the fourteenth century, as well as his high hat in the style worn by Henry Bolingbroke, connect the Squire’s attire to royal and courtly fashion. His physiognomical traits also contribute to endorsing his hierarchical status especially if compared with those of lower-class characters like the Cook and the Miller. His mouth and nose are of medium size in accordance with the idea expressed in books of physiognomy which praised moderate features. Chaucer describes him as having a stature of “evene lengthe” (I, 83) and “greet strengthe” (I, 84). By contrast, the Cook and the Miller have coarse traits with excessively large eyes, noses and mouths as well as stout, bulky bodies. On the whole, the miniature conveys a sense of freshness, youth and light-heartedness successfully rendering Chaucer’s twenty-year-old “lusty bacheler” with his “lokkes crulle” and “hoote” love-making.
Chaucer’s own portrayal in the General Prologue seems to encourage the interpretation of the Squire’s character in terms of his courtly accomplishments: he is a modest, courteous and attentive son, a passionate lover, an excellent rider and a perfect courtier, who can joust, sing, dance, write poetry and draw. Yet, as Kahrl has pointed out, the reference to the Squire’s participation in armed raids in Flanders, Picardy and Artois is a an example of “much of the highly unchivalrous fighting of the Hundred Years’ War”. Unlike his father the Knight, who was one of the last defensores fidei, the Squire “was certainly cast in the mould of one of the ‘new men’ of the court of Richard II” characterised by their extravagance and their taste for fancy dress (Kahrl 1973: 208). What strikes in both miniatures is the absence of pictorial signs which would have contributed to depicting the Squire and the Knight as martial figures. Though the latter has a dagger in the Ellesmere miniature, this type of weapon was worn not only by knights, but also by members of the lower classes like Chaucer’s Yeoman and Shipman (Herben 1937: 483). The coarse cloth tunic and
coat of mail mentioned by the poet are substituted by an elegant bombarde-sleeved houppelande, fashionable long-tipped boots, chaperon with cornete, and gloves (fol. 10r). The limner chose to represent the Knight in “his domestic rather than his military role” (Stevens 1981: 123). Moreover, what is being emphasised is the Knight’s high social status, not his role of miles Christi just returned from an expedition where he had courageously fought “for oure feith” (I, 62). By contrast, the woodcuts in Caxton’s illustrated edition (1483) and in the subsequent incunabula of the
Canterbury Tales highlight the Knight’s role as miles Christi by depicting him as a fully
plate-armoured warrior gripping firmly his sword (Fig. 5.3) or holding a lance and an emblazoned shield.1 The Squire’s woodcut also reflects a different actualization of Chaucer’s text. With head slightly bent in melancholy musing, the Squire holds a myosotis, commonly known as ‘forget-me-not’, in his hand (Figs 5.2 and 5.4). 2 An emblem of true enduring love, based on a medieval legend about a knight’s death for love, the flower also had political connotations, since Henry Bolingbroke, the future king Henry IV, adopted it as his symbol during his exile in 1398 and kept it after his return to England. The melancholy pose, the idea of death for love as well as that of exile contribute to creating an image of the Squire as a young man affected by the “loveris maladye of hereos”, which is “engendred of humour malencolik” (I, 1375) and is similar to mania, one of the forms of folly mentioned in medical treatises. As Giaccherini has shown, the conventional representation of the melancholy lover with head or cheek resting dejectedly on his hand was widespread in medieval and early modern literature and iconography (2002: 142).3 So, in describing the “man in blak” in the
Book of the Duchess” as a pensive knight leaning against an oak tree, with his head “heng[ing]
adoun” in an attitude of complete estrangement from the world, Chaucer departed from this tradition and he got closer to Dante’s model of dejection outlined in the Vita Nuova (Giaccherini 2002: 143). In the Book of the Duchess, the knight’s deep affliction is evidently rooted in the hereos (heroic love) caused by the prolonged and obsessive musing over the idealized mental image of the beloved. Since hereos was considered to be a malady of the aristocracy, and, as such, its symptoms were encoded into the conventions of courtly love and behaviour, the Squire’s representation as a
1 Caxton (1483), sig. a3v and sig. c5v; Pynson (1492), sig. a2v and sig. c4v; Wynkyn de Worde (1498), sig. c2r.
2 While the type of flower is barely discernable in the black and white woodcut (Fig. 5.2), the forget-me-not is clearly
visible in the illuminated copy of Caxton’s 1483 edition preserved in St. John’s College Library, Oxford (Fig. 5.4).
3
In a twelve-line historiated initial from the first folio of the Canterbury Tales, preserved in what is known as the ‘Devonshire’ manuscript (c. 1450-1460), an elegantly dressed young man is depicted with his head resting thoughtfully on his right hand. He is sitting on a turf bench whose flower-patterned cloth is modelled upon the flowers which cover the surrounding ground. According to Hardman, the miniature contributes to creating a conventional figure of the author as melancholy lover, subject both to the joys (symbolised by the sun) and to the woes (symbolised by the rain) of love, who seems to be depicted in the act of composing “the text written down on the page (as if from dictation) by the scribe” (2003: 46). The pictorial representation bears striking parallels to the narrator’s self-description in the Book of
the Duchess. For a thorough analysis of the notion of melancholy and its historical development, see R. Klibansky, E.
Panofsky and F. Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art, London: Nelson, 1964
lovesick young man in Caxton’s woodcut was consistent with Chaucer’s portrayal of him as “hoote” lover and perfect courtier.
When exiled from the bliss of love, the lover falls into a melancholy despair close to death, just like Arcite in the Knight’s Tale and Troilus. In the Complaynt D’Amours, a poem accepted by Skeat as Chaucerian, but not ascribed to the poet in the manuscripts, lovesickness is described in precisely these terms:
Your plesaunce is to laughen whan I syke, And thus ye me from al my blisse exyle. (10-11) In love -- nay, but in dispayr I dye!
But shal I thus yow my deeth foryive, That causeles doth me this sorwe drye? Ye, certes, I! For she of my folye
Hath nought to done although she do me sterve, Hit is nat with hir wil that I hir serve. (30-35)
Thus, the fashionable courtier of the Ellesmere miniature is rendered in the woodcut as a lovesick fool, a depiction whom Caxton’s gentlemen customers might easily have identified with the Squire’s romance predecessors ‒ Lancelot, Yvain, Tristan ‒ and their pretended or real folly for love. The iconographic choice may be partly explained as an attempt to appropriate the tale and present it in a material form which encouraged customers to read it as a courtly romance even though the tale resisted generic categorization. That courtly romance enjoyed much popularity in fifteenth-century aristocratic circles is testified by Caxton’s choice of beginning his career as printer with the publication of his translation of the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye from the French original by Raoul le Fevre, chaplain to Philip III, duke of Burgundy. Moreover, the fact that the first book printed in English (1473/74) was a romance reveals much about the reading tastes of Caxton’s potential customers as well as of his patrons. In the prologue to the Recuyell, the printer attributes his decision to complete the translation to Margaret of Burgundy’s patronage and encouragement. In the dedicatory engraving from the presentation copy (STC 15375), he is depicted in the act of kneeling deferentially and presenting the Recuyell to the Duchess whose coat of arms and motto appear on a canopy in the background. The woodcut of the Squire may thus be part of Caxton’s marketing strategy meant to conceal some of the internal and formal incongruities of the Squire’s
Tale: its resistance to inclusion in a genre; its incompleteness, whether deliberate on the part of
Chaucer or not; its disenchanted depiction of courtly love, with Canacee acting as a calculating counterpart of the lovelorn lady falcon, and the tercelet reversing the positive function of the emissary’s courtly speech. Despite Caxton’s attempt to model the Squire’s character upon romance heroes like Lancelot, Yvain and Tristan with their chivalric and courtly love ideals, the image of the lover holding a flower triggers a further set of associations connected with Roman de la rose which
undermine the same ideals by exposing the artificiality of their conventions. The image is reminiscent of Amant and his allegorical lover, the rose, whom not only does he kiss passionately in a miniature from a fifteenth-century manuscript of the Roman (Bodleian Library, MS Douce 195, fol. 26r) but he also manages to pluck at the end of his quest.
But what does the Squire’s account of the Great Khan and his court reveal about the teller of the tale? Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale has long been viewed as “the locus classicus of Chaucer’s Orientalism” (Lynch 1995: 530). Various analogues have been suggested for the tale, ranging from Marco Polo’s and Mandeville’s accounts of their travels, the Epistula Presbyteri Johannis, and the
Arabian Nights to the French romances Cléomadès and Méliacin, as well as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.4 The almost unanimously accepted opinion is that “Chaucer derived the material […] from many quarters and worked inventively with a free hand” (Jones 1958: 357).
From the earliest times the Orient was perceived in the West as something more than what was known through the firsthand experience of travellers, something which inspired both awe and fear. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the accounts of missionaries like the Franciscan friars John of Plano Carpini (the Italian Giovanni da Pian del Carpine), William of Rubruck and Odoric of Pordenone, as well as the experiences of merchants like the Polo brothers contributed to consolidating what Said calls an “imaginative geography” which drew boundaries between West and Orient, and established a fixed vocabulary and imagery through which the latter could be represented. In fact, the success of works like The Book of John Mandeville, testified by the great number of surviving manuscripts (about three hundred) and the wide range of European languages in which it was translated soon after its redaction in the fourteenth century, can be partially explained through the fact that in describing the Orient and its wonders, the author did not attempt to challenge the already established views of his contemporaries. In most cases he brought no new information and confirmed what other travellers had written about the customs of the peoples and the monstrous races of the Orient.
For medieval Western people, the Orient was subdivided into realms previously known through conquests such as that of Alexander, crusades and travel accounts. As Said pointed out, “there was a Near Orient and a Far Orient, a familiar Orient (Levant) and a novel Orient”, and “they alternated in the mind’s geography between being an Old World to which one returned […] to set up a new version of the old, and being a wholly new place to which one came as Columbus […] to set up a New World” (1994: 58). In their accounts, John of Plano Carpini, William of Rubruck,
4 See H. S. V. Jones, “The Squire’s Tale”, in Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ed. by W. F.
Bryan and others, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1958, pp. 357-76; H. Braddy, “The Oriental Origin of Chaucer’s Canacee-Falcon Episode”, Modern Language Review, 31 (1936): 11-19; C. O. Chapman, “Chaucer and the Gawain-Poet: A Conjecture”, Modern Language Notes, 68 (1953): 521-24.
Odoric, Marco Polo and Mandeville (who probably never travelled at all or at least not farther than the Holy Land), tend to explain the unfamiliar through the familiar. Sometimes, their discourses take the form of polemical confrontation as in William of Rubruck’s Itinerarius. When the Franciscan friar arrives in the land of the Tartars, whom he calls “barbarous people”, he thinks that he had entered into a “new world” from which he manages to escape as if “out of the hands of devils” after having passed during his journey to the north through what had seemed to him the gate of hell. He also observes that if the Pope should “cause the ensign of the cross to be displayed against them”, the Tartars would all flee into the desert and other solitary places.5 Other times, the travellers to the Orient interpret the unfamiliar as a version of previously known things. Mandeville, for example, remarks that the Saracens’ religious beliefs are so close to the Christian ones that they could easily be converted if they were taught Christ’s law. When he speaks about the Tartars’ customs, Marco Polo explains that the Tartars, like other gentlemen around the world, “trouble themselves about nothing but hunting and hawking, and looking after their goshawks and falcons, unless it be the practice of warlike exercises“ (1903: 252). Another example to the point is Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale where the Great Khan’s court becomes “a modern version of the Arthurian court” (Schildgen 2001: 26), the foreign messenger’s courtesy is defined through comparison with Gawain,6 “love and his servyse” can only be described by Lancelot, and the magic gifts are interpreted through their western mythological, biblical and scientific counterparts. Whatever the approach, as Greenblatt has correctly observed, “in the account of the Other we principally learn something about the writer of the account” (1991: 14).
If information about the Near Orient, and in particular about the Holy Land, abounded in the aftermath of the crusades (1095-1099, 1147-1149, 1187-1192), the first record of the Mongol’s manners, customs and history available to European Christian audiences was John of Plano Carpini’s Historia Mongolorum, written around 1246-1247. During his journey as a papal emissary to Kuyuk Khan (1246-1248), Carpini came into contact with the people of the land called “Mongal or Tartaria” whom he described as bloodthirsty, “disdainful, deceitful, unmannerly and uncleanly in taking their meat and drink” (1937: 213-218). Yet he could not help noting that Tartars were praiseworthy for being more obedient to their lords and masters than any other people in the world. He also remarked that they did not steal things from each other, did not quarrel among themselves even if they were often drunk, and their women were chaste. Carpini’s account reflects the author’s oscillation between fear of novelty and respect for Tartar values which in the Latin Christian world
5 All the quotations from the travel accounts of John of Plano Carpini, William of Rubruck, and Friar Odoric are from
Komroff’s 1937 edition.
6 For a useful discussion of Gawain’s medieval reputation as a paragon of courtesy, see J. B. Whiting, “Gawain His
had been lost. His observation that the dissensions and wars which raged through Europe made it an easy target for the Mongols’ plans of conquest and dominion reveals his preoccupation with the continuous decline of the Old World which instead of carrying out its ‘civilizing’ mission among the so called ‘barbarians’ had to cope with its own internal conflicts. Carpini also points out that western nations are “arrogant and proud” and gives the example of the foreign emissaries who, because they were dressed in Tartars’ attire, were almost stoned to death by the Dutch. An echo of the preoccupation with the decline of the Latin Christian world can be found in what is known as the “Sultan’s speech” in the Book of John Mandeville. In a dialogue with the Mandeville persona, the Saracen Sultan, who is described as a righteous heathen, points out how Christian men had lost the Holy Land because of their sins and wicked example. The critique of the corruption reigning among lay people and the clergy is mitigated, however, by having the Sultan affirm that Christian people shall win again these lands. As Kohanski and Benson have shown, “the Saracens’ tacit acceptance of Christianity as the true faith [was] a common feature of medieval European depictions of the Muslim world” which helped fuel Europe’s claims of territorial and religious sovereignty (2007: 114).
If the Tartars’ manners and customs, in particular their eating habits and religious practices, were often the object of criticism and disapproval, the powerful Mongol Khans and the opulent splendour of their courts fascinated the travellers to the Far Orient provoking their admiration and astonishment. For example, Carpini describes Kuyuk Khan as wise, politic, serious and grave. He also adds that the Khan never laughed, a characteristic which the friar obviously perceived as positive, since in medieval monastic ideology laughter was thought to be linked to sin and the diabolical expressions of the flesh (Le Goff 2003: 163). The description of the Khan’s qualities is followed by the remark that he was on the point of becoming a Christian. The pagan ‘Other’ is thus safely enclosed in a familiar Christian framework. The Mongolian prince Batu, Khan of the Golden Horde, is presented as stately and magnificent in his demeanour, courteous to his men, prudent and politic in war (1937: 245-46). The sight of Batu’s court also astonishes William of Rubruck who describes it as “a huge and mighty city, stretching out a great way in length” (1937: 304). The friar uses a familiar imagery in order to explain the unfamiliar. Batu’s features remind him of those of John of Beaumont, marshal of France under Lewis IX (1215-1270). Mangu Khan’s palace in Karakorum is “enclosed within a high wall like those which enclose monks' priories” and its structure is similar to that of a church. The Khan sits in a high place “like a divinity” and the cup-bearers bring him wine, cara cosmos (clarified mare's milk), bal (a drink made with honey), or rice mead, which flow from the four conduits of a silver tree made for him by a European, master
William the Parisian. Yet nowhere is the splendour and magnificence of the Great Khan’s court more evident than in Il Milione, and in its French version entitled Le divisament du monde (1298). By the time Marco Polo travelled to the Orient (1271) the Mongol capital had been transferred under Kubla Khan’s reign from Karakorum to Cambaluc, “The City of the Emperor” (the modern Beijing). Marco describes Kubla Khan according to the medieval western canons of beauty (1267-1294). He is neither tall nor short, but of middle height, very shapely in his limbs, his complexion is white and red, the nose well formed. He is wise, accomplished, and valiant. Marco Polo’s encomiastic description finds a counterpart in the miniatures which illustrate the text in MS Bodley 264 (1400-1410) and MS Français 2810 (1410-1412). In the first codex, he is depicted in the act of giving bread to the poor (fol. 244r). In the second, he is represented supervising the emission of paper money which was an innovation for the period (fol. 45r), giving instructions to the workers who plant trees on the trade routes in order to facilitate travel as well as the exchange of messages between the different regions of the empire (fol. 47v), observing and discussing the properties of amianthus with philosophers and men of science (fol. 24r). During the winter months (from December to February), he resides in his palace in Cambaluc. The detailed description of the architecture and decoration of the palace is interspersed with hyperboles such as “this is the greatest palace that ever was” or “it is a marvel to see how many rooms it has”, which are reminiscent of the language of romance. It is in the description of the palace as well as of the battles that the contribution of Rustichello da Pisa, the romance writer who helped Marco compose his text during their imprisonment in Genoa, is mostly felt. It is interesting to notice how, although Il Milione was perceived by most of Marco’s contemporaries as a geographical work useful for the practical information it contained, Kubla Khan is invested with the aura of a romance hero.7
In the Squire’s Tale, the founder of the Mongol empire, Genghis Khan (1206-1227) is also presented through a series of hyperboles. He is a paragon of virtue: “an excellent lord in alle thing” who “lakked noght that longeth to a kyng”, “hardy, wys, riche”, piteous, just, honourable, courageous. His virtues have a counterpart in his physical beauty and vigour:
Yong, fresh, and strong, in armes desirous As any bacheler of al his hous.
A fair persone he was and fortunat, And kept alwey so wel roial eastat
That ther was nowher swich another man. (V, 23-27)
7 The use of the language and imagery of romance in the travellers’ accounts finds a counterpart in the illustrations of
the texts. As Wittkower has shown, illustrations of such works as the Romance of Alexander were often transferred into travellers’ reports since medieval audiences did not regard them as having a lesser degree of veracity than the illustrations of real travel accounts (1977: 91).
In his description of the Khan, his family and the court, Chaucer repeatedly employs the topos of the inexpressible which combines the hyperbole of high expectations with the failure of inadequate words:
But for to telle yow al hir beautee, It lyth nat in my tonge, n’yn my konnyng; I dar nat undertake so heigh a thyng. (V, 34-36)
The magnificence and solemnity of the Khan’s birthday feast is such that “in this world ne was ther noon it lyche” and it would take a whole summer’s day to describe it. Yet, as Ambrisco has argued, it is “not so much that the Mongol setting exceeds the descriptive abilities of the Squire as it is that
occupatio allows for a kind of imaginary occupation of the Mongol court, which is peopled by
courtiers who act and think as Europeans” (2004: 214). He also points out how “very little specific information about Mongol characteristics or cultural practice […] makes it into Chaucer’s text”, which “highlights rather than occludes these strange omissions, asserting Mongol difference while simultaneously deferring descriptions of that foreign people and culture.” (Ambrisco 2004: 207-208). As a consequence, the Squire’s Tale encouraged readers to interpret the absences and omissions in the description of the Mongol Khan’s court in terms of their own cultural repertoire, thus contributing actively to what Said called the “theatrical staging” of the Orient in European representational practice. Their cultural repertoire was based on the experience of travellers to the East and the literature, combining fact and fiction, which was the product of those experiences. For example, when Chaucer mentions en passant the strange foods of the Mongols, he refers his audience to the accounts of “knyghtes olde”. Bennett interprets the sentence as a clear allusion to the Book of John Mandeville (1953: 533), since Mandeville was the only medieval traveller who described his narrative persona as being a “knyght of Ingelond, that was ybore in the toun of Seynt Albons”.8
Though he did not use the topos of the inexpressible, friar William of Rubruck lamented his inability to paint because he believed words could not fully express the beauty and marvel of the things that he saw in the Tartars’ lands. His is an interesting affirmation of the superiority of pictures over words in the representation of reality, which not many of his contemporaries would have agreed with. The privileged role of the word in Western medieval culture, based on the centrality and authority of the divine logos, had contributed to relegating images to an ancillary position. By its likeness to natural objects, the image could create the illusion of reality, a simian mockery of God’s creation and it was regarded as dangerous for the unlearned who were not always
8 The quotation is from J. Mandeville, The Book of John Mandeville, ed. by Tamarah Kohanski and David C. Benson,
Kalamazoo (MI): Medieval Institute Publications, 2007. All further quotations are from this edition unless otherwise mentioned.
able to distinguish between the image and its prototype. One of the Twelve Conclusions of the
Lollards posted on the doors of Westminster Hall and of St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1395 denounced
imagery as “a bok of errour” for the “lewid puple”. Since St. Paul’s and its environs ‒ in particular Paternoster Row ‒ was the London area with the highest concentration of booksellers and craftsmen involved in manuscript production, the Conclusions must have had a significant impact on their work.9 Scott has suggested that the scarcity of illustrated codices in vernacular may be partially explained by the controversy over the function of images and over their role in educating the laity which sometimes accompanied the debates between Lollards and the defenders of the established church in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries (1: 44-45). The almost complete lack of illustration in Lollard manuscripts is significant if considered in the context of the tradition of richly illuminated Bibles which characterised book production in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Even such popular vernacular works as the Canterbury Tales, The Book of John Mandeville and Il
Milione contain few pictorial programmes.
Since none of the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales contains a pictorial representation of the Great Khan and his court, we must turn elsewhere to find one. In England, the Khan and his court are depicted in three fifteenth-century manuscripts: Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264, owned by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, which contains Marco Polo’s Li Livres du Graunt Caam (fols. 218r -71v, with fol. 2v); 10 two manuscripts of what is known as the “Defective version” of the Book
of John Mandeville, British Library, MS Royal 17. C. XXXVIII and MS Harley 3954 (fols 1-69v).11 Art historians have identified four different hands in the later illustration of Bodley 264. The most famous artist, Johannes (Scott’s Hand C), was probably of German or Low Country, extraction. The other three illustrators (Hands A, B, and D) are “certainly English in style” (Scott 1996, 2: 72). The two British Library manuscripts have many illustrations but they are not particularly luxurious. Whether they were meant to be used for travelling and functioned as portable books is still a matter of scholarly debate. The particular format of the Harley copy (an elongated ‘holster’ or vertical quarto shape) and the itinerary from Northern Europe to Florence, the full-page diagram of the points of the compass and the names of the winds in Italian added later, seem to suggest such a use. Scott has argued that two artists, possibly three, worked on the pictorial
9 Paul Christianson has convincingly argued that by the beginning of the fifteenth century, there was an established
community for book-craft and book commerce in London, and, in particular, in the environs of St. Paul’s Cathedral. See “The Rise of London’s Book-trade”, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 1400-1557, Vol. 3, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999, pp. 128-47.
10 In addition to Marco Polo’s work, the manuscript contains The Romance of Alexander (fols 3r-208r) in French verse,
with miniatures illustrating legends of Alexander the Great and with marginal scenes of everyday life, by the Flemish illuminator Jehan de Grise and his workshop, 1338-1344), and Alexander and Dindimus (Alexander Fragment B) in Middle English verse, with coarser miniatures (fols 209r-215v, with fol. 1r). Marco Polo’s work was added and illuminated in England at the beginning of the fifteenth century.
11
MS Harley 3954 also contains the Infancy of Christ (fols 70r -74r); Merits of the Mass (fols 74r -76r); Virtues of
programme of Harley 3954. Whereas the artists of this manuscript made narrative scenes and depicted the Mandeville persona as a pilgrim, the illustrator of Royal 17. C. XXXVIII used single standing figures and he illustrated the content of the rubrics rather than the text. The artist of the Royal copy was more interested in depicting the Holy Land and the saints. By contrast, the Harley artists did not illustrate the Jerusalem section, focusing instead on the depiction of the wonders of the East.
The only full-page miniature among the 99 which illustrate the Harley copy of Mandeville’s
Travels contains the representation of the Great Khan’s banquet hall (Fig. 5.5). Since the 38 blank
spaces left for images indicate that the miniatures were placed in specially chosen positions in the text, this editorial and pictorial choice is particularly significant in that it reflects the supervisor’s interest in and fascination with the Mongol Khan. Scott has remarked that the architectural details make this miniature “a remarkable creation for the period” (1996, 2: 210). The artist is faithful to the textual details concerning the spatial position of the emperor, his family and noblemen. The Khan is represented seated on a throne “right heygh” at the “over eynde of the hall” having his own table, under which clerks sit and write everything he says. There are wide steps leading to this throne. His three wives are seated at his left side, each lower than the other, and his eldest son at his right side, “a degré lower than the emperour”, and by him “other lordes of kynne”. The magnificence of the court and the emperor’s power are suggested not so much through the great quantity of gold, precious stones and pearls mentioned in the text, as through the imposing architecture of the hall, the illusion of depth of field and the vertical perspective. The Khan’s towering figure ‒ the largest, though the most distant from the viewer ‒ dominates the whole scene. It is interesting to note how such a textual detail as the Mongol empresses’ headdress called boḡṭāq, a tall construction of felt and willow or wood, which Mandeville describes as “a counterfeit of a mannes foot”, “half a foot longe and all y-maked with precious stones”, is transposed by the artist into the horned bourrelet worn by fifteenth-century western women. The Mongol empresses are depicted as fashionable European ladies wearing western garments and having a carefully plucked hairline and high foreheads according to the latest Burgundian and French fashions. The Khan’s blue robe and ermine collar are also modelled upon European monarchs’ attire. Far from wearing the long sashed or belted Mongolian coat called qabā,12 the courtiers are dressed in
12
It was worn over a long-sleeved tunic or shirt, qamīz or pīrāhan, and trousers tucked into boots or low shoes. A square of ornament might appear on the chest of the overgarment of a man of rank, and the upper arms and shoulders of the qabā might also be decorated. See E. Schroeder, “Ahmed Musa and Shams al-Dīn: A Review of Fourteenth Century Painting,” Ars Islamica, 6 (1939): 113-42, and F. Boucher, 20,000 Years of Fashion : The History of Costume and
Personal Adornment, New York: H. N. Abrams, 1987. See also “Clothing in the Mongol and Timurid Periods”, in Encyclopaedia Iranica, <http://www.iranica.com/articles/clothing-ix> [accessed 23 July 2010].
century houppelandes with voluminous sleeves and slashed edges. Given the similarities between Chaucer’s and Mandeville’s description of the Great Khan, the miniature could have been an appropriate illustration for the following passage from the Squire’s Tale:
In roial vestiment sit on his deys, With diademe, ful heighe in his paleys, And halt his feeste so solempne and so ryche
That in this world ne was ther noon it lyche. (V, 59-62)
In representing Kubla Khan’s birthday feast, the artist of Bodley 264 (Hand D) depicts several textual details from Marco Polo’s Li Livres du Graunt Caam, such as the vessel of pure gold from which delicious beverages flow, the Khan’s four wives, the barons kneeling as a sign of obeisance/homage when the Khan holds the cup in his hands, the movement of the barons to and fro looking to the wants of the guests at table, and the musicians, depicted at the two upper corners of the picture, who play their instruments when the emperor drinks (Fig. 5.6). Yet this artist pays little or no attention to spatial disposition: the empresses are erroneously positioned on the Khan’s right side, his table is not elevated above the others and he shares it with two other men, possibly his sons, even if the text clearly states that the emperor’s sons sit on his right side with their heads at the level of his feet. The artist seems to be particularly interested in the richness of the court and its marvels. He represents the golden fountain as a piece of workmanship with finely wrought figures of lions and places it in the central part of the picture. The golden cups or “hanaps”, considered to be of inestimable value, are also depicted. The Khan wears the same blue robe and ermine collar as in the Harley picture and his wives are also represented as European princesses. They have blond hair plaited into twin buns, white complexion and rosy cheeks, and they wear golden crowns set with pearls and precious stones.13 In Bodley 264, the Khan seated on the throne and wearing a royal ermine-lined blue robe is also depicted in two presentation scenes by Johannes (fols 219r, 220r) whose name appears on the Khan’s robe on folio 220r.14 Even if he is represented with white beard and hair, the emperor’s features are hardly those of an eighty-year-old man. According to Marco Polo, Kubla Khan started reigning when he was 43, and in 1288, when Marco met him, the emperor was eighty-five. It is clear that the artists who made the miniatures discussed so far were following
13 A similar representation of the Mongol empresses (fol. 36r) can be found in Marco Polo’s Devisement du monde from
Le livre des merveilles, the luxurious manuscript offered to Jean Duc du Berry by his nephew Jean san Peur, Duc de
Bourgogne, in 1413. In the Devisement du monde, Kubla Khan’s banquet hall, depicted by one of the artists of the “Egerton-Bedford” stylistic group, is represented against the background of the wall which encloses the imperial gardens (fol. 39r). The artist is faithful to the textual details concerning the spatial position of the Khan and the royal family, but he reduces the number of wives to three and he depicts three of the Khan’s sons, for reasons of symmetry, with the Khan’s figure at the centre top of the picture. The central, elevated position of the emperor reminds one of the later Harley picture. The great power and authority of the Khan is not suggested here through the scale of the figure or the magnificent architecture, but through the crowned figures, the barons and courtiers of rank mentioned in the text, who wait on him at table.
a well-consolidated western iconographic tradition for representing royal figures. However, their choice of representing certain textual details rather than others reflects their own interpretation of the text. For example, in the presentation scene by Johannes, Kubla Khan holds a phial in his left hand. In the text, he is said to rejoice greatly at receiving the oil from the lamp of the Holy Sepulchre that he had asked the Polo brothers to bring him. In the miniature which illustrates the same section of the text in the Devisament du monde, upon their return from the newly elected Pope Gregory X (1271-76), Niccolò and Maffeo offer the Khan a golden cross and an elaborately bound book with golden clasps set with pearls, probably the Bible (fol. 5r). The two objects are not mentioned in the text. They appear however, in William of Rubruck’s account.15 So the artist of the Boucicault-Mazarine stylistic group who made this miniature may have had the friar’s account in mind. In the Devisement du monde, Kubla Khan is willing to accept Christianity as the only true religion provided that one hundred wise Christian men manage to convince him of it through scholastic disputation. Presumably, the artist perceived the cross and the Bible as more effective instruments of conversion and decided not to depict the phial of oil from the Lamp of the Holy Sepulchre. He also illustrated the section of Mandeville’s travels from the Livres de merveilles in which the Great Khan Chicoto is described as paying homage to the cross and bowing to receive the Christian prelate’s benediction. In the miniature, the artist depicts a crown instead of a hat to emphasise the submission of the Khan’s secular power to the eternal power of God, symbolized by the cross (fol. 205r). Western dreams of religious sovereignty are thus transposed into pictures even at the cost of creating incongruity between text and image.
One more example of interpretive intervention on the part of the artists is the representation of the Great Khan’s death. In keeping with the more austere subject matter and style of the miniatures in MS. Royal 17.C.XXXVIII, the Khan is depicted lying on his deathbed in a simple and unadorned chamber with hands closed in prayer: a Christian representation of a pagan’s death (fol. 50r). None of the details of the Khan’s burial mentioned in the text are depicted. By contrast, in the miniature which illustrates the description of the emperor’s death in the French version of Mandeville’s travels from Le Livre des merveilles, the artist depicts two servants in the act of pushing the emperor’s consort and another courtier into the grave opposite the Great Khan’s deathbed (fol. 207r). A third servant strikes a spear on the earth beside him. The picture illustrates the Tartars’ custom described in the text of putting into the emperor’s grave food, drinks, horses, mares and whatever else he might need in the next world. The miniatures offer two different
15 When the friar goes to see Batu’s son, Sartach, he takes with him the Bible, and “a most beautiful Psalter” “wherein
there were goodly pictures” (1937: 295), while his companions carry a missal and a cross. Sartach seems to be particularly interested in the books and the cross for he and his wife look earnestly at them and he asks if the image on the cross is the image of Christ.
interpretations of the text. In the first, the Christian perspective prevails. In the second, the marvellous and astonishing aspects of the Tartars’ “barbarian” customs is emphasised.
What emerges from this survey of the representation of the Great Khan in Chaucer’s
Squire’s Tale and in the illuminated manuscripts of two of its possible sources ‒ The Book of John Mandeville and Il Milione ‒ is the writers’ and limners’ effort to adapt the topos of the righteous
heathen to an ideological representation of kingship and royal authority.16 As Grady has shown, the typical “virtuous pagan scene” comprised a number of structural elements which could appear in various combinations (2005: 7). There would usually be a dialogue between a representative virtuous heathen (a king or a sultan) and a Christian interlocutor, in which the enquiry into the spiritual beliefs of the former leads to the enumeration of his many virtues. These virtues are then contrasted with the sins and corruption of some members of the Christian society. The scene concludes either with an exceptional salvation or, as in the Sultan’s speech in The Book of John
Mandeville, with the prediction of Christian people’s return to their original virtuousness which will
help them regain the Holy Land.
If in the Squire’s Tale, the Great Khan’s religious faith is only fleetingly touched upon in a brief reference to the fact that he keeps the “lay, to which he was sworn”, in the travel accounts discussed in this chapter, the Mongol khans are described either as powerful kings on the point of becoming Christian, or as illuminated monarchs whose tolerance of the other religions of the empire culminates in the particular favour they show to Christians. The equation of being a good monarch with being a good Christian or promoting Christian values is thus absent from Chaucer’s text. The poet seems to be more interested in offering an encomiastic representation of royalty than in re-proposing the righteous heathen topos. Both the Squire’s Tale and The Book of John Mandeville were written in a period of European history marked by internal wars and dynastic conflicts.17 The Hundred Year’s War (1337-1453) between the House of Valois and the House of Plantagenet had contributed to fuelling more conflicts throughout Europe. In England, the atmosphere of political discontent provoked by Richard II’s excessive reliance on a private military retinue culminated in
16
The only exception is the miniature which illustrates the description of the White Feast on New Year’s Day in MS Français 2810. Surprisingly enough, the artist does not depict the sumptuous feast in which the wealth and power of the emperor are most fully displayed. He chooses, instead, to represent princes and men of rank in the act of delivering their gifts for the Khan to a servant in front of a column supporting an idol (fol. 40r). In the miniature, which is obviously based on Marco Polo’s statement that the courtiers bow down until their foreheads touch the ground in adoration of the emperor as if he were a god, the artist suggests that this type of adoration is idolatry, thus throwing a shadow of doubt over the representations of the Great Khan as a noble and virtuous heathen.
17 Most scholars agree that the account of Mandeville’s travels was first written in French and later translated into
English, but there is no general consensus about the date of its composition. Most of the manuscripts from the French tradition contain a statement which indicate 1357 as the year of composition. Nevertheless, some manuscripts from the English version give the year 1366. Seymour tentatively dated the most popular English translation, known as the “Defective Version”, to “after 1377, perhaps c. 1385” (Kohanski 2007: 13). See also C. W. R. D. Moseley, “The Scribal Tradition of Mandeville’s Travels: The Insular Version”, Scriptorium, 18 (1964): 34-48, and “The Metamorphoses of Sir John Mandeville”, The Yearbook of English Studies, 4 (1974): 5-25.
the Appellant Lords’ armed rebellion against the king (1387). After Robert de Vere’s defeat, who was one of Richard’s most fervent supporters, he had to comply with the appellants’ demands and was almost completely deprived of his royal prerogatives. Though he gradually re-established his royal authority and reassumed full control of government in May 1389, the king’s relationship with the appellants remained problematic and in 1397, he had Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, the Earl of Arundel and the Earl of Warwick arrested. As king, Richard II was less of a warrior than his predecessors had been. He attempted to bring to an end the Hundred Year’s War and transformed Edward III’s court, which had been predominantly martial, into an oasis of courtly culture, where the works of poets like Chaucer and Gower were read and commissioned. Richard’s programme of asserting his authority also involved a strong awareness of the importance of language in achieving political power. In formal addresses, he substituted the traditional “your rightful and gracious lord” with the highly charged ideological formula “your highness and royal majesty” (Saul 1997: 238). He also liked to be referred to as “prince”, that is a sovereign ruler who acknowledged no earthly superior (Saul 1997: 265). The linguistic elevation of the king was complemented by the promotion of his royal image. An illustrative example is the Wilton Diptych in which the king, presented by the Saints John Baptist, Edward the Confessor and Edmund the Martyr, is depicted kneeling before the Virgin and Child. Another example is his over life-size portrait (Fig. 5.7) in Westminster Abbey. The king seated in the coronation chair is represented wearing coronation robes and holding the orb and sceptre. What strikes an alert spectator is the king’s youthful figure with his “lokkes crulle” which remind one of Chaucer’s portrayal of the Squire. While I do not argue that this wooden panel-painting is a direct source for the Squire’s miniature, I do suggest that in attempting to depict the Squire as an accomplished nobleman and perfect courtier, the Ellesmere artist might have unwarily drawn closer than expected, or than it was politically safe under the reign of Henry IV, to the representation of Richard II in the Westminster panel (Fig. 5.8).
Although scholars have not been able to establish with certainty fifteenth-century ownership of the Ellesmere manuscript, the poem signed “per Rotheley” which appears on one of the flyleaves (fol. ivr), was evidently written as a tribute to the House of Vere. Manly and Rickert have suggested that John de Vere, thirteenth Earl of Oxford, may have inherited the manuscript from his father. Both earls were known to have been fervent supporters of the House of Lancaster. The two scholars agree, however, that the twelfth earl (b. 1407) could not have been the original owner (1940, 1: 158).18 It would therefore be tempting to conjecture that if there was a deliberate association of the Squire’s figure with Richard II’s Westminster portrait on the part of the limner, the commissioner
18
For further insights into the question of the ownership of the Ellesmere manuscript, see R. Hanna, and A. S. G. Edwards, “Rotheley, the De Vere Circle, and the Ellesmere Chaucer”, Huntington Library Quarterly, 58 (1995): 11-35.
might have been a sympathizer of the late king.19 Regardless of the possible commissioner’s political views, Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, with its encomiastic description of the Great Khan, must have appealed to many. First of all to Richard II and to the noblemen who belonged to his circle of faithful courtiers. Richard’s patronage of Chaucer is well attested in the surviving documents.20 Moreover, the poet’s appointment as clerk of the King’s Works on 12 July 1389, soon after Richard had regained power, testifies to the distinguished position he occupied within the king’s courtly circle. As a court poet, clerk of the King’s Works and, later, deputy forester of the royal forest, he witnessed Richard’s efforts to consolidate royal authority through political action as well as through the promotion of culture. So in reworking his sources, Chaucer was less concerned with domesticating the non-Christian “Other” than with offering an image of kingship and courtly behaviour that Richard could easily identify with. If the Squire’s Tale did not lose its appeal even to such fervent Lancastrian supporters as the De Vere family, it was because in a historical period characterised by plots and rebellions against Henry IV, the Canterbury Tales continued to be both “a triumph of culture that redress[ed] the anxieties of lost power” (Hanna 1995: 28) and a means of promoting political power through the construction of an authoritative language.
19 It may be useful to remember that Robert de Vere, ninth Earl of Oxford (1362-1392), was a favourite and close
advisor of Richard II. He led the group of faithful courtiers who supported the king in his efforts to gain complete control over the government and diminish the authority of powerful nobles.
