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IMPERIAL FANTASIES: IMAGINING CHRISTIAN EMPIRE IN THREE FOURTEENTH-
CENTURY VERSIONS OF "THE BOOK OF SIR JOHN MANDEVILLE"

Author(s): MARIANNE O'DOHERTY
Source: Medium Ævum , 2017, Vol. 86, No. 2 (2017), pp. 323-349
Published by: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature
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MEDIUM jEVUM, VOL. LXXXVI, No. z, pp. 323-349 © SSMLL, 1017
IMPERIAL FANTASIES: IMAGINING CHRISTIAN EMPIRE

IN THREE FOURTEENTH-CENTURY VERSIONS OF
THE BOOK OF SIR JOHN MANDEVILLE
Introduction
Investigating notions of empire in pre-modern texts can be a tricky task. As

scholars of empire and medievalists alike have shown, what was considered to
be 'empire' or an empire' in the Middle Ages is not identical - though clearly
etymologically and conceptually related - to what is meant now, and the same
is true for related terms.1
Historians have noted that some of the usual ways of defining empire in
historical and structural analyses - a rimless wheel comprised of a hub and
spokes; a dominant core and a dominated periphery, often established by or
reliant on violence — fit uncomfortably with some entities that are considered
to be, or considered themselves to be, empires in the Middle Ages.2 'Empire',
imperium, and cognate terms in the Middle Ages, scholars point out, could be
used exclusively to mean the Holy Roman Empire; could retain their Roman
meaning of right to command {imperium)-, could refer to the specific right of
rulership believed to be inherited first by Constantinople, then by the Franks,
in the person of Charlemagne, from Roman imperial rule; they could refer to
territories acquired by conquest or far-flung possessions; or simply a territory
governed by a sovereign ruler. An empire could exist without an emperor, and
vice versa.3 As Reynolds notes, the combination of difference from and overlap
with modern usages can create difficulties for those engaged in investigating and
comparing empires in the Middle Ages. However, the works of scholars such as
Robert Folz and James Muldoon show us that the history of thought concerning
empire in the Middle Ages can be productively investigated from a different
perspective. Folz's and Muldoon's usage-based, conceptual-historical approaches
- particularly influential on this article - aim instead to trace the meanings
and connotations of empire in particular spaces, contexts, and situations.4
Nonetheless, works like those of Folz and Muldoon are political and legal, top
down histories. They tell us what powerful or influential thinkers, papal and
imperial courts, and their propagandists thought or wanted others to think about

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1M MEDIUM ^VUM LXXXVI.2
empire. As Leonard Scales has pointed out, though, it is not reasonable to assume
that imperial ideologies simply radiated out from propaganda produced by their
proponents to be passively absorbed by 'inert populations'.5 To assume this would
be to entirely strip agency from all members of an empire's polity other than its
rulers. And, as Peter Crooks has observed, for those who considered themselves
(willingly or unwillingly) part of one, empire was not only a political structure,
but also, following Benedict Anderson's formulation, an 'imagined community'.6
Like any other imagined community, imperial communities were continually
produced, contested, and renegotiated in locally specific, differentiated ways.
In order to understand this process of production, contestation, and
renegotiation, it helps to turn to culture, and, specifically, texts. It is not news,
of course, that literary studies can advance our understanding of imperialism's
social and cultural dimensions. In medieval studies, the trajectory of Robert Folz's
work on the Holy Roman Empire indicates the centrality of the study of cultural
representations to an understanding of such phenomena. Folz's magisterial
cultural study Le Souvenir et la legende de Charlemagne dans I'Empire germanique
medieval preceded his political study, The Concept ofEmpire in Western Europe from
the Fifth to the Fourteenth Century, by three years and helped lay the conceptual
foundations for it.7 Numerous books and articles have engaged with questions
such as medieval cultures' senses of their relationships with empires past, and
with perceived cultural imperialism and resistance to it in the transmission and
reception of medieval texts.8 Recently, Matthew Gabriele's Empire of Memory has
traced how notions of empire from the Carolingian era to the eleventh century
were bound up with their creators' interpretations of its past, and specifically
Charlemagne. To speak of the first crowned western Christian emperor was
'a way of saying something about a universal community of Christians, that
community's special place in God's eyes, and your relationship to that community
in the arc of sacred history'.9 In the schema that Gabriele delineates, in which
cultural productions are simultaneously sites of contestation between memory
and history and opportunities to remake the relationship between oneself, one's
community, and an imagined universal Christian empire, the reception history
of visions of empire takes on a new significance. This article seeks to show how
close attention to one such history can nuance our understanding of how empire
was produced as a concept, an ideal, and a community; how notions of empire
were renegotiated in locally and temporally specific contexts; how mythologized
histories of empire were contested and remade as texts crossed political, cultural,
and linguistic borders; and how these could be mobilized in attempts to shape
the present and the future.
The Book of Sir John Mandeville is a particularly valuable text with which to
undertake this kind of enquiry. It was probably the most widely read geographical
text of its day, certainly in the sense that its popularity cut across reading

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IMPERIAL FANTASIES 325
communities of different languages and social and cultural backgrounds, from

merchants and laypeople to clerics to kings.1" Moreover, as the detailed analysis
below of one of the two earliest versions of the text shows, Mandeville displays
a close and informed interest in the history and legitimacy of empires, and in
changing power relations in its contemporary world. However, it is also a very
problematic text. Where the Book might have been written and by whom are
questions of seemingly endless but often unproductive debate,11 and its nature and
purpose are no less contested. It is well known that the text is not the account of
a wandering knight s travels that it purports to be, but an extensively reworked
amalgamation of a wide range of geographical source texts.12 Interpretations that
attempt to tease out the Book's aims range from wilfully playful, self-conscious
work of fiction to forerunner of modern geographical writing, and encompass
pretty much everything in between.13 Moving away from this kind of genre
scholarship, however, much recent work on the text has focused — not wrongly,
I should make clear - on its open and enquiring attitude to regional and human
diversity, its willingness to hold up a critical mirror to Latin Christendom and,
in the words of Karma Lochrie, to 'provincializ[e] Europe' in a manner that,
she argues, betrays a 'cosmopolitan' world view.14
However, aim- and genre-based arguments of this kind tend to share the
weakness, noted by Kohanski back in 2001, that they are based on a fixed idea of
what The Book of Sir John Mandeville is, and that fixed idea is frequently formed
following analysis of a single version of the text, often the widely available but
somewhat unrepresentative English translation known as the Cotton Version.15
The 'multi-textual' nature of the Book, so carefully demonstrated by Higgins in
1997, also needs to be considered. Higgins's pithy explanation of the meaning
of his coinage - characterized not just by intertextuality but also by 'distinctive
iw^mtextual multiplicity' — alerts us to the need to consider two distinct issues
that complicate the picture of a 'cosmopolitan' text.1'' Firstly, as a text that draws
on a wide variety of quite disparate (though sometimes substantially repurposed
and rewritten) earlier texts, Mandeville even in its earliest known forms bears
traces of the perspectives of its sources. Its perspective is not singular, and is
not entirely its own. Secondly, we need to bear in mind Higgins's observation
that this 'medieval multi-text' exists not so much as a textual tradition but - to
borrow Higgins's vocabulary — as an isotopic structure characterized by myriad
similar-but-different textual versions. In common with other types of text valued
more for their 'continued functionality', as Bella Millett has put it in another
context, than for their 'textual integrity, or indeed authorial intention', Mandeville
was often extensively adapted in the process of transmission and translation.17
As Kohanski puts it, 'popular manuscripts such as the Book were by nature in a
constant state of flux: scribes, translators, and redactors all treated alterations to
such texts as potential enhancements'.18 Each 'isotope' thus balances an element

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326 MEDIUM «VUM LXXXVI.i
of fidelity to its source version with 'potential enhancements' adapting it to

target language, audience, context, and purpose. It follows that scholars ne
to balance attention to what can be ascertained of the aims and purposes
the text's earliest versions with attention to its locally and temporally spec
modes of reception.
Through attention to an insular version of Mandeville (c.1356) and two
adaptations produced by the end of the fourteenth century, this article seeks
trace some of the cultural work that memories, histories, and myths of em
did in specific political circumstances and historical moments. It shows how
earliest textual versions' vision of a declining western Christian empire, challen
by great imperial powers in the East and surpassed in efficacy by an expansion
Church, is contested by two redactors who encounter it half a century late
the Prince-Bishopric of Liege, within the Holy Roman Empire. Their rewrit
of their contemporary world also involves, as I will show, a rewriting of t
history of Christian empire, a rewriting that, to repurpose in a different cont
Gabrielle Spiegel's observation on the chroniclers of Saint-Denis, turns the p
into an explanatory principle, a way of ordering and making intelligible ev
separated by vast distances of time'.'9
While normally considered marginal to the textual tradition of Mandevil
these later redactions were extremely significant in its fourteenth- and fiftee
century reception. Although there are only six surviving manuscripts of the f
of these, the so-called Version liegeoise or Liege version of Jean d'Outremeu
the second of the two redactions, the so-called Vulgate Latin translation, ba
directly upon it, was widely diffused across Europe, and particularly in t
Empire. Both versions then influenced a further immensely popular vernac
translation: the German version of Otto Von Diemeringen.20 These redacti
are thus more significant in their own right than is normally recognized. Inde
assuming that empire in the Middle Ages was, as Crooks suggests, an 'imagi
community' as much as a political structure, but, as Gabriele indicates, one wh
representations are 'tethered to local conditions', these redactions can provid
insight into some of the processes through which an imaginatively constitu
empire could be sustained, contested, and reshaped, in part by reshaping
'explanatory' past.21 They show, in fact, how the process of rewriting prov
an opportunity to renegotiate one's own or one's community's relationship w
empire and imperial rule.
Visions of empire in the Insular Mandeville
Before turning to the resistant 'counter versions' that will be the subject of
later sections of this article, it is first necessary to outline the state of contempor
empires in the world according to the earliest Mandeville versions on which th

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drew.22 The specific early text examined here is the so-called Insular versi
of the two French texts that scholars have identified as potentially repres
the earliest textual tradition.23 Insular by name, this version is hardly ins
nature; it is highly attuned to recent shifts in global power relations an
a particular interest in questions of Christian authority and influence arou
world. The text was produced in the 1350s, just as the intense flurry of mi
activity in Asia that characterized the thirteenth and fourteenth centu
coming to an end, and just before the fall of the Mongols (Yuan) and the a
of the Ming Dynasty rendered China much more difficult for European tr
to access.24 The Book, however, drew on knowledge gathered over a cent
a half of contact between sacred and secular European potentates and
in the East. Its geographical range and its deployment of thirteenth- an
fourteenth-century eyewitness sources forced it to consider the balance of
not within Europe, but across the world. Through the work's varied acco
imperial powers near and far, past and present, one can trace the outli
particular vision of the spread of Christian empire across the world.
An examination of the usage of the terms empire and emperor in the Book
that it reflects the multiplicity of sometimes overlapping, sometimes con
meanings and connotations of the term outlined by recent commenta
The Book's first references to imperial power appear in its descriptio
Constantinople, the imperial capital of the Romans under Constantin
capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. The basis of the Byzantine emp
imperial title was often questioned in the Latin West following Charlem
coronation, by which Leo III was held to have effected the translatio im
the transfer of the Roman Empire to western European, specifically Fr
rule.25 Mandevilles account of Constantinople reflects a wider pattern
medieval scepticism about the reality of the Byzantine emperor's imperial
became a cliche among canon lawyers, according to Muldoon, that 'the By
emperor was no more a true emperor than the king in a chess-set wa
king'.26 Indeed, the Book's description is rich with symbolism of the tr
imperii away from Constantinople. The city's statue of Justinian, the grea
century Eastern Roman emperor, once held a golden apple to signify his
'seignurie' ('lordship', or imperium), but that apple has fallen, and can
replaced.27 Through this symbolism, the Byzantine Empire's claim to au
based on its inheritance of the imperial title from Rome is undermined
Byzantium's claim to imperial status based on religious authority is unde
in the Book too. According to the Book, many of the sacred relics of Chri
held at Constantinople have passed to western Europe. This move is both
and symbol of the Byzantine Empires decline. With the emperor forced
of funds to pawn holy relics to the Genoese, part of the Crown of Tho
of the crucifixion nails, and the head of the spear that pierced Christ's

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328 MEDIUM ,EVUM LXXXVI.i
'plusours autres reliques sont en France en la chapel le roi' ('many other rel
are in France in the chapel of the king').29 And, while the Byzantine empe
might claim that he retains the head of the Holy Lance, this sacred relic is
between France and Germany: the Emperor of Germany (the Holy Roman
Emperor) has the shaft, Mandeville tells us, but the blade is at Paris.30 As A
Latowsky and Matthew Gabriele have pointed out, in early medieval narrat
of the life of Charlemagne, the transfer of Byzantine relics to the Frankish k
functions to signal 'a shift in imperial primacy to the West'.31 Just such a tran
is signalled in Mandevilles account of Constantinople. In the following chapt
the Mandeville-author underscores the separation of this Byzantine Empire fr
the Latin Christendom to which its symbols have now passed. In respons
overtures by Pope John XXII, the Greeks firmly reject the notion of obedienc
the papacy. It therefore falls to the Byzantine emperor to appoint 'le patriark
archevesques et les evesques' because 'il est sires de temporel et del espiritue
soun pais' ('the patriarch, the archbishops and the bishops'; 'he is both temp
and spiritual lord in his land').32
Mandeville's description of the Byzantine Empire, then, on the one han
recalls the notion of universal Christian empire and the theory of its translat
from East to West so central to much medieval thought on empire, but on
other undermines it. Certainly, the Book's account shows an Eastern Emp
that has lost its imperium: that is, its imperial authority.33 However, the acco
by no means univocally supports the theory of that imperiums transfer
the Carolingian Empire, a theory that was central to the claims to autho
and universal jurisdiction of a Holy Roman Empire that considered it
Charlemagne's successor.34 The relics of Christ are dispersed in the realms
the King of France and Emperor. The nominal Byzantine Emperor, moreov
submits to neither the temporal nor the spiritual lordship of the West. W
the Eastern Empire has lost its imperial authority, then, whether and to wh
that authority has been transferred is not made clear.
Having raised, then troubled, in its account of Constantinople, the notion
a universal Christian empire whose authority and legitimacy can be traced b
through the Eastern Empire, to ancient Rome, the Book moves on to discuss ot
contemporary empires and emperors beyond the borders of Christendom.
legitimacy of these empires is built on quite different foundations. These east
empires are self-sufficient and powerful, and their rulers' claims to imperial st
rest at least in part on their subordination, sometimes by military conquest
other kingdoms.35 The Sultan of Egypt is described as 'sires de V roialmes
il ad conquis et appropriez a luy par force' ('lord of five kingdoms that he
conquered and taken to himself by force').36 The Emperor of Persia's impe
status, on the other hand, appears to be based in his rulership over the 'moi
pais', 'mointe cite', 'mointe ville', 'mointes terres' ('many countries, many cit

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many towns, many lands') that one must traverse to pass through it, rather more
than on the pre-eminence of a ruler who, the text mentions elsewhere, in fact
holds his lands from the Great Khan.37 Nonetheless, at the great Silk Road city
of Tabriz, this emperor 'prent plus en celle cite pur cause des marchandises, que
ne fait le plus riche roy christien de mounde' ('takes more in that city on account
of merchandise than the richest Christian king of the world').38
Moving beyond Muslim lands, further east, we come to the two greatest
empires delineated in the Book: the Christian empire of Prester John, and the vast,
multi-ethnic, multi-religious Mongol empire of the Great Khan. The presentation
of these Far Eastern empires seems designed to throw into relief the mutability
of imperial power and to put grand ideals of universal Christian empire into
contemporary global perspective. Mandeville's readers would most likely have
already been familiar with the legendary empire of Prester John from the Letter
and its many interpolations, so it is instructive to compare the Book's deployment
of this figure with that of its major source. Bernard Hamilton has persuasively
argued that the initial Letter was produced in the ambit of Holy Roman Emperor
Frederick Barbarossa's court and was intended to function as a specular image of
an idealized alternative social order in which Church and state function together
harmoniously under the ultimate leader of a pious, ordained ruler: in short, that
it presented an image of an imperial court matching Fredericks ideal.39 While
Hamilton's account of the genesis of the Letter is not universally accepted, there
are unquestionably parallels between the Letters vision of Christian empire and
the idealizing notion of the sacrum imperium that became a 'standard formula'
under the Hohenstaufen emperor.40 Mandeville draws heavily on the Letter
tradition for his account of Prester John's empire.41 However, compared with
the priest-king's presentation in the Letter and its interpolations, his powers in
Mandeville are surprisingly circumscribed. Prester John's apostolic Christianity
is clearly differentiated in the Book as inferior to that of Latin Christendom.42
Whilst his title as emperor is supported by the fact that he has 'desouz ly mointes
rois et mointes isles et mointes diverses gentz' ('beneath him many kings and
islands and different peoples'), these lands are 'noun pas si riches comme cely
de Grant Chan' ('not as rich as that of the Great Khan').43 While the Book's
priest-king is not the Great Khan's vassal, it is nonetheless clear that, following
the major shift in world power brought about by the unification of the Mongol
tribes and the establishment of the Mongol empire, the greatest emperor of the
fourteenth-century world is the Great Khan:
Dessouz le firmament n'ad point de si grant signour ne de si puissant come est

ly Grant Chan ne dessure terre ne dessous, qar ne Prestre Johan qe est emperour
de la haute Ynde, ne ly Soudain de Babiloigne, ne l'emperour de Persie n'ad
comparisoun a ly ne de puissance, ne de noblesse, ne de richesse, qar en tout ceo
il passe touz les princes terrienz.44

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33° MEDIUM y£VUM LXXXVI.z
(Beneath the firmament there is no lord so great or so powerful as the Great

Khan, neither above the ground or below, because neither Prester John who is
Emperor of Upper India, nor the Sultan of Babylon, nor the Emperor of Persia
can compare with him in power, nobility, wealth, because he surpasses all earthly
princes in all things.)
The empire of Prester John might be long-lived, devoutly Christian, legitimized

by apostolic authority, but it is nonetheless no match for the conquering empires
of the expanded world.
The narrator of the Insular version presents a world where Christian temporal
power has fragmented and declined. The location of temporal lordship in the
West is unclear, and no European Christian ruler can match the wealth and
power of the Great Khan. The prologue, finally, pointedly ascribes the failure
of Christians to retake the Holy Land to lack of unity among Christian lords
who 'entendent plus a autry desheriter q'ils ne font a chalanger et a conquerre
lour droit et propre heritage' ('prefer to disinherit one another than to declare
war upon and conquer their rightful inheritance').45
The Book, however, takes a very different view of the expansion across the
world of Christian spiritual power, spread through the agency of the Church and
its representatives, the missionary orders. It is important to recognize at this point
that, while the Church did not refer to itself as an empire in the later Middle
Ages, canon lawyers nonetheless developed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
a detailed theory of universal Christian empire that, broadly speaking, separated
imperial power from papal authority, and subordinated the former to the latter.46
In 1302, a related doctrine of what is often known as papal imperialism found
expression in Boniface VIII's bull Unam sanctum. According to this doctrine,
holders of secular power must 'be subject to the Roman pontiff as a condition of
their salvation.47 Hie development of this universalist doctrine coincided with and
influenced late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century missions, which, under
the licence of an admittedly sometimes reactive papacy, a ttempted to secure the
obedience of non-Christian potentates and peoples alike to the Latin Christian
Church and its leader.48 While papal universalist theories had lost influence
by the time of the Book's composition, as a work that draws on a number of
thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Dominican and Franciscan missionaries'
narratives, the Book's vision of mendicant missions shows the influence of the
ideals that inspired these.49 The Mandeville-author places the most optimistic spin
possible on the outcome of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century diplomatic and
missionary efforts in Asia, which it represents as a non-Christian world in the
process of being spiritually recovered for Latin Christendom.50 The mendicant
friars are represented as in the vanguard of attempts to convert non-Christians
across the world. Mendicant houses and communities of 'bones Chrestiens' -
or non-heretical, meaning Latin, Christians - are now scattered across Asia,

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IMPERIAL FANTASIES 33i
according to the Book. And, as Heng has noted, references in the Book's sources
to communities of influential Nestorian (but in Latin eyes, heretical) Christians
in India and China tend to be quietly ignored, throwing the activity of the Latin
missionary orders further into relief.51 The Book also borrows and exaggerates
Franciscan missionary Odorico da Pordenone's anecdotes concerning the Great
Khan in order to represent him and his lands as on the cusp of conversion: the
Khan is happy to hear the faith spoken of, permits Christians throughout his
lands, and has many Christian servants 'convertyz a la bone foy' ('converted to
the true faith').52
That the earliest versions of The Book of Sir John Mandeville comment on the
fragmentation and decline of Christian empire is perhaps not surprising, given
that the book was written outside the contemporary borders of the empire and
at a time when Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV has been described as engaged
in the 'liquidation' of the empire as a political reality.53 At the same time, the
French and English sovereigns were occupied by their own territorial conflict,
with the result that the Insular Book features only passing references to any of
these sovereigns as contemporary powers. Instead, the Book presents the work of
bringing about a universal Christian order that reaches into the furthest regions of
the known world as undertaken by the Church and its mendicant representatives.
Rewriting empire in the Liege and Vulgate Latin Mandevilles at the end of the
fourteenth century
In the two adaptations of Mandeville produced in late fourteenth-century Liege,

the Book's representations of contemporary empires and its vision of the future
trajectory of Christian power in the world are almost entirely recast. Some of
the changes in these resistant rewritings relate to changes in contemporary
conditions; the papacy's focus on missions to Asia began to decline even before
the Church was riven by the schism of 1378. But these versions are also, in a
sense, imperial reworkings. Whether produced in England or northern France,
the early French versions of Mandeville were certainly produced beyond the
historic and contemporary borders of the Holy Roman Empire.54 As it comes
to be read in imperial lands, however, the Book claims the attention of readers
whose sense of their community and its place in the world is shaped by the
myth and memory, as well as the contemporary political reality, of the Holy
Roman Empire. As the two versions examined here and their context are not
well known, I begin this section with a brief introduction to these, and to the
local and wider political context of their production.
The first of the two Liegeois reworkings chronologically is now generally
agreed to be the handiwork of a Liegois cleric known as Jean d'Outremeuse.
Normally known as the Version liegeoise or Liege version, it is a substantial

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33* MEDIUM jEVUM LXXXVI.2
rewriting of the Continental version that was circulating in the vicinity of Paris
by the early 1370s.55 The version's editors, Raelet and Tyssens, date its composition
with reference to Jean's other works to between 1375 and 1390, a date window
that, with minor variations, is broadly accepted.56 As well as being the redacto
of the Liege Mandeville, Jean was the author of a chronicle by the name of th
Myreur des hystors, a Geste de Liege, and a Geste d'Ogier, now lost.57 In all these
works, Jean indulged both his intense patriotic pride in his home city and region
and his extraordinary obsession with legends of Ogier the Dane, a paladin of
Charlemagne who, over the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, had develope
from his minor role in the Chanson de Roland into a heroic protagonist in hi
own right.58 In his Myreur des hystors, Jean created links between Ogier an
Liege, borrowed Ogier's legendary exploits in the Orient from existing Ogier
romances, and substantially amplified and extended these using details from
The Book of Sir John Mandeville.w With ingenuity worthy of an internet hoaxer,
Jean also revised the very book from which he borrowed so that Mandeville,
too, contained multiple references to the great exploits of Ogier the Dane acros
the eastern reaches of the known world. As has been extensively demonstrated
elsewhere, the works knit together neatly, with the Myreur even including a clear
cross-reference to the Book. Jean d'Outremeuse cements the Book's link to hi
home city through interpolations suggesting that Jean de Mandeville returned
to Liege, composing his book and dying there.60
The second revision discussed below is generally known as the Vulgate Latin or
Hakluyt version. There are good reasons for accepting, with Ridder, the version's
assertion that the translation was completed in Liege; in particular, the text's
early reception shows a significant clustering around this area.61 Though a very
widely read and influential version of Mandeville into the sixteenth century, the
Vulgate Latin version is not very well known today, perhaps in part because, a
Ridder notes, Latin translations from vernacular sources are rare in the period
and the manuscript transmission of the text is not well understood.62 While
scholarship has been able to shed little clear light on the authorship of the version
it has provided a broad sense of when it was produced. Higgins and Tzanaki
both suggested a production date of 1396 or later, while Deluz gave it a date
of 1375, all suggestions apparently firm, though based on reasoning that is not
entirely clear.63 At any rate, the version must have been produced before Otto
von Diemeringen completed a German translation that drew upon it in 1398.64
The location of both versions of the texts in Liege and their dating to
the final decades of the fourteenth century enables us to consider how their
representations of empire were inflected by their specific temporal and local
contexts. Both versions were produced at a moment characterized by particular
conflict and uncertainty within the Holy Roman Empire, in which they were
produced, as well as by the papal schism that took place in 1378. Geographically

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close to the Carolingian historic heartland of Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), Liege

was a prince-bishopric whose prince-bishop's secular authority derived directly
from the emperor.65 Between 1378 and 1402, when both redactions were almost
certainly produced, however, the empire lacked an emperor. Though elected King
of the Germans in 1368, Vaclav IV of Bohemia never underwent the coronation
ceremony that would have conferred on him the imperial title. Indeed, the Holy
Roman Empires powers and claims had diminished substantially since the days
of the Hohenstaufen emperors, who laid claim, if only rhetorically, to universal
imperium.6(: Vaclav's father, Charles IV, had attempted to consolidate the central
power of the empire politically, assert its independence from the papacy, and
promulgate ideals of unity and of the 'indivisibility' of electoral principalities in
his Golden Bull (1356).57 Nevertheless, he divided his own territories amongst his
sons and other male relatives in a manner that seriously weakened the future king
and would-be emperor Vaclav and the future position of the empire/'8 Following
his accession in 1378, Vaclav became embroiled in a series of bitter conflicts and
rivalries.69 Old imperial lands only relatively rarely saw their titular ruler, who
on two occasions found himself imprisoned, once by his own nobles, and once
by his brother and eventual successor Sigismund (1394; 1404).70 Though the
justice of some of the accusations made against him has in recent years been
disputed, Vaclav was ultimately accused by electors from the Rhineland of a
variety of charges ranging from failure to resolve the papal schism to 'dilapidating'
the empire in granting the dukedom of Milan to Giangalazzeo Visconti and,
ultimately, of being 'inutilis' - incompetent or useless - in the empire.71 Indeed,
it is noteworthy that, within imperial lands, Liege specifically experienced in the
1390s a period of crisis and conflict regarding the extent of the prince-bishop's
authority, one that was only resolved, long after Vaclav's death, following the
intervention of his brother, emperor-elect Sigismund.72
The two Liege versions of Mandeville, I suggest below, are shaped by and
intervene in this wider political context. It is particularly striking that both texts
respond to the contemporary challenge of the rise of great eastern empires by
recourse to Western Europe's own imperial past. I argue that their treatment of
the past has affinities with that identified by Gabrielle Speigel in her study of
thirteenth-century vernacular French chronicles' uses of the past. It is not just
a 'repository of dreams and desires' and a 'consoling image of what was and
is no longer', but also as a source of authority for their visions of the present
and future.73
Jean d'Outremeuse's Liege version
Jean d'Outremeuse's Liege version makes a number of major changes to its

Continental French source, but the most significant and arresting of these is his

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334 MEDIUM iEVUM LXXXVI.z
interpolation into the body of the text of fabricated anecdotes concerning the
legendary Carolingian-era hero Ogier the Danes fantastical adventures in the
East.74 On the face of it, this is a peculiar thing to do; why fixate on an ultimately
minor figure in the Charlemagne tradition in this way, a figure defined in earlier
versions by his rebellion against his lord?75 Scholars have broadly identified
two strands in Jean's use of the figure across his histories and his revision of
Mandeville, strands that we might call the local and the global. Focusing on
Jean's uses of Ogier across his many works, Knud Togeby has observed that
Jean d'Outremeuse, 'ne et mort a Liege (1338-1400), a fait d'Ogier le Danois
le personnage central de toute son oeuvre, en faisant de lui le baron principal
de Charlemagne et en le rattachant de multiples manieres a la ville de Liege'.76
Edina Bozoky, similarly, has suggested that, in making Ogier a founding figure for
Liege in his historiographical works, Jean d'Outremeuse links his home city to a
glorious past. However, in avoiding a direct link to Charlemagne - associated at
the time with great German cities such as Cologne and Aachen - Jean contributes
in her view a un reequilibrage du prestige historique des villes du pays wallon
par rapport aux villes allemandes'.77 Ogier is in these accounts a kind of local
hero: one both linked to and drawing authority from the myths and legends
that grew up around Charlemagne, and a figure whose legendary rebelliousness
and independent achievements also distinguish him from the emperor, 'dont la
figure reste secondaire'.78 Indeed, in this respect, Jean's use of Ogier relates to
wider trends in the character's development and social relations as identified by
Emmanuele Poulain-Gautret; the legend's later incarnations aim, she argues, to
establish a relationship of mutual dependence between Ogier and Charlemagne.
This trend reflects a desire to rebalance the lord-knight relationship in a way
more favourable to the subordinate partner, but that at the same time reinforces
the lord's status.7'-1 Indeed, in the Myreur des histors, Jean suggests that Ogier is
an ancestor of all the major princes of his day, including 'les roys de Franche'
and 'les empereres de Romme et de Consantinoble'.8" Ogier proves, then, a
useful figure through which to renegotiate local-imperial political relationships
both geographically and socially. It is the global strand of Jean's interpolations,
however, that is particularly interesting for understanding how Jean remoulds
his source's understanding of empire.
As the basis of his interpolations into Mandeville, Jean d'Outremeuse takes
one strand of his hero's long and varied literary history, a strand in which he is
a representative of'une foi active, conquerante', fighting to extend Christendom
on behalf of the putative founder of the Holy Roman Empire, Charlemagne.sl It
is a tradition that draws and expands upon a strand in the historiographical and
poetic material that had accrued around Charlemagne by the twelfth century, in
which his imperial authority is related to military success against the pagans and
either his pilgrimage to Jerusalem or his acquisition of relics from there."Among

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the Capetians, Spiegel has noted, this invented crusading past was sometimes
deployed to 'supply historical precedent, and hence legitimacy to royal crusading
ventures'.83 The Ogier traditions appear to be inspired by and in dialogue with
such histories. In the early fourteenth-century Roman d'Ogier en decasyllabes,
Ogier's adventures take him to Acre in an attempt to retake Jerusalem, and to
Egypt where he ends up imprisoned by the sultan.84 In Jean d'Outremeuse's
vision, these relatively limited adventures in the East are considerably expanded
and Ogier becomes a figure who claims and marks out distant regions of the
world for Christendom and, specifically, Charlemagne; he is responsible, for
instance, for renaming the crusader fortress of Carach (Shoubak) as Mont Royal
in token of his loyalty to the emperor.85 The Version liegoise then takes particular
care to note how Ogier conquered lands and Christianized peoples across the
Middle East, Asia, and Africa:
Les genz de ce pays que on appelle Samaritans furent premierement convertis et

baptiziez des apostles, maiz puis furent destruis par Ie souldant et remis en leur
loy. Et au temps Charles le Grant, roy de France et de Rorame empereur, les
[reconverti] et les fist baptizier Ogier le Danoys, qui fu un des .xij. pers de France et
qui, oultre mer, sicomme je vous ay autreffoiz dit, conquist une foiz .xv. royaumes
et une autre fois .xij., desqueilles terres et pays celle fu une.86
(The people of this country are called Samaritans and were first converted and
baptized by the apostles, but then were destroyed by the sultan and returned to
their law. And in the time of Charlemagne, King of France and Emperor of Rome,
Ogier the Dane reconverted them and brought about their baptism. Ogier was one
of the twelve peers of France and, beyond the sea, as I have told you elsewhere,
conquered at one time fifteen kingdoms and at another time twelve, of which
lands and countries this was one.)
In other words, eastern Mediterranean lands that had, by the time of Jean
d'Outremeuse's writing, been wholly lost by the crusaders are transformed into
former vassal states of an aggressively expansionist Carolingian Empire.
In the same vein, Jean d'Outremeuse also transforms the Book's account of
the lands further to the east. Many eastern lands are identified in Jean's version
as former conquests of Ogier, including the vast, wealthy lands of Cathay and
Manzi, now under the control of the Great Khan, and those of the legendary
Indian emperor Prester John.87 In Jean's retelling, Prester John is no longer a
survival of an apostolic brand of Christianity that developed entirely separately
from Latin Christendom, and certainly no longer functions as an alternative,
idealized vision of western Christian empire. Instead, Prester John is a vassal of
the Frankish empire; the first Prester John was Gondebuef of Frisia (an earlier
Frankish conquest), a pious, Christian cousin of Ogier, installed to govern lands
that Ogier had conquered and converted 'a l'espee' ('by the sword').88 The fate
of those who refused to convert is memorialized in the very name of the river

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336 MEDIUM AtVUM LXXXVI.z
Ganges. While in the Insular and Continental versions of the Book, the river
Ganges is simply named, following an established medieval tradition, after an
Indian king, in Jean d'Outremeuse's hand it becomes a marker of Ogier's violent
conversion of the country; following his refusal to convert, the pagan king
Gangens is drowned in the river, which thenceforth takes his name.89
As Tzanaki has observed, changes of this kind 'deliberately reverse the Book's
attitudes to self-aggrandizing conquerors and pagan peoples', supporting an idea
of the 'military propagation of Christianity' that is, as we have seen, 'foreign to
the book's original author'.'-10 However, they do something else too: they present
an alternative mythologized history of the Holy Roman Empire of which Jean
d'Outremeuse's home region formed part. While Charlemagne had conquered
lands stretching from Lombardy to Iberia, the idea that his empire extended into
the eastern Mediterranean and beyond is, of course, pure fantasy. And, while
the precise source of the Frankish emperor's imperial authority was the subject
of protracted and ultimately unresolved debate, by the high and later Middle
Ages it was most usually thought to derive either from his papal coronation as
protector of the Church or from his status as successor to the Roman emperors,
specifically Augustus and Constantine.91 His empire, however, is recast by Jean
d'Outremeuse as one whose legitimacy is principally based in far-flung military
conquests and religious conversion, on behalf of God but not necessarily or
evidently sanctioned by the Church.92 The text implies that the early stages of this
empire-building involved expansionist activities reminiscent in some significant
ways of the high and late medieval European colonization practices outlined by
Robert Bartlett. Bartlett has argued that the medieval process of colonization
that shaped Europe was composed of independent agents, not normally acting
under royal or imperial command, 'reproducing units similar to those in their
homelands' in a process that most resembles 'a kind of cellular multiplication,
of the cultural and social forms found in the Latin Christian core'.93 While
Bartlett notes that, within the core areas of Western Europe, the 'new colonies
of Holy Christendom' could become 'replicas without political subordination',
relations between the 'more homogenous central zone' and the furthest reaches
of European expansionist influence were 'not between equals: they involved
domination and subordination, control and resistance'.94 The Liege version
appears to reflect some elements of this recent history of European expansion,
and projects them back into an imagined imperial past. Ogier's conquests are
clearly his own, autonomously led; they benefit and add to the glory of, but
are not purposefully directed by Charlemagne, who is a barely present shadow
in the story. Indeed, particularly when combined with the Myreurs assertions
about Ogier's royal and imperial descendants, they enhance Ogier's status relative
to his lord. The expansionist activity in the Far East aims to replicate European
structures: Ogier sets up monasteries, churches, and even rulers. But the pattern

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at times more closely reflects what Bartlett finds on what he terms the peripheries:
a model of violent political subordination. That this neither reflects the usually
diffused versions of the history of the Carolingian Empire of Jean's day nor the
historical or contemporary practice of the Holy Roman Empire is not the point.
Jean d'Outremeuse imagines an empire whose legitimacy is not in the gift of the
papacy, but based in its conquest, subordination, and Christianization of vast
areas of land and multiple peoples. But it is also a geographically differentiated
vision of empire in which core territories - those in what Bartlett calls Europe's
'central zone' - work together; nominally subordinate rulers within the core
enjoy autonomy and voluntarily contribute to empire's success, participating in
a community of peers defined against subordinated outlying regions.
Of course, Jean's vision of an aggressively expansionist Christian empire is a
reimagining of the past. But this reimagining is not a fantasy whose effects are
limited to the past; the legacies of the past extend into the present and beyond.
To understand this, it helps once again to turn to Gabrielle Spiegel's insights
into the nature of medieval historiographers' engagements with the past. Spiegel
has shown how, in medieval chronicles, the relationship between events was
often animated not so much by cause and effect as we would understand these
terms as by typology, following the model of the typological interpretation that
had been so foundational to Christian biblical exegesis. Spiegel notes that, for
many chroniclers:
By means of typological interpretation, the significance of the past is reaffirmed

for the present; the old becomes a prophecy of the new and its predeterminant
in the sense that its very existence determines the shape and the interpretation of
what comes later. In this way, the past becomes an explanatory principle, a way
of ordering and making intelligible events separated by vast distances of time.95
Jean d'Outremeuse's reimagining of the past, in his Mandeville and his

historiographical work alike, foreshadows and legitimizes a future of violent
Christian imperialism. For Jean, Christian empire has been far more successful
in the East than suggested in the early Mandeville versions. In a significant
alteration to his source, Jean insists that no lord is as great as the Great Khan
'fors settlement le Prestre Jehan' ('except only Prester John').96 Ogier's 'veritable
programme politico-religieux', bringing Christianization and conquest in tandem,
still has impacts in the present; 97 much of the work of conversion that in the
Insular and Continental Mandeville texts is credited to mendicants is instead
credited to the religious foundations that Ogier established. The Christians
responsible for, for example, the key symbolic, Christianizing work of leading
the Khan to revere the cross are 'religieux crestiens de[s] religions que Ogier le
Danoys estora' ('Christian religious of the religious orders that Ogier the Dane
created').98 But this imagined imperial past is one that contains within itself an

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338 MEDIUM jEVUM LXXXVI.2
imagined imperial future; Jean invents a Saracen prophecy that predicts the final
completion of this programme. Ogier is not dead, it holds, but merely sleeping,
and 'il revenra et si conquerra tout leur pays et convertira a la foy crestiene' ('he
will return and conquer their entire country and convert them to the Christian
faith').J<J The use of the 'sleeping king' motif here is particularly striking. Gabriele
has argued that the legend of the Last Emperor, a great Christian ruler who
would emerge in the Last Days to convert the whole world to Christianity by
force and usher in the coming of the Antichrist, was closely attached in the
eleventh century to Charlemagne, whose body was reported, when his tomb was
opened in the year 1000, to be in a form of 'suspended animation': not dead,
but sleeping.'00 This association raises the possibility that the Liege version is
obliquely referencing an imperial vision of prophetic history built up around
the mythologized figure of the empire's founding father. However, the marker
of status is transferred from the emperor himself to his Liegeois paladin.
It is through the figure of Ogier, then, that the transformation of the Liege
version's renegotiation of local—imperial and imperial-global relations emerges.
The mid-fourteenth-century Insular Mandeville reflected a sense that secular
Christian rulers had failed to bring about the Christianization of the world. The
Liege version, on the other hand, imagines a world whose scattered Christian
communities result from a period of bloody conquest. Responsibility for
converting the world passes from the apostles not to the papacy — in the text's
contemporary moment distracted by schism - but to the emperor and, notably,
his representatives. Such Christianization of the East as has taken place has
been achieved not so much by a distracted and disunified Church as through
the continued influence and agency of Ogier, a local agent acting in voluntary
partnership with an imperial ruler. But Jean's reimagined history is also typological
and prophetic; the process will one day be completed, whether peacefully through
the Christian foundations Ogier established under the aegis of the Carolingian
Empire, or by the sword. Through the suggestion of a miraculous return, feared
by the Saracens, Ogier implicitly challenges the primacy of the Holy Roman
Empire's claimed founding father.
Visions of the end of empire: the Vulgate Latin Mandeville
As the Liege version was reworked by the Vulgate Latin translator, in the same
city and at some point later in the fourteenth century, it underwent a further
set of adaptations. Many of these pertain to the Ogier interpolations, and,
taken together, work to create a very different sense of the present and future of
Christian empire in the world among the pan-imperial, clerical, educated reading
community that its Latin addressed."" In some ways, the Vulgate Latin follows
its predecessor; it too also assigns responsibility and credit for surviving and

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expanding Christian communities in the Orient to Ogier the Dane.102 However,

the Vulgate is also sharper in its criticisms of the contemporary Church, and less
so of contemporary princes. It is not the disunity of European lords that is to
blame for Latin Christendom's loss of the Holy Land, but the faults of Church
and people. The woeful state of the present Church and society is decried in a
caustic couplet:103
Virtus, Ecclesia, Clerus, dasmon, symonia,

Cessat, calcatur, errat, regnat, dominatur.
(Virtue, ceases; the Church is trampled; the Clergy strays

The demon rules; simony dominates.)
Instead, the Vulgate Latin version goes much further than Jean d'Outremeuse
in pressing the view that the ideal empire is a propagator and protector of
Christianity. In the Vulgate, Ogier's role in the expansion of the Christian faith
across the world, and in particular in the lands that now form its two greatest
eastern empires, is rendered both explicit and intentional:
Circa annum ab incarnatione Domini octingentessimum, dux Ogerus de

Danemarchia, cum quindecim cognationis suae baronibus et armatis viginti
milibus, transivit mare Greciae, et, favente sibi Deo, conquisivit Christianitati per
multa pradia pene omnes terras, regiones, et insulas, quas esse de potestate Grand
Can praedixi, nec non et omnes, quae sunt de potestate Imperii huius Imperatoris
India;."14
(Around the eight hundredth year after the incarnation of the Lord, Duke Ogier
of Denmark, with fifteen barons of his kin and 20,000 armed soldiers, crossed the
Greek sea, and, with the will of God, conquered for Christianity, through many
battles, virtually all of these lands, regions, and islands that I have mentioned as
being under the control of the Great Khan, and likewise all those that are under
the control of the empire of this Emperor of India [that is, Prester John].)
The Vulgate's carefully worded passage makes clear, as its Liegois source does
not, that these lands were conquered for Christianity intentionally, with divine
support, for the purpose of the advancement of Christianity.105 The Vulgate Latin
redactor makes a similar point about Ogier's conquest of lands and division of
these among his relatives, including Gondebuef of Frisia, nicknamed Prester
John for his piety:
Dum ergo Ogerus, dictas regiones expugnatas, divideret in hiis quindecim suis
cognatis, et quemlibet eorum in suo loco constitueret regem, quatenus Christiana
religio in ilia orbis superficie semper stabilis permaneret, tradidit isti Prasbytero
Joanni superiorem Indiam, cum 4000 insulis, regionibus, et ipsum praefecit
Imperatorem super reliquos cognatos, ut ei certa tributa impenderent, et in omnibus
obedirent. Atque ex tunc omnes successores India: sunt vocati Prassbyter Joannes et
usque in hodiernum tempus boni manserunt Christiani, et religionis asmulatores.106

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34° MEDIUM ^EVUM LXXXVI.i
(At that time, then, when Ogier had defeated the aforementioned regions, an
had divided them among fifteen of his kin, and set up each one as king in his ow
place, so that the Christian religion would always endure on the surface of th
world, he gave this Prester John Greater India, with 4,000 islands and regions, an
made him emperor over the remaining kin, so that they would give him certa
tribute and obey him in all things. And indeed as a result of this, all those w
succeeded him [as Emperor of] India are called Prester John, and up until t
day remain good Christians and committed followers of religion.)
The diffusion of Christianity across the globe is established not as a fortui

accidental outcome of expansion, but as the central aim of Ogier s conquests. I
for precisely this purpose that he creates a priest-king, whose vassals then sec
the Christianity of the various regions of his imperial domain. Once again
papacy's role in the establishment of global Christian empire is undercut; inste
the revived Western Roman Empire under Charlemagne and his subordin
partners is reimagined as central to God's plan for the Christianization of
entire known world.
The Vulgate Latin version, however, rather than acting as a cheerleader
the myth of Christian empire that, with a little help from Jean d'Outremeus
has helped to create, takes a more admonitory stance towards it. It accepts mu
of the Liege version's reimagined Carolingian imperial history, but questions t
relationship between that past and the future. The Vulgate redactor curbs
critiques the worst excesses of the Liege version's Ogerian fantasies. He expres
scepticism for Jean's claim that Ogier gained immortality through eating
fruit of the Trees of the Sun and Moon, and excises altogether its report
prophecies that the now immortal Ogier will return to conquer the world
Christendom.'07 Thus the Vulgate Latin crushes the notion that an empir
imagined glorious past foreshadows a future of global triumph. In a signifi
twist on Jean d'Outremeuse's version, moreover, the Vulgate Latin version
Prester John's empire to present a cautionary tale in which Christian imperial
expansion ultimately fails. Prester John's empire, in the Vulgate translato
interpolation, is in the process of disintegration, with catastrophic conseque
for the faith and souls of its people:
Interim, cum causa matrimoniorum aut procurationis filiorum, dispersa est pri
Imperii integritas, et multje de insulis conversae, vel potius perversa:, retrocesserun
ad vetustum squalorem paganismi primi.1"8
(However, because of marriages or making provision for children, the initial integr
of the empire has broken apart, and many of the islands have converted back,
indeed more truly perverted, towards the ancient foulness of their initial paganism
While this may at first glance appear to be a slightly unnecessary warning aga
the kind of long-distance imperial expansion in which the Holy Roman Emp

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IMPERIAL FANTASIES 34i
had never actually engaged, a closer look suggests that something else i
on here. Indeed, the empire of Prester John appears here to function on
as a mirror in which the contemporary Holy Roman Empire could view
condition. Given the political situation outlined earlier in this section
a sharp criticism of an empire's failures would surely have resonated st
across the imperial lands of the late fourteenth century. Such actions as
IV's decision to partition his territories to make provision for dependan
his son Vaclav's creation of the Duchy of Milan in 1395 could well hav
seen as fracturing the 'initial integrity of the Empire'. For the Vulgate red
however, it is the spiritual consequences of the fragmentation of Christian
that are most worrying; with the fracturing of the Christian community
loss of faith and consequent damnation among its inhabitants. Embed
this translation's representation of global Christian empires past and p
then, is what appears to be a critique of the political state of the empire
which the redactor was writing, and a thinly veiled warning about the p
spiritual consequences of the fragmentation of Christian empire.
Conclusion
This article has illuminated significant concerns about the historical, prese
future trajectories of imperial power in three late fourteenth-century v
of Mandeville. In all three versions, empires past relate to empires prese
future, and empires far away comment upon empires closer to home. In th
earliest versions, the Mandeville-author demonstrates concern with the
and legitimacy of Christian empire in the West, and presents a world in
notions of a pre-eminent Christian empire in the West are challenged by t
of great Islamic and multi-religious empires from the eastern Mediterra
China. The two Liege reworkings of the text are generally treated as per
to the Anglo-French textual tradition in Mandeville scholarship, while th
earliest versions implicitly suggest the peripherality of the Holy Roman
to the world's political geography. These reworkings write back against th
of peripherality; with their assertion that Mandeville returned to Liege,
and died there, they stake a claim to originary and central status in the
tradition, just as they make claims to the historical and political centra
a western Christian empire through which they connect their political
to the days of Charlemagne. This perhaps helps shed light on a certain p
that Leonard Scales has observed in his work on the late medieval Empir
while 'imperial government' moved 'with short and leaden steps', the im
idea, by contrast, 'drifted far and wide'.10' These influential redactions
explain some of the ideal's persistence and drift by exemplifying the k
local renegotiations and adaptations that, paradoxically, both transforme

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341 MEDIUM yEVUM LXXXVI.z
helped to make it so resilient. Redactors' interventions helped to sustain an

reinforce, through recourse to history and myth, the power of the Holy Roman
Empire as an ideal and imagined community in a period when the empire's re
political power was in decline.
The two Liege redactors brought their histories of empire to bear on thei
readings of Mandeville and their readings of Mandeville to bear on the
understanding of empire. Both texts imagine for the Holy Roman Empire
prehistory, in the form of its claimed Carolingian ancestor, of glorious Christia
expansionism. I have referred a few times through the course of this article
Gabrielle Spiegel's phrase 'a consoling image of what once was and is no longe
because it seems a particularly apposite description of this past.'10 Like othe
consoling histories, it offers not just identity- and community-affirmation through
the articulation of shared history, but also what Spiegel terms an alternative visi
to a now unpalatable present' and a way of projecting, explaining, or guardin
against the future. This past is both like and not like the invented histories o
Charlemagne's 'crusades' that, as scholars have noted, helped to provide the
legitimacy, authority, motivation, and sense of martial identity to incentivi
participants in the first and later crusades. It is something more than a versi
of history that allows all of the east' - in its newly expanded form - to be
considered 'not only Christ's patrimony but a Frankish protectorate'.1" Rathe
it is a version of imperial history that allows the redactors and their communit
to reimagine not only imperial-global relationships, but local-imperi
relationships too. Through his use of Ogier, figured as nominally a vassal but
practice a virtually autonomous partner in conquest and Christianization, Je
d'Outremeuse is able to set out a kind of blueprint for the ideal imperial—loc
relationship within a Christian empire. A relationship of mutual dependenc
and partnership between the emperor and his core subordinate polities is one
that, the version implies, can form the basis for the kind of strong and successf
programme of Christian expansion thought necessary to complete the divi
plan for universal Christian community and thus human salvation. The Vulga
Latin version, however, presents its imperial histories not so much as consolatio
but rather as admonitions to an imagined pan-imperial community of reader
Even a great, powerful, seemingly God-ordained Christian empire can lapse in
disintegration and decay. There is, perhaps, a recognition in the Vulgate that
imperial communities are political as well as imagined; without strong leadership
holding it together, empire will fail. In different ways, then, both the Lieg
and Vulgate Latin versions of Mandeville demonstrate a mutually reinforcing
relationship between the process of rewriting one's imperial past and workin
out one's own and one's community's relationship with Christian empire in th
present and future.
University of Southampton MARIANNE O'DOHERTY

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NOTES
I am grateful to the editors and anonymous peer reviewers at Medium JEvum for t
comments on drafts of this article.
' See for example Stephen Howe, Empire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2002),
I3f.; Susan Reynolds, 'Empires: a problem of comparative history', Historical Resear
79 (2006), 151-65.
2 Reynolds, 'Empires', p. iyij Peter Crooks, 'State of the union: perspectives on Eng
imperialism in the late Middle Ages', Past and Present, 212 (2011), 3-42 (pp. 9Q.
3 Reynolds, 'Empires', pp. 153, i55f. Muldoon investigates the full range of medi
connotations of the term and its cognates in James Muldoon, Empire and Order 800—18
(Basingstoke, 1999).
4 Muldoon, Empire and Order; Robert Folz, The Concept of Empire in Western Europe f
the Fifth to the Fourteenth Century, trans. Sheila Ann Ogilvie ([London], 1969).
5 L. E. Scales, 'Late-medieval Germany: an under-stated nation?', in Power and
Nation in European History, ed. L. E. Scales and Oliver Zimmer (Cambridge, 2005), p
166-91 (p. 168).
6 Crooks, 'State of the union', p. 20. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflect
on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (Cambridge, 2006).
7 Robert Folz, Le Souvenir et la legende de Charlemagne dans I'empire germanique medi
(Paris, 1950).
8 For instance, on medieval responses to traces of Imperial Rome, see Nicholas Howe,
'Anglo-Saxon England and the postcolonial void', in Postcolonial Approaches to the
European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures, ed. Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne
Williams (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 25-47 and Alfred Hiatt, 'Mapping the ends of empire',
in the same volume, pp. 48-76. On what she sees as the supersession of military empire
building in the form of crusade by 'cultural forms of empire' in the late Middle Ages see
Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy
(New York, 2003), p. 14. On perceived cultural imperialism and resistance as witnessed
by literary translations, see Sif Rikhardottir, 'The imperial implications of medieval
translations: Old Norse and Middle English versions of Marie de France's Lais', Studies
in Philology, 105 (2008), 144-64.
9 Matthew Gabriele, An Empire of Memory: The Legend of Charlemagne, the Franks, and
Jerusalem before the First Crusade (Oxford, 2013), p. 9.
10 For the general reception history see Rosemary Tzanaki, Mandeville's Medieval Audiences:
A Study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville (1371-1550) (Aldershot, 2003).
11 This vexed question does not bear upon this article and scholarship on the subject is too
vast to cite fully. For a good summary of the history of the arguments and one hypothesis
of English authorship, see Michael Bennett, 'Mandeville's Travels and the Anglo-French
moment', M/E, 75 (2006), 273-92. For a recent hypothesis linking the text to Edward
Ill's court, see W. Mark Ormrod, 'John Mandeville, Edward III, and the King of Inde',
Chaucer Review, 46/3 (2012), 314-39.
12 See the tabulation of the text's sources in Christiane Deluz, Le Livre de Jehan de
Mandeville: une 'geographie au XlVe siecle (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1988), appendix VI and
the footnotes to her edition of the Insular version: Jehan de Mandeville, Le Livre des

194.230.148.99 on Sat, 28 Jan 2023 13:47:04 UTC
344 MEDIUM j*EVUM LXXXVI.i
merveilles du monde, ed. Christiane D

13 Approaches are too varied to summ
on what she identifies as the work's k
Other World: Exotic European Travel W
other end of the spectrum, Deluz uses
geographical work in style and conten
14 On the role of diversity in the bo
diversity of mankind in the Book of
Travellers, ioso-itfo, ed. Rosamond A
studies focus on specular relationships
The Indies and the Medieval West: Thou
See Karma Lochrie, 'Provincializing m
PMLA, 124 (2009), 592-9 and Nowher
89-131 (p. 90; p. in) . The debt here is
Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Tho
15 Tamarah Kohanski, 'Introduction, i
Pynson Text with Commentary on the D
Renaissance Texts and Studies 231 (Tem
16 Iain M. Higgins, Writing East: The
[i997]). P- 19
17 E. N. Millett, 'Textual introduction',
in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College
I, xi—lxvi (p. xlv).
18 Kohanski, 'Introduction', p. xii.
19 Gabrielle Spiegel, The Past as Text
(Baltimore, Md, 1999), p. 92.
20 When taken together, manuscripts o
among the surviving fifteenth-century c
of Sir John Mandeville (New York,
Deluz, Le Livre de Jehan de Mandevill
been the subject of a detailed study, wh
backstory: Klaus Ridder, Jean de Mande
der deutschen Ubersetzung des Otto vo
21 Gabriele makes this point about re
also holds true of representations of
Gabriele, An Empire of Memory, p. 5.
22 Higgins terms the Vulgate Latin a
both texts: Higgins, Writing East, p. 8
23 The other is the so-called Continen
version over another have thus far pro
of the Continental version that wou
Susanne Rohl, Der Livre de Mandeville
handschriftlichen Uberlieferung der ko
However, the two versions are, with th
Perilous Valley episode), sufficiently cl

194.230.148.99 on Sat, 28 Jan 2023 13:47:04 UTC
as generally representative of the text's earliest version

differences that Deluz identified, based on the textual s
appears in the 'Introduction' and 'Annexes' in Jean de
pp. 7-85 (pp. 33-6) and 483-8 (pp. 485f.).
24 The outline history of the establishment of conta
a variety of syntheses. See in particular Christopher
1980) on the religious missions and Peter Jackson, Th
(Harlow, 2005).
25 On these disagreements, see Muldoon, Empire and
2f' Ibid., p. 52.
27 Le Livre des merveilles, p. 97.
28 On the history of this claim, see Muldoon, Empir
30 Ibid., p. 105.
31 Anne Latowsky, Emperor of the World: Charlemagne
Authority; 800-1229 (Ithaca, NY, 2013), p. 67. See also
p. 101. Mandeville also repeats from legends of Cha
story of the miraculous presentation to Charles of th
that, according to Gabriele, performs a similar function
authority: Le Livre des merveilles, p. 199; Gabriele, An
32 Le Livre des merveilles, p. 110; p. 112.
33 On the need to distinguish in translation between
see Gabriele, An Empire of Memory, p. 101.
34 On the development of the Holy Roman Empire's cla
(which reached their zenith under the Hohenstaufen in t
see Muldoon, Empire and Order, pp. 87-93.
35 On this usage see Reynolds, 'Empires', p. 153 and M
37 Ibid., pp. 294f; p. 141.
38 Ibid., p. 294.
39 Bernard Hamilton, 'Prester John and the three king
History Presented to R. H. C. Davis, ed. H. Mayr-H
1985), pp. 177-91. For a translation of the letter and
of recent scholarship, see Prester John: The Legend and
(London, 2015).
40 See, for example, Jacqueline Pirenne's argument for Pro
Jean (Strasbourg, 1992). On the development of the not
Frederick, see Muldoon, Empire and Order, p. 37, quo
the High Middle Ages, c.1050-1200, trans. Timothy Re
41 See Le Livre des merveilles, ed. Deluz, p. 443 n. 1, f
sources, fleshed out in detail in subsequent footnotes.
42 Ibid., p. 435.
43 Ibid., p. 433.
44 Ibid., p. 402.
45 Ibid., p. 92.

194.230.148.99 on Sat, 28 Jan 2023 13:47:04 UTC
346 MEDIUM ^VUM LXXXVI.i
46 This inevitably simplifies a set of

Order, see in particular p. 86.
47 Robert Folz, The Concept of Empi
48 On the reactive nature of many of
IV, see James D. Ryan, 'Conversion o
fourteenth-century missionaries in
Richard Gyug (New York, 2003), pp.
fourteenth-century papacy was more
assumed: James Muldoon, "The Avig
evidence of Vatican Register 6z,Arch
4S On the final phase of papal unive
Offler, 'Empire and papacy: the last st
(1956), 21-47. Mandeville's Dominican
Beauvais; his Franciscan sources Odor
John of Piano Carpini.
50 On this optimism, see Higgins, W
pp. 2I4f.
51 he Livre des merveilles, p. 318; p. 362; Heng, Empire of Magic, p. 254.
52 Le Livre des merveilles, p. 401; p. 402; p. 396.
53 On Charles IV's effective 'liquidation' of the empire, see Folz, Le Souvenir, pp. 438f.
54 French lands had of course been part of the Carolingian Empire, but did not form part
of the revived Ottonian and later Empire. See Peter Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire: A
Thousand Years of Europe's History (London, 2017), maps 1, 3, and 6.
55 For a detailed critical discussion of scholarship on the Liege version, see Ridder, Jean
de Mandevilles Reisen, pp. 149-64.
56 Raelet and Tyssens, 'Introduction', in La Version liegeoise du 'Livre' de Mandevilk, ed.
Madeleine Tyssens and Rene Raelet (Brussels, 2011), pp. XII1-LV (p. XXXIV n. 76).
Deluz places it circa 1373 and Josephine Bennett between the 1380s and 1390s: Deluz,
'Introduction', Le Livre des merveilles du monde, ed. Christiane Deluz, Sources d'histoire
medievale 31 (Paris, 2000), p. 32; Bennett, Rediscovery, pp. 156E
57 'Introduction', in Version liegoise, ed. Tyssens and Raelet, p. xxvii.
,s On Jean and Ogier, see Madeleine Tyssens, 'Jean d'Outremeuse, les origines legendaires
et le passe carolingien de la patrie liegeoise: modalite d'une reconstruction du passe', in
History and Heroic Tale: A Symposium, ed. Tore Nyberg et al. (Odense, 1985), pp. 173-205.
On the development of the legend, see Knud Togeby, Ogier le Danois dans les litteratures
europeennes (Copenhagen, 1969) and Emmanuelle Poulain-Gautret, La Tradition litteraire
d'Ogier le Danois apres le XIIIsiecle: permanence et renouvellement du genre epique medieval
(Paris, 2005).
59 Togeby, Ogier le Danois, p. 158. On the use of Ogier in the Myreur, see Dominique
Boutet, 'Entre historiographie et roman epique: le Myreur des Histors de Jean d'Outremeuse',
Histoire et roman (Bien dire et bien aprandre 22), ed. Catheerine Croizy-Naquet and
Philippe Logie (Villeneuve d'Aske, 2004) pp. 67-78. Boutet notes that Jean makes Ogier
his own ancestor, providing one reason for this glorification.
60 Claims for Liege as the original text's place of composition are debunked in Bennett,
Rediscovery, pp. 89-122.

194.230.148.99 on Sat, 28 Jan 2023 13:47:04 UTC
61 Ridder,y&z» de Mandevilles Reisen, p. 177. The assert

and Hakluyt's probable main source (Itinerarius (Goud
including the 1424 text in Minneapolis, James Ford
167", but is absent in full or part in others, e.g. B
1160-3. New York, Columbia University, Plimpton 26
Liege, Bibliotheque generale de philosophie et lettres,
respectively. Other texts from neighbouring and close
with Grave (Hamburg, Staatsbibliothek. H. G. fol
(Charleville-Mezi^res, Mediatheque Voyelles 62), conne
the north and south respectively, Leuven to the west
1160-3) and Deutz (Cologne) to the east (Minneapolis
62 Ridder, Jean de Mandevilles Reisen, p. 169; p. 177. No
so I follow the usual practice of using the version i
(1589). I will discuss Hakluyt's treatment of the text
'Richard Hakluyt and the 'Vulgate Latin' version of M
will show, Hakluyt's version works with a textual tra
annotations. While this complex textual history canno
practical implications: those elements identified as inc
and any significant variations between editions or m
In quotations, I have omitted Hakluyt's diacritics, lig
capitalization, and distinguished between u and v and
63 Higgins, Writing East, p. 171; Tzanaki, Mandeville
'Introduction', Le Livre des merveilles, p. 31.
64 Deluz, 'Introduction', p. 31.
65 Ferdinand Henaux, Histoire du Pays de Liege, 2 vol
pp. n8f.
Folz, Concept of Empire, p. 171. On the Hohenstaufen claims to universal empire, and
the decline of imperial ideal after Frederick II, see Muldoon, Empire and Order, pp. 37-42.
67 Ivan Hlavacek, 'The Luxemburgs and Rupert of the Palatinate, 1347-1410', in The New
Cambridge Medieval History, VI: c.1300-1415, ed. Michael Jones (Cambridge, 2000), pp.
56of. (p. 554); F. R. H. Du Boulay, Germany in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1983), pp.
42f.; Muldoon, Empire and Order, p. 142.
68 Folz, Le Souvenir, pp. 438f. But the empire was already seriously weakened politically
prior to Charles; see Offler, 'Empire and papacy', pp. 30-2.
69 Du Boulay, Germany in the Later Middle Ages, p. 45.
70 Hugh LeCaine Agnew, The Czechs and the Lands of the Bohemian Crown (Stanford,
Calif., 2004), p. 37.
71 Hlava&k, 'The Luxemburgs', pp. 56of.; H. S. Offler, 'Aspects of government in the
late medieval empire', in Europe in the Late Middle Ages (London, 1965), pp. 217-47; p.
219; Agnew, The Czechs, p. 37; L. E. Scales, The Shaping of German Identity: Authority and
Crisis, 1245-1414 (Cambridge, 2012), p. 199 and n.
72 Henaux, Histoire du Pays de Liege, II, 606-9.
73 On the consoling image, see Spiegel, The Past as Text, pp. 2iif. Spiegel's discussion
is quoted in part in Gabriele, An Empire of Memory, p. 6, to which I am indebted for
drawing my attention to this discussion. On the past as providing typological authority

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MEDIUM ;£VUM LXXXVI.2
for understanding the present and future, se

74 Version liegeoise, ed. Tyssens and Raelet, p
75 Poulain-Gautret notes that the legend o
'Cycle des barons revokes': La Tradition litte
76 Togeby, 'Ogier le Danois', p. 158 ; Tyssens
et le pass£ carolingien de la patrie liegeoise',
77 Edina Bozoky, 'L'Invention du passe lieg
I'epreuve du present: appropriations et usage
Pierre Chastang (Paris, 2008), pp. 75-88 (p.
78 Boutet, 'Entre historiographie et roman
79 Poulain-Gautret, La Tradition litteraire, p
80 Quoted in Boutet, 'Entre historiographie
81 On this strand in the remaniements see Po
82 For details see Gabriele, An Empire of Mem
83 Spiegel, The Past as Text, p. 94.
84 On the Chevalerie see Togeby, 'Ogier le
on the Roman, see pp. 134-48.
85 Version liegeoise, p. 63.
86 Ibid., p. 65.
87 See ibid., pp. 63, 65, 73, 85, 100, 109, no, 116, 144, 163, 154, 167, 168.
88 Ibid., p. 73.
89 Ibid., p. 167.
90 Tzanaki, Mandeville's Medieval Audiences, p. 10; p. 152.
91 I inevitably simplify here in summarizing the two major papal and imperialist positions.
See Muldoon, Empire and Order, p. 15, with fuller discussion across chs 3 and 4 of the
same volume.
92 There are some affinities with certain eleventh-century justifications of Charlemagne's

imperial authority discussed by Gabriele, in which his imperial authority, while based on a
putative link to the Roman Empire, is also causally linked to military successes, including
campaigns against pagans: see Gabriele, An Empire of Memory, pp. 9gf.
93 Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change
95-1550 (London, 1994), p. 306.
94 Ibid., p. 313.
95 The Past as Text, p. 92.
96 Version liegeoise, p. 135 at line 4605, then again ('excepte Prestre Johan'), lines 46o9f.
97 Bozoky, 'L'Invention du passe liegeois', p. 84.
98 Version liegeoise, p. 134.
99 Ibid., p. 85. See also p. 109.
100 See Gabriele, An Empire of Memory, pp. 120-2. Anke Holdenried provides a different
explanation for the evolution of the Sybilla Tiburtina text in which the Last Emperor
prophecy first appears in Holdenried, 'Many hands without design: the evolution of a
medieval prophetic text', The Mediaeval Journal, 4 (2014), 23-42.
"" Bennett's list of confirmed manuscripts shows it distributed overwhelmingly among
Austrian, German, and Low Countries libraries, with copies in libraries elsewhere often
identified as copied in these regions: Bennett, Rediscovery, appendix I, pp. 301-10.

194.230.148.99 on Sat, 28 Jan 2023 13:47:04 UTC
102 See for example PN, I, ch. 26, p. 48; ch. 36, p.
103 PN, I, ch. 1, p. 25: 'nostris exigentibus meritis'
out'); the couplet is sometimes erroneously identifi
in manuscripts, for instance: Brussels, BR, MS 1160
104 pj; cj, ^ p ^
105 Absent in the relevant passage in the Version Liegoise, p. 163.
106 PN, I, ch. 41, p. 65.
107 PN, I, ch. 29, p. 58.
108 PN, I, ch. 41, p. 65.
105 Scales, 'Late-medieval Germany', p. 179.
110 Spiegel, The Past as Text, pp. 2iif.
111 Gabriele discusses in detail, with numerous references, the profound effect of mythic
histories of Charlemagne in the East on crusading ideology, An Empire of Memory, pp.
129-59 (quotation at p. 157).

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IMPERIAL FANTASIES: IMAGINING CHRISTIAN EMPIRE IN THREE FOURTEENTH-

CENTURY VERSIONS OF "THE BOOK OF SIR JOHN MANDEVILLE"

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26396423

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IMPERIAL FANTASIES: IMAGINING CHRISTIAN EMPIRE

Investigating notions of empire in pre-modern texts can be a tricky task. As

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communities of different languages and social and cultural backgrounds, from

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of fidelity to its source version with 'potential enhancements' adapting it to

Visions of empire in the Insular Mandeville

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Dessouz le firmament n'ad point de si grant signour ne de si puissant come est

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(Beneath the firmament there is no lord so great or so powerful as the Great

The empire of Prester John might be long-lived, devoutly Christian, legitimized

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In the two adaptations of Mandeville produced in late fourteenth-century Liege,

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close to the Carolingian historic heartland of Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), Liege

Jean d'Outremeuse's Liege version

Jean d'Outremeuse's Liege version makes a number of major changes to its

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Les genz de ce pays que on appelle Samaritans furent premierement convertis et

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By means of typological interpretation, the significance of the past is reaffirmed

Jean d'Outremeuse's reimagining of the past, in his Mandeville and his

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Visions of the end of empire: the Vulgate Latin Mandeville

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expanding Christian communities in the Orient to Ogier the Dane.102 However,

Virtus, Ecclesia, Clerus, dasmon, symonia,

(Virtue, ceases; the Church is trampled; the Clergy strays

Circa annum ab incarnatione Domini octingentessimum, dux Ogerus de

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The diffusion of Christianity across the globe is established not as a fortui

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helped to make it so resilient. Redactors' interventions helped to sustain an

University of Southampton MARIANNE O'DOHERTY

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merveilles du monde, ed. Christiane D

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as generally representative of the text's earliest version

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46 This inevitably simplifies a set of

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61 Ridder,y&z» de Mandevilles Reisen, p. 177. The assert

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for understanding the present and future, se

92 There are some affinities with certain eleventh-century justifications of Charlemagne's

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