Book 6 – “The Riddle and the Knight” by Giles Milton

In 1322 Sir John Mandeville set off on his travels across Europe and into Asia and Africa. He was gone for over thirty years and on his return, as so many travellers do, he wrote a book about his experiences. His narrative of the journey and the strange sights he had seen was a best seller and highly regarded for centuries. It was only during the Victorian era that the book fell out of favour because of the perceived inaccuracies of the text. In The Riddle and The Knight the author, Giles Milton, seeks to find out how much, if any, of the book was factual and to restore the book to favour.

In order to determine how factual the original text is the author travels to some of the places he allegedly visited and which he wrote about in Part 1 of his book. These include Jerusalem, Rome and Istanbul as well as a desert monastery in Syria. He checks to see if he can find traces of the things which Sir John writes about but the book becomes a bit of a travel book at this point because the author also talks about his own experiences in these cities and what he sees.

Part 2 of Sir John’s book is where things become wildly improbable (people with faces in their stomachs and so on) and he visits places further afield such as China, India and Burma. The author doesn’t visit these places and is able to show us from where Sir John got his descriptions (mostly word for word copied from other writers). Giles Milton doesn’t feel that this negates the first part of the book which he assesses as much more likely to be true and he has a theory about why the second part of the book is written in this way.

The author also spends time searching the records of England for evidence that Sir John existed and attempting to find out when he returned to England and where he is buried.

The problem, for me, of this book is that I’ve obviously never read the original text and the author doesn’t quote it much. It means that I have no way of assessing for myself whether if what the author says makes sense. This is quite a short book so you do feel that the author is picking and choosing which parts of Sir John’s narrative to discuss but you can’t know how representative they are of the whole because the original text is not available.

This book is a strange mish mash of history and travel. It’s entertaining enough but I felt that it was somehow incomplete and nowhere near comprehensive enough.