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| 0202 |
Southern Tibet : vol.1 |
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therefore believed that the Franciscan Friar had been a companion to Mandeville,
and plagiated his diaries. Purchas would not reckon the Friar amongst his pilgrims,
but entertained a very high opinion about his countryman.¹ ASTLEY says that after
Marco Polo's time ›we meet with no European traveller into Tartary for above
three hundred years, excepting our Mandeville, who went thither fifty years after‹.²
He does not believe at all in Odoric: ›This is a most superficial Relation and full
of Lies . . . In short, though he relates some Things of the Tartars and Manci,
which agree with Polo's Account; yet it seems plain, from the Names of Places
and other Circumstances, that he never was in those Countries, but imposed on the
Public the few Informations he had from others, mixed with the many Fictions of
his own.‹³
As a matter of fact Odoric was a simple but honourable man, and Mande-
ville a well-read and intelligent impostor. He has stolen every word in his narra-
tive, except the description of the Sultan of Egypt and the life at his court. He
has, in a most unscrupulous way, stolen whole passages, verbally, from Odoric,
Haiton, Plano Carpini, and even from Pliny and other classics, as well as from
many books of his own time. He never made the journey he describes.⁴
One place, however, he generously confesses not to have visited; the talk is
of the first Persian kingdom which begins toward the east, toward the kingdom of
Turkestan, and stretches toward the west, ›unto the Ryvere of Phison, that is on
of the 4 Ryveres, that comen out of Paradys‹, but: ›of Paradys ne can not I speken
propurly: for I was not there . . .‹ So much is sure that in the middle of paradise,
and at its highest place there is a well, ›that castethe out the 4 Flodes, that rennen
be dyverse Londes: of the whiche the first is clept Phison or Ganges, that is alle
on; and it rennethe thorghe out Ynde or Emlak: in the whiche Ryvere ben manye
preciouse Stones, and mochel of Lignu Aloes, and moche gravelle of Gold‹.
The Ganges water is in some places clear, in others troubled, in some places
hot, in others cool. And no mortal man can approach Paradise; ›and be the Ry-
veres may no man go; for the water rennethe so rudely and so sharply, because
that it comethe down so outrageously from the highe places aboven . . .‹⁵
Under such conditions it is clear that the wonderful, though brief observations
Odoric brought back from Tibet would not be left alone by the noble knight, in
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