4. Mandeville

The Itinerarius claiming to describe the travels throughout Asia of the English knight Sir John Mandeville was the first travel account stretching beyond the Holy Land pilgrimage to reach print in Italy, and by some distance the most popular travel account in late fifteenth-century Italy. “Mandeville” was a fiction, his travels were synthesized from numerous earlier textual sources comprising a kind of greatest-hits compilation of medieval European fables about Asia, and some fifteenth-century Italy readers clearly approached them with skepticism. Nonetheless, Mandeville probably had the greatest chance to influence the European imagination of musical practices in particular regions of Asia, especially India and China. In the first half of the work, concerned with pilgrimage to the Holy Land, we find expressed more briefly similar musical elements to those found in the sources analysed in the previous chapter. In the second half, presenting more free-ranging adventures throughout Asia, we find richly exemplified two musical themes that will also dominate the following chapter: the musical components of unfamiliar religious customs; and the musical patronage of the great rulers of Asia, particularly Kublai Khan.