According to the prologue, the book was produced especially for pilgrims intending to go to Jerusalem, a claim apparently confirmed by the text, which devotes about half of its considerable length to tracing different routes from Europe to the Holy Land as well as to describing important historical and sacred sites in, around, and en route to Jerusalem. Yet the same prologue also tempts its readers with the promise of information about the larger and more diverse world beyond the biblical East, and the book appropriately spends its latter half describing the distant places only recently made familiar to the Christian West by the travel memoirs of missionaries and merchants such as John of Plano Carpini and Marco Polo (Friar John produced his Latin History of the Mongols in 1245, while Polo dictated his Description of the World in about 1298). In its unique account of both the old East and the new, Mandeville's Travels offers its audience more than just a guidebook and a geography lesson; it also offers details from local and world history, accounts of curious fauna, flora, and minerals, descriptions of the diversity of human appearance, language, customs, and religious practices, the odd story, and even a few anecdotes about Sir John himself: one learns, for instance, that he received as a gift one of the thorns from Christ's crown of thorns, that he once drank from a healing fountain which some call the Fountain of Youth (and felt the better for it), that through his renewed piety he survived a horrible passage through a mysterious far-eastern valley called the Vale Perilous, that he was not worthy to reach the Earthly Paradise, and that he served as a soldier under both the sultan of Egypt and the great khan of Cathay, the former even offering him a large inheritance and a Muslim princess in marriage, if he would only give up his Christian faith (he would not).
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