ABSTRACT
Overall there are three times as many surviving manuscripts of The Book of John Mandeville as there are of Marco Polo's travels. The Book's persistent popularity, as Rosemary Tzanaki has shown, indicates its status as an authoritative source of geographical information for Europeans just beginning to venture across the seas. After 1725, with the publication of an edition based on the Cotton manuscript, the Book found a new audience and began its strange double life in English literature. Reflective of its being a conglomeration of multiple sources, the Book is fragmented and discontinuous. The structure of the plot is recognizable as two distinct movements: the pilgrimage to the Holy Land and the journey to the lands beyond. This chapter explores the lands beyond the Holy Land, in which Mandeville encounters the wondrous sights and peoples of the East. The symbolic and ideological significance of Mandeville's encounter with the Sultan would have been apparent to the Book's early modern readers.
