Odoric of Pordenone, was a Franciscan friar and missionary explorer from Friuli in northeast Italy. He journeyed through India, Sumatra, Java, and China, where he spent three years in the imperial capital of Khanbaliq. After more than ten years of travel, he returned home and dictated a narrative of his experiences and observations called the Relatio, highlighting various cultural, religious, and social peculiarities he encountered in Asia.
The departure of Odoric
The ancient Persian city of Persepolis through which Odoric passed. The columns are nearly 25 meters (84 feet) tall. Drawing by Eugène Flandin in 1840.
Odoric's tomb in Udine
Chinese depiction of the Blessed Odoric (c. 1930)
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, commonly known as Mandeville's Travels, is a book written between 1357 and 1371 that purports to be the travel memoir of an Englishman named Sir John Mandeville across the Islamic world as far as India and China. The earliest-surviving text is in French, followed by translations into many other languages; the work acquired extraordinary popularity. Despite the extremely unreliable and often fantastical nature of the travels it describes, it was used as a work of reference: Christopher Columbus, for example, was heavily influenced by both this work and Marco Polo's earlier Travels.
The emperor of Constantinople holding the Holy Lance, from a British Library manuscript
Cotton plant as imagined and drawn by John Mandeville; "There grew there [India] a wonderful tree which bore tiny lambs on the endes of its branches. These branches were so pliable that they bent down to allow the lambs to feed when they are hungrie."
The only illustration in the Tractato delle piu maravegliose cosse, Bologna, 1492
Portrait of Sir John Mandeville, manuscript of 1459