The Travels of Sir John Maundeville, 1322-1356

'I have put this boke out of Latyn into Frensch, and translated it agen out of Frensch into Englyssche, that every man of my nacioun may undirstonde it.'

Sir John Mandeville, a fourteenth-century English knight about whom very little is known and whose very existence some scholars have doubted, set sail from the land of his birth in 1322. Thirty- four years later, in 1356, he finally returned. During his travels, through Europe, the Near, Middle and Far East and India, he had seen giraffes and crocodiles, fought for the Great Khan and refused an offer of marriage to a sultan's daughter. His account of his adventures was an instant best-seller, second only to the Bible, and, despite that fact that some of it, such as the lambs that grew on trees, is now known to be untrue, it was used as a work of reference: Christopher Columbus had a copy aboard his ship when he first sailed to the Americas.

Serious journal or ripping yarn, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville is an enthralling account of a journey into the unknown.