The Riddle and the Knight

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville claimed to record a knight’s journey through the eastern Mediterranean, Asia and lands filled with marvels. The book circulated widely from the fourteenth century and influenced European ideas about geography, religion and distant peoples, yet the identity of its supposed author remains uncertain. Giles Milton treats that uncertainty as a historical investigation, following clues in manuscripts, borrowed passages and places associated with the Mandeville tradition.

The search separates the text’s literary construction from the question of whether any single traveller completed the journey it describes. Milton compares its accounts with earlier sources and with the better documented travels of figures such as Marco Polo. The result is both an inquiry into a disputed authorship and an examination of why a mixture of observation, compilation and fantasy became one of medieval Europe’s most influential descriptions of the wider world.