MONSTERS AND MENTALITIES

Even though ancient and medieval travel accounts are clearly less abundant than those composed and circulated after the sixteenth century, the perspective of later developments can be misleading regarding both their quantity and their significance. In particular, medieval descriptions of oriental lands and peoples form an important body of literature, which must be interpreted in terms of the basic identities valid at the time. In the West, these identities were articulated at a general level by the Church and the Carolingian idea of empire, but in practice were fragmented and conditioned by feudal structures of power which weakened public authority and only slowly gave form to states able to appeal to national feelings. This explains the importance of pilgrimage, crusade and mission as collective ideologies.

Thus it was not really `India’ or `Cathay’ that constituted the societies most obviously distinct from western Europe. In fact anything outside the limits of the rather small Latin Christian world was, at the beginning of the twelfth century, a potential area for expansion – military, economic or cultural. This means that Greek Christians as well as other oriental churches, and of course Muslims and Jews, formed an initial frontier of `otherness' no less important than those groups which could be described as gentile or barbarian.