The Library of Charles V: History and Function

The archival program that led to Charles V’s remarkable library in the Louvre began long before his coronation in 1364. As discussed in chapter 1, the kings of France had for centuries possessed archives that facilitated and enabled their rule, along with the royal material housed at Saint-Denis.² Prior to Charles V’s reign, the most significant development in royal recordkeeping was Philip II Augustus’s creation of the royal archive in the palace on the Ile de la Cité beginning in the 1190s.³ Thereafter there developed, broadly speaking, two spheres of document production around the Crown: records for government, and books for the kings, their families, and their associates.⁴

It appears that by the end of the thirteenth century, a royal library for the monarch’s personal use had been established in the palace on the Ile de la Cité.⁵ This collection continued to grow under the last Capetians and first two Valois kings (Philip VI [r. 1328–1350] and John II [r. 1350–1364]). When in 1368 or 1369 Charles V had these books transferred to the northwest tower of his newly renovated Louvre (the “tour de la fauconnerie”), they likely already numbered in the hundreds.⁶ The king had three rooms on consecutive floors outfitted to receive the books. The lowest had wainscoting of wood imported from Lithuania.⁷ In each room there were reading desks, book wheels, shelves, and stands on which special manuscripts were displayed. In addition to books, the library also had astronomical instruments and rare objects (such as a unicorn horn), so that it was also a treasury and cabinet of curiosities.⁸

Two main sources inform us about which books were, or likely were, in this library and which had been given away or lent out between 1373 and 1380: the two inventories produced in 1380 (shortly after Charles V’s death), and surviving manuscripts. Despite the seeming wealth of information that the inventories provide, they must be interpreted with caution. As Potin observes, the first inventory of 1380 (BnF, fr. 2700, 2r–37r), which was produced for the royal librarian Gilles Malet and lists 917 manuscripts, was “un inventaire comptable et gestionnaire, pas catalographique [an accounting and managerial, not a cataloguing, inventory].”⁹ That is, the inventory did not enable one to find a desired book in a specific position, either in the inventory or in the library itself, because neither had a strict system of classification. The same is true of BnF, Baluze 397, which is a copy, with some slight differences, of fr. 2700, written on a parchment roll that was given to King Charles VI. Potin argues that fr. 2700 was made by copying the (now lost) inventory of 1373, after which an agent or agents of Gilles Malet (or Malet himself) went to the library and noted in the margins whether or not a given book was present.¹⁰ Thus fr. 2700 does not necessarily indicate the physical location of a book relative to other books, nor even whether a book is in fact in a specific room. All that appears certain is that a book was present somewhere in the library in 1380 if in the inventory it bears the marginal notation “il y est.”

While these caveats are critical, certain assumptions about the library seem reasonable even in the absence of direct evidence. Despite the uncertainty about the books’ placement, it is likely that in 1380 they remained in the rooms indicated in the 1373 inventory. This assumption rests on the observation that there was in fact a logic to the distribution of the books. The première chambre, or lowest room, was dedicated principally to texts on history and government and to devotional works, and seemingly housed the “lectures du souverain [sovereign’s books].”¹¹ As we will see, this room also housed works on geography and travel. The chambre du milieu (middle room) housed literature and encyclopedias in addition to works on government and history. The works in these two lower rooms were primarily in French. The chambre haute (upper room) contained the bulk of the library’s Latin texts, particularly works on astronomy and astrology. It would seem that both a text’s language and its subject matter determined where it resided in the library. For Potin, the library’s tripartite division corresponded to “trois modèles culturels et sociaux [three cultural and social models]”: the king and government on the lower level, the nobility and the court on the second, and the clergy and university on the third.¹² For Tesnières, the lower room was “la bibliothèque du prince [library of the prince],” the middle a “bibliothèque de recueillement et de divertissement [library of meditation and relaxation],” and the upper room a “bibliothèque de clerc [cleric’s library].”¹³

Charles V augmented the royal collection considerably through his commissions, his purchases, and the gifts he received. Most famous among these are the translations Charles ordered of classical and medieval works from Latin into French. While Avril and Lafaurie observe that Charles V’s acquisitions were all intended to “procurer au souverain des enseignements de portée politique [provide the sovereign with instruction of a political nature],” there were in fact several different genres among the translations he commissioned.¹⁴ Overtly political and related moral works include Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, Vegetius’s Traité de l’art militaire, the first four books of Valerius Maximus’s Factorum et dictorum memorabilium libri novem, Augustine’s City of God, and John of Salisbury’s Policraticus. However, Charles also commissioned a translation of Aristotle’s Livre du ciel et du monde; a devotional work, Saint Elizabeth of Schönau’s Les voies de Dieu; an encyclopedic biblical gloss, Bartholomeus Anglicus’s Propriétés des choses;¹⁵ an agricultural treatise, Peter of Crescenzi’s Rustican (a translation of the Ruralium commodorum libri XII); and Gonzalo of Hinojosa’s universal history titled Les croniques d’Espaigne.¹⁶ Christine de Pizan states that Charles also commissioned a translation of the Bible with textual glosses and allegorical commentary. According to Christine, Charles’s ambition was to have translated from Latin into French “tous les livres les plus importants [all of the most important books].”¹⁷ Be that as it may, he did make the royal library’s French-language holdings considerably more diverse.

Charles V’s decision to establish the library in the Louvre, his numerous commissions, and his persistent acquisition of books are unique in French royal history up to his time and therefore deserve closer examination.¹⁸ When he took the throne in 1364, Charles V had to contend with not only challenges to his legitimacy but also a realm demoralized and divided by what was perhaps the darkest period in its history. There was an overwhelming sense that France had attracted divine punishment, although the reason was not clear: blame was assigned to King Philip IV (r. 1285–1314), who had defied the pope and the Templars and whose punishment was being visited on his descendants and his realm; the peasantry, for not respecting social hierarchy; the nobility, for its decadence and cowardice; and Christendom for abandoning Jerusalem.¹⁹ Here is how a chronicler writing of the year 1365 characterized the era: “For the space of twenty-five years … [the French] had almost continuously sustained and endured … tribulations, afflictions, oppressions, perils, losses, many evils, homicides, and exactions; devastations of towns, churches, monasteries, and castles; depopulation, plagues, violences, rapes, and, to make an end, perturbations innumerable … caused by the wars long waged” by the kings of France, England, and Navarre.²⁰ However, the chronicler was also optimistic because God had shown compassion and arranged a peace between France and Navarre.

This pairing of despair and hope, suffering and redemption, is thoroughly biblical in its inspiration, echoing as it does the repeated rise and fall of Jerusalem in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian cycle of salvation. Like the Israelites, the French had broken faith with the Lord, and because France’s sins were of biblical proportions, so were its trials. Just as the Israelites had been saved by their leaders, so did Charles’s people need a monarch whose wisdom and prudence would lead to a reestablishment of divine favor, peace, and prosperity. Charles V’s library may be read as an attempt to co-opt this biblical discourse and shift such comparisons from despairing to optimistic by reshaping the image of royal authority. Much as the Sainte-Chapelle had allowed Louis IX to claim a unique relationship to God that continued biblical tradition, so did the library allow Charles V to evoke comparisons to biblical and ancient exemplars of royal wisdom.

Charles V thus realized that the possession of a royal library and the commissioning of manuscripts could be effective tools for governance. The many images of him receiving or reading manuscripts, such as the famous frontispiece of the translation of the Policraticus that he ordered in 1372 (fig. 6), reveal the extent to which the library was central to Charles’s statecraft.²¹ With the library, Charles sought to cultivate the image of the learned king, which had several political advantages. Charles’s much celebrated learning compensated for the perception of him as sickly and less manly than his energetic and combative father, John II. Charles could still claim to be protecting his people even though he was not a warrior king. As the preface to Denis Foulechat’s translation of the Policraticus says, quoting the book of Proverbs: “The true king, endowed with Wisdom, sits in the throne of judgment and destroys all evil with his wise gaze.”²² As this quotation suggests, the understanding of human nature that wisdom endows was itself a form of might arguably even more powerful than the ability to fight. It is for this reason that Christine de Pizan could write that Charles, though he spent most of his reign in his palaces, was a “true knight.”²³ Charles was no doubt well aware that being learned gave him an aura of authority and perspicacity that intimidated his subjects and his enemies. Thus while the king was certainly fascinated by astronomy, astrology, and divination, his large collection of books on the subjects can also be seen as a political tool for making him seem supernaturally foresightful, thereby inspiring doubt and fear in his foes and awe in his subjects.

By placing the library in the Louvre, Charles amplified this aura of omniscience. The palace itself, which loomed over its surroundings, was a manifestation of the king’s gaze, knowledge, and power (fig. 7). After Charles had it renovated, the Louvre was punctuated by numerous windows, towers, and turrets, and it had high crenelated walls, from all of which the king and his men could surveille Paris, the Seine, and the countryside. Two statues of Charles were placed on the Louvre’s exterior. That on the eastern façade faced the city, that on the south the river. With these images, Charles conveyed the sense that while his subjects and those entering and exiting Paris via the Seine might be looking at his palace, he too was watching them.²⁴ The Louvre’s evocation of royal surveillance corresponded perfectly to the Solomonic image that Charles sought to cultivate. Together, the library and the palace were integral to creating the image of a majestically wise king who, perched in his tower with his books, was able to apprehend the workings both of nature and of human minds and hearts.

Charles V’s library also marked an institutional and intellectual transformation that downplayed the feudal and chivalric vision of kingship and emphasized informed administration and the enrichment of French language and culture. The most famous books in Charles’s library, in his day as in our own, were the aforementioned translations, which brought great works into the French language and thus within reach of the king, his family, his councilors, and the literate. The translations expressed the king’s desire to improve the national character and mind. They also enriched the French language with numerous neologisms and greatly augmented its expressive capacity. They thereby embodied the king’s commitment to national expansion and renewal in the aesthetic, cultural, intellectual, and linguistic realms. Nor were the translations meant only to serve the French kingdom. Charles sought to restore Paris to its position as the new Jerusalem, Athens, Rome—to once again make France, and especially its capital, the center of learning in Europe. As Raoul de Presles wrote in the preface to his translation of Augustine’s City of God, Charles had the translations produced “for the benefit and advantage of your kingdom, your people, and all Christendom.”²⁵

The royal library was therefore intended to shape Charles V’s image during his lifetime and with posterity. Charles’s sobriquet, “the Wise,” was used during his reign and assimilated the king directly to the biblical exemplar of the king-sage, Solomon. Significantly, Solomon was believed to be both the author of the books of Proverbs and the Wisdom of Solomon, and the patron of the royal palace, the Temple, and the wall around Jerusalem.²⁶ The Solomonic quality of Charles’s translations, library, and buildings was a recurring trope in numerous texts including the translations themselves. In the preface to his translation of the Policraticus, for example, Denis Foulechat, extolling Charles’s “great love of true learning, which is true and perfect philosophy,”²⁷ quotes Proverbs: “Blessed is the man, says most noble and lofty Wisdom, who listens to me and watches over my doors and observes the thresholds of my house.”²⁸ Foulechat goes on to gloss the biblical text in a direct address to the king: “These doors and thresholds are the noble and great books, which your most lofty, clear, and subtle understanding watches over day and night.”²⁹ Foulechat’s commentary thus transforms Charles’s library, and by extension the Louvre in which it is kept, into the house of Wisdom, whose presence is a divine blessing for the French just as it was for the Israelites in the days of Solomon.

None of this is to say that the library was merely decor in Charles’s performance of monarchy. As Christine de Pizan and many others observed, Charles’s love of books was not an act. Charles read (or was read to) on a daily basis, had books with him wherever he went, and kept small permanent collections at his other residences, most famously in his study at Vincennes. Although Charles is often depicted reading alone as in the Policraticus frontispiece, the library at the Louvre was in fact open for consultation. As Becdelièvre notes, 9 percent of the library’s manuscripts contained at least one chivalric romance (of antiquity, Arthurian, etc.), which could be read for amusement and for moral instruction.³⁰ One can easily imagine that the many works devoted to the history of France, the Crusades, and Saint Louis were intended as exemplary material for the royal family and their entourage. Charles also wanted his councilors to avail themselves of his collection, which contained a far higher percentage of works of history and government (over 10 percent) than other contemporary princely libraries. As Beaune has argued, works of history and government were especially important given the intense legal disputes between France and England, both of whom drew on ancient precedents, customs, and laws to construct their arguments and to persuade third parties.³¹ Charles V’s library thus had many functions and may be understood as an essential organ of his rule.

The Mongols in the Library of Charles V

One of the library’s principal functions was to present the king and his entourage with a detailed image of the world past and present. Charles V was not a traveler. He never went on crusade or led an army beyond the borders of his kingdom. Indeed, Charles rarely left the Ile-de-France, and many of the projects for which he is famous—the construction of palaces and fortifications, the commissioning of translations and manuscripts—happened in and around Paris. The catastrophic capture of his father, King John II, by the English at Poitiers in 1356 had taught Charles the danger of risking himself in battle or traveling beyond his realm. Moreover, Charles faced the constant threats of English invasion from without and insurrection from within. As Charles saw it, he, the Crown, and the kingdom were consubstantial—France’s very existence depended on his safety and ability to govern, and he was therefore obligated to stay near his capital.³²

Charles V’s rootedness contrasted markedly with the international scope of his library. Of the 917 manuscripts listed in the 1380 inventory, more than a third are related to Asia in some way. That is, over three hundred nondevotional manuscripts preserve ancient histories set in Asia, mention Asian peoples, or are translations of works originally composed in Arabophone and Persophone realms.³³ This percentage is considerably higher if we include biblical and devotional texts. It was precisely because Charles stayed home that his library was so large and included so many works on foreign lands. Nicole Oresme writes in the prologue to the translation of Aristotle’s Politics, which he produced for Charles V, that the study of politics allowed the prince to learn about governing “selon la nature des regions et des peuples, et selon leur meurs [according to the nature of lands and peoples and their customs].”³⁴ As this statement suggests, Charles traveled in mind rather than in body. His library was intended as a universal speculum that enabled him to visit places remote in both time and space, and thereby to acquire lessons in rulership and other domains.

Among the books that brought the world into Charles V’s library were around forty that mentioned or described the Mongols, and which Charles inherited or acquired during his reign.³⁵ Many of these are works that have already been discussed in earlier chapters: Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale, which quotes extensively from John of Plano Carpini’s and Simon of Saint-Quentin’s accounts of their embassies to the Mongols in the 1240s;³⁶ the Grandes chroniques; various crusade treatises of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, including Hayton’s Flower of the Histories, Torsello’s Liber Secretorum Fidelium Crucis, and the Directorium; Joinville’s Vie de saint Louis; and Polo’s Description of the World. A work titled Les faiz des Tartars (The Deeds of the Tartars), compiled with La prinse d’Antioche (The Capture of Antioch), is also listed. Les faiz des Tartars is also the title given to the work presented by David of Ashby to Lyon II in 1274. While it is tempting to imagine David’s text in the royal library, the fact that this work was compiled with a crusade text suggests that it was Hayton’s Flower of the Histories, not Ashby’s report.³⁷ The most significant additions made to the Mongol archive during Charles V’s reign were The Book of John Mandeville and the Catalan Atlas, both of which were kept in the première chambre, or king’s study. The former, a fictional travel account, was the most popular source on the Mongols in late medieval Europe, and it survives in far more manuscripts than Hayton, Polo, or Odoric of Pordenone. The Atlas is possibly the oldest surviving map to apply Polo’s geography and is a monumental testament to cartographic innovation. Charles’s collection thus represented a consolidation and expansion of the archival work undertaken by his royal predecessors, and it ensured the Mongols’ place in the royal library and in the libraries of other French elites.

I focus in this section on three ways in which the Mongols appeared in Charles V’s library: in the copies of Polo’s Description of the World, in brief but important mentions in a cluster of lesser known but important works, and in The Book of John Mandeville.³⁸ Five copies of Polo’s Description are mentioned in the inventories of 1380. That in fr. 2700 lists four copies, that in Baluze 397 one more. One of these Charles gave away between 1373 and 1375, so that four copies (of which only one survives) were in his possession when he died in 1380.³⁹ Other works that appear in five or more copies in the 1380 inventories, aside from the Bible and devotional works, include Vegetius, the Speculum historiale, the Livre du trésor, the Livre de Sydrac, lives of Saint Louis, law books, Giles of Rome’s Gouvernement des rois et des princes, several astrological and astronomical works, the Grandes chroniques, and histories of Troy, Alexander the Great, and Godfrey of Bouillon. From a numerical standpoint, the Description was in the company of foundational and authoritative works that spoke to the king’s keenest interests. It is reasonable to assume that Charles V not only knew and appreciated the Description but saw it as an important part of his collection.

Charles’s library confirms the status of the Description among members of the Valois dynasty. As I have already noted, the Description reappeared repeatedly in the possession of Charles of Valois’s descendants and their associates for generations. While we can only speculate, it is likely that Royal 19 D 1—the compilation produced for King Philip VI in 1335–1336 discussed in the previous chapter—passed to Philip VI’s son King John II (r. 1350–1364), from whom the manuscript was probably taken after John’s defeat by the English at Poitiers in 1356. This scenario would explain why the manuscript was in England in the 1360s, and why it is not listed in either of the inventories of Charles V’s library from 1380.⁴⁰ Yet this loss did not break the chain of the Description’s transmission among the Valois. At least one of Charles V’s brothers, Duke John of Berry, also possessed multiple (three or four) copies of the Description.⁴¹ Another brother, Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, may also have had copies, as is suggested by his interest in Asian affairs and the copies of the Description owned by his descendants.⁴² Of Charles V’s copies of the Description, three were still in the royal library in 1411, 1413, and 1424.

Charles V’s appreciation of the Description is evident from the entries in the two library inventories of 1380. One of the four copies of the Description listed in BnF, fr. 2700 was kept in the première chambre. In fr. 2700 this book is described in entry 97 as follows: “Messire Marc Paul qui parle de plussieurs seigneurs et pays ou luy et ses deux freres furent et par especial parle du grant caen [Sir Marco Polo who speaks of many lords and lands where he and his two brothers were and in particular he speaks of the Great Khan].”⁴³ A note in the left margin reads: “donné a mons. d’Orleenz.”⁴⁴ This was Charles V’s uncle Philip of Orleans, brother of King John II (and thus a member of the Valois dynasty), who died in 1375. How long Charles had had this copy before he gave it away is impossible to say, and as far as is known it is no longer extant. The other three copies of the Description listed in fr. 2700, and the copy listed in Baluze 397, were in the chambre du milieu. All of Charles’s copies were in French, and none was kept in the upper or “clerical” room of the library. One copy was covered in parchment, one is described as “non enluminé [not illuminated],” one was covered in “drap d’or [cloth of gold],” and the most sumptuous was “couvert de drap d’or, bien escript et enluminé [covered with cloth of gold, well copied and illuminated].”⁴⁵ Thus one copy of the Description was in the king’s private study, and another was the object of luxury facture. It seems safe to assume that not only did Charles V read the Description, he intended others to have access to it as well.

As a dynastic heirloom and unprecedented contribution to ethnogeographical knowledge, the Description was emblematic of the political and intellectual motivations that underlay the creation of Charles V’s library. The Description was a monument to Charles V’s descent from Charles of Valois and King Philip VI, the first Valois king and Charles V’s grandfather. The Description also represented a long tradition of information gathering on Asia by and for the French Crown. It was the most remarkable of the many accounts of the Holy Land and Asia that Charles V’s Capetian and Valois ancestors had acquired and inspired, several of which Charles preserved in his library. At the same time, the Description’s content reflected the breadth of Charles’s curiosity and the diversity of his library. As Oresme writes in the preface to Le Livre du ciel et du monde, Charles was “desirant et amant toutes nobles sciences [desirous and a lover of all noble forms of knowledge].”⁴⁶ To a greater extent than most other works in Charles’s library, the Description was a mirror of the world that allowed the king to learn “selon la nature des regions et des peuples, et selon leur meurs”—that allowed him, that is, to indulge his curiosity and to travel without leaving his library. The Description reflected not only the history of the Valois dynasty and of royal book collecting but the current state—the vast geographical and temporal reach—of the library’s holdings thanks to Charles’s assiduous collecting and patronage.

The Description’s encyclopedic content—which treats of everything from government, religion, and gastronomic habits to animals, astrology, and astronomy—overlapped with many other works in Charles’s library. We can appreciate the extent to which the Description was representative of Charles V’s library by imagining the collection as a network and by mapping the Description’s intertextual relationships with the rest of the collection. This approach reveals the ways in which the Description, though unique, was nonetheless connected to existing literary traditions. Put another way, we can see how the Description brought the Mongols into French literary culture by examining how the Description draws on works or traditions that were preserved in Charles V’s library. For example, as I discussed in the previous chapter, the Description’s portrait of a centralized administration and strong monarch likely appealed to elite French readers. Given Charles V’s interest in government, economics, ethics, and astrology, all of which are discussed as aspects of Kublai’s ideal realm and represented extensively in Charles’s library, it is not at all surprising that the Description occupied a prominent place among his books.

Another tradition on which the Description drew and that is well represented in Charles’s library is the romance of Alexander the Great. The inventory in fr. 2700 lists eight manuscripts that contain what is definitely or presumably Alexander Romance material, while a ninth manuscript contains an Alexander text in Latin that may have been the Alexandreis.⁴⁷ One of the eight vernacular manuscripts may have contained the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César; three appear to have preserved the Roman d’Alexandre, two the Voeux du paon, one the Restor du paon, and one the Old French Prose Alexander.⁴⁸ Polo cites a “livre Alixandre [book of Alexander]” that claims Alexander enclosed the “Tartars” behind the “Porte de fer [iron gate].”⁴⁹ However, according to Polo, the “Tartars” did not exist in Alexander’s time, and the Macedonian in fact enclosed the Cumans (“Comains”).⁵⁰ In this way the Description “updates” the Alexander legend, rehabilitates the Mongols, and complements the Alexander texts in Charles V’s library. Although Polo makes only a few other explicit or implied references to the Alexander Romance tradition, Alexander’s legend is arguably one of the most important intertexts for the Description. Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan are presented as two of the greatest conquerors and lords in history, surpassing even Alexander the Great. As Polo writes, Kublai is the greatest ruler who has ever lived, and greater than all living European lords combined. Instead of employing translatio studii et imperii to show how power has passed from Greece to the medieval West, the Description portrays a west-to-east translatio and declares that power and wealth have moved to the Yuan Empire. Polo adopts a Mongol perspective and implies that the Mongols are the true heirs to Alexander.

Another source on which the Description draws is the Letter of Prester John, of which Charles owned two copies.⁵¹ Polo, following a long-standing Eurasian tradition, weaves Prester John into the history of the Mongols. As we saw in chapter 1, Jacques de Vitry identified “King David”—a composite of Central Asian lords, one of whom was Genghis Khan—as the figure “quem vulgus presbyterum Iohanem appellant [whom the common people call Prester John].”⁵² Simon of Saint-Quentin, whose account is excerpted in the Speculum historiale, wrote that the Mongols had rebelled against and killed their lord King David, son of Prester John.⁵³ Polo presents Prester John as a mighty lord in central China who goes to war with and is killed by Genghis Khan. He also mentions Prester John’s descendants.⁵⁴ The Description may thus be read as a direct response to the legend of Prester John. On the one hand, it is an intentional demythification and rationalization of Asia that counters the marvelous tradition that Prester John texts had contributed to and come to represent by the late thirteenth century. On the other, it expresses Polo’s Mongol triumphalism by insisting on Prester John’s defeat at the hands of Genghis Khan.

The Description also exhibits the broader influence of other genres and works that were housed in Charles V’s library. Rustichello da Pisa, Marco Polo’s amanuensis and likely coauthor, was the author of an Arthurian romance compilation. As Gaunt has discussed, it is probably because of Rustichello that the Description bears the imprint of chansons de geste, Arthurian romances, and chronicles, genres that abound in Charles’s collection.⁵⁵ For example, Polo describes a ceremony during the Mongols’ New Year’s festival for which a lion is brought before the khan, throws itself on the ground, makes a sign of “great humility,” and seems to acknowledge that the khan is its lord by remaining in this position unchained.⁵⁶ This scene resembles that in Chrétien de Troyes’s Le chevalier au lion in which the lion kneels before Yvain as a sign of fealty, and it may be an example of Rustichello’s intervention in Polo’s story.⁵⁷ Whether a reference to Chrétien was intended or not, the Description is a multifaceted work that defies categorization. An educated medieval reader like the king could have perceived in the Description resemblances to and echoes of any number of texts, particularly those French works with which Rustichello was deeply familiar and on which he apparently drew. The Description’s links to works in the French literary tradition may be another reason Charles V and other French elites appreciated it.

Despite its early acquisition by French readers and its historical significance, the Description was apparently not widely known beyond the nobility and some clergy in fourteenth-century France. As Gadrat-Ouerfelli has shown, almost no fourteenth-century French authors cite the Description in French or Latin.⁵⁸ Charles V’s library confirms this observation. With the exception of The Book of John Mandeville and the Catalan Atlas, both of which seem to respond to Polo’s text, the Mongols appear in the library in historical and encyclopedic works that were themselves decades old, and in some cases over a century old, when Charles was crowned in 1364. Thomas of Cantimpré’s Bonum universale de apibus (ca. 1260) was translated into French as the Livre des mouches à miel for Charles V in 1372.⁵⁹ Interspersed throughout the work are events in the history of the Dominican order, including Mongol attacks in Hungary, Louis IX’s embassy of 1249, and the Mongol lord’s vision of Christ.⁶⁰ Between 1373 and 1379, Jean Golein translated Gonzalo of Hinojosa’s Cronice ab origine mundi (before 1327) for Charles V; it appears in fr. 2700 as Les croniques d’Espaigne.⁶¹ Charles V’s copy does not survive, but BL, Royal 19 E VI, produced ca. 1400–1407 in Paris for Charles’s brother Duke John of Berry, has an image of the Great Khan on folio 441r. This copy must descend from that made for Charles and may indicate that the original had similar iconography, although another copy from the same time does not include this image.⁶² The Mongols appear several times in this text, which recounts their conquests in Asia and the Middle East and the embassy to Louis IX in Cyprus. It also describes with great accuracy the territorial extent of the four khanates in the early fourteenth century.⁶³ The Mongols appear too in Bernard Gui’s Flores chronicarum (1306–1331), which Charles commissioned to be translated in 1368 and appears in the inventory in fr. 2700 as the Chronique martinienne.⁶⁴ It contains an account of Louis IX’s embassy to the Mongols in 1249 that is of interest because it gives a more positive spin to the embassy’s reception than does Joinville. The chronicle reports that the friars arrived to discover that the “king of the Tartars” had died, but the queen and her son “honorerent les messages et leur donnerent donz [honored the messengers and gave them gifts]”; no mention is made of Oghul Qaimish’s demand for tribute.⁶⁵ Thus, while these translations expanded the Mongol archive, they did not contribute any significant new information to it. They demonstrate too that the Mongols occupied a relatively limited place in European historiography, and that the same stories—for example, the invasions of Hungary, Louis IX’s embassy—were told repeatedly.

Aside from the Speculum historiale, the only encyclopedic text in Charles V’s library that mentioned the Mongols is the Livre de Sydrac (last third of the thirteenth century, by an anonymous author), of which the king owned five copies. The Mongols are mentioned in Sydrac’s prophecy about the Muslim caliphs: after a reign of 740 years the caliphs will be subjugated by both Christians and “Tartars,” the latter of whom will emerge from between two mountains. The Christians and “Tartars” will then fight in the far east around the “arbre sec [dry tree],” which according to the Sydrac “est au chief d’Orient [at the top of the Orient].”⁶⁶ The Sydrac here appears to be referring to the legend of the enclosed nations that was widespread thanks to the Alexander Romance and Pseudo-Methodius, the latter of which occurs twice in the library inventory in fr. 2700.⁶⁷ In the Sydrac as in the chronicles, the Mongols play a well-established role as harbingers of the apocalypse, which ties Sydrac to the long tradition of eschatological interpretation of the Mongols that begins with the Relatio de Davide.

Perhaps the most important evidence for the Mongols’ place in the French literary tradition by the time of Charles V appears in The Book of John Mandeville, a fictional travel account from ca. 1360.⁶⁸ Charles owned only two copies of Mandeville, but one of his manuscripts is of great historical significance because it is the oldest dated copy (1371) and the oldest extant illuminated copy. This manuscript was given to Charles by his physician Gervaise Chretien, was in the library’s première chambre, and survives to this day as BnF, nouv. acq. fr. 4515 (the other copy has presumably been lost).⁶⁹ This copy of Mandeville contains an accurately written Hebrew alphabet and Hebrew inscription at the end, and it was originally compiled with a plague treatise (today BnF, nouv. acq. fr. 4516). This manuscript is thus one of the most striking expressions of the multifaceted intellectual culture of Charles V’s court.⁷⁰

Mandeville is in essence an anthology that combines material from different sources into an imaginary travelogue.⁷¹ The narrator’s movement from place to place allows him to move simultaneously from story to story, source to source. As a product of citation and paraphrase, Mandeville is akin to florilegia or an encyclopedia, and it is a much more bookish text than the Description. Whereas Polo reports new information about the Mongols and relies on no previous European sources about them (or refutes these sources), Mandeville uses only preexisting works, in particular the Speculum historiale, Hayton, and Odoric of Pordenone. Mandeville signals the final fossilization of the Mongols in the French literary tradition—the culmination of generations of recopying and citing the same episodes and interpretations over and over. Mandeville’s thematic familiarity, and the manner in which it confirmed and comforted the Latin Christian reader’s worldview, no doubt helps explain why it survives in around three hundred manuscripts and was apparently much more widely read than Polo, Hayton, or Odoric.

Aside from its success, The Book of John Mandeville is important to the history of the Mongol archive because of its positive portrayal of the Mongols. The Mandeville author, recycling as he does existing texts and traditions, and dreaming throughout of the universal triumph of Latin Christianity, could easily have chosen to embrace the “apocalyptic Mongol” tradition and demonize the Mongols for their “paganism.” Instead, “Mandeville” intentionally rewrites or refutes sources to avoid disparaging the Mongols. For example, one of Mandeville’s sources, the Mirabilia mundi, states that Gog and Magog were “Tartars,” but in Mandeville the enclosed peoples are Jews.⁷² “Mandeville” also writes that he had been told that the women descended from Noah’s son Ham (“Cham”) had fathered children with demons, and from these children came Muslims, “Tartars,” and the monstrous peoples of the East. According to this account, the emperor of the “Tartars” was called “Cham” in honor of their progenitor. However, while “Mandeville” agrees that Asians descend from Ham, when he goes to India he learns that the rest of the story is false. For one, the “Tartar” emperor is called not “Cham” but “Chan.”⁷³ For another, the “Tartars” are not demonic. In fact, their rise to power was providential and divinely inspired, as suggested by the visions of Genghis Khan that “Mandeville” describes and by the fact that Genghis was their first lawgiver.⁷⁴ The Mandeville descriptions of the Mongol emperor and his realm are overwhelmingly positive, and the author even seems to hold out hope for their conversion.⁷⁵ While he finds it a great pity that the khan does not believe firmly in God (by which he means the Christian God), the Mongols do believe in “the immortal and all powerful God,” and the khan does allow Christians to move freely throughout his empire.⁷⁶

It is difficult to overstate the importance of Mandeville’s depiction of the Mongols. This text was a major reference on Asia for generations, and had it portrayed the Mongols as monsters, I have no doubt that the Mongols would have been viewed much more negatively in Europe for centuries. Instead, “Mandeville” employs a laudatory and hopeful tone, and he integrates the Mongols fully into the family of rational and organized nations. In other words, the Mandeville author chose to adopt the perspective of his sources, particularly Hayton and Odoric. And while it seems that this author willfully avoided citing Polo’s Description, it is hard not to see Polo’s influence in this positive portrayal as well.

Polo’s Description and The Book of John Mandeville are also comparable in that they represent two poles of Charles V’s intellectual culture: the Description the desire for modern and novel information about the foreign largely devoid of judgment, Mandeville the desire to root foreign accounts in religious and geographical tradition. However, neither work represented anything near the true situation in Asia by the time Charles V took the throne in 1364. Only four years later, the Yuan Empire came to an end and the Mongols were replaced by the Chinese Ming dynasty. Even as the Mandeville author was composing his book in the 1350s, the Yuan Empire had descended into a “chaotic tableau of ruthless intertribal fighting for supremacy, of intrigues, political plots, betrayal, and murder.”⁷⁷ When Charles moved the royal book collection to the Louvre in 1368–1369, the Yuan Empire was already a memory. In some ways, then, we can see Charles V’s library as a regression in knowledge about the Mongols. This is particularly true if we compare Charles’s Mongol archive to Royal 19 D 1, which was an attempt to combine ancient texts with up-to-date information about the East. When Royal 19 D 1 was produced, Odoric of Pordenone had only recently returned from his travels and the Directorium was freshly written. Charles V’s reign witnessed no such attempt to gather information about the Mongols, or any other Asian people for that matter, with one great exception—the Catalan Atlas.

The Catalan Atlas and the Library of Charles V

Produced in Majorca around 1375, the Catalan Atlas (BnF, esp. 30; figs. 8–10) is one of the most famous and remarkable maps in world history and has long fascinated scholars.⁷⁸ While most studies of the map are concerned with its sources, makers, and place in the history of cartography, I am interested in the map’s meaning in the context of Charles V’s book collection and the Mongol archive. It is possible that the map was made with Charles’s intellectual interests in mind, but even if it was not, many thematic correspondences between the Atlas and the library show them to be products of overlapping geographical cultures. Like the king’s library, the Atlas emphasizes the size and importance of Asia, and it combines traditional and modern sources on Asia. The map’s portrayal of the Mongols reflects the different traditions about them in European writing that were also represented by works in Charles V’s library. The map incorporates apocalyptic interpretations of the Mongols in its depiction of Alexander the Great, the devil, Gog and Magog, and Antichrist. At the same time, it portrays the Mongols and their realms in a thoroughly realist and rationalist light informed by modern writers, notably Marco Polo. It also adopts the assemblage and geographical perspective of The Book of John Mandeville. The Catalan Atlas is in many ways the culmination of the Mongol archive, in that it reflects the previous 135 years of contact between Latin Christians and the Mongols.⁷⁹

The Catalan Atlas has been in the possession of the French state since the 1370s. Entry 200 in the inventory of Charles V’s library in fr. 2700 informs us that the Atlas was in the première chambre, or king’s study, and reads: “Une quarte de mer en tabliaux faicte par maniere de unes tables painte et ystoriee figuree et escripte et fermant a iiii fermoers [A nautical chart on several sheets, arranged as one panel that is painted with figures, illuminated, and inscribed, and closed by four clasps].”⁸⁰ There is no doubt that this description corresponds to the Catalan Atlas, as it matches the Atlas’s original format and appearance. Moreover, in one of the map’s opening texts the year 1375 is used as the starting point to calculate the Golden Number, which suggests that the Atlas was completed in that year.⁸¹ The map was therefore most probably in Paris before the death of Charles V in 1380.⁸²

The Catalan Atlas originally consisted of six sheets of parchment that altogether measure 64 × 300 cm. In the sixteenth century these sheets were glued to seven stacked wooden panels, to which they are still attached, to make a book. The sheets were also folded lengthwise down the middle and eventually split, so that today the Atlas is composed of twelve sheets damaged along their vertical edges.⁸³ The first sheet contains a text on the days of the month, a diagram of the tides, a diagram for calculating movable feasts, and a figure and chart for determining the appropriate time for surgery and bloodletting. The second sheet has texts describing the world, the phases of the moon, the tides, and astronomical calculations. Sheets 3 and 4 preserve the impressive astronomical and astrological wheel—essentially a cosmic diagram that portrays the earth, the four elements, the planets, the zodiac, the phases of the moon, and the seasons, among other features. The first four sheets, which encompass phenomena ranging from the corporeal to the cosmic, the microcosm to the macrocosm, establish the universal sweep of the Atlas.

The map portion of the Catalan Atlas depicts the expanse of the ecumene—the habitable world—from its western to its eastern edges. The map was originally designed to be seen lying flat as is evident from its legends and images, which are laid out for viewing from different vantage points. It combines a portolan chart of the Mediterranean with a mappa mundi but expands the representation of Asia far beyond what earlier European maps had shown.⁸⁴ It was made by Elisha Cresques (1325–1387), a Jewish mapmaker, scribe, and illuminator who lived in Majorca.⁸⁵ As Kogman-Appel discusses, Elisha was apparently a highly educated man—multilingual, well read, skilled in painting, cartography, and manuscript making—who had access to a wide array of Jewish, Christian, and Arabic material, as well as firsthand information from sailors, all of which he used to produce his charts and maps. The Catalan Atlas is thus an encyclopedic expression of the geographical knowledge of multiple cultures and social milieus.

One of the most important questions about the Catalan Atlas concerns whether Elisha Cresques knew for whom he was making it and, if so, how much this influenced his design of the map. Any consideration of this question is speculative, as King Charles V is not named on the map, and there survives no document tying him to its creation. Given that Elisha Cresques was an official mapmaker for King Peter IV of Aragon, one might assume that Peter commissioned the Catalan Atlas as a gift for Charles V, who was his distant cousin.⁸⁶ It is also possible that Charles himself requested the Atlas and perhaps even suggested material to be included. Either way, there is good reason to think Elisha knew that the map was destined for Charles V and that he tailored its content to the king’s interest in history and science. Paris is the only city on the entire map designated by three city icons (fig. 11); Khanbaliq (fig. 12), like Venice and Baghdad, has two “mirrored” icons, while all other cities have a single icon.⁸⁷ The French royal arms are emblazoned on a banner that rises from Paris, and the city’s name is written twice in red ink (fig. 11). Paris thus receives special visual emphasis. In the border around the astronomical and astrological wheel on panels 3 and 4, the red, blue, and gold diamonds of the diaper ground all have stylized fleurs-de-lys painted into them (fig. 13). The wheel, like the description of the earth, diagram of the tides, bloodletting figure, and images of astronomers that precede it, suggests that Elisha Cresques knew of Charles’s interest in astronomy, astrology, and medicine. The city of Shiraz is given an extra-large icon and a legend explaining that it was the birthplace of astronomy (fig. 14), which again seems to address the king’s interests directly.⁸⁸ The legend devoted to Khanbaliq mentions Kublai’s use of astronomers and his construction of a new walled city. This may be an intentional evocation of Kublai’s resemblance to Charles, who also employed astronomers and was a builder king responsible for much construction in Paris—including the extensive wall on the Right Bank and, of course, the library in the renovated Louvre.⁸⁹

It is reasonable to see these features of the Catalan Atlas as a form of personalization for Charles V. But was Elisha Cresques aware of the contents of Charles’s library, and did he take the library into account when designing the map? I do not think we can answer this question definitively, but there are certainly numerous commonalities between the map and the library—from a shared emphasis on the non-European world, to the Atlas’s use of texts that were also in the library. These affinities are most easily explained by seeing the Atlas and the French royal library as parallel products of overlapping geographical cultures whose image of the world had greatly expanded through the combining of modern accounts and travel experiences with traditional sources. As I noted earlier, more than a third of the works in Charles V’s library related to Asia in some way, and far more if we count devotional texts. The Catalan Atlas presented a modern view of the world that similarly emphasized Asia’s immensity and Europe’s relative smallness. Of the eight sheets of the Atlas devoted to the depiction of the ecumene, Europe occupies the upper portion of two and a sliver of a third. Whereas O-T maps show Europe as a quarter of the world, Europe’s surface area on the Atlas corresponds to about 10 percent of the total landmass represented. The Atlas was apparently intended as a textual and visual aid that allowed Charles to globe-trot in the comfort of his library—to contemplate the “nature of lands and peoples and their customs” in conjunction with his books on Asia and Africa.

The geographical culture from which the Atlas and library both arose is evident too in the many texts and traditions common to both. It is in these shared sources that we see the extent to which the Catalan Atlas complemented and completed the Mongol archive in France. The Mongols appear in different guises on the Atlas, just as they do in Charles V’s library. The apocalyptic tradition, according to which the Mongols were harbingers of the apocalypse or allies of Antichrist, is apparent in a cluster of images and texts on sheets 11 and 12 (figs. 15, 16). The first text in question, on sheet 11, reads:

The Caspian [i.e., Caucasus] Mountains, where Alexander saw trees that were so tall that their tops touched the clouds, and he would have died there, had not Satan come to his aid with his cunning, and with his art he shut up the Tartars [tartres] Gog and Magog and had the two bronze statues shown above made to bind them with a spell. Likewise here he shut up various tribes who have no scruples about eating any kind of raw flesh. That is the nation from which the Antichrist will come forth, and their end will be by fire, which will fall from the sky and destroy them.⁹⁰

To the right (east) of this text, on the other side of a mountain range, a crowned Alexander converses with the devil, and near them are two figures blowing trumpets that represent the two bronze statues guarding the mountain pass (fig. 15). Next to Alexander and the devil, oriented 180 degrees from them on the edge of Asia on sheet 12, is an image of a crowned figure who holds a branch in each hand and appears to distribute golden orbs falling from the branches to two groups, one of laypeople (left) and the other of ecclesiastical figures (right) (fig. 16). A caption to the northeast, in the ocean, tells of Antichrist and seems to correspond to the figure holding the branches.⁹¹ Finally, at the top (far north) of sheet 12 is a text that reads: “The great lord and ruler of Gog and Magog. He will march out with many followers at the time of Antichrist.”⁹² Below this legend, written in alternating blue and red capitals, is the rubric “GOG I MAGOG,” next to which (to the west, on sheet 11) is a mounted and crowned figure who rides under a canopy and leads foot soldiers (fig. 16). These figures are shown moving from right to left (west to east), as if they were marching toward Antichrist, who is larger than the lord of Gog and Magog and who looks in the direction of the approaching army.

With these images and texts, the Catalan Atlas associates the northeastern edge of the habitable world with end-times and makes the “Tartars” central actors in the apocalypse. Charles V’s library contained several works related to these texts and images, either as sources or as the products of these sources. Chief among these works are the Hebrew Bible, in which Gog (of the land of Magog) is an enemy of the Jewish people (Ezekiel 38–39), and the Christian Bible, in which Gog and Magog are allies of Antichrist (Revelation 20:8).⁹³ The library also contained two copies of Pseudo-Methodius, according to whom Alexander the Great enclosed Gog and Magog behind the Caspian Gates, from which they would break out at the apocalypse.⁹⁴ The Roman d’Alexandre and the Old French Prose Alexander, both of which were in Charles V’s library, recount versions of the enclosure of Gog and Magog but make no mention of the “Tartars” or Satan.⁹⁵ The Atlas text appears to conflate the episode of the Perilous Valley, from which Alexander escapes by forcing a demon to reveal the exit, with the enclosure of Gog and Magog.⁹⁶

The Atlas’s identification of Gog and Magog as “Tartars” recalls the many European texts from the thirteenth century, and particularly from before 1274 and Lyon II, that interpreted the Mongols as precursors of the apocalypse. In Charles V’s library, this tradition was visible in Simon of Saint-Quentin’s account (excerpted by Vincent of Beauvais in the Speculum historiale), which relates that Guyuk’s private name was Gog and that of his brother Magog: “In this way did the Lord predict by the voice of Ezekiel the coming of Gog and Magog, and by the same prophecy he promised to exterminate them.”⁹⁷ This tradition also influenced the aforementioned Livre de Sydrac (five copies in Charles’s library), which identifies the “Tartars” as “unne orde gent d’entre deus montaingnes [a filthy people from between two mountains].”⁹⁸ There is thus a rich layering and condensing of sources from different eras in the Atlas’s texts and images, which echo a long tradition of apocalyptic interpretation and prophecy around the Mongols—a tradition represented fully in the library of Charles V.⁹⁹

In addition to this “apocalyptic Mongol” tradition, the Catalan Atlas also presents a historical vision of the Mongols completely devoid of legend and prophecy. Indeed, proportionally speaking, the space devoted to the realistic depiction of the Mongols on the Atlas far outweighs that devoted to the apocalyptic. Four realms ruled by the Mongols or their successors—corresponding to the Golden Horde, the ilkhanate, the Chaghatai khanate, and the Yuan Empire—occupy almost half of the Atlas, and the largest realm of any on the map is that of Kublai Khan (fig. 12). While it is tempting to imagine that Elisha Cresques intended this representation of the Mongol khanates as an acknowledgment of the long history of Franco-Mongol contact, I think it is unlikely. Rather, the Atlas’s portrayal of the Mongols is an embrace of modern texts that supplement, rewrite, or refute traditional sources on Asian geography. In this way it echoes Charles V’s copies of Polo and Hayton. Moreover, like the library, the Atlas did not contain current information on Asia’s political landscape or on the Mongols. Kublai—“Holubeim”¹⁰⁰ on the map—had been dead for over eighty years by 1375. The most recent khan depicted on the Atlas—Janibek, ruler of the Golden Horde—had died in 1357. It is also not clear that Elisha Cresques tied “Jambach” (Janibek), the “Rey del Tauris” (king of Tabriz, or ilkhan, who is not named), and “Chabech, ruler of the kingdom of the Medes” (Kebek Khan, lord of the Chaghatai khanate, d. 1327) to the Mongols—nor is it clear that Charles V would have done so.¹⁰¹ I will therefore focus on “Holubeim,” the only king who is identified on the Atlas as a Mongol (“the most powerful prince of all the Tartars”), and his realm, which is demarcated by flags adorned with three crescents.¹⁰²

The Atlas’s emphasis on Kublai reflects the deep influence of Marco Polo’s Description of the World. The Description was one of the most important sources for the Atlas’s representation of Asia, and certainly for its depiction of the Yuan Empire (“Catayo”). It is generally accepted that the Catalan Atlas is the oldest surviving map to employ information from Polo’s text.¹⁰³ Gadrat-Ouerfelli’s comparison of the Atlas’s description of the Lop desert with the related passages in the Catalan version and French version of the Description (her source for the latter is Royal 19 D 1) indicates that Elisha Cresques used the French version of the Description.¹⁰⁴ I would add as confirmation the following comparison between the account of Khanbaliq in the French Description and on the Atlas:¹⁰⁵

I have provided more text from the Description for clarity, but I think it is obvious that the Catalan text derives directly from a French original, and that it was carefully translated. Certain phrases in the Atlas text—notably “avia una gran ciutat antigament qui avia nom Guaribalu e lo gran Cha trobà per l’estornamia que aquesta ciutat se devia revelar contra él”—are almost a word-for-word translation of the French text. Other phrases are very accurate abridgments. The information is presented in the same order, and all of the numbers are the same in both texts.

Gadrat-Ouerfelli also provides evidence that the French Description was in the orbit of King Peter IV of Aragon in this period, and she concludes:

On peut donc tout à fait supposer la présence du livre dans sa version française en Catalogne dans la seconde moitié du XIVe siècle et son utilisation par l’atelier des cartographes majorquins, d’autant plus si l’on considère que la carte est une commande royale destinée à être offerte au roi de France.

[Thus one can certainly assume that [the Description] in its French version was in Catalonia in the second half of the fourteenth century and that it was used by the workshop of Majorcan cartographers, especially if one considers that the [Catalan Atlas] was a royal commission meant to be given to the king of France].¹⁰⁶

While there is no evidence that Elisha Cresques knew that Charles V possessed the Description, I suggest it was possible, which would explain why Cresques is the first cartographer we know of to have employed Polo as a cartographic source. In this scenario, Elisha used the Description for the Catalan Atlas not only because of its authority and modernity but also because he associated the text specifically with the king of France and therefore found it an appropriate source for the king’s map.¹⁰⁷

Polo’s influence on the Catalan Atlas’s portrayal of the Mongols is apparent in several ways. The first concerns the map’s depiction of the Yuan Empire (fig. 12). In addition to the captions on the dangers of the Lop desert and on Khanbaliq, there are texts on the merchants who stop in Lop on their way to Cathay (panel 11; Description, chapter 56); on the gyrfalcons and falcons of the northern islands that are sent to the Great Khan (panel 12; Description, chapter 70); on Kublai and his imperial guard (panel 12; Description, chapters 75 and 85); and a short text that reads simply “The city of Khanbaliq, of the Great Khan of Cathay.”¹⁰⁸ The excerpts from Polo and accompanying images suggest that Elisha chose to adopt Polo’s perspective. Thus he emphasizes the Mongols’ associations with international trade, illustrated spectacularly by the image of the caravan (fig. 17) whose accompanying caption reads “This caravan set out from the empire of Sarra to go to Cathay.” The extraordinary depiction of multicolored islands off the coast of China, several of which are painted with gold leaf, further highlights the great resources within reach of the Great Khan. Elisha also portrays the Yuan Empire as the largest realm in the world, and as densely settled by cities that represent its immense population, wealth, and might.

In effect, the easternmost portion of the Atlas is divided into two zones that reflect the different sources on which Elisha drew. That in the far northeast (and the southern ocean and island of Trapobana) is a zone of legend and prophecy, while that of the Yuan Empire is historical and rationalist thanks largely to Polo’s influence.¹⁰⁹ Polo twice defends the Mongols against defamatory legends. As mentioned above, he notes that although the “book of Alexander” states that Alexander enclosed the “Tartars,” he in fact enclosed the Cumans because “Tartars n’estoient a celui tans [Tartars did not exist at that time].” Polo later argues against identifying the Mongols as Gog and Magog by explaining that these are the names of two regions, not peoples; that the Mongol words are “Ung” and “Mugal”; and that because the “Tartars” lived in the latter region they are sometimes called “Mongle.”¹¹⁰ Thus Polo does not even entertain the idea that the Mongols are demonic, and he intentionally neutralizes the characterization. This rationalist perspective is evident too in the Catalan Atlas’s image of the Yuan Empire, which is divided from the apocalyptic zone by mountain ranges that visualize the break between the space of prophecy and that of political and historical reality.

Another way in which Polo’s Description influenced the Catalan Atlas’s portrayal of the Yuan Empire, and Asia more broadly, concerns the places the map depicts. Again, the Catalan Atlas appears to be the oldest surviving map to employ Polo’s toponymy. To appreciate the importance of this development, it must be noted that Polo added a tremendous number of toponyms to European geographic knowledge. I determined that the text of the Description in Royal 19 D 1 names 249 different places. I estimate that at least half of these were new to Europe—that is, they had never appeared before in any source known in Europe.¹¹¹ It may be precisely because Polo provided so many new geographical data points that his text was not used earlier by cartographers. To account for the cities, regions, mountains, islands, lakes, rivers, peoples, and distances described by Polo, one had to thoroughly reshape the world’s image. In particular, one had to stretch Asia to the east by a considerable amount. The conservatism of the mappa mundi tradition likely explains why Polo’s geography was not visualized for so long.

Elisha Cresques’s decision to represent Polo’s world was thus revolutionary, and the result of remarkable skill and imagination.¹¹² Yet the Catalan Atlas is far from depicting all of Polo’s new toponyms—to do so would have required much more time and a much larger map. Nor can we say definitively how many toponyms Elisha drew from Polo and how many came from other sources.¹¹³ In part this is because Elisha also used other works, such as Odoric of Pordenone’s Relatio, whose toponymy overlaps with Polo’s.¹¹⁴ In part it is because of the notorious variance among toponyms, particularly those that were unfamiliar, within medieval scribal culture. Litteral substitution, phonetic adjustment, improper scanning or letter grouping—these are but a few of the processes by which medieval scribes transformed unfamiliar place names.¹¹⁵ Even within a single text, a scribe might write the same toponym in different ways, and these variations might be so great that it would not be evident that the same word was intended. When unfamiliar toponyms were copied by scribes speaking other languages, the likelihood of transformation increased. The following examples illustrate both internal and translinguistic variation using the same toponyms from the Description in Royal 19 D 1 and the Catalan Atlas:

From this handful of examples we can make some preliminary deductions. The first is that while the French Description may have been the source for some of the Asian toponyms on the Catalan Atlas, it was certainly not the source for all of them. “Cocam/Cocan” could easily be the source for “Cotam” on the Atlas, given the very frequent confusion of “c” and “t” in Gothic scripts. “Fugio” on the Atlas could represent a Catalanized form of “Fuguy,” and “Cinsay” could have been changed to “Cansay” (although the phonetic shift from “i” to “a” is problematic). The other forms on the Catalan Atlas are too far from the French versions to be reasonable derivatives, unless one imagines an exceptionally interventionist or confused scribe, or a corrupt copy.

Given that Elisha Cresques drew on multiple sources, including some in Arabic, for the toponyms on the Catalan Atlas, and that his native language was not French, the variance between the Atlas’s toponyms and those of the French Description is no surprise.¹¹⁶ Furthermore, there are many toponyms in the Atlas’s Yuan Empire that do not appear at all in the French Description. Thus, as important as Polo’s text was as a source for the Atlas’s toponyms, perhaps its greatest influence is visible not in the Atlas’s sites but in its dimensions. The Catalan Atlas resembles a traditional circular mappa mundi that has been pulled eastward, putty-like, so that the middle has expanded but the eastern edge has retained its rounded profile.¹¹⁷ Similarly, the sea is given much more prominence than on traditional mappae mundi, in response to Polo’s reference to thousands of islands in the China Sea (“mer de Cin”),¹¹⁸ which the Atlas cites. This eastward expansion was the result of Elisha’s reading of Polo’s Description, in conjunction with other sources. Thus the Catalan Atlas combines not two mapping traditions but three: a portolan chart, a mappa mundi, and modern accounts of Asia that Elisha was apparently the first to visualize.¹¹⁹

In addition to Polo’s Description, another of those modern sources may have been The Book of John Mandeville (ca. 1360), of which again Charles V owned two copies. Edson observes that the Atlas contains elements found in Mandeville, such as burial customs in Asia, the shape of the Caspian Sea, and the names of towns in China not mentioned by Polo. However, as she notes, these features may derive from another source such as Odoric’s Relatio (on which Mandeville drew).¹²⁰ Sáenz-López Pérez remarks that both Mandeville and the Atlas declare that Antichrist will come from Galilee.¹²¹ Higgins observes that the Atlas and Mandeville both combine traditional and modern geographical sources, and that both are in the vernacular.¹²² However, as Higgins sees it, whereas Mandeville is concerned with the Christianization of the world, the Catalan Atlas “does not place its world under the sign of Christian history”—an opinion shared by other scholars, especially those who emphasize the Jewish influence on the map.¹²³ Thus, while one can argue for shared features, there is no certain proof that Elisha Cresques drew on Mandeville to make the Atlas.

For my purposes, Mandeville is important to a consideration of the Catalan Atlas’s place in the library of Charles V for two reasons. The first concerns the fossilization of the European image of the Mongols that I discussed in the previous section. In the same way that Mandeville’s portrayal of the Mongols relies on the Speculum historiale, Hayton, Odoric, and possibly Polo, and contained no current information on the Mongols, so too was the Catalan Atlas’s depiction of the Mongol world out of date when it was produced. Both Mandeville and the Atlas demonstrate the effects that the disintegration of the khanates had on Eurasian travel networks and on the European conception of Asia.¹²⁴ Aside from a few exceptions, such as Genoa and Venice, European contact with and knowledge of central and eastern Asia in the mid-fourteenth century atrophied significantly. Polo, Hayton, and Odoric represent the summit of late medieval reporting on Asia in France, with accounts that presented a contemporary (or nearly so) and dynamic image of Asia to French audiences. Mandeville and the Catalan Atlas mark the end of that era, at least as concerns the Mongols, and the beginning of a new one in which the Mongols were largely detached from the churn of history and fixed in immutable, and often recopied, texts such as those in Charles V’s library.

The second reason for which Mandeville offers insight into the Catalan Atlas’s function in the royal library concerns contemporary ideas about global connectedness. Paradoxically, even as Eurasia fragmented in the mid-fourteenth century, European elites conceptualized a world that was more connected than ever before. Both Mandeville and the Atlas are products of this reasoning. “Mandeville” states three times that the world is spherical, which is important to him because it means that the world is also circumnavigable.¹²⁵ He recounts a tale he heard in his youth of a man from “our country” who set out “pour aler cerchier le monde [to explore the world],” traversed India and islands beyond, and eventually found himself in a land where he understood the language. But instead of continuing in the same direction and returning home quickly, the man, ignorant of the earth’s sphericity, turned around and “si perdi assez de ses painnes [thus wasted much of his effort].”¹²⁶ Furthermore, travel times by sea have been greatly reduced according to “Mandeville”: “In the past when one crossed in the old ships from Prester John’s land to [Trapobana], it took twenty-three or twenty-four days. And in the ships that are made now one crosses in eight or seven days from one end to the other.”¹²⁷ The Catalan Atlas can be read as reflecting a similar conception of the earth’s connectedness. As Estow observes, “the Atlas’ crisscrossing rhumb lines foster the sense that [Asia] is reachable and navigable; the numerous figures and legends dotting the landscape render it knowable and familiar.”¹²⁸ The caravan image represents the infrastructure, effort, and investment put into overland travel, while the Atlas’s images of boats in the sea west of Europe, the Caspian Sea, and the Indian Ocean depict one of the most important means of global trade and travel.¹²⁹

There is good reason to think that Charles V would have understood the Catalan Atlas in a “Mandevillean” manner—as the representation of a spherical earth whose realms were accessible by land or sea.¹³⁰ In his Traictié de l’espere (Treatise on the Sphere, 1365–1368), Nicole Oresme, a translator and advisor for Charles V and one of the leading intellectuals of his day, wrote extensively about the implications of a spherical world. Oresme observes that the earth is immense but can be circumnavigated.¹³¹ Moreover, Oresme performs a thought experiment in which one man circumnavigates going west and loses a day, while another walks east and gains a day. When they meet, they disagree on what day of the week it is.¹³² Like “Mandeville,” Oresme was fascinated by the earth’s sphericity and realized that it had profound ramifications for understanding astronomy, geography, and perception.

One observation of Oresme’s is of particular importance for understanding the Catalan Atlas in contemporary terms. In the Traictié de l’espere, Oresme writes:

According to Aristotle at the end of the second book of De caelo et mundo, the end of the habitable world in the East and the end of the habitable world in the West are very close to one another, and between them there is only a sea that is not very wide.¹³³ And for this reason, between one end of the habitable world and the other there is much more space than half of the circumference of the earth.¹³⁴

Oresme was not the first medieval scholar to comment on Aristotle’s postulate about the enclosed sea, which had already drawn the attention of Averroes, Aquinas, and Roger Bacon.¹³⁵ His work is nonetheless significant because it connects Aristotle’s claim directly to Charles V and the Catalan Atlas.

While the Atlas may seem to represent the Far East as immensely distant from France, Mandeville and Oresme should incite us to understand it in an entirely different manner. For its makers, and for Charles V and his entourage, the Catalan Atlas was the flat representation of a portion of the spherical earth whose two ends are not far apart, relatively speaking. The Atlas does not indicate directly that it is meant to be viewed in this way, but it comes close. The opening text reads: “The world is round in shape, which is why it is called orbis, meaning ‘roundness.’ And if a man were situated in the air and looked at the earth from high up, the whole immense expanse and irregularity of the mountains and the deep furrows of the valleys on the earth would appear smaller than the finger of someone holding a ball in his hand.”¹³⁶ The reader is meant to understand that the Atlas depicts a sphere, or portion thereof, and not a flat earth. It should also be noted that Eurasia is bracketed by water to the west and east on the Catalan Atlas. It seems more than likely that the ocean we see on sheets 5 and 12 (figs. 9 and 10) is in fact one continuous body of water—the narrow sea Aristotle describes—and that the Atlas represents nearly the entire circumference of the latitudes occupied by the ecumene.¹³⁷ If indeed this is how Charles V viewed the Catalan Atlas, then the map is one of the most significant items in the Mongol archive not only because it was the first to use Polo’s geography but also because it was the first to show that the Mongols resided over the western horizon.

The Catalan Atlas confirms the worldview that emerges from the Mongol archive. This worldview is summed up at the end of the letter sent by Mongke to King Louis IX, in which the khan writes that God “has made easy what was hard, and brought near what was far distant.”¹³⁸ From the Relatio de Davide to the Catalan Atlas, a consistent theme in the Mongol archive is that what happens in one part of the world may matter elsewhere, despite time, distance, and human and natural obstacles. The Mongols, like other migrating and invading peoples who preceded them, had reminded Europe that the ecumene was one space. The difference this time was that European contact with the Mongols led to sustained exchanges and, eventually, a thorough transformation of the European conception of the world. No object better expresses this transformation than the Catalan Atlas, which brings near what was far distant and portrays the Mongols as the mightiest people on earth. In this way—not surprisingly, given its sources—the Catalan Atlas’s worldview is more Mongol than European.

Earlier I characterized the Mongol archive in Charles V’s library as a regression in knowledge about the Mongols. While this observation is true as concerns contemporary information, it is ungenerous from a historical perspective. In fact, Charles V’s library likely held more information on and from Asia than that of any other European sovereign or lord aside from the pope or the archives of Genoa and Venice. Indeed, Charles’s library was probably one of the most extensive in Eurasia. Rulers and scholars in the Middle East and in the Yuan Empire possessed libraries and archives, but it is doubtful that any of them had accounts of Europe that were as informative as the European accounts of Asia. As far as we know, the Mongols did not possess any text that informed them about Europe in the way that Polo, Hayton, and Odoric of Pordenone informed Europe about the Mongols. My point is not that the Mongols or other peoples were deficient—there were many reasons for the information imbalance, often having to do with European prejudice (e.g., an unwillingness to learn “heathen” tongues)—but that viewed from a Eurasian perspective, Charles V’s library was an extraordinary achievement. And as history would subsequently show, the library was a major step in the development of a state ideology that joined information, exploration, and conquest.

The library of Charles V was a crucial moment for the Mongol archive not only because it led to the gathering of existing books and to the production of new material during Charles’s lifetime but also because it led to the creation of manuscripts after Charles’s death. The library instituted both a regular practice of commissioning manuscripts among members of the royal family and their entourage, and a network of artisans, scribes, and artists that survived and renewed itself for decades. In some cases, these makers produced copies of books made for Charles V, as with the aforementioned BL, Royal 19 E VI, an early fifteenth-century copy of Les croniques d’Espaigne. They also created new works as their patrons requested them. In the early 1400s, this network produced two of the most important manuscripts in the Mongol archive: John of Sultaniyeh’s life of Tamerlane (BnF, fr. 12201), and the Book of Marvels (BnF, fr. 2810). The former was the last major contribution of contemporary information to the Mongol archive, the latter the most sumptuously illuminated vernacular compilation on Asia produced in medieval Europe. Both books are the legacy of Charles V’s desire for knowledge about Asia and of the infrastructure he created to acquire it. They and the works of Philippe de Mézières are the subject of the next chapter.

1. Martinez, “Institutional Development.”

2. Kopp, Der König und die Bücher, 38–46.

3. On Philip Augustus’s archive, see Baldwin, Government of Philip Augustus, 402–423, and chapter 1 of this volume.

4. For the history of the royal library, with a focus on Charles V, see Kopp, Der König und die Bücher.

5. Guérout, “L’Hôtel du roi,” 229–253; Guérout, “Le Palais de la Cité,” 99–102.

6. Potin observes that the seventy-six books added to the première chambre of the Louvre library between 1373 and 1380 represented a 40 percent increase of the books already there: “Le fonds antérieur à 1373 était donc déjà honorable [before 1373 the collection was thus already respectable]” (“A la recherche,” 34).

7. I am focusing on the Louvre, but it should be pointed out that Charles also kept books in his other residences: “les plus beaux …, généralement de luxueux manuscrits liturgiques …, étaient gardés à Vincennes qui tenait lieu, en quelque sorte, de ‘réserve’ [the most beautiful …, generally luxurious liturgical manuscripts, were kept in Vincennes, which acted in some ways as a ‘special collection’]” (Avril and Lafaurie, La Librairie de Charles V, 56–57).

8. Kopp, Der König und die Bücher, 47–50, esp. 48; Potin, “A la recherche,” 34. On Charles V’s library, see also Robin, “Le luxe des collections”; Sherman, Imaging Aristotle; Tesnière, “La librairie modèle”; Tesnière, “Librairie et politique”; and the bibliography in Kopp.

9. Potin, “A la recherche,” 30. In fr. 2700 the pagination in roman numerals begins on a blank page, so that the first page of text is numbered “ii.” The arabic numerals added much later begin on the first page of text and skip folio 32. Following the roman numerals, the text of the inventory occupies 2r–37r.

10. However, the creation of the 1380 inventories must have involved more steps, since they include works that were acquired after 1373 (e.g., the Catalan Atlas) within the list of books, not as an appendix. There may therefore have been a running inventory on which the 1380 inventories drew.

11. Becdelièvre believes the first chamber “était sans doute réservée [was without doubt reserved]” for the king (“Leçons d’inventaires,” 40–41).

12. Potin, “A la recherche,” 25.

13. Tesnière, “Librairie et politique,” 3–4.

14. Avril and Lafaurie, La Librairie de Charles V, 87.

15. See Byrne, “Rex imago Dei.”

16. Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, 6–9.

17. Christine de Pizan, Le Livre des faits, 217.

18. Cruse, “The Louvre of Charles V.”

19. See, for example, Autrand’s discussion of the Tragicum argumentum de miserabili statu regni Francie by François de Montebelluna (Charles V, 212–214).

20. Newhall and Birdsall, Chronicle of Jean de Venette, 133.

21. See Sherman, Imaging Aristotle.

22. “Le vray roy, garni de sapience, qui siet en chaiere de jugement, destruit tout mal par son sage regart” (Foulechat and Brucker, Le “Policratique,” 83).

23. Christine de Pizan, Le Livre des faits, 194.

24. Charles’s statue was also placed on the façade of the Bastille where, as at the Louvre, it was directly assimilated to both protection and observation of the Parisian populace.

25. Sherman, Imaging Aristotle, 7.

26. Solomon’s buildings are mentioned, for example, in 1 Kings 3:1.

27. “grant amour de vraie science, qui est vraie et parfecte philosophie” (Foulechat and Brucker, Le “Policratique,” 85).

28. “benoit est l’omme, dit la tres noble et haute sapience, qui me escoute et veille a mes portes et garde as postis de mon huis” (Foulechat and Brucker, Le “Policratique,” 85).

29. “Ces portes et postis sont les nobles et grans livres, as quelz le vostre treshault cler et subtil entendement si veille jour et nuit” (Foulechat and Brucker, Le “Policratique,” 85).

30. Becdelièvre, “Leçons d’inventaires,” 45.

31. Beaune, “L’invention de l’histoire,” 40.

32. See Cazelles, “Charles V,” on the symbolism of the Crown during Charles V’s reign.

33. This number would be higher were one to include works such as the De re militari of Vegetius, who was concerned with the defense of Roman territory (which reached into Asia), or Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum (translated into French as Li livres du gouvernement des rois et des princes), which mentions that the French do not seek to advise the inhabitants of India or Africa on their forms of government (Molenaer, “Li Livres du gouvernement des rois,” 329).

34. Oresme, Le Livre de Politiques d’Aristote, 44.

35. A precise number is impossible to obtain because we often cannot know what is contained in various copies of the Speculum historiale, chronicles of France, lives of Saint Louis, and crusade accounts listed in the inventories.

36. On the Mongol material in the Speculum historiale, see Guzman, “Encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais”; Guzman, “Simon of Saint-Quentin and the Dominican Mission”; Guzman, “Simon of Saint-Quentin as Historian”; Richard, Au-delà de la Perse; Simon de Saint-Quentin, Histoire des Tartares.

37. This Prinse d’Antioche could have been one of two chansons de geste known today as the Chanson d’Antioche and the Siège d’Antioche.

38. Cruse, “Marco Polo’s Devisement.” I leave aside Odoric of Pordenone’s Relatio. As noted in the previous chapter, Jean de Vignay translated the Relatio, and a copy of this translation—Les Merveilles de la terre d’outremer—was included in Royal 19 D 1. This translation, with a copy of Jean de Vignay’s translation of Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia imperialia, also survives in BnF, Rothschild 3085 (on which see Hong, “Le projet de croisade,” 254–259). Barrois believed that Rothschild 3085 had belonged to Charles V (Vignay, Les Merveilles, xviii). While this is possible, given that the manuscript was produced in the 1330s in Paris (the Rouses date it to 1331–1333 [Manuscripts and Their Makers, 1:212), there is no firm evidence placing it in Charles V’s library. A manuscript like Rothschild 3085 that contained only Jean de Vignay’s translations of the Otia imperialia and the Relatio is listed in three royal library inventories, but all postdate the reign of Charles V, and the earliest is from 1411 (Delisle, Recherches, 2:126, no. 776). Moreover, O’Doherty observes that while the inventories describe the hand in this manuscript as “menue lettre batarde,” Rothschild 3085 is written in gothic (The Indies, 109n14). It is therefore not certain that Charles owned a copy of Odoric’s account.

39. The surviving copy is Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, Cod. Holm. M 304, edited by Overbeck, Literarische Skripta in Ostfrankreich.

40. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 761, a French and Latin miscellany containing historical and medical texts, and produced in England 1360–1370, has on 195r a twenty-one-line excerpt from Polo’s Description taken from Royal 19 D 1. On Bodley 761, see Meyer, “Notice.” None of the copies of the Devisement listed in the inventories of 1380 is described as compiled with any other text, and the sole surviving manuscript contains only the Devisement.

41. Two of these survive: BnF, fr. 2810; and BnF, fr. 5631, which John of Berry left to his daughter Marie. See Gadrat-Ouerfelli, Lire Marco Polo, 136–137.

42. See chapter 5 of this volume.

43. BnF, fr. 2700, 7v (roman numerals). Polo was accompanied not by his brothers but by his father and uncle.

44. Number 872 in Delisle, Recherches, 2:142.

45. Respectively, numbers 873, 875, 876 (listed in Baluze 397 but not fr. 2700), and 874 in Delisle, Recherches, 2:142.

46. Oresme, Le livre du ciel et du monde, 38.

47. This is Delisle’s opinion (Recherches, 2:201).

48. The Histoire ancienne is number 1211 in Delisle, Recherches, 2:196.

49. Overbeck, Literarische Skripta in Ostfrankreich, 263. Note that in Charles V’s surviving copy the text reads “porte dinfer” (gate of Hell).

50. Overbeck, Literarische Skripta in Ostfrankreich, 263.

51. Numbers 893 and 1089 in Delisle, Recherches, 2:146, 178. For 1089, Prester John is mentioned in neither fr. 2700 nor Baluze 397; the text is first mentioned in the 1411 inventory (modern number 401), fr. 2700, 83r. On Prester John, see Beckingham and Hamilton, Prester John; Brewer, Prester John.

52. Jacques de Vitry, Lettres de la Cinquième Croisade, 176.

53. Simon de Saint-Quentin, Histoire des Tartares, 27.

54. Overbeck, Literarische Skripta in Ostfrankreich, 294–295, 301.

55. Gaunt, Marco Polo’s “Le devisement du monde,” 28–35. See also Goodman, Chivalry and Exploration, 83–103. Becdelièvre counts seventy-two romances, forty-two of which are Arthurian, in the library (“Leçons d’inventaires,” 39).

56. Polo, Le Devisement du monde, 3:83.

57. Chrétien de Troyes, Le chevalier au lion, 321–323, ll. 3392–3407. Odoric of Pordenone also mentions lions that bow before the emperor (“faicent reverance a l’empereur” [Andreose and Ménard, Le voyage en Asie, 55]), which he claims to have seen himself, so this detail may not be an invention—or Odoric is simply parroting the Description.

58. Gadrat-Ouerfelli, Lire Marco Polo, 119–120, 159, 209–210.

59. The king’s copy is today Brussels, Bibliothèque royale, ms. 9507.

60. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale, ms. 9507, 30v, 88v, 110v–111r. On the vision legend in Joinville and Cantimpré, see Friedman, “Joinville’s Tartar Visionary”; Ridoux, “Une abeille.”

61. Number 1015, Delisle, Recherches, 2:167–168. Charles V’s manuscripts are not described as illuminated in the inventory in fr. 2700 (11v in the arabic numeral pagination; 12v in the roman numeral pagination), but later inventories mention that the text was “très bien historiez et enluminez” (Delisle, Recherches, 2:167). See also Aubert, “Les Cronice,” and Castan, who notes that the work is titled the Chroniques de Burgues in copies made for the Dukes of Berry and Orleans (“Les Chroniques de Burgos,” 266).

62. This is Besançon, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 1150, a partial copy (see Castan, “Les Chroniques de Burgos,” 268–269).

63. BL, Royal 19 E VI, 440r, 441r–441v, 447v–448v.

64. Three copies appear in the inventory, one of which survives (BnF, nouv. acq. fr. 1409).

65. BnF, nouv. acq. fr. 1409, 140r. The same passage appears in the Trésor des histoires (ca. 1400); see, for example, Arsenal 5077, 366v–367r.

66. Ruhe, Sydrac le philosophe, 405, 407.

67. On the enclosed nations, see Anderson, Alexander’s Gate. Pseudo-Methodius is in Delisle, Recherches: number 535, 2:91, and number 1120, 2:183.

68. On this date see Higgins, Book of John Mandeville, xvi; Higgins, Writing East, 6. On Mandeville in general, see, for example, Akbari, “Diversity of Mankind”; Bennett, Rediscovery of Sir John Mandeville; Higgins, Writing East; Röhl, Der “livre de Mandeville.”

69. Röhl, Der “livre de Mandeville,” 166.

70. On the Hebrew writing in this manuscript, see Kupfer, “Lectres.”

71. A list of Mandeville’s sources is in Higgins, Book of John Mandeville, 219–221.

72. Higgins, Writing East, 184–185; Schaaf, “Christian-Jewish Debate,” 251. On Mandeville and the Mirabilia mundi, see Burnett and Dalché, “Attitudes.”

73. BnF, nouv. acq. fr. 4515, 65v–66r; Higgins, Book of John Mandeville, 134–135; Mandeville, Voyage, 167–168.

74. BnF, nouv. acq. fr. 4515, 67r–68v.

75. Higgins, Writing East, 167–168.

76. BnF, nouv. acq. fr. 4515, 69v, 74r.

77. Veit, “Eastern Steppe,” 157.

78. Viewable on Gallica: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b55002481n. See Kogman-Appel, Catalan Maps, for a detailed study and bibliography.

79. On medieval cartography as a multidisciplinary cultural practice, see Dalché, “Un problème.”

80. BnF, fr. 2700, 11v. The Atlas is number 879 in Delisle, Recherches, 2:142–143.

81. Grosjean, Mapamundi, 38.

82. There has been some confusion over the years as to whether the inventory in fr. 2700 does in fact refer to the Catalan Atlas. The confusion arises from two letters written on November 5, 1381, by Prince Joan of Aragon. The first is addressed to King Charles VI of France (Charles V’s son; Rubió y Lluch mistakenly identifies the recipient as Charles V) and acknowledges the king’s desire to have a world map; the second asks the archivist Pere Palau to give a world map to Charles VI’s envoy Guillaume de Courcy and to summon the map’s creator, “Cresques the Jew,” to explain the map to Courcy or, if Cresques is not available, to have “two good sailors” provide an explanation (Rubió y Lluch, Documents, 1:294–295). As these letters make clear, the map in question was not in Paris in 1380 and is thus not the map mentioned in the library inventories, although like the Catalan Atlas it was seemingly made by Elisha Cresques. This second map apparently does not survive.

83. On the map’s present form, see Grosjean, Mapamundi, 10–11; Kogman-Appel, Catalan Maps, 32.

84. The phrase quarte de mer in the inventory shows that Gilles Malet was familiar with portolan charts and described the Atlas according to what he knew. This term may also suggest that the rest of the map, or at least the Far East, was novel to him and that he was unsure how to describe it concisely.

85. Most studies have referred to him as Abraham Cresques (or, occasionally, Cresques Abraham). Kogman-Appel restores his complete name: Elisha ben Abraham Bevenisti Cresques.

86. Peter IV was the great-great-great-grandson of King Louis VIII of France. Charles V was Louis VIII’s great-great-great-great-grandson.

87. Jaynes notes that Rome is not portrayed prominently on the Catalan Atlas, which may reflect the tension between France and the church “during the waning years of the Avignon papacy” (Christianity beyond Christendom, 207). Or it may be that from Elisha Cresque’s perspective as a Jew, Rome was no more important than any other city.

88. Grosjean, Mapamundi, 40–50, 81.

89. Pleybert, Paris et Charles V.

90. Grosjean, Mapamundi, 86.

91. The text is in Grosjean, Mapamundi, 90. The image of the figure holding the branches has been the object of much analysis, and there is still not firm agreement on what it represents. See, among others, Baumgärtner, one of the few who thinks this scene represents Paradise (“Weltbild und Empirie,” 244); Gow, who sees the scene as representing Christ who “distributes the palms of immortality to the faithful” (“Gog and Magog,” 77); Grosjean, who thinks it depicts Antichrist (Mapamundi, 90); Kogman-Appel, for whom “the king is neither Antichrist nor Christ, but … a royal figure that alludes to both Christian and Jewish mythical scenarios. Antichrist is treated in the inscription, but he is not depicted” (Catalan Maps, 274); Reichert, who believes it is Antichrist (Das Bild der Welt, 88); Sáenz-López Pérez, who argues that it is Antichrist (“La representación”); and von den Brincken, for whom “die Deutung einer Antichrist-Szene im Orient—das Jungste Gericht wird im Okzident vermutet—auf dem Katalanischen Atlas von 1375 problematisch ist [the interpretation of the Antichrist image in the Orient—the Last Judgment is expected in the West—on the Catalan Atlas of 1375 is difficult]” (Fines Terrae, 159).

92. Grosjean, Mapamundi, 90.

93. The end of the Atlas legend is a paraphrase of Revelation 20:8: “fire came down on them from heaven and consumed them” (Suggs et al., Oxford Study Bible, 1573).

94. Anderson, Alexander’s Gate.

95. As noted in chapter 1, the Roman d’Alexandre ties Gog and Magog to Antichrist (“Tant que Antecris viegne que ja mais n’en istront [They will not come out until Antichrist comes]”; Harf-Lancner et al., Le Roman d’Alexandre, 430, branch III, l. 2158), but the Old French Prose Alexander does not.

96. The Perilous Valley episode is in Harf-Lancner et al., Le Roman d’Alexandre, 450–477, branch III, ll. 2471–2895. Whereas the Catalan Atlas makes it seem that Satan wished to aid Alexander, in the romance Alexander sacrifices himself, Christlike, so that his army may escape the valley, and he frees a trapped demon only after the demon has explained how Alexander may escape.

97. Simon de Saint-Quentin, Histoire des Tartares, 92.

98. Ruhe, Sydrac le philosophe, 405. As Waffner observes, the Mongols in the Livre de Sydrac are both allies and enemies of the Latin Church, but they are not identified as Gog and Magog or as allies of Antichrist (“Die Völker der Endzeit,” 104).

99. It should be noted that Prester John was also connected to this apocalyptic geography in Asia for generations—some versions of the Letter of Prester John state that he fortified and established surveillance over the walls enclosing Gog and Magog. However, this tradition is not relevant to the Catalan Atlas, which is one of the first maps to locate Prester John in Africa and thus to distance him from the legend of the enclosed peoples (Edson, World Map, 83).

100. The transformation of “Kubilai” (most often spelled “Kublai” today) into “Holubeim” arose through metathesis, vowel shift, transformation of the plosive /k/ to the fricative /h/, and nasalization of the final phoneme: Kubilai—Kulibai—Kolubei—Holubeim.

101. As Grosjean observes, Elisha Cresques appears to confuse the ancient Medean Empire (“imperi de Medeja”) with the Middle Horde or Chaghatai Khanate (Grosjean, Mapamundi, 87), on which see Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 235; Morgan, The Mongols, 83, 99–100. Similarly, see Hayton’s description of the kingdom of “Mede” in the Flower of the Histories (La Flor des estoires, 127). One might expect that the flags of the realms descended from Genghis Khan’s empire would share some common feature, but no visual element connects the flags of the four khanates. However, as noted above, the chronicle of Gonzalo of Hinojosa does describe the four khanates, as does Hayton in the Flower of the Histories (La Flor des estoires, 214–216), so it is possible that Charles V was aware that all were Chinggisid realms.

102. I will not discuss Hayton’s Flower of the Histories, which mentions Kublai only briefly, although it too “may well have been among Elisha’s sources of information” (Kogman-Appel, Catalan Maps, 196).

103. Harley and Woodward, History of Cartography, 1:315. Baumgärtner notes that the Caspian Sea is named “mar de Sara” on the Vesconte mappa mundi of 1320, which may reflect the influence of Polo or Hayton and thus make it an earlier example of Polo’s toponymic influence (“Weltbild und Empirie,” 236).

104. Gadrat-Ouerfelli, Lire Marco Polo, 130–132. On the Catalan and Aragonese versions of the Description, see Meneghetti, “Sulla ricezione di Marco Polo.”

105. Polo, Le Devisement du monde, 3:74–75 (left column); Grosjean, Mapamundi, 90–91 (right column).

106. Gadrat-Ouerfelli, Lire Marco Polo, 131–132.

107. As a chart maker, Elisha might have been particularly drawn to the Description because of its attention to ports. See Vicentini, “Il Milione.”

108. On merchants, see Grosjean, Mapamundi, 87; Polo, Le Devisement du monde, 2:14. On gyrfalcons, see Grosjean, Mapamundi, 86; Polo, Le Devisement du monde, 2:37. On the imperial guard, see Grosjean, Mapamundi, 90; Polo, Le Devisement du monde, 3:76. On Khanbaliq, see Grosjean, Mapamundi, 91.

109. The southern sea has an image of a mermaid and a legend describing hybrid Sirens, while the legend for Trapobana speaks of cannibalistic giants. Grosjean, Mapamundi, 92.

110. Polo, Le Devisement du monde, 1:139, 2:42.

111. Cruse, “A Quantitative Analysis,” S254.

112. Other texts on the Atlas may adapt Polo’s or combine it with other sources—for example, those on the islands in the China Sea (“mer de Cin”; Grosjean, Mapamundi, 92; Description, chapter 160), on Saint Thomas (Grosjean, Mapamundi, 88; Description, chapter 170), and on the men who retrieve diamonds that stick to pieces of meat (Grosjean, Mapamundi, 87–88; Description, chapter 171). The Atlas text that states that the “Tartars” call Trapobana “Great Caulii” (Grosjean, Mapamundi, 92) does not come from the Description. Another notable example of a departure from Polo is that Polo locates the former realm of Prester John in the province of “Tandut” in China, which appears on the Atlas as “Tanduch” (sheet 11). But as noted above, Prester John is shown in Africa on the Atlas.

113. On Cresques’s use of the Description, see Kogman-Appel, Catalan Maps, 155–158. Edson writes that twenty-nine names of Chinese cities on the Atlas come from the Description (World Map, 85), but I do not think we can arrive at a precise count.

114. Larner, Marco Polo, 135.

115. Cruse, “A Quantitative Analysis,” S249–S253.

116. Brentjes, “Revisiting”; Kogman-Appel, Catalan Maps, 77, 153, 155–156, 163; Vagnon, “Pluricultural Sources,” 168.

117. The shape of the traditional mappa mundi is also evoked in the text on sheet 2, which refers to the “zona o cercle habitable” (Grosjean, Mapamundi, 41).

118. Polo, Le Devisement du monde, 6:9. Note that the Atlas refers to 7,548 islands in the “mar de les Indies” (Grosjean, Mapamundi, 92), but the Description in Royal 19 D 1 mentions 7,449.

119. The Catalan Atlas is the oldest surviving European map to depict India as a peninsula (Larner, Marco Polo, 135; Suárez, Early Mapping of Southeast Asia, 77).

120. Edson, World Map, 109.

121. Sáenz-López Pérez, “La representación,” 271.

122. Higgins, Book of John Mandeville, 263–264.

123. Edson, World Map; Franke, “Miracles and Monsters”; Higgins, Book of John Mandeville, 264; Kogman-Appel, Catalan Maps; Schaaf, “Christian-Jewish Debate.”

124. On this fragmentation, see Veit, “Eastern Steppe.”

125. BnF, nouv. acq. fr. 4515, 55r–57r, 91v, 92v–93r; Higgins, Book of John Mandeville, 111–116, 179, 181; Mandeville, Voyage, 137–142, 227, 230. On Mandeville’s conception of the world’s shape and arrangement, see Higgins, Writing East, 132–139.

126. BnF, nouv. acq. fr. 4515, 56v.

127. “Anciennement quant on passoit la terre Prestre Iehan on mectoit bien au passer a celle ylle a navies anciennes l’espace de. xxiii. iours ou de. xxiiii. Et aus nefz que on fait maintenant on passe bien en. viii. iours ou en. vii. de l’un coron a l’autre” (BnF, nouv. acq. fr. 4515, 91r). See also Higgins, Book of John Mandeville, 178; Mandeville, Voyage, 226.

128. Estow, “Mapping Central Europe,” 6.

129. O’Doherty, The Indies, 276–277; Reichert, Das Bild der Welt, 88.

130. Kupfer notes that BnF, nouv. acq. fr. 4515–4516, which again was made for Charles V and originally compiled Mandeville with a plague treatise, “lays out an integral scheme realized pictorially in the six-panel Catalan Atlas” (“Lectres,” 96).

131. He writes that someone who wished to circumnavigate the earth at a rate of ten leagues a day would need 1,575 days (BnF, fr. 565, 11r).

132. BnF, fr. 565, 17r–17v.

133. Oresme translated the De caelo for Charles V in 1375 or 1377 as the Livre du ciel et du monde (Kopp, Der König, 389). The relevant passage in this translation reads: “cuident aucuns que le lieu qui est en la fin de terre habitable vers occident environ les colompnes de Hercules et le lieu qui est en la fin d’orient habitable vers Inde soient prochains, et que la mer qui joint a l’un et a l’autre soit une meisme mer [there are some who think that the place where habitable land ends in the West, around the Pillars of Hercules, and the place where habitable land ends in the East, near India, are close together and that the sea adjoining the two is one and the same]” (Oresme, Le livre du ciel et du monde, 566–567).

134. “Selon Aristote en la fin du secont livre de celo et mundo la fin de terre habitable vers orient et la fin de terre habitable vers occident sunt bien pres l’une de l’autre en ne a entre d’euz fors une mer qui ne est pas moult large. Et pour ce en alant d’une fin a l’autre par terre habitable ha plus d’espace grandement que ne ha la moitie du circuite de la terre” (BnF, fr. 565, 16v).

135. Jourdain, De l’influence d’Aristote; Quillet, “L’Imago mundi,” 112–113.

136. Grosjean, Mapamundi, 40. I find it intriguing that in the Traicté de l’espere, Oresme wrote the following: “Le monde est reont ainsi come une pelote… . Premierement est la terre toute masseice et reonde non pas parfaitement car il y a montaignes et vallees mais toutesvoies tent elle a reondesce et qui seroit ou ciel et la resgarderoit elle sembleroit toute reonde [The earth is round like a ball. First, the earth is entirely solid and round, but not perfectly, because there are mountains and valleys, but nonetheless it tends toward roundness. And to someone who might be in the sky and look at the earth, it would appear entirely round]” (BnF, fr. 565, 2r). Could this text have been known to Elisha Cresques and have influenced the text on the Catalan Atlas?

137. Trapobana is cut off on its eastern side.

138. Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 250.