Mandeville

The travels of Sir John Mandeville first saw the light of day in the mid 13th century and states in the introduction that it's intended as a guidebook for pilgrims venturing to the Holy Land. Unfortunately most of the guidebook information is wildly out-of-date. The travels of John Mandeville, despite posing as a guidebook, is actually just a sort of combination of many eleventh and twelfth century sources. Mandeville ripped pieces from one source bits from another and put them together in a big melting pot and one continuous narrative. A storyteller at heart, Mandeville quickly leaves the guidebook behind and starts spinning tales. Now based on events described within the travels of John Mandeville we can say fairly definitively that it was written after 1360 which would seem to jive with the 1366 date that Mandeville gifts for when he finished his narrative. Now while there is no original manuscript known to survive we do have a very early copy from 1371. It was written in French although it's heavily peppered with Anglicanism, suggesting that the book was written in English initially and later translated to French. The 15th century copy of the work says it was originally written in Latin, translated into French and then translated into English that it might reach men of all parts of the world but this seems to be a much later edition. The work was quickly translated into all the dialects and languages of Europe, French, Spanish, Dutch, German, Bohemia and even Gaelic. We have three early English manuscripts although they're all post 14 hundred but to give something of an indication of how popular Mandeville's work was. We do have over 300 surviving manuscripts versions of the travels of John Mandeville, as opposed to only 77 of Marco Polo. Now all of this is in an aged Pre Guttenberg so that should give you some sort of indiction of just exactly how much these works spread.