Of smelly seas and ashen apples (chapter)

Of smelly seas and ashen apples: two German pilgrims’ view of the East
By Anne Simon, a chapter from Eastward Bound (ed. Rosamund Allen, 2004)

In this chapter, Simon follows two German travelers – Ludolf von Suchem (1350) and Hans Tucher (roughly 150 years later) through their pilgrimages to the east. As the chapter title indicates, both pilgrims write of the ashen apple that appears in Mandeville.

Says LvS, “. . . all the country round about is full of trees and great fruits, exceeding fair to see; but when these fruits are plucked and broken open, they are full of dust and ashes within, and for three days the hands of him who plucked them cannot be rid of a vile stench; for even all the country round about it is full of God’s curse” (196).

He’s writing of the land around the Dead See, of which HT writes similarly: “The stench by the Dead Sea is vile, yet many pretty trees are to be found there which bear fruit that is large, attractive and appealing, just like nice apples. However, when you pick them, on the inside these fruit are full of dust and emit an evil smell” (196).

Of course, the Biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah bordered the Dead Sea, and “Both authors explicitly connect the overwhelming stench of the Dead Sea and its inability to support life to the evil practiced in these cities” (196).

Simon offers the following interpretation of the moralized nature presented to us by LvS, HT and Mandeville, among others: “Apples recall Original Sin and the Fall of Man, or which the vice that led ultimately to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was but one manifestation. Given their deceptive appeal, they may also symbolise the vanity of all earthly appearances, especially in comparison with the eternal truths to which pilgrimage bear witness” (196).

What does Mandeville have to say on the matter? Quoting from the Penguin modern:

“By the side of this sea grow trees that bear apples of fine colour and delightful to look at; but when they are broken or cut, only ashes and dust and cinders are found inside, as a token of the vengeance that God took on those five cities and the countryside roundabout, burning them with the fires of Hell” (90).

Like other travelers, he includes this piece of information – whether as a means of moralizing, as a simple observation, or more likely because it had already become a standard feature in travel narratives mentioning the Dead Sea to which M. was compelled to conform. In any event, he is clear and vehement in his connection of the phenomenon to the fires of Hell. It is an interest token of moral nature that is of clear importance to European travelers. It does not concern Simon (her article is not actually about Sodom apples) but I am also interested in the real plant that medieval travelers likely understood to be an “apple of ash”, and on the prevailing use of the Sodom apple as a symbol in modern queer literature. If connecting Mandeville with Colm Toibin isn’t bizarre, I don’t know what is.

What Simon does is take us briefly through the travel narratives composed by each of these German travelers. This provides lots of interesting insight into the idea of travel writing and pilgrimage, the conception of audience, and the impetus for writing and communicating the experience of travel.

In no particular order:

-Simon mentions at a certain point, in relation to LvS, that he intentionally omitted details about things in exotic places that were commonplace there. That is, even if they are unknown to home audiences, the quality of being commonplace in their indigenous contexts struck down the worthiness of these objects in LvS’s narrative. So, in Famagusta, LvS states “I say nothing about spices, for they are as common there as bread is here” (200). I think that Mandeville is not so discerning, but it is interesting to reflect on the extent to which the personal qualities and prejudices of the author limit or mitigate the information received by the audience.

-Of the distinctly religious discourse in pilgrimage narratives from the Holy Land: “. . . missing from this and indeed many other pilgrimage reports is any explicit expression of personal piety or jubilation on finally seeing the places of Christ’s ministry so familiar from the Bible” (202). I think this is true of Mandeville and many other authors, any might be attributed to a desire to make it simple for the audience to experience the travel vicariously without feeling inhibited by the author’s own specific personal, emotional or spiritual investment. But I guess it depends on your purpose in writing. When I think back (with a small shudder) on Margery Kempe, I seem to remember nothing BUT passionate weeping at the firsthand experience of Biblical places. Then again, she was basically a self-styled saint who probably expected her readers to want to mimic and assume HER experience just as she mimicked and assumed that of Christ.

-Simon mentions LvS’s relative tolerance toward people of other religions (204). This is largely true of Mandeville but not, apparently, universally amongst medieval travel writers. (Is anything ever universally true?)

-LvS writes of the Bedouins in almost the exact same language as Mandeville. (Shit, is he a source used by Mandeville and I’m just forgetting? That would be embarrassing. Jessie: “Wow, these are super similar!” Committee: “Well, Jessie, that’s because ONE IS PLAGIARISING THE OTHER.”) Anyway, the point is made that they are swarthy, uncouth nomads who neither sow nor reap, and are therefore EVIL. (TruFacts: The proper term for this is “Disney Logic”. Or should be, anyway.) Says Simon, “Even if the characteristics singled out for description reflect the facts, swarthiness and ugliness are signs of the diabolic with which the genuinely strange and threatening are associated. Bedouins live outside regulated urban communities, dress differently, and enjoy a way of life that must have been completely incomprehensible to pilgrims” (205). I’d like to take this one step further and look at how their values regarding and interactions with the natural world are also read as an indication of their spiritual state.

-LvS apparently mentions barnacle geese in his narrative, at least according to Simon, and perhaps the vegetable lamb as well (though I’d think she’d have mentioned). But Simon has a fairly pithy summary of why the fantastical cannot be dismissed, even if we don’t find it plausible: “The for-us-unlikely is not questioned, possibly because in God’s Creation, everything is possible. The Bible itself bears witness to the existence of giants (Genesis 6:4); fantastic creatures were documented in classical and oriental travel literature and depicted on the margins of medieval mappaemundi. Besides this, the exotic was essential to the poetics of the Other, especially of the Orient” (206).

-On the practice of incorporating existing material into personal travel writing, Simon upholds Hans Tucher as evidence that it is not an unusual method – he had a particular “skill in integrating into the narrative material from other sources, including legendaries, chronicles, mythology, other pilgrimage reports, oral traditions and information passed on by monks, guides and local inhabitants” (209). Further, his sources are not acknowledged. So why does Mandeville get such a bad rap for doing the same, huh? Huh? Okay, there’s probably a good reason why that I’m just too tired to think of.

So, in sum: a useful commentary on some of the conventions of medieval travel writing with examples from outside of England/France that still show important commonalities with the texts I stare at balefully every day.