In the 13th century, commercial contacts between Europe and Asia were consolidated. The gold and silver of Sumatra, Korea and Malaysia. Sandalwood, bamboo and the camphor tree from which to extract a fragrant essence. Aromas such as incense and musk, then precious stones such as rubies and sapphires from Ceylon and India. And the spices! Nutmeg, pepper, cinnamon, cloves.
Despite the repeated commercial exchanges that, through the Mediterranean, have long connected the East with the West, if we ask ourselves what the image of Asia was for a Westerner we cannot answer without calling into question a series of myths, legends, magical tales and fantastic geographies.
In the shadow of Genghis Khan (the Mongol leader often compared to Alexander the Great for having unified much of Asia) we find real galleries of monsters: s ciapodi (one-footed beings), blemmi (face-on-the-belly creatures), cynocephalus, panozi (giant-eared beings) and other fantastic creatures that we have come to know also thanks to the novels of Umberto Eco ( The name of the rose and Baudolino , for example).
How come this mixture of myth and reality? The idea of the East and India that the Greeks had depended on the conquests of Alexander the Great. After the battle of Gaugamela and the collapse of the Persian empire, Alexander turned to conquer the eastern regions. After penetrating the Iranian plateau, which had only partially been subject to Persia, he occupied various regions and founded a second, third and last Alexandria. Alexandrèscata (Last Alexandria) in Sogdiana (a region of Central Asia, in present-day southern Uzbekistan) is the place where he married Rossane, daughter of a valiant Bactrian prince.
But that's not all. Alexander arrived in India, precisely as far as the Indus basin (327 BC), and his conquests have left an indelible trace in culture and literature (not only Greek). It therefore seems likely that Alexander's greatness necessarily contributed to the mixture of the two planes (mythological and "historical").
If we pass to the Roman world, we cannot be surprised by the difficulties in isolating historical and geographical data from myths and legends. The Romans they were aware of the existence of the way of incense , that from the extremity of the Arabian peninsula the spices from China and India brought to the Mediterranean; however, they did not have any reliable information on the Asian hinterland and its inhabitants. They only had the echo of Alexandrian enterprises.
Many confirmations come even from a quick review among Roman travelers and encyclopedists . Even in the presence of new information, it is very difficult for us to isolate them from the legends that shrouded Asia. We can remember Pomponio Mela (1st century AD), to whom we owe the oldest geography preserved in Latin literature, a work that has come down to us in various codices and which was intended to present itself as an exhaustive description of the known world: De Chorographia (Description of places), Cosmographia (Description of the world) and De situ orbis (The position of the earth).
Pliny the Elder (23 A.D. - 79 A.D.) of which we only have the Naturalis historia , a real encyclopedia in which the author is influenced by some instances of middle stoicism and which will have a lot of luck in the Middle Ages. Not to mention Gaio Giulio Solino (3rd century AD) author of a Collectanea rerum memorabilium, in which he draws heavily from Pomponius and Pliny who in the Naturalis Historia describes the inhabitants of India as monocles , belonging to a breed that has only one leg and is very skilled in jumping ( singulis cruribus, mirae pernicitatis ad saltum).
The encounter with the Mongols is the entrance into a fantastic world destined to inevitably disintegrate. Westerners were certainly very interested in the places of origin of those spices that were an important part of their lives, or in the precious gems and fabrics that Christian principles and liturgy made great use of. To the point that, towards the end of the thirteenth century, there is a story of a letter received by the court of Pope Alexander III and Frederick I, perhaps through the Byzantine medium, which described the wonders of Asia:of a great Christian kingdom at the head of the which there would have been a priest-king called Prete Gianni . The writing, certainly propaganda according to the historiographic tradition in which Franco Cardini is inserted, showed allusions to real historical facts:to the presence of Turkish-Mongolian kingdoms in central Asia, to the existence of Christian-Nestorian communities scattered along the Silk Road , from Iran to China.
But on the origins of all these goods, as on the history and nature of those distant places, Westerners were willing to accept pure and simple fairy tales : the fire barrier that surrounded the most extreme part of the Earthly Paradise, which obviously was in the East, or the Mount of the Magnet which was located in the Indian Ocean, capable of attracting all the metal objects that were on the ships. And many began to build them without nails, to prevent them… from sinking. Once again, myth is intertwined with reality.
Sources and Bibliography:
Grousset, R., L’empire des steppes. Attila, Genghis Khan, Tamerlan , Paris, 2001
Phillips, E.D., Genghiz Khan and the empire of the Mongols, Newton Compton, 2008
Stahl, W. H., The Science of the Romans , Bari, Laterza, 1962