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of all Europeans), who was the son of Moses. Isidore describes the Thracians as the most ferocious of all peoples living around Scythia. Echoing Pliny the Elder, he writes, “Indeed, they were the most savage of all nations, and many legends are recorded about them: that they would sacrifice captives to their gods, and would drink human blood from skulls.” He says that the Albanians are born with white hair (“because of the incessant snow”), differing slightly from Pliny, who argued that they were bald from childhood. Despite these descriptions of the Scythians and their neighbors, Isidore specifically locates the homeland of the Cannibals as somewhere beyond India. “The Anthropophagians . . . feed on human flesh and are therefore named ‘man-eaters.’”33

      He also describes many different kinds of monstrous humans, the Plinian races, as they have come to be called, but adds a new dimension to the subject. Since Isidore is writing from a Christian perspective, unlike many of the sources he draws from, he cannot discuss monsters without clarifying their place in God’s creation. As he tells us, there are no beings that are contrary to nature, and nothing can be contrary to God’s will. He is concerned with developing a more rational approach to understanding monsters and human monstrosities and is careful to distinguish between beings that are portents and those that are unnatural. Nonetheless he reports on the existence of Cynocephali, Cyclopes, Blemmyes, Sciopodes, Giants, Pygmies, the Hippopodes, and the Panotians (people with ears so large that they cover their whole body). While not all of these monstrous beings lived in Scythia, several did, and Isidore reports that among the tribes that reside in this region “some cultivate the land, whereas others are monstrous and savage and live on human flesh and blood.”34 Thus the Etymologies maintain the earlier traditions of representing cannibals as both actual monsters, residing near monsters, or being like monsters. Anthropophagi do not appear to fit neatly into any category, but it seems that Isidore views man-eaters as human—perhaps monstrous but human nevertheless.

      Isidore presents a common premodern understanding of human temperament as directly related to the climate and geography of the region that a group inhabits: “People’s faces and coloring, the size of their bodies, and their various temperaments correspond to the various climates. Hence we find Romans are serious, the Greeks easy-going, the Africans changeable, and the Gauls fierce in nature and rather sharp in wit, because the character of their climate makes them so.”35 This climatic theory of human development will be echoed repeatedly by European travelers to the Americas well into the modern era.

      A few centuries after Isidore of Seville composed his encyclopedic work, European Christians embarked on series of conquests of the Holy Land. The accounts of the First Crusade, which lasted from 1096 until 1099, add another important, and perplexing, layer to the medieval discourse on cannibalism. While one might expect that the Catholic Crusaders would follow earlier precedents and accuse their Muslim enemies of cannibalism, this is not the case. Rather the firsthand reports describe Catholic soldiers consuming Muslims. In 1098, during the Siege of Ma’arra, in modern-day Syria, there were a surprising number of reports that the Crusaders ate the bodies of their enemies. While the reports agree that bodies were consumed, the how, why, and who are not quite as clear. Some chroniclers blame the acts on a perhaps fictitious group of impoverished soldiers known as the Tarfur, reinforcing that even if acts of cannibalism did happen, they were committed by an outsider group. Equally important, however, is the fact that these reports stressed that the only bodies the Crusaders consumed belonged to Muslims; even when driven to desperate acts, the soldiers maintained a distinction between the bodies of their compatriots and those of their enemies. Symbolically, of course, treating the bodies of one’s enemies as food dehumanizes them. But it also, in some ways, dehumanizes the consumer. As the historian Jay Rubenstein notes, however, “behind each narrative direction lies a common impulse: the recognition of cannibalism not as an aberration from the ethos of holy war but as an aspect of it.”36 In a holy war, which is by its nature understood as justified, the means must always support the ends. This same logic will be repeated by English settlers in North America who resorted to cannibalism to survive in a world that they believed was hell-bent against them.

      Medieval Travel Narratives

      Typically in the Middle Ages cannibals were portrayed as either distant foreigners from the East, witches, Jews, or savage forest-dwelling wild men. The cannibal was always an individual who resided outside of mainstream Christian culture. European traditions about the Other reinforced a civilizing agenda, in which strangers were meant to be converted to the proper Christian way of life or eliminated. Because these processes were set in motion long before the first European set foot in the “new world,” the writings of early explorers tended to focus on the differences between themselves and the inhabitants of the Americas. As it was common in medieval Europe for individuals to label peoples and cultures that were quite different from their own as cannibalistic, this led to an abundance of references to cannibalism in the Americas. Additionally medieval European writings were rife with references to the threatening powers of women, as evidenced by the numerous accounts of witches, for example. The medieval tendency to portray women’s sexual freedom as threatening was continued in the Americas.37

      Writings about travel to exotic lands were enormously popular in the Middle Ages, and it was not uncommon for these accounts to feature descriptions of cannibalism. Two of the most important travel narratives for our concerns are those of Marco Polo and John Mandeville. Columbus read both of their works and to varying degrees used them as guides for his own explorations. Polo’s writings helped Columbus to determine what he believed to be the circumference of the Earth (he turned out to be quite wrong).38 More important, however, it was Polo’s writings that kept Columbus searching for Cathay (China), Cipangu (Japan), and the Great Khan. Just as Columbus’s quest was shaped by Polo’s own journey, so too did Polo impact discourses of cannibalism.

      The travelogue of Marco Polo remains one of the most enduring narratives of the later Middle Ages. The Travels were actually written down by Rustichello of Pisa, who shared a prison cell with Polo in Genoa in the late thirteenth century. The work itself is a blend of travel narrative, fantastic history, and romance. Polo traveled much of the known world, from Acre to Beijing around the Indian peninsula and back to Constantinople. He traveled to the seat of Mongol power and met with Kublai Khan, who asked Polo, along with his father and uncle, who traveled with him, to carry a letter to Pope Clement IV requesting an official delegation of Christians. Polo’s opinions on the peoples he encountered range from outright disgust to measured admiration.

      Alongside marvels of ingenuity, wealth, and engineering, Polo’s narrative discusses marvels of custom, behaviors that were decidedly outside the norms of Roman Catholic societies. He was fascinated in particular by women’s sexual licentiousness. In the majority of cultures he discusses, women are depicted as either chaste and modest or overly passionate and without shame. He describes the women of Cathay as “excel[ling] in modesty,” which profoundly shapes their lives. These women go to great lengths to preserve their hymens (and thus the assumption of their virginity): “The maidens always walk so daintily that they never advance one foot more than a finger’s breadth beyond the other, since physical integrity is often destroyed by a wanton gait.” He was fascinated and appalled by the range of sexual practices that he heard about on his journey. In central Asia he met a group of people whose notions of hospitality went well beyond acceptability in Polo’s mind. When a stranger arrived, the host was warm and welcoming, offering his house, and his wife, to the guest. The host then departed for several days, leaving the guest to do “what he will with her, lying with her in one bed just as if she were his own wife; and they lead a gay life together. All of the men of this city and province are thus cuckolded by their wives; but they are not the least ashamed of it. And the women are beautiful and vivacious and always ready to oblige.” A lack of “proper” attitudes regarding gender and sexual norms was enough for Polo to describe a group of people as “liv[ing] like beasts.”39

      The first reference to anthropophagic practices in the Travels comes from a description of religious leaders in Tibet and Kashmir. According to Polo, holy men in these regions are filthy and have “no regard for their own decency or for the persons who behold them.” They are so physically and spiritually abhorrent that they eat the corpses of convicted criminals (but never those who die a natural death). In a region of China subject to the Great Khan, Polo tells of a group of bloodthirsty people

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