Marino Sanudo and Pragmatic Geographical Knowledge

"Marino Sanudo and Pragmatic Geographical Knowledge." Imago Mundi, 67(2), pp. 258–259

Notes

^1. This is an abstract of my doctoral thesis ‘Marino Sanudo: the geographical knowledge of a merchant in the fourteenth century’, supervised by Drs Sophie Page and John Sabapathy in the Department of History, University College London.

^2. A. Leopold, How to Recover the Holy Land: The Crusade Proposals of the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2000); and S. Schein, Fideles Crucis (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991).

^3. The Secreta was written between 1306 and 1321. Nineteen complete redactions of the text are extant, of which nine include a collection of maps. All the copies were written in Sanudo’s lifetime. His proposals began with a stand-alone treatise, the Conditiones, written in 1306–1307. It was subsequently amended and to it were added a second book in 1312 and a third completed in 1321. The three books were then brought together to form the Secreta. My base text is London, British Library, MS Add. 27376 and 27376*. For an English edition see P. Lock, Marino Sanudo Torsello: The Book of the Secrets of the Faithful of the Cross (Farnham, Ashgate, 2011).

^4. Keith D. Lilley ‘Geography’s medieval history: a neglected enterprise?’ Dialogues in Human Geography 1:2 (July 2011): 147‒62; Natalia Lozovsky, Geographical Knowledge in the Latin West ca. 400–1000 (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2000), 5.

^5. For an English translation of a Venetian merchant manual see Merchant Culture in Fourteenth Century Venice: the Zibaldone da Canal, transl. John E. Dotson (Binghamton, NY, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1994); John Dotson, ‘Perceptions of the East in fourteenth-century Italian merchants’ manuals’, in Across the Mediterranean Frontiers: Trade, Politics and Religion, 650–1450: Selected Proceedings of the International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, 10–13 July 1995, 8–11 July 1996, ed. Dionisius A. Agius and Ian Richard Netton (Turnhout, Bepols, 1997), 173‒92.

^6. A possible indirect reference to Hayton of Corycus’s La Flor des Estoires d’Orient (c.1307) appears in redacted versions of the Conditiones. For Latin and French versions of Hayton’s treatise see ‘Flos historiarum terre orientis’, Recueil des Historiens des Croisades: Documents arméniens, vol. 2 (Paris, Imprimerie nationale, 1906), 113‒253 (French); 255‒363 (Latin).

^7. C. Tyerman, ‘Marino Sanudo Torsello and the last crusade: lobbying in the fourteenth century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 32 (1982): 57‒73.

^8. The earliest example is in Venice, Biblioteca Marciana, ms lat. Zanetti 410, fol. 13v.

^9. See Antonio Garcia Espada, ‘Marco Polo, Odorico of Pordenone, the crusade and the role of the vernacular in the first descriptions of the Indies’, Viator 40:1 (2009): 201‒22.

^10. To ensure success ‘the captain of the fleet [should] have before his eyes to observe, the maps of the world’ (Sanudo’s letter to Philip of France dated 4 April 1332, in Friedrich Kunstmann, ‘Studien über Marino Sanudo den älteren mit einem Anhang seiner ungedruckten Briefe’, Abhandlungen der Historischen Classe der Köneglich Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Munich, 1855), vii, 695‒ 819, at 794.

^11. Venice, Biblioteca Marciana, ms lat. Zanetti 547, fol. 14v.

^12. A fictional travel account first appearing in French c.1357. See Sir John Mandeville: The Book of Marvels and Travels, transl. Anthony Bale (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012).