Odorichus de Rebus Incognitis (1330)

This treatise, detailing the journey of group of Franciscan missionaries to China from 1318-1330, became one of the more influential late-medieval travel accounts of the East. Dictated in Latin by Odoric of Pordenone, this narrative was translated into French, Italian, Spanish, and Middle High German during the Middle Ages. The text now survives in at least 111 manuscripts. Part of the staying power of Odoric's narrative is certainly its even mix of observation and rumor. Although Odoric lifts several of his travel anecdotes from the Letter Of Prester John (pepper forest; sandy sea), of the Prester himself he writes that “not one hundredth part is true of what is told of him as if it were undeniable.”

As Heng (p.269) maintains, Odoric appeared to be particularly fixated on the threat of Nestorianism among the Christians he met on his jorurney:

Rather than rejoice in the presence of Christian houses in Tana... Odoric’s record names and identifies those houses as deviant in the instant of their acknowledgment as Christian. They are ‘Nestorian’ houses, which is to say, ‘schismatics and heretics’ (‘scismatici et heretici’ [Yule-Cordier, 2:284], ‘most worthless and most vile’ [2:297]), whose deviancy is immediately show up by the 1321 martyrdom, at Tana, of friars of Odoric’s own Franciscan order, who are on their way to join the mission of John of Monte Corvino, Archbishop of Khanbalik (Peking). Dwelling on this Franciscan martyrdom at length in a lovingly conventional exercise of descriptive hagiography, Odoric’s travelogue takes pains to underscore and shore up doctrinal Latin Christian orthodoxy [Yule-Cordier, 2:284-94) in the face of heterodox Nestorianism.

Read more about Odoric’s travels.