In the 1300s, only a minority of English-speaking people could read. Nevertheless there were still what we would call “bestsellers.” One of these was “The Travels of Sir John Mandeville,” published around 1357. The author, Sir John Mandeville himself, explains that he was born in St. Albans, England, became a knight, sailed the seas, and visited practically every place that Europeans in the 1300s had heard about: Turkey, Persia, Syria, India, Arabia, Libya, Egypt, and even “Amazonia.” Although nowadays we would assume that “Amazonia” was in South America, in those days it was thought to be a place near either Libya or Turkey.
Mandeville’s book was translated into any number of languages, and became as popular as any work of its era. It was treated, in fact, like a traveler’s true account of his experiences, and was used as a reference book by people like Christopher Columbus. This was a serious mistake, it turns out, because not only did Sir John Mandeville not really do any of that traveling; he didn’t even write the book! This is primarily because he didn’t exist. As far as anybody knows, the book was put together from stories found in a monastery library by Jan de Langhe, a Benedictine monk near Calais, France.
But the avid readers of the 1300s didn’t have a clue about that, and they thought the stories were all true, regardless of how odd some of them seemed. One of the oddest was the story of the “barometz” — which was also known as the “vegetable lamb of Tartary.” This is what the book said: “There groweth a sort of Fruit as it were Gourds, and when it is ripe, Men cut it asunder, and they find therein a Beast as it were of flesh, bone and blood, as it were a little Lamb without Wool, and Men eat the Beast and Fruit also, and sure it seemeth very strange.”
Strange indeed, but that didn’t stop people from retelling the story and embellishing it. Eventually it became a a tale of a real lamb that stayed connected by some sort of vine to the original plant. The story might have seemed more credible because “barometz” was supposed to be a Tartar word, and Tartar was far away in central Asia. Nobody knew of anybody who had really been there, so it must have had arcane mysteries and dozens of unknown languages with weird words, right?
The word “barometz” is actually (or probably) derived from the Russian word “baranets,” which means a kind of moss. In whatever original story the monk read, though, there was probably a germ of truth, and it had to do with, of all things, cotton. Cotton was native to India and virtually unknown in Europe, and the stuff does seem bizarre in some ways — particularly to people who never encountered it before. It resembled wool (like you’d get from a lamb) but it comes from a plant — and the way it grows is inside a little pod that resembles a gourd.
Cotton was described more accurately by the ancient authors Herodotus and Pliny, who explained that “Certain trees bear for their fruit fleeces surpassing those of sheep in beauty and excellence,” and “These trees bear gourds the size of a quince which burst when ripe and display balls of wool out of which the inhabitants make cloths like valuable linen.”
The barometz is not the only legend probably based on cotton, either. It was also unknown in China, and there was a legend there that it grew where a dead lamb had been buried. The Chinese, who were first in most things back then, started their legend nearly a thousand years before the English knight who didn’t exist didn’t travel to Tartar, didn’t encounter the barometz, and didn’t write a bestselling book containing a story about it.
Oh, and by the way, Sir Mandeville’s book comes from the 1300s, so I hope you didn’t think the title was as simple and short as I initially listed it. The complete title was: “The Voyages and Travels of Sir John Mandevile, Knight; Wherein is set down the Way to the Holy Land, and to Hierusalem: as also to the Lands of the Great Caan, and of Prestor John; to India, and divers other Countries: Together with many and strange Marvels therein.”
