We
should suppose it most likely that this fact had been interpolated in the
copy of Odoric used by Mandeville; for, if he had borrowed it direct from
Polo, he would have borrowed more." (Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 474.)
"Leaving this question, there remains the more complex one whether the
book contains, in any measure, facts and knowledge acquired by actual
travels and residence in the East. We believe that it may, but only as a
small portion of the whole, and that confined entirely to the section of
the work which treats of the Holy Land, and of the different ways of
getting thither, as well as of Egypt, and in general of what we understand
by the Levant." (Ibid. p. 473.)
Dr. Warner deals the final blow in the National Biography: "The
alphabets which he gives have won him some credit as a linguist, but only
the Greek and the Hebrew (which were readily accessible) are what they
pretend to be, and that which he calls Saracen actually comes from the
Cosmographia of aethicus! His knowledge of Mohammedanism and its Arabic
formulae impressed even Yule. He was, however, wholly indebted for that
information to the Liber de Statu Saracenorum of William of Tripoli
(circa 1270), as he was to the Historiae Orientis of Hetoum, the
Armenian (1307), for much of what he wrote about Egypt.
