Java in the Irish Marco Polo
This piece appeared on my Patreon account way back in 2022. I thought I’d move it here so that it would be more accessible.
Would you believe that there’s a medieval text on the island of Java in the Irish language? Well, perhaps you would: it’s not really so strange, given the existence of similar descriptions of Java in Middle English and Old Czech and many other languages. Ireland wasn’t as isolated from the rest of the medieval world as many would like to believe, and there are in fact two known medieval texts in Irish that mention Java. We’ll only be looking at one of them here.
The Leabhar Ser Marco Polo
The text on Java in question is a section of an Irish translation of the Marco Polo travels, known in Irish as the Leabhar Ser Marco Polo (where leabhar means ‘book’, from Latin liber). I’ve mentioned this text before, in a piece on the Medieval Indonesia blog about Indonesian spices in a Middle English poem written in Ireland in the 1330s. You may thus already know that this Irish Polo translation is heavily abridged and the section on Java is very short. The fact that it exists is perhaps the most interesting thing about it.
The Leabhar Ser Marco Polo forms part of a fifteenth-century manuscript called The Book of Lismore (Leabhar Leasa Móir), formerly held in private hands at Chatsworth House in England but now thankfully repatriated to the Boole Library at University College Cork in Ireland. The Book of Lismore is a miscellany of religious and secular texts, containing saints’ lives, topographical descriptions, satires, and works on kingship and the conquests of Charlemagne. It was probably written/copied in around 1480 for Finghin MacCarthy Reagh, Prince of Carbery.
The Leabhar Ser Marco Polo is on f.121ra–f.131vb, and the few sentences on Java are near the end, on f.131r. This foliation is different, by the way, to that used by the Celticist Whitley Stokes, who transcribed and translated the text of the Irish Polo for the Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie in 1897. In this piece I shall be relying on Stokes’s translation (1897:408–409) because my poor Irish is not up to the task of tackling the tricky orthography and vocabulary of the work.
I’m somewhat familiar with Old Irish — or, at least, I know of some resources I can use to work through an Old Irish text — and of course for modern Irish there are plentiful dictionaries and books. This fifteenth-century text is something in-between. That makes it a little trickier. I would be tempted to translate some of the text differently; where Stokes went for ‘Java is a great island’, I might prefer ‘Great Java (Iana mor) is…’, particularly as Sumatra is known in this Irish version as Inis Iana Beg ‘Island of Little Java’. I’m not sure, however, whether such interventions are necessary with such a short passage.
The Text
I have nonetheless transcribed the text below from the digitised manuscript (Figure 1) and supplied Stokes’s normalised version below that. Stokes’s translation then follows.
[… … …] IAna
mor fria hur na riġi sĩ ⁊ rí f[uirri] cĩ cõʒ
rig f[or] biṫ f[air]. T[ri]cha c[ét]. m[íle]. a tĩcill na rí-
ġi sĩ. is lan da gach uili ṁaiṫiʒ f[or] biṫ hi.
Iana [sic] mor fria hur na righi sin, (agus) rí fuirri cin comus righ for bith fair. Tricha cét míle a timcill na ríghi sin. Is lan da gach uili mhaithius for bith hi.
‘Java is a great island on the border of that kingdom [Champa], and its king is not under the sway of any king on earth. Three thousand miles is the compass of that kingdom. It is full of every good thing in the world.’
You’ll note that Java is written here as Iana, the common spelling of the island’s name in European manuscripts after the early fourteenth century. You may also note that the Irish abridger didn’t bother with the extended list of spices and luxurious things (clove, nutmeg, cinnamon, cubeb, etc.) found in other Polo texts; Iana is merely ‘full of every good thing’ (lan da gach uili mhaithius) in the world, a phrasing curiously reminiscent of the Middle English text of John Mandeville’s Travels that we looked at earlier in the year (‘all things are there in plenty but wine’). Indeed, there’s also an almost contemporaneous Irish translation of Mandeville; that’s where the other medieval Irish Java text can be found.
Ireland in the Middle Ages
The Celtic-speaking parts of Britain and Ireland tend to get short shrift in English-language historiography, and it would doubtless surprise many people to know that Ireland was such a well-connected place even in the late Middle Ages. Ireland may be a rich country today — one of the most developed in the world according to most rankings — but the popular perception is that this is a historical aberration, something permitted only by modern technology and low corporate tax rates.
In truth, Ireland’s links with the outside world have always been strong, even in the late Middle Ages, even after the depredations of the Vikings and the Norman invasion of 1169. It would be wrong to believe that the island has always been destined for poverty and isolation. Ireland may not have been part of the Roman Empire, but there’s plenty of evidence for long-distance trade at surprising time-depths: The skull of a Barbary ape was excavated at Fort Navan/Eamhain Mhacha in County Armagh in a context dated to around 2,300 years ago. It isn’t entirely clear how it came to Armagh, but presumably it got there in the usual way that things travelled long distances in the pre-industrial world (by ship).
In the early Middle Ages Ireland had an enormous impact on European Christianity and monasticism, with many of the more prominent continental European monasteries having Irish founders or, at least, residents. Some of the best-known works of Old Irish literature were written by Irish monks working on the continent, like the wonderful Pangur Bán, a poem about a pet cat written at Reichenau Abbey in what is now Germany in the ninth century (Figure 2).
Texts written in early medieval Ireland itself also reveal the usual links to other parts of Europe and the wider (Christian) world. Here’s Christopher de Hamel, writing on the historical context of the eighth-century masterpiece the Book of Kells in his Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (2016:124–5):
‘No one knows how literacy and Christianity had first reached the islands of Ireland, possibly through North Africa. This was clearly no primitive backwater but a civilization which could now read Latin, although never occupied by the Romans, and which was somehow familiar with texts and artistic designs which have unambiguous parallels in the Coptic and Greek churches, such as carpet pages and Canon tables. Although the Book of Kells itself is as uniquely Irish as anything imaginable, it is a Mediterranean text and the pigments used in making it include orpiment, a yellow made from arsenic sulphide, exported from Italy, where it is found in volcanoes. There are clearly lines of trade and communication unknown to us.’
This situation changed somewhat with the Norse settlement of Ireland shortly after the Book of Kells was written and illustrated (indeed, the manuscript itself was stolen by Vikings in 1007). Ireland didn’t become less well connected — it’s hard to lose connections with the outside world when outsiders have just turned up and started building new settlements — but Irish Christianity lost its powerful position in Europe around this time and Irish literature became something produced almost exclusively in Ireland and Scotland. Contacts with the wider world came to be mediated by others.
The Norman invasion of 1169 didn’t help matters in this regard. Throughout the later Middle Ages foreign visitors — including particularly Gerald of Wales, whose Topographia Hibernica (c.1188) is far and away the most influential medieval description of the Irish — tended to describe Irish people as fundamentally different to other Europeans. Gerald implied that the Irish kept up blasphemous pagan traditions — a claim that may or may not have a basis in fact — but even small things seemed different there: Gerald said that the Irish rode horses without stirrups, for example, something noted again in a treatise on horsemanship written by Duarte/Edward I (1391–1438), King of Portugal, whose mother was English.
As we’ve seen, however, cloves and other spices are mentioned in works of literature written in later medieval Ireland. And not just in English: there are Middle and early modern Irish words for the usual spices — nutmuic ‘nutmeg’, for example, and clous or clobus ‘clove’, both from the English — as well as for ‘pomegranate’ (greanta poma) and other luxury goods that came from far outside Ireland. Ireland was unquestionably linked to and part of the wider medieval Afro-Eurasian world. One could have had a conversation about Indonesian spices on Ireland’s Atlantic coast in the fifteenth century about as easily as one could in southern Russia or Hungary.
Finally, there were Irish people who travelled long distances themselves in the Middle Ages too. One of these, James of Ireland, even made his way to the Indo-Malaysian archipelago in the company of Odoric of Pordenone, whose account of Java we looked at some months ago. In this context, the survival of one or more medieval descriptions of Java in Irish seems less incredible and more par-for-the-course.
A. J. West — Lisbon, 2022 (posted here 2024).
References
Hamel, Christopher de. 2018. Meetings with remarkable manuscripts. London: Penguin Books.
Stokes, Whitley. 1896–7. The Gaelic abridgement of the Book of Ser Marco Polo. Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie. 1:362–438
