Fear of the Unknown and raft ‘Elegant’. Pt 2 – the white wall

These are just two of numerous instances where the manuscript’s imagery includes motifs, details and stylistic habits characteristic of hither or further Asia.

As to the ‘white wall’ idea reflected in popular histories of the earlier twentieth century – little of it is found today in serious historical writing.  In fact, just a year after Friedman interviewed Erwin Panofsky, a first paper on the subject of Asian and other foreign peoples within Latin Europe was published in Speculum – the same journal which had finally decided to publish O’Neill’s 300 word ‘note’.  The latter sparked another Voynich narrative; the former failed to see any widening of the NSA’s research parameters.

• Iris Origo, ‘The Domestic Enemy: The Eastern Slaves in Tuscany in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’,  Speculum, Vol.30 (1955) pp. 321-66

Origo cites, for example, via Robert Davidsohn, the complaint made by a twelfth-century Pisan monk about the number and variety of foreigners in his city during the annual Great Fair, speaking of:

  “Turks and Lybians [Libyans] and Parths and Chaldeans, and similar monsters emerging from the sea.” 

• Robert Davidsohn, Origini della Storia di Firenze (8 vols  1956-1968) pp.1203.   Origo adds that Donizone wrote a biography of the Countess of Tuscany, Matilde di Canossa.

In the same century, Benjamin of Tudela described those to be seen in the city of Montpellier:

… Har Gaash which is called Montpellier. This is a place well situated for commerce.  It is about a parasang from the sea, and men come for business there from all quarters, from Edom, Ishmael [Yemen?], the land of  Algarve , Lombardy, the dominion of Rome the Great (by which he means all the Byzantine empire), from all the  land of Egypt, Palestine, Greece, France, Asia and England. People of all nations are found there doing business through the medium  of the Genoese and Pisans. In the city there are scholars of great eminence, at their head being R. Reuben,, …. They have among them houses of learning devoted to the study of the Talmud.

• M.N. Adler, The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela Critical Text, Translation And Commentary (OUP, 1907) p.3
• For the later history of Montpellier’s Jews see ‘Montpellier‘ in the Jewish Encyclopaedia online.

From those many temporary or shorter-resident foreigners, we move in the fourteenth century to greater number of permanent ones, beginning with  the decree issued by the Priors of Florence on March 2nd., 1363, which permitted “the unlimited importation of foreign slaves of either sex – provided only that they were infidels, not Christians”.

A slave should not be presumed illiterate, ill-bred or uncultured.  Slaves included free persons enslaved, whether by capture in war, by abduction or by deliberate sale to the slavers.   Mamluk Egypt was the major buyer, and Arab slavers the major supplier within the African continent, but the European Knights Hospitaller in Crete and the Genoese were the next most important figures in the medieval trade.   So alarmed did the Mongol rulers of the north become at the draining of their own potential armies by the loss of women and children that they banned the trade – or rather, attempted to do so.

Thus the plain fact of history is that the strange-looking matter in the Voynich manuscript could – for all we know – have come first into Latin horizons with an Asian woman as easily as a Latin man.  The ‘white wall’ idea is now nearly seventy years out of date at least, yet for theorists attached to narratives originating in the ideas of that time, assumptions and bias implicit in Wilfrid’s narrative, in the Friedman’s  parameters for research and thus in d’Imperio’s Elegant Enigma remains current thinking.   When one can be publicly admonished by a ‘Eurocentric’ on the grounds that, by asking whether we haven’t placed too much reliance on the Mnishovsky rumour, one deserves censure for having ‘spoken disrespectfully of a member of the nobility’, then one can only imagine the offense likely to be taken if one suggests Rudolf might have paid six hundred ducats for the writings of a Mongol slave.

Of course, it wasn’t only the slaves who knew something of Asia by the late 1300s.  In the Upper church of St. Francis of Assisi, a manuscript is depicted in the style of a western codex and with inscriptions intended for the  recently-invented  Phagspa script.   Tanaka wrote the seminal paper on this matter,  to which I referred when explaining for Voynicheros the historical context for the manuscript’s final phase of development before c.1400.   The information was received in silence.

Sources recommended in those posts to voynichimagery.

• Hidemichi Tanaka, ‘The Mongolian script in Giotto’s paintings at the Scrovegni Chapel at Padova’,  Akten des XXV. Internationalen Kongresses fur Kunstgeschichte Pt.6 (1986) pp.167-74. or:
• Hidemichi Tanaka, “Giotto and the Influences of the Mongols and the Chinese on His Art: A New Analysis of the Legend of St. Francis and the Fresco Paintings in the Scrovegni Chapel”, in: Bijutsu  shigaku [Art History] (Sendai), VI (1984),
• D.N. O’Donovan, ‘Chronological strata ~ Avignon 1300s’, voynichimagery, (February 6th, 2015).
  • __________________, ‘On the doorstep.. and things Manichaean’, (October 31st, 2016).
• Roxanne Pranzniac, ‘Siena on the Silk Roads: Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the Mongol Global Century, 1250-1350’, Journal of World History, Vol. 21, No. 2 (June 2010), pp. 177-217.

but see  also

• Hidemichi Tanaka,, Oriental scripts in the paintings of Giotto’s period” – Extrait de la Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Mai-Juin 1989 pp. 214-224 .
• Vera-Simone Schulz, ‘From Letter to Line: Artistic Experiments with Pseudo-Script in Late Medieval Italian Painting, Preliminary Remarks’ in Marzia Faietti and Gerhard Wolf (eds.), The Power of Line (2015) pp.144-161.

and

I also see that a wiki article has been written during the past couple of years.

note (22nd April 2019) – on second reading I found that wiki article so bad as to be objectionable and have removed the link.  Readers will get a less skewed idea of the degree of intercourse between Asia and Europe during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by reading the primary sources in Henry Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither, [4 vols]which can be read through the internet archive (vol. 1 linked) or  the excerpts reprinted with commentary on the  Silk Road Seattle site.