Sir Henry Yule traces thus the sources of the spurious work:  “Even in that part of the book which may be admitted with probability to represent some genuine experience, there are distinct traces that another work has been made use of, more or less, as an aid in the compilation, we might almost say, as a framework to fill up.  This is the itinerary of the German knight William of Boldensele, written in 1336 at the desire of Cardinal Talleyrand de Perigord.  A cursory comparison of this with Mandeville leaves no doubt of the fact that the latter has followed its thread, using its suggestions, and on many subjects its expressions, though digressing and expanding on every side, and too often eliminating the singular good sense of the German traveller.  After such a comparison we may indicate as examples Boldensele’s account of Cyprus (Mandeville, Halliwell’s ed. 1866, p. 28, and p. 10), of Tyre and the coast of Palestine (Mandeville, 29, 30, 33, 34), of the journey from Gaza to Egypt (34), passages about Babylon of Egypt (40), about Mecca (42), the general account of Egypt (45), the pyramids (52), some of the particular wonders of Cairo, such as the slave-market, the chicken-hatching stoves, and the apples of Paradise, i.e. plantains (49), the Red Sea (57), the convent on Sinai (58, 60), the account of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (74-76), etc.”

He adds:  “It is curious that no passage in Mandeville can be plausibly traced to Marco Polo, with one exception.  This is (Halliwell’s ed., p. 163) where he states that at Ormus the people, during the great heat, lie in water,—­a circumstance mentioned by Polo, though not by Odoric.  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