Mandeville against magnates
Abstract
Mandeville's discrediting of the European aristocracy's failed crusading mission is much discussed but there is a deeper, constitutional critique of aristocratic power in the Book of Marvels and Travels. Its corollary is a valorization of centralized power. Together these political strands in the Book resonate with late medieval discussions of lordship and the state and, in this context, go to bat for the state. Mandeville's account of the Mongol great khan, for example, not only glamorizes a monarch but idealizes impersonal, state-like power to the exclusion of the personal politics of lordship prized by medieval kings' most powerful subjects.
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