When researching the history of utopian
thought, one of my main points of interest is when I can map the continuity of
an idea or a topos across the medieval/early modern periodisation. My interest
stems from the artificial nature of periods, and how these chronological
divides continue to impede our understanding of the past. The other day, I
encountered one such example of continuity that both pleased me and surprised
me.
The example in question comes from the 1616
novel Histoire du grand et admirable royaume d'Antangil incogneu jusques a
present à tous historiens et cosmographes (‘History of the great and marvellous
kingdom of Antangil, unknown to historians and cosmographers until the present
day’). On the title page of the 1616, the work is attributed to a certain I. D.
M. G. T, whose identity is, as far as I know, still a mystery to us. The work
was part of a growing vogue that followed in the wake of Thomas More’s Utopia,
published one hundred years before Antangil, where authors described
ideal societies found in faraway locations, which could also be used to
satirise or criticise the real-world societies of the author’s own time. While the
main form of this vogue – a novel about an invented ideal society – had Thomas
More’s work as its starting point, both More and later authors belonged to long
strands within the history of ideas, and therefore ensured a great deal of
continuity in thought and form from both the medieval and the pre-medieval
cultural frameworks.
At the point of writing this blogpost, I have
not read Antangil in its entirety, and I hesitate to say much about its
content, as most of my knowledge about the work comes from secondary sources –
especially David Fausett’s excellent 1993 monograph Writing the New World.
What I can say, however, is that this marvellous kingdom is located south of
the tropic of capricorn, and south of Great Java, the latter being a common
point of orientation in late-medieval travelogues. The reader is not only
provided with coordinates, but also a woodcut map made with incredible detail, where
the main villages and rivers are numbered, and these 129 numbers correspond to
a list of three columns where the names are provided. The capital of the kingdom,
Sangil, is located at the bottom of a long, narrow inlet akin to a fjord.
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The great kingdom of Antangil
Table of the main cities and rivers of Antangil
The capital of Sangil
I hope to delve more deeply into the world of
Antangil in the future, but at this point I am most interested in the fifth
book, which describes how Christianity was brought to Antangil, and how the
kingdom got its first martyr. The events are summarised in the header of chapter
1, which states that the holy gospel was proclaimed the capital of Sangil by
Byrachil, who is described as a very sage ‘Braquemane’ who was the disciple of
Saint Thomas the Apostle. As I have yet to read how Byrachil met his martyrdom
in chapter 16, I can only focus on what the information from chapter 1 tells us,
and how this connects to utopian thinking from the Middle Ages.
Header for chapter 1, book 5
If we start with the description of Byrachil as
a ‘Braquemane’, this points us to the tradition of medieval travelogues
exemplified in particular by Marco Polo and John Mandeville, two figures whose
works remained impactful and widely read well into the seventeenth century. (I
say this with full awareness that it was Rustichello of Pisa who gave Marco
Polo’s account the shape by which we know it today, and also that John
Mandeville might never have existed.) In these accounts, we read about non-Christian
sages who are given variations of the name ‘Bragmanni’, which in turn comes
from ‘Brahmin’. The descriptions of these sages drew heavily on the so-called
Alexander tradition, a long line of fantastical accounts of the exploits of
Alexander the Great that comprise the legacy of the Alexander romance by Pseudo-Callisthenes
rather than any contemporary accounts from Alexander’s own time. What interests
me here, however, is that the figure of the Brahmin was well-established as a
marker for the positive ‘other’, and also as a representative of the far east.
That the author of Antangil has decided to use such a figure as the
apostle of their fictional utopia shows that they were familiar with the
traditions of the Middle Ages, and that they expected the medieval traditions
to be known to their audience. In short, we see that the idea of the Brahmin was
still a figure of contemporary resonance in the early seventeenth century, and
that markers of the ideal society established in medieval writing still served
that function centuries later.
Another point of importance is that Byrachil
was the disciple of Saint Thomas, the apostle of Christ whom the post-biblical
apocryphal literature claimed to have evangelised in India. Thomas’ missionary
activities were accepted as historically true in the Middle Ages, and there are
to this day those who believe that this account is based on historical reality.
As Saint Thomas was the apostle of India, it only makes sense to use his activity
as a historical reference point for the introduction of Christianity in the
antipodean kingdom of Antangil. A similar idea can be found in Francis Bacon’s New
Atlantis (1624/27), where the society in question is converted to
Christianity through a letter from Saint Bartholomew (who was also credited
with evangelising in India). In terms of continuity of ideas, however, the use
of Saint Thomas as a marker of an ideal society located on the far side of the
world – albeit vicariously through his disciple – is also seen in medieval
literature. In the mid-twelfth century, members of the court of Frederick
Barbarossa forged a letter claiming to be from Prester John, a Christian king
in the east, who ruled over an ideal kingdom, which became a fixture in Latin
medieval thought well into the sixteenth century and beyond. In the letter, the
king states that the tomb is Saint Thomas the Apostle is located in his realm,
and that he undertakes pilgrimages to this holy site. Moreover, the king’s own
palace is modelled on the palace that Saint Thomas built for King Gundoforus of
India, which means that the connection to the apostle is both one of
architectural emulation and continuous contact by way of his relics. In other
words, Saint Thomas, as apostle, saint, and biblical figure, a marker that proves
the ideal condition – the utopian quality – of Prester John’s realm. This same
function is fulfilled by him – by way of his disciple – in the novel Antangil.
The Christianisation of the kingdom of Antangil
by Byrachil also rhymes with the medieval thoughtworld in another way, namely
that apostles of new members in the Christian oikumene had a connection to a
biblical figure. Such a connection provides a link to biblical history, and
when the figure in question is an apostle, the Christianisation of the new location
takes the form of apostolic succession. Such a succession was not always the
case in the Christian histories of Latin medieval kingdoms – Latin is here used
about the liturgical language, not about the vernacular – and there are plenty
of medieval polities where the apostolic mission is not traced all the way back
to the Bible. The native France of Antangil’s author, however, had
several traditions concerning such biblical connections. In the ninth-century Vita
Dionysi by Hilduin, Saint Dionysius – or Saint Denis of Paris – was conflated
with two other individuals by the same name, one of whom was Dionysius the Areopagite,
who is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, which recounts his meeting
with the apostle Paul. Through this conflation, the apostle of the Paris region
was linked to the apostolic activities of Paul. Similarly, around the year
1000, Ademar of Chabannes, a historian at the abbey of Saint-Martial in
Limoges, rewrote his chronicles to claim that Martial was also a first-century
figure. It is tempting to see the apostolic succession from Saint Thomas in India
to Byrachil in Antangil as a variant of the theme represented by Dionysius and
Martial.
The novel Antangil is very much a work
of the seventeenth century, in that it belongs to a contemporary vogue in
utopian writing. However, it is also steeped in ideas and traditions that run
through the Middle Ages, and which showcase how ideal societies have been
imagined or represented in medieval writings. The connection with the Brahmins is
a utopian strand where an ideal society is located in the far east. The
connection with Saint Thomas is a utopian strand which also places the ideal
society in the far east, but which also includes biblical history, and, by
extension, the figure of Prester John, the ideal Christian king. The connection
with the idea of apostolic succession might be seen as stemming from similar
ideas in French medieval hagiography. These medieval strands have remained forceful
and important by 1616, and they continued to be so for centuries afterwards. The
novel Antangil, therefore, is a good reminder that ideas have a long and
often curious life, and that there is more that connects the so-called modern
world with the Middle Ages than what separates it.
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