years of age, naturally shows very few signs of reading, there are
indications that he had read romances, especially those dealing with
the fabulous adventures of Alexander.
To these he refers explicitly or tacitly in his notices of the Irongate
and of Gog and Magog, in his allusions to the marriage of Alexander
with Darius’s daughter, and to the battle between those two heroes,
and in his repeated mention of the _Arbre Sol_ or _Arbre Sec_ on the
Khorasan frontier.
The key to these allusions is to be found in that Legendary History
of Alexander, entirely distinct from the true history of the
Macedonian Conqueror, which in great measure took the place of the
latter in the imagination of East and West for more than a thousand
years. This fabulous history is believed to be of Græco-Egyptian
origin, and in its earliest extant compiled form, in the Greek of the
Pseudo-Callisthenes, can be traced back to at least about A.D. 200.
From the Greek its marvels spread eastward at an early date; some part
at least of their matter was known to Moses of Chorene, in the 5th
century;[16] they were translated into Armenian, Arabic, Hebrew, and
Syriac; and were reproduced in the verses of Firdusi and various other
Persian Poets; spreading eventually even to the Indian Archipelago,
and finding utterance in Malay and Siamese. At an early date they had
been rendered into Latin by Julius Valerius; but this work had probably
been lost sight of, and it was in the 10th century that they were
re-imported from Byzantium to Italy by the Archpriest Leo, who had
gone as Envoy to the Eastern Capital from John Duke of Campania.[17]
Romantic histories on this foundation, in verse and prose, became
diffused in all the languages of Western Europe, from Spain to
Scandinavia, rivalling in popularity the romantic cycles of the Round
Table or of Charlemagne. Nor did this popularity cease till the 16th
century was well advanced.
The heads of most of the Mediæval Travellers were crammed with these
fables as genuine history.[18] And by the help of that community of
legend on this subject which they found wherever Mahomedan literature
had spread, Alexander Magnus was to be traced everywhere in Asia.
Friar Odoric found Tana, near Bombay, to be the veritable City of King
Porus; John Marignolli’s vainglory led him to imitate King Alexander
in setting up a marble column “in the corner of the world over against
Paradise,” _i.e._ somewhere on the coast of Travancore; whilst Sir
John Maundevile, with a cheaper ambition, borrowed wonders from the
Travels of Alexander to adorn his own. Nay, even in after days, when
the Portuguese stumbled with amazement on those vast ruins in Camboja,
which have so lately become familiar to us through the works of Mouhot,
Thomson, and Garnier, they ascribed them to Alexander.[19]
Prominent in all these stories is the tale of Alexander’s shutting up
a score of impure nations, at the head of which were Gog and Magog,
within a barrier of impassable mountains, there to await the latter
days; a legend with which the disturbed mind of Europe not unnaturally
connected that cataclysm of unheard-of Pagans that seemed about to
deluge Christendom in the first half of the 13th century. In these
stories also the beautiful Roxana, who becomes the bride of Alexander,
is _Darius’s_ daughter, bequeathed to his arms by the dying monarch.
Conspicuous among them again is the Legend of the Oracular Trees of the
Sun and Moon, which with audible voice foretell the place and manner of
Alexander’s death. With this Alexandrian legend some of the later forms
of the story had mixed up one of Christian origin about the Dry Tree,
_L’Arbre Sec_. And they had also adopted the Oriental story of the Land
of Darkness and the mode of escape from it, which Polo relates at p.
484 of vol. ii.
[Sidenote: Injustice long done to Polo. Singular modern instance.]