The Travels of Friar Odoric

Odoric, a Franciscan monk from northeastern Italy, spent much of the early 14th century traveling throughout Asia. His adventures provided one of the most important Western accounts of life and culture in what is present-day Iran, India, Indonesia, China, Nepal, and Russia.

---

Mountains made of salt, deserts wider than oceans, mice as big as dogs, trees that produced bread, magic fish, sensational pearls, gigantic tortoises, men with the head of a dog, hens covered in wool...not to mention women with fangs. It was all heppening in the Far East in the 14th century! Odoric, a Franciscan monk from northeastern Italy, spent much of the early 14th century travelling throughout Asia, just twenty years after Marco Polo. His adventures provided one of the most important Western accounts of life and culture in what is present-day Iran, India, Indonesia, China, Nepal, and Russia. Despite the exaggerations which crept into his journals, Odoric noted with acute accuracy the religious and cultural customs of the places he visited making his account of unparalleled importance for scholars and historians.