The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, which first appeared in print around 1371, purported to document the travels of an English knight throughout Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Persia, and Turkey.

The book was very popular, and was regarded as being factual by medieval scholars, but modern readers can easily spot that the majority of it is fiction. For instance, it describes islands whose inhabitants have the bodies of humans but the heads of dogs, a tribe whose only source of nourishment is the smell of apples, people the size of pygmies whose mouths are so small that they have to suck all their food through reeds, and a race of one-eyed giants who eat only raw fish and raw meat.

Mandeville himself was probably also a fictional character. The name might have been adapted from an earlier French romance titled Mandevie that also involved a hero who embarked on an imaginary journey. The true author of the book remains unknown.