Professor Charles Fraser Beckingham 19141998
Professor Charles Fraser Beckingham 19141998
1914-1998
A gente se alvoroca e, de alegria,
Nao sabe mais que olhar a causa dela.
Que gente sera esta? em si diziam;
Que costumes, que Lei, que Rei teriam?
Western Christians to look for Prester John to the east of the Islamic world
with which Crusaders were by now locked in continual conflict. It was not
until Ethiopian embassies began to reach Western Europe in the early four-
teenth century that attention moved towards Africa. In ' An Ethiopian Embassy
to Europe c. 1310' (Journal of Semitic Studies, 14, 1989, 337-46), Beckingham
would conduct an in-depth examination of an episode that may have played
a major role in this shift.
Well before this, his inaugural lecture at SO AS in 1966, 'The achievements
of Prester John', had signalled the extension of his interest to the obscure
genesis of the legend, including the notorious ' Letter of Prester John', which
did so much to nurture its growth. The original document, which appears to
have been concocted within Western Europe in the mid-twelfth century, was
in Latin; but it was subsequently translated into many vernacular languages,
usually with matter added or omitted. The provenance of the three Hebrew
versions of the Letter presents an especially difficult and fascinating problem,
and in 1982 Beckingham and Edward Ullendorff published The Hebrew letters
of Prester John (Oxford: Oxford University Press). This volume comprised the
texts and English translations together with an authoritative commentary, the
scope of which was by no means confined to the Hebrew documents alone.
Beckingham's last major publication was again a collaborative work, an edition
(with Bernard Hamilton) of a collection of texts and essays entitled Prester
John, the Mongols and the Ten Lost Tribes (Variorum, 1996). Here were com-
bined reprintings of some of the seminal material on Prester John, by Zarncke
and by Pelliot, and a number of specially commissioned studies; the result was
a valuable addition to the corpus of scholarship on this labyrinthine problem.
The volume incorporated three of Beckingham's papers, including his SOAS
inaugural lecture, and a hitherto unpublished piece, 'Prester John in West
Africa', so that his total input outstripped that of any other single contributor.
These engagements with the mythical Christian potentate did not keep
Beckingham from a long-standing commitment to work on the most famous
of medieval Muslim travellers. Sir Hamilton Gibb had undertaken in 1922 to
produce for the Hakluyt Society an annotated translation of the itinerary of
the fourteenth-century Moroccan pilgrim and jurist Ibn Battuta, who had
aimed to visit every part of the Islamic world. Beckingham assisted Gibb with
the production of the third volume of The travels of Ibn Battuta A.D. 1325-54,
which appeared in print just a week after Gibb's death in 1971. It was left to
Beckingham to complete the fourth and last volume of the translation, which
he accompanied with a commentary that tended to be fuller than was Gibb's
in the earlier volumes. This section of the Travels comprised much of Ibn
Battuta's stay in India, his visits to the Maldives and (purportedly) to Bengal,
south-east Asia and China, his return home to Morocco, and a further jour-
ney—his last—to Spain and then across the Sahara to the kingdom of Mali.
In the foreword to the volume, which finally saw the light of day in 1994,
Beckingham observed wryly that 'the translation of the narrative of Ibn
Battuta's travels has taken more than twice as long as the travels themselves'.
Be that as it may, by bringing the project to completion he had earned the
heartfelt gratitude of present and future scholars concerned with the Islamic
world and with the history of the Indian subcontinent. When he died, he was
engaged in the preparation of a fifth volume, which would have included an
index to the entire work and appendices on difficult matters like the chronology
of the travels and the authenticity of certain visits.
Beckingham's work was characterized not merely by meticulous and lucid
scholarship, but by the perhaps rarer qualities of humour and common sense,
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0041977X00018589 Published online by Cambridge University Press
546 OBITUARY
as when he described the Peutinger Table as sharing ' some of the limitations
and the compression of those familiar, highly schematic and extremely useful
maps of the London underground railway system' ('Achievements', p. 19); or
when he wrote of the Letter of Prester John (' discussed more often than it has
been read') that' much of the enormous mass of commentary that has accumu-
lated around it, however ingenious and erudite it may be, seems to me some-
what perverse. When so many people had such good reasons for wishing to
believe in it, it seems to me to partake of their naivete to search for geographical
and historical facts which might help to justify their acceptance of this or that
preposterous assertion' (ibid., 13). Good sense was manifest, too, in his insist-
ence that medieval Europeans were far less ignorant of the geography of the
world than is often thought; they lacked, rather, the tools to distinguish reliable
traditions from those that were bogus and fabulous.
He tried, wherever possible, to experience at first hand the areas with which
his research was concerned, visiting, for example, Ethiopia on more than one
occasion and touring southern India, Sri Lanka and the Maldives in the steps
of Ibn Battuta. Beckingham's own high standards did not lead him, however,
to engage in captious or mordant criticism of other scholars. The unfailing
courtesy he displayed in his professional relationships was in evidence also in
his writing: either he was content to correct error without attacking the indi-
viduals responsible, or his strictures were couched in general terms and no less
effective for that. One reason for this restraint was undoubtedly the modesty
that rendered him ever alert for flaws in his own work, a modesty that was
genuinely felt and never assumed by way of conventional politesse. A notable
instance appears early in his inaugural lecture at SOAS, when he introduced
Prester John as ' someone less substantial than even I am'. There was nothing
remotely insubstantial about Beckingham's wide-ranging erudition, and his
published work will prove of immense value to scholars for a considerable
time to come.
PETER JACKSON
Keele University
OWEN WRIGHT
School of Oriental and African Studies