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Medieval travellers Giovanni da Pian del Carpine and Marco Polo both mention cynocephali. Giovanni writes of the armies of Ogedei Khan who encounter a race of dogheads who live north of the Dalai-Nor (Northern Ocean), or Lake Baikal. Polo's Travels mentions the dog-headed barbarians on the island of Angamanain, or the Andaman Islands. For Polo, although these people grow spices, they are nonetheless cruel and 'are all just like big mastiff dogs'.<br/><br/> According to Henri Cordier, the source of all the fables of the dog-headed barbarians, whether European, Arabic, or Chinese, can be found in the Alexander Romance.
Odoric of Pordenone, OFM (1286–1331), also known as Odorico Mattiussi or Mattiuzzi, was an Italian late-medieval Franciscan friar and missionary explorer. His account of his visit to China was an important source for the account of John Mandeville.<br/><br/> Many of the incredible reports in Mandeville have proven to be garbled versions of Odoric's eyewitness descriptions.<br/><br/> Seventy-three manuscripts of Odoric's narrative are known to exist in Latin, French and Italian: of these the most important, of about 1350, is in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris.