bout de papier, Vol. 22, No. 1 (2006) — Spring 2006 // Printemps 2006, pp. 5–7
in the first decades of the thirteentl Lcentury, rumours began to circulate Il the Middle East and Europe about a new and terrible power emerging in Upper Asia Some rumours associated these “Tartars” with Prester John (“John the Priest”), a mythical Christian king, with whom, it was hoped, an alliance could be formed to encircle and destroy Islam. Others, with a penchant for philology, associated Tartars with Tartessos, the lowest circle of Hell. Both versions, as it turned out, had an element of truth. Between 1247 and 1291, in the hope of encouraging one interpretation and averting the other, a series of remarkable diplomatic missions were sent from Europe to the deepest reaches of Asia.
The first intimations of something new out of Asia came in 1145, when a Syrian priest appeared at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, claiming to represent a Christian prince from the east who was on the march against Islam. This king, who became known as Prester John — Prester meaning a priest in middle English — had just taken Hamadan in Iran and planned to join forces with the crusaders in the Holy Land. There was some truth in this, since in what is now Chinese Turkestan the Khanate of Kara Khitai (Black Cathay) included many Nestorian Christians. The Nestorians took their name from a deposed fifth century Patriarch of Constantinople who had found refuge in Persia. His adherents had followed the Silk Road, spreading his teachings into Central Asia and India. There were many Nestorians in Mongolia and Turkestan at the time, but also many Buddhists, Muslims, Manicheans and shamanists. The Kara Khitai had been summoned by the Khwarizm Turks, centered in the “Stans,” to help sort out their differences with the Seljuk Turks in Persia. This the Kara Khitai had done, but rather than continue their “crusade,” had returned to Central Asia.
In 1220 reports arrived that Prester John’s son David had again appeared out of the east, and after destroying the Khwarizm and overrunning northern Iran was preparing to attack Baghdad. This was very encouraging to the leaders of the Fifth Crusade, vainly waiting for the arrival of Emperor Frederick II. Optimism turned to alarm when it was reported that David had been killed by one of his vassals, Chingis Can, leader of the Tartars or Mongols. Instead of continuing the war against Islam, Chingis’ forces turned north into the Caucasus, destroying first the Georgian army and then, on the steppes north of the Black Sea, a Russian host. The only peoples who had withstood the Mongols were the Chechens (who lured the Mongol cavalry into an ambush) and the Alans, ancestors of today’s Ossetians. The Mongols then vanished back into the east.
This chronology was not strictly correct. Jenghiz Khan, né Temujin, had been born in 1167 and, after a turbulent youth, had united the Mongols and subdued his neighbours. The final act in the process – the destruction of his former ally, Wang Khan, leader of the Keraits, who was a Nestorian
– was probably the event that gave rise to the legend of his overthrow of David, son of Prester John. In 1206 Temujin was proclaimed “universal ruler” (which is what Jenghiz Khan implies) by a tribal assembly. Jenghiz spent the next 15 years destroying the northern Chinese Ch’in Empire, taking Beijing in 1215. He then defeated the Kara Khitai, which made him a neighbour of the Khwarizm Empire. In 1218, vassals of the Khwarizm ruler, Mohammed Shah, attacked a Mongol caravan. The victims included a Mongol diplomatic delegation. Far from denouncing this act, Mohammed Shah accepted a share of the booty. War swiftly followed. The ensuing scale of slaughter and destruction was probably not equalled again until the twentieth century. The Khwarizm armies were destroyed, Mohammed Shah was hounded to his death on the shores of the Caspian and his son Jalal ed-Din was chased across the Indus river. The great cities of Central Asia and northern Iran from Samarkand to Qom were systematically destroyed, and, save where they speedily capitulated, their inhabitants massacred Jenghiz died in 1226 and was succeeded by his son Ogodai. Once securely on the throne, Ogodai consolidated Mongol rule in Iran and the Caucasus, which the new Khwarizm Shah, Jalal ed-Din, had tried to reoccupy. In 1232, the Assassins, no friends of the Khwarizm or of any other Sunni ruler, were so alarmed that they sent envoys to the kings of England and France proposing a grand alliance of Christians and Muslims to oppose the common threat. The Pope and the kings of Christendom, however, saw nothing wrong with this situation – until the Mongols renewed their offensive against Russia. From 1238 to 1240, the cities and principalities of Russia were systematically reduced, beginning two centuries of what the Russians call the “Tatar Yoke.” When Kiev fell on December 6, 1240, the Mongols turned against Poland and Hungary. Emperor Frederick II called on his fellow rulers to unite against this threat, but the Pope preferred to press his own crusade against Frederick. Closer to the scene, the Teutonic Knights rallied to help the Poles (normally not their best of friends). On April 5, 1241, the Grand Master and his knights, along with the hosts of Henry the Pious, Duke of Silesia, and Boleslaw the Chaste, Duke of Cracow, fell before the Mongols at Liegnitz, in Silesia. Silesia was so devastated that it had to be largely repopulated with German settlers — only to be depopulated again 700 years later by another onslaught from the east. On the same day, the southern wing of the Mongol army destroyed the Hungarian army at the river Sajo before sweeping on to the gates of Vienna. It was there that news reached the Mongol leaders Batu and Subadai that Ogodai Khan had died (of drink). The main Mongol armies were summoned home to help decide the succession, although their offensive into the Caucasus and Anatolia continued. The Seljuk Sultan and the Kings of Armenia and Georgia all deemed it prudent to submit to the Mongols.
In 1245, Pope Innocent IV decided to send embassies to the Mongols, largely to learn more about them, but also to learn if there was any truth in the tales that they were, or harboured, Christians, and to determine if they could be converted to Roman Catholicism. In April 1245 the first mission set out from Lyons, under John de Plano Carpini, a senior Franciscan (indeed one of the originals who served with St. Francis of Assisi himself) well versed in the ways of eastern Europe. Sixty years old and very overweight, Plano Carpini and three friars recruited from Poland and Bohemia took the better part of a year to get to Kiev.
En route, various Polish and Ukrainian magnates gave them advice on dealing with the Mongols, which included exchanging most of their travel advance for beaver and other pelts. From Kiev, Mongol outposts directed them to their Viceroy Batu.
After a journey threatened by Lithuanian raiders and made more onerous because it was Lent and they were subsisting on boiled millet, they reached Batu’s encampment on the lower Volga. Before being received in his magnificent tent – looted from the King of Hungary — they had to undergo a “security inspection” similar to that experienced by Byzantine envoys to the Turks 600 years earlier — passing between two purifying fires to screen out evil spirits. They also had to pay Batu’s attendants a douceur of forty beaver and eighty badger skins. Batu received their credentials, which he had translated with the help of a Russian delegation into Persian, Turkish and Mongol. These he sent by courier to Karakorum. He then instructed the friars to follow, courtesy of the Mongol postal service, sometimes changing horses several times a day. This brought them to Karakorum in what is now eastern Outer Mongolia, on July 22, 1246. Given the hardships of the journey, the choice of Franciscans was probably a sound one. A mendicant order, they were inured to hunger and cold, and had a reputation for seeking converts in forbidding places. St. Francis himself had tried to convert the Sultan of Egypt. Other Franciscan missionaries were already out probing the steppes of Tartary. That said, Brother John set forth with low expectations. He noted in his dispatch:
…we feared we might be killed by the Tartars or other people, or imprisoned for life, and afflicted with hunger, thirst, cold, injuries and exceeding great trials…all of which with the exception of death and imprisonment fell our lot…in a much greater degree than we had conceived beforehand.
As it was, except for two letters from the Pope, one outlining the Christian faith, the other admonishing the Mongol Khan for his attacks on Christendom and urging him to refrain and repent, the mission was remarkably ill-equipped. Brother John had to shell out all of his pelts to ease his passage through the territories of subordinate Mongol rulers, leaving nothing to offer the Khan when he got to Karakoram. Additionally, finding reliable interpreters was a major challenge, which probably accounts for some of the nuggets of strange information about the Mongols and their history found in Carpini’s otherwise quite informative despatch.
Karakoram in the summer of 1246 was probably the scene of the greatest diplomatic assemblies to gather prior to that in Paris in 1919. Plano Carpini estimated there were some 3,000 diplomats and their entourages and up to 5,000 representatives of vassal tribes and peoples. They were there to ratify the election of Ogodai’s successor Guyuk Khan. Like a political convention, the election process was a foregone conclusion. It still required another month after Carpini’s arrival to finalize it. Given their seemingly humble status and lack of any offerings, it was not until November that Carpini was received by the new Khan and given official replies to the Pope’s letters.
While Guyuk and his nobles, like their subjects, lived in yurts, this was no mere tent city. Carpini comments on the splendour of Guyuk’s white velvet tent and those of his relatives, the richness of their furnishings, and the lavishness of their entertainments. Guyuk’s throne was made of ivory with gold and jeweled fittings; he and his nobles wore silk, fur and many golden ornaments. That said, Carpini and his four-man delegation only received official rations for one and had to supplement this by browsing at official functions and at other delegations’ hospitality tents, and by scrounging from members of the local expatriate community and other Christian envoys. Prince Jaroslav of Suzdal’s staff were particularly helpful, providing valuable advice and interpretation services. Prince Jaroslav, however, showed the potential perils of incautiously partaking of official hospitality. After dinner with the Queen Mother, he turned a strange blue-grey colour and died. His son, Alexander Nevsky (the eponymous proto-Stalinist hero of Eisenstein’s famous film), while willing to confront the Teutonic Knights head to head on the ice of Lake Pepsius, deemed it prudent to shelter behind the marshes of Novgorod, rather than come to Karakoram to be invested in his late father’s lands.
The audience with Guyuk Khan, when it finally came, was polite, but the tone was less than auspicious. It was delayed while Guyuk officially declared war against the whole world. Guyuk proposed sending envoys back with Carpini’s party, but Carpini feared they might be spies and pleaded that he could not guarantee the envoys’ safety when passing through lands ravaged by Batu’s hordes. The Franciscans received an official reply to the Pope’s letter, in Mongol with Persian and Latin translations. It still exists, and rejects the Pope’s exhortation to convert. Guyuk saw no need for that. The Mongols’ own god had done an excellent job leading them to victory. He concluded the letter by ordering the Pope to come forthwith to Karakoram to submit – or else!
Carpini and his colleagues were dispatched back to the west on November 13. After a bitter journey, often camping in the snow in the open steppe, they reached Batu’s camp on the Volga on May 9, 1247, and Kiev, where they were greeted as returning heroes, a month later. Some of the local Ukrainian princes were sufficiently impressed to switch their spiritual allegiance to Rome. Travelling through Germany and France, Carpini worked the lecture circuit, drawing in capacity crowds with his account of the Mongols’ customs and history, plus some sound – if hard to implement — advice on how the Mongols should be confronted in battle. There was no doubt in John de Plano Carpini’s mind that a renewed Mongol invasion of Europe was imminent.
The invasion never came. Relations between Batu and Guyuk were poor and only with difficulty was civil war averted Batu was able to engineer Guyuk’s overthrow, placing his own candidate, Mongka, on the throne of Genghis Khan. Carpini’s was not the only mission to the Mongols. Pope Innocent IV also sent out a Dominican delegation in 1247, led by Brother Ascelin, who travelled to Transcaucasia. As befitted the shock troops of the Inquisition, the Dominicans refused to offer any form of homage and acted in an uncompromising manner. The local Mongol commander was about to have them executed when Aljigiday, Guyuk’s viceroy to west Asia, intervened and had them sent home with a letter similar to that given Carpini. This time Mongol emissaries, two Nestorian priests, went with them. Aljigiday also sent emissaries to Cyprus where King (later Saint) Louis IX of France was preparing a Crusade against Egypt. Aljigiday offered to protect all Christians and help retake Jerusalem. In 1248, Louis sent a return mission, led by another Dominican, Andrew de Longjumeau. Unlike the Franciscans, he was equipped with a large entourage and rich presents, including a portable chapel. After a year, passing many ruined cities filled with “great heaps of dead men’s bones,” they reached the camp of the Mongol regent near Lake Balkash. The regent assumed the gifts were tribute and in her reply asked King Louis to send more if he wished to avoid destruction.
As France has only twice acknowledged the existence of superpowers (the empires of Charlemagne and of Napoleon), this caused considerable affront. Louis’ biographer admits he much regretted the offensive with the help of the Crusaders. The Crusaders however were hesitant. They did not all share the grand design of a Christian/Mongol alliance that lured the Pope and kings of Europe. In fact they had grown used to (if not always peaceful) coexistence with their Muslim neighbours. The Mongols, in many respects, seemed to be the devil they didn’t know.
The Mamluks from Egypt mounted a counteroffensive. The Crusaders remained ostensibly neutral, but in fact provided the Mamluks with some logistic support, while indulging in plundering some unguarded properties. On September 2, 1260, at Ayn Jalut (Goliath’s Well) near Nazareth, the Mamluks defeated the Mongols and their Georgian and Armenian allies. The victory is still celebrated by the Arabs as one of the defining moments of their history on a par with Yarmuk, Qadisiyah and Hattin, although most of the Muslim fighters would have been Kipjaks and Kurds.
The dream of the grand east-west alliance did not quite die at Ayn Jalut. In 1288 emissaries from the Mongol Il Khan of Persia received an encouraging response from Edward Prince of Wales, who was crusading. Unfortunately the other major European rulers were more interested in siding with Naples and Aragon in their war for Sicily. The plan came to naught and in 1291 the last Crusader stronghold in Palestine, Acre, tell to the Mamluks. Still the legend of Prester John lived on, inspiring Columbus’ search for a direct route to Asia, while reports of the Ethiopian Kingdom led to Prester John’s translation to Africa. This in turn encouraged Portuguese efforts to sail around that continent.
Readers may have noticed that one name is conspicuously absent from this account — Marco Polo. By the time he got to east Asia — assuming he was really there
– 20 years after Carpini, Rubruck et al., the golden road to Samarkand and beyond was a well-established route for western diplomats, entrepreneurs, missionaries and adventurers. Marco told a good story, but his predecessors had already left behind even more interesting accounts.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 22, No. 1 (2006) — Spring 2006 // Printemps 2006, pp. 5–7. Read the rest of this issue →
