Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World by John Larner

From the Publisher

No mere travel account, the book that Marco Polo wrote after many years in Asia became one of the most influential of the millennium. Historian John Larner here explores for the first time the full range of influence of Polo's Book on the history of geography and exploration, showing why the Book came into being and how it played a key role in the development of European overseas expansion.

Los Angeles Times - Tom Engelhardt

Much is alien and strangely wondrous in the history of the book. So John Larner makes clear in his learned history of the book of travels that Marco Polo, a Venetian merchant who became a minor official of a Mongol khan, co-authored in a 13th century Genoese prison.

Jonathan Spence

[An] erudite and highly personal book . . . Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World is an eloquent attempt to prove that Marco Polo’s main importance was to the discipline. This focus leads Larner to much creative rethinking of things that have puzzled many readers.

Library Journal

Larner (Culture and Society in Italy 1290-1420) focuses on the book that Marco Polo produced. After setting the stage, he introduces us to both Marco Polo and the man he believes was his coauthor, Rustichello da Pisa (whom Polo met when both were prisoners of the Genoese). He makes his case by arguing that the type of occupation-specific education that Polo, a member of Venice's mercantile class, had received before his journey to China would not have enabled him to write a literate narrative. Rustichello, on the other hand, was a minor author of literary romance, an ideal partner to sort out Polo's notes and arrange them into the work that captivated a generation. (Its geographical content, descriptions of Chinese cities and Mongol customs, and emphasis on the wealth of the East, Larner argues, inspired the Age of Discovery.) He also refutes Frances Wood's theory (in Did Marco Polo Go to China?, LJ 9/1/95) that he never went to China by presenting reasoned proof that he couldn't have been anywhere else for 24 years. Of interest to students and lay readers with an interest in history; for academic and larger public libraries.--Robert James Andrews, Duluth P.L., MN Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

New York Times Book Review - Jonathan Spence

[An] erudite and highly personal book . . . Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World is an eloquent attempt to prove that Marco Polo's main importance was to the discipline. This focus leads Larner to much creative rethinking of things that have puzzled many readers.

Choice

Larner has written an erudite, comprehensive, and very readable study of enigmatic Venetian Marco Polo, his book, and the book's impact on European culture.

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Read a Sample Chapter

Table of Contents

Read a Sample Chapter

Chapter One

Images of Asia and the Coming of the Mongols

I

In the century in which Marco Polo was born the peoples of western Europe had a vision of the East which was formed from theological learning, classical memories, and their own vivid dreams. In order to assess those changes to knowledge which his book was to bring we must begin by summarising the elements of that image of the Orient: the curious miscellany of information where biblical knowledge and stories of the mission of St Thomas the Apostle to India mingled with legends of Alexander's conquests and tales of the stupendously powerful Prester John. Then we must turn to the first transformation of those elements which came with the creation of the Mongol empire. We must consider the tales told by European legates and missionaries who first visited the Mongols in their heartland and the later development of relations between the Mongols and the West, that development which created the conditions in which the Polos were able to travel to the Far East.

    In its simplest form, early medieval understanding of the geography of the earth is found in the so-called TO maps (see Illustration 2). Within the O or circle representing the world, Asia, largest of the three continents, fills the upper semicircle. Below is a T whose arms are formed by schematic representations of the Don and the Nile, and whose upright is the Mediterranean, dividing Africa to the right from Europe to the left. In the mappaemundi or world-maps of the age that basic pattern is amplified. At the very centreof the O (following the Book of Ezekiel 5.5: `I have set her in the midst of the nations') is Jerusalem (as in the world map of Pietro Visconte, see illustration 6). At the top, in the Far East (see illustration 3), is the Earthly Paradise, ringed by fire, within which Adam and Eve eat the Apple. Following Genesis (2. 10-14), this was the source of four great rivers, sometimes visible, but sometimes meandering underground for many hundreds of miles before re-emerging: the Pishon (identified with the Indus, the Ganges, and at times even the Danube), the Gihon or Nile, the Hiddeckel or Tigris, and finally the Euphrates. As in the map in Hereford Cathedral, the image of the East might also take in such scenes as Abraham at Ur of the Chaldees, the resting place of Noah's Ark, the Tower of Babel. Lot's Wife, Joseph's Granary, and the track of the Israelites from Egypt to the Holy Land. Here too might be seen the Magi, following a star to the new-born Christ (only slowly was the western church transforming them into three kings, representing the three known continents).

    Asia, itself very often called simply `India', was frequently subdivided into three parts, sometimes `Lower', `Middle', and `Upper India', sometimes `Lesser', 'First', 'Greater India', and so on. These terms signified different things to different authors, but normally comprised first Egypt with the Ethiopian Kingdom, second lands to the east including today's subcontinent of India, imagined then as projecting hardly at all into the Indian Ocean but with the vast island of `Taprabona' lying off it, and finally 'the lands beyond the Ganges' (in which from the fourteenth century China came to be included). Each of these had its apostle: St Matthew in Ethiopia, St Bartholomew in 'the third India', and, most celebrated, St Thomas in India proper. Towards the end of the ninth century King Alfred from distant England had dispatched alms to the supposed shrines of Bartholomew and Thomas, while the apocryphal Latin versions of Thomas's Acts and Passion, telling of how, before his martyrdom, the architect-saint had built a palace for the Indian King Gundoforus, enjoyed great popularity (surviving in over a hundred manuscripts from before 1200).

    Secular literature too played its part in this geography. From the classics men remembered the Seres or Chinese making silk garments, while of particular importance were the legends which proliferated around Alexander's conquest of India in the fourth century BC. These told of his wars against Darius of Persia and Porus of India, and `the mightiest mountains in the world' he had found there. They describe how he had enclosed Gog and Magog behind Iron Gates set in a great wall of bronze across the Caucasus. This pair were sometimes portrayed as two great giants, sometimes identified with the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, who would, it was said, at the coming of the Last Days, break from their confinement to bring destruction to the world. Other stories spoke of Alexander's visit to the frontiers of the Terrestrial Paradise, of his correspondence with Didimus the Brahmin, where the conquered Indian is made to draw a contrast between on the one side, riches and power, on the other, naked asceticism, community of goods, and pacifism. Immensely popular were stories of the Amazons and all the progeny of the monstrous races that Alexander had encountered — Cynocephali or dog-headed men; the Blemmyae with faces on their breasts; Sciopods, with only one leg, yet running with amazing swiftness, and who, at rest, used their vast foot as a sunshade; `the anthropophagi and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders', and so on. Together with the monstrous races were found strange beasts: camels and elephants (these occasionally found in western royal menageries), unicorns, griffins, the rhinoceros, mantikhoras with the body of a lion and the face of a man, crocodiles, dragons, serpents with two feet.

    This material was copied in hundreds of manuscripts in languages from all over (and from outside) Europe. In the twelfth century the West's vision of Asia as a land of glorious otherness was enlarged first by `the visit of the Patriarch John' and then by the legend of Prester John. In 1122 a man claiming to be the Patriarch John of India arrived at Rome, seeking papal confirmation of his office. We are faced here perhaps with no more than some confidence-trickster, skilfully playing upon papal hopes with an imaginative and enterprising imposture. Both Odo, abbot of St. Rémi of Rheims, and an anonymous independent account (surviving in eleven manuscripts) describe with reverential awe the lecture on India he gave before the papal curia in which he describes the huge city of Hulna, built on the river Phison and inhabited by devout Christians, and outside the city the twelve monasteries erected in honour of the twelve apostles and the Great Church of St Thomas, visited by all the Christians of Asia on his feast-day. This tale of powerful Christian communities in the East was echoed and reinforced some twenty-three years later. In 1145 Otto of Freising wrote of how, at the court of Pope Eugenius III, he had met a Bishop from Syria who had told him that recently a certain John, king and priest, a Nestorian Christian, descended from the line of the Magi ruling beyond Persia, had defeated the Medes and Persians in battle. He had been prevented from advancing further to bring aid to the Christians of the Holy Land only through the difficulties of ferrying his army across the Tigris." On the basis of tales such as these, combined with the romances of Alexander and the stories about St Thomas, a talented anonymous writer, some time before 1180, concocted the richly imaginative Letter of Prester John. Ostensibly directed to the Emperor Manuel Comnenus, it is a work that survives in over 120 manuscripts in many languages, and was to enjoy an immense success in the late Middle Ages.

    In the letter John announces that he is a Christian king and priest who proposes to visit the Sepulchre of Christ. He rules over the three Indias and has under his authority sixty-two Christian and many other kings, together with a Patriarch Archbishop, and many bishops. He describes the magnificence of his palace, `built in the style of the one which St Thomas designed for King Gundoforus', and of the solemn feasts with which he entertains his peoples. He writes of the prosperity of his realm, where milk and honey flow, of the river Phison in which, since it comes from Paradise, all manner of precious stones are found. He tells of its salamanders, of the fountains of youth which abound, and how no serpent or reptile can live there. In his city there is no perjurer, no counterfeiter, no fornicator or adulterer. Thousands of people at court, together with all pilgrims are fed and accommodated at his expense. He can put into the field 10,000 knights, the same number of sergeants and a 1,000 cross-bow men. The land abounds in gold and silver, corn, wine, myrrh, incense, and silk. Doctors are unnecessary, since the region's precious stones, fountains, and trees possess all the virtues necessary against wounds and poison. So it goes on. `There is no king as powerful in this world as am I.' The original text was progressively expanded by copyists anxious to enliven the material still further. English manuscripts tell of how 11,000 Englishmen were to be found at his court, all knighted by him on arrival, while French versions tell of the presence of 11,000 French knights. Others add all the traditional material of Asian lore: Amazons, Brahmins, Gog and Magog, the Ten Lost Tribes and others.

    Without themselves reaching any generally accepted conclusions, historians have asked how the letter should be read. Leonardo Olschki has interpreted it as the representation of an ideal theocratic Utopia. Bernard Hamilton takes it to be a forgery produced at the court of the Emperor Frederick I, designed to show the splendours of a world in which clerics are in just subordination to righteous rulers. It may be so; or it may be simply a poetic wish-fulfilling dream which enticed contemporaries through its rich exotic surfaces, the concoction of some goliard scholar amusing his friends with a vision of the Land of Cockaigne. Whatever the answer the popularity of the letter left in most people's minds — beyond all the details which might be doubted — the quite false conviction that somewhere in the East there was indeed a most powerful Christian ruler who could be seen as an ally in the struggle against the Muslim world. Tales of Prester John, of `many Christian kings living in the Orient', of John's son, King David, were still to be rousing illusory hopes at the time of Columbus and beyond.

II

While in the twelfth century the West's understanding of Asia was expressed in these fantasies, the religion and commerce of Islam were flourishing as realities throughout that continent. In which circumstances, it may be briefly inquired first what geographical knowledge of the continent was to be found at the time in the writings of Arab scholars in lands close to Christian realms, that is to say in the Middle East, the Maghreb, and Spain, and second, how far any such information was transmitted to the West to check or modify current beliefs. In neither case can one give any very positive responses. Among Arab geographers of the ninth century can be found some notices of India, the East Indies, and even China (it was a time when there were, though briefly, regular direct sailings to Canton from the Persian Gulf). Notably, in his Amusement for Him who Desires to Travel Round the World, completed in 1153-4, the celebrated North-African scholar, al-Idrisi, gives some information on India and South-East Asia. Yet what he writes is confused and confusing, for the work is structured not on countries but on the various climates of Ptolemaic theory. Looking forward to the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the work of Abulfeda contains material from earlier geographers, together with a rather small amount of contemporary knowledge. This was a time when the so-called Karimi merchants of Cairo were conducting an extensive trade with, in particular, India and the Spice Islands. Yet their knowledge seems to be very slightly drawn upon in his account. And of China, where Egyptian merchants were to be found, though not in great numbers, Abulfeda offers very little:

Writers on the customs and kingdoms of the world have in their works mentioned many provinces and places and rivers as existing in China under the different climates, but the names have not reached us with any exactness, nor have we any certain information as to their circumstances. Thus they are as good as unknown to us; their being few travellers who arrive from these parts, such as might furnish us with intelligence, and for this reason we forbear to detail them.

He continues by offering twelve place names, with a grudging, perhaps sceptical, reference to his source as `the accounts of merchants who have travelled in those parts'. One is tempted to conclude that this is one of those scholastic works — we shall find examples later in the West — which drew upon and trusted books rather than experience.

    As it was, Europe learnt nothing of this Arabic knowledge. During the twelfth century western scholars acquired a large measure of Arabic scientific learning but, for reasons which have not yet been fully clarified, they largely ignored what related to geography. From Ptolemy's works in Arab translation, they turned into Latin the Almagest on the shape of the heavens and the Quadripartitum on astrology. But though it was a work which had been read in the Islamic world from the eighth century, they showed no interest either in the Geography, or in any other Greek or Arabic geographical studies. Exceptionally, al-Sharif al-Idrisi had written his Amusement at the court of Roger II, King of Sicily. But it seems likely that he had been called to Palermo rather for the political importance of his high blood (al-Sharif) than for his learning. Certainly his book remained untranslated until the seventeenth century (and even then was published in abbreviated form and anonymously). It was never to have any influence on European geography during the Middle Ages. In the same way, though European Jews were sometimes aware of their co-religionists in Islamic lands who traded occasionally with India and beyond, their information gained no general currency. In particular Christian Europe ignored the work of the Spanish Jew, Benjamin of Tudela. Between 1166 and 1171 Benjamin had travelled from Tudela (on the Ebro in Aragon) through Italy, Greece, and Palestine, to Damascus, Baghdad and Egypt. From the island of Kish (Jazireh-ye Qeys) in the Persian Gulf, at that time a great staging point for trade into the Indian Ocean — and probably the furthest east to which he travelled — Benjamin sailed to Al Qatif in Bahrain. From here, he was told, it took seven days to sail to the port of Quilon on the Malabar coast (in the Middle Ages a very important point of encounter between the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal), from Quilon a twenty-three day journey to `Ibrig' (Ceylon? ... but if so, it seems far too long), and from Ibrig to Zin (China) a voyage of forty days. These observations are not easy to interpret, but they give the book which he wrote on his travels the distinction of being the first work of the Middle Ages, written in Europe, to mention either China or a route by which it might be visited.

III

Yet it was a book not read by Christians. For the moment all that was generally known in the West of the East were such myths and hopes as were aroused by Prester John. Behind these hopes lay in fact, however blurred and grossly magnified, a reality. In the early Christian centuries subtle enquiries into the nature of the Godhead had produced in the East two particular interpretations of the person of Christ which were condemned as heretical by the Greek and Latin Churches. The first of these was the doctrine of the Monophysites who held that in Christ there was one person, one hypostasis (a word variously interpreted but perhaps meaning `reality') and — in this lay its difference from Catholicism — one, wholly divine, nature. Adherents of this view were gathered in the three `Jacobite' churches, that is to say the churches of the Copts, the Abyssinians, and the Armenians.

    In much greater numbers were the Dyophysites or Nestorians. In the fifth century, Nestorius, the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople, had been anathematised and condemned because he preached the doctrine that within Christ there was one person, two natures, but two hypostases. Theologians today still debate whether this might imply an `heretical' overemphasis upon the Divinity's two natures rather than his one person. For our purposes it is sufficient to note that in the Middle East the unrepentant followers of St Nestorius — as he was known to them — followed doctrines at variance with those of the Greek and Latin Churches, and employed a liturgy in the Syriac tongue. With their patriarchate established at Baghdad, Nestorian churches were prominent in Syria, Asia Minor, Iraq, and Persia. In the early medieval centuries, in competition with Manichees, Buddhists, and then Muslims, they pursued an intense activity of proselytism within Asia. It was the Nestorians in reality, and not St Thomas, who had first brought Christianity to India. By the eighth century there were Nestorian Christians in Turkestan and China while, among the nomadic tribesmen of Mongolia, the Kerait and Ongut could, had they wished, enjoy Christological debates with the Jacobite Uighurs, each denouncing their opponents as heretics doomed to be excluded from salvation. Along the caravan routes of Asia news of the fortunes of their brothers in Christ no doubt circulated back to the Nestorian churches of the Middle East. It was perhaps the victories in 1141 of one Yeh-la Ta-shih, ruler of the partially Christianised Khitans, over the Muslim sovereign of Khwarezm and the Seljuk Sultan Sanjar that had first given rise to those rumours of `John, King and Priest' which Otto of Freising was to hear at the Roman court five years later.

    However this may be, in the Course of the next century the existence of the Nestorian and other Christian churches in the east were to provoke great, illusory, expectations. These are to be seen in the context of a period in which the Roman Popes had entered on a policy of actively seeking some form of overlordship over the known world. In the north crusades were launched which by fire, sword, and compulsory baptism were ultimately to bring Livs, Letts, Estonians, Prussians, and Finns under their spiritual authority. In the Mediterranean the Crusade of 1202-4, originally designed to attack Muslim Egypt, was diverted against the Byzantine Empire which professed the Greek Orthodox faith. Although the Papacy was not directly responsible for the attack, it welcomed the result: the establishment of a Latin empire controlling most of the European provinces formerly under Greek authority. Only in the Holy Land had the cause suffered a setback. Here, from the failure of the Third Crusade in 1192, Jerusalem was (save for the brief period 1229-44) lost, and Latin control was confined to the Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli, and a narrow coastal strip of the former Kingdom of Jerusalem. Yet even here the effects of Muslim successes were to throw the Latin settlers, more than in the past, into dependence upon the Papacy.

    In the same period the spiritual climate which had both fostered and was fostered by the expansion of the Papacy had brought about the foundation of new religious orders which, under the influence of St Dominic (d. I221) and St Francis (d. 1226), sought the promulgation of Latin Christianity through a closer involvement in everyday life. Among their followers the missionary spirit burnt strongly. The Latin occupation of Constantinople allowed both Latin merchants and missionaries to penetrate into the Black Sea, to the Crimea in the north and to Trebizond in the south. In the vicinity of `the Great Sea', as they spoke of it, and between Syria and Khorassan, they discovered more Christians, principally followers of the Orthodox Church: Russians, Georgians, the Goths of the Crimea, the Alans of the Caucasus. At the same time Dominican missionaries from the Latin Christian kingdom of Hungary began to proselytise the pagan nomadic Comans or `Polotsvi' of the steppe-lands of southern Russia. In the 1230s, in their search for `Greater Hungary', the heartlands from which, many centuries before, had come the peoples who had created the Hungarian Kingdom, the friars reached some 750 miles north of the Caspian.

    Yet it was less pagans than eastern Christians who caught the attention of the West. Their numbers, it was asserted, were enormous. The Nestorians and Jacobites alone, claimed Jacques de Vitry, Bishop of Tyre, exceeded the numbers of Latins and Greeks taken together, and within Muslim lands, apart from Egypt and Syria, far exceeded the number of Mohammedan believers. Hence the rise of a great hope: if these people could be brought to acknowledge the supremacy of the Roman See, what vistas of Latin-Christian advance opened up, what spiritual, what worldly gains! Yet as it fell out, by the 1240s these hopes of new triumphs were to give way to new fears, and the first tentative Latin-Christian penetration into Asia beyond Palestine was overtaken by the creation of the Mongol Empire and the Mongol discovery of Europe. Some consideration of that discovery — which like most discoveries in history was extremely painful for the discovered — is a necessary preliminary to any consideration of the Book of Marco Polo. For it was that discovery which made possible the first visit of Marco's father and uncle to China and Marco's subsequent career as a servant of the Great Khan.

IV

At the end of the twelfth century, the Mongols were merely one among a variety of Turco-Mongolic nomad tribes on the high plateau beyond the Altai mountains. In the years before 1209 these groups, till then continually at war with each other, were united by Temüchin, a minor princeling, henceforth to be known as Genghis Khan (`Very-mighty Lord'). Once established as leader, he directed his followers to the conquest of the outer world: to the east over the Tanguts of Gansu, and then those territories north of the Yellow river which were subject to the northern Chinese empire of Chin. After which, turning to the west, he gained the Kingdom of Kara-Khitai in eastern Turkestan and, with amazing impetus, the vast Khwarizmian Empire, which included Persia, Khorassan, Transoxonia, Samarkand, and much of Afghanistan.

    Genghis died in 1227. His successor Ögedei completed the conquest of the Chin empire and of Korea and in the west established protectorates over Georgia and the Turkish sultanate of Anatolia. In 1240 his army compelled the Russian principalities to submit to overlordship and occupied the steppe plains bordering the Black Sea. Other forces turned on eastern Europe, advanced through Poland and Silesia, and defeated the King of Hungary. Isolated detachments pushed forward to reach Dubrovnik and the Adriatic. At this point, for a variety of reasons but in particular as a result of the death of Ögedei in the spring of 1241, the leaders of the invasion withdrew to the Kipchak steppe. Both Ögedei's death and then that of his successor Güyük provoked severe internal conflicts, and it was only ten years later, with the emergence in 1251 of Möngke as the fourth Great Khan, that the Mongols turned again to expansion. In the meanwhile a rudimentary administrative system was established by the Uighur Turks (often touched by Buddhist and Nestorian Christian beliefs, and thus literate) and the Khitans (among whom was some Chinese influence) who had become part of the empire, and an imperial communication system was established — the Yam — whose relay posts allowed messengers of the Khans to travel at great speed from the Yellow Sea to the Black Sea.

    In the West the first news of the Mongols reawakened hopeful fantasies. In November 1219, Jacques de Vitry, Bishop of Acre, was preaching that David, `King of the two Indies', was leading ferocious peoples to assist the Christian warriors and `eat up' the Saracen peoples. When, in 1237, the Mongols first invaded Europe such illusions soon dissolved. Thanks to the name of the `Tatar' tribe among them (which had, in fact, been virtually destroyed by Genghis Khan), they were, almost from the start, given the name of `Tartars', as if they had arisen from Tartarus, the infernal regions. Whatever their origin, warned Fra Julian, a Dominican friar of Hungary, these peoples are seeking nothing less than the conquest of Rome and world dominion.

Matthew Paris, monk of Saint Albans in England, gave his own account. Here were men with heads grossly disproportionate to their bodies, feeding on raw, even human, flesh, impious and inexorable. From his chronicle one gains a picture of letters being dispatched all over Europe, scanned. copied, and passed on, for the fearful news they bear. Calling for a crusade against them, the Emperor Frederick II expresses the hope that they are not, destined to destroy Christianity. But other letters say that it is Frederick who has called them into Europe. Where have these people, so long hidden, lain so long concealed? Are the Jews, seeing the Mongols as being of their own race, aiding them? Are they the descendants of the Magi Kings, seeking to recover the bones of their ancestors buried in Cologne? The Tartar chief has asked the Prince of Antioch for a tribute which includes 3,000 virgins. A letter has been received by the Archbishop of Paris which says that they are the tribes of Gog and Magog, once imprisoned by Alexander the Great behind the Caspian mountains, now, in the Last Days, due to devastate mankind. Meanwhile at Palestrina, south of Rome. Ruggiero delle Puglie, who had recently served as Archdeacon in the cathedral chapter of Nagy-Várad was giving literary form to his experiences with a Carmen miserabile or Letter Upon the Destruction of the Kingdom of Hungary Effected by the Tartars.

    Pope Gregory IX's attempt to raise a crusade against the Mongols in 1241 petered out almost at once. Two years before he had embarked on a war against the Emperor, and the divisions within Latin Christianity paralysed any attempts at a united front before the invaders. None the less, shortly before the meeting of the First General Council of Lyons the papacy made a determined attempt to discover something about the dangers which threatened. In March 1245 Pope Innocent IV wrote two letters to `the King and people of the Tartars'. The first contained a resumé of Christian doctrine, the second an expression of astonishment at the attack upon Christian peoples. Copies of these were given for delivery to groups of friars, together with (in pursuance of the old dream) a papal bull (Cum simus super) asserting the primacy of the Roman Church which was to be presented to any Christian but non-Latin prelate whom they might meet. It was planned that two parties of friars should seek out Mongol commanders in the Near East to whom the letters should be consigned. Another was to go west through Poland and Russia and deliver the papal messages to the east of these territories.

    All these envoys enjoyed some measure of success. Crossing the Holy Land, the Dominican André of Longjumeau reached Tabriz, from where the Mongol leader, Baiju, ruled Greater Armenia, north-west Persia, and the former Seljuk Sultanate of Konya. The second mission, consisting of the Dominicans Ascelino of Cremona, with Simon of Saint Quentin and two other friars of the order, came upon Baiju's summer camp in the Armenian highlands at Sisian. By nature impolitic, perhaps even seeking the glory of martyrdom, Fra Ascelino succeeded remarkably well, at least, in antagonising his hosts. But he ensured that the papal letters, translated into Persian, were dispatched by the Mongol posts to the Great Khan at Karakorum in Central Asia, the Mongol capital. When the reply came he returned to Lyons accompanied by two Mongol envoys with whom the Pope had a series of unfruitful discussions. These Dominican embassies, as we shall see, were to give rise to written accounts of the Mongols which were in many ways both remarkably original and destined to be of considerable influence in western Europe.

The third legation was led by the Italian Franciscan Giovanni di Pian di Carpine. Born near Perugia, now in his late fifties or early sixties and considerably overweight, Giovanni had had an important career as an administrator in his order, and was a man who found it easy to speak with kings and princes. His party set out from Lyons on Easter Sunday 1245, was joined in Silesia by a Polish Franciscan, Brother Benedict, who acted as interpreter in Slav lands, and after an exciting journey which he describes with great vividness, reached the Volga and the camp of Batu, Khan of the Golden Horde, at the beginning of April 1246. He handed over the letters and presumed that his mission had been accomplished. But at this point, Batu told the two friars that he required them to attend the assembly in Outer Mongolia which was shortly to elect the new Great Khan Güyük. Perforce, on Easter Sunday, with two Mongol guides, they set out again, hard riding, changing horses five or seven times a day, through the Cumanian steppes, the former Kingdom of Khwarezm with its `many devastated cities, destroyed castles, deserted villages', Otrar, Kara-Khitai, the land of the Naimans where, despite the season, `the snow fell heavily and we suffered intense cold'. Finally on 22 July they reached Güyük's Syra Orda or `Yellow Camp', half a day's journey from Karakorum. Representatives from many lands were present for the ceremonies. After the election and enthronement, they were summoned to the presence of the Great Khan. The `Emperor', Giovanni writes, was very intelligent, and the Christians in his household were convinced that he was about to become a Christian. But negotiations did not go well. The friars delivered verbally the sense of the papal letters that Batu had already forwarded, and with the help of an interpreter of one of the Russian princes they made a Latin version of Güyük's reply — an uncompromising rebuttal of Innocent IV's arguments and a demand for his personal appearance and submission. They returned in winter, reaching Kiev on 9 June 1247. Their journey of well over 3,000 miles to Karakorum had taken five and a half months, they had stayed four months at the court of the great Khan; they had spent six months in returning to Kiev.

    However unsatisfactory as an exercise in diplomacy, Fra Giovanni's mission gave rise to sober and informative accounts of the peoples through which he had passed. His companion Benedict left a very brief narrative which survives in two manuscripts and a somewhat longer version dictated by him to a `Friar C. de Bridia' (sic, the very unusual absence of a Christian name has given rise to suspicions that this is a forgery). Giovanni's work, the so-called Historia Mongolorum, of greater length and written with much greater skill, uses the same body of notes on which Benedict's account was based. This too is found in a shorter and in a longer edition (of about 20,000 words). These reveal a strong practical sense, a genuine intellectual interest in the peoples among whom he had passed, and striking powers of observation. It is written in a typical early Franciscan style, that is to say one which avoided all rhetoric and cultivated an assured simplicity and directness. It avoids almost all learned reference (there is a passing mention of Isidore) and even (what is otherwise common in Franciscan style) biblical quotation. Yet this apparent simplicity is in some ways deceptive, for at the beginning of the work, Fra Giovanni lays out the plan of what will follow, which in its schematic form clearly derives from scholasticism, the methods used in teaching in the cathedral schools and from carefully structured lecture notes:

Wishing to write an account of the Tartars in which readers will be able to find their way about, we will divide it by chapters in this way. In the first we will speak of the country, in the second of their peoples, in the third of their religion, in the fourth of their customs, in the fifth of their empire, in the sixth of their wars, in the seventh of the lands which they have subjected to their rule, in the eighth of how war should be waged against them, and in the last of the journey we made, of the court of the Emperor, and of the witnesses we came across in the land of the Tartars.

Each chapter is prefaced by a similar spelling out of the matters which are going to be treated. So the first, on `the country':

We propose treating of the country in this way: we will say something first of its position, secondly of its character, and third of its climate.

    Within this framework, Giovanni offers a remarkable description of an alien world. In the first eight chapters, he considers the Mongols' methods of warfare (organisation of armies, weapons, armour, river-crossing, battle lines, siege-tactics), and peace-making (only on terms of complete submission). Then again, offering what he believes is a history of the Mongols, he gives an interesting resumé of the abundant folklore which had grown up around Genghis Khan. Stories of the great hero had already fused with traditional eastern stories about Alexander (of which there was a contemporary Mongol version) and the Monstrous Races (sciopods, the country of female monsters and male dogs and those who feed on the smell of food) and this material he gives his readers, without any expression of doubt. At the same time he essays a useful genealogy of the Mongol princes and gives a sound account of the Great Khan's power.

    In addition Giovanni has a strong interest in ethnography: the Mongols' beliefs, marriage customs, food and drink, clothes, divination, burial practices and purification by fire. His schematism becomes very marked when he tries to distinguish their good qualities — obedience, avoidance of brawling, honesty (at least among themselves), hardiness, chastity — and their bad — arrogance, impatience, filthy eating habits and drunkenness. This is much more than a simple diplomat's, report on the dangers posed by these people. It reveals genuine interest in details which he himself probably felt went beyond what was required of his mission. (So, for instance, having described the physical appearance of the Mongols, Giovanni in a later chapter excuses himself, as it were, by saying that this will enable Christian commanders to distinguish between captives who are genuine Mongols and those who have been pressed into their armies.)

    Yet, at the same time, in the first eight chapters there is little that can be translated to a map. Giovanni's painting of the landscape of the Mongolian heartland is instantly recognisable. Here are mountain and infertile plain, both overwhelmingly of sandy gravel, largely treeless (with fires built from animal dung). Here is the irregular weather: the snow which comes in the summers, when there are sudden alternations of great heat and extreme cold. Here is a land of flocks of sheep, cattle, goats; felt-tents taken around on carts drawn by one to four oxen; the whole territory `large, but otherwise ... much more wretched than we can say'. But his attempt to situate it within its boundaries is vague and over-succinct: `To the east is placed the land of the Kitayoi and also the Solangi; to the south the land of the Sarraceni; to the south-west the land of the Huyrii; to the west the province of the Naimani; to the north it is bounded by the Ocean'. By the Kitayoi he means the Chinese. Their neighbours, it is to be presumed, are the Solangqas, dwelling in Manchuria and Korea. The Huyrii will be the Uighurs, and the province to the west was indeed the province of the Naimans. Yet the Sarraceni, who must be the Muslims of Central Asia, are also (as is clear from other references in the text) the Persians, who both lived a long way to the south-west rather than the south. So too Giovanni's account (the first European description) of the Kitayoi/Cathayans/Chinese (`friendly and most humane ... they have no beard and the shape of their face is very like that of the Mongols, though they are not so broad in the face ... their land is very rich in corn, wine, gold, silver, and silk.'), is marred by seeming to identify them, perhaps following over-optimistic information from Nestorians, as Christians. And, apart from a list of the peoples whom the Mongols have conquered which can only have confused a contemporary reader, that is all we are given of the relation of peoples to peoples until we arrive at the final chapter.

    This final chapter describes the itinerary taken by the friars, gives an account of their negotiations with the Mongol leaders and enumerates the witnesses who can testify that they have actually visited the East. Apart from being our principal source for the business of the embassy, this section offers a great real on the geographical character of the Mongol world. Though no distances are given it would have been possible for a reader of the time to deduce that it took Giovanni two months to travel from Kiev to the Volga, and, riding at very great speed, another three and a half months to go from the Volga to the Great Khan's orda near Karakorum. It would also have been possible for him to mark in more detail the times of Giovanni's journey from the Volga, across `Comania', to the kingdom of the Kangits (the Kangli Turks), the kingdoms of Khwarezm, of Qara Khitai, the land of the Naimans, and so to the Great Khan's orda. Then again, on the return journey a contemporary geographer could have noted that, journeying in winter, Giovanni reached the Volga almost five months after leaving the Great Khan, and took a month to pass from the Volga back to Kiev. (The work would also have reinforced the time-honoured European error that the Volga and the Ural both flowed into the Black Sea rather than the Caspian.)

    Yet such knowledge never became general. This final chapter was written, it could be said, only as an afterthought, when doubts had come to be expressed about the truth of the report. (Already in the prologue Giovanni remarks how hard it is to be called a liar.) It was an attempt to validate the truth of what had been told by elaborating on the journey, and providing names of witnesses to it. Yet only three manuscripts which contain this section survive. In other words, despite its brilliance and the astounding journey it records, the strictly geographical elements in the book had a very limited circulation. These were perhaps more widely diffused through the lectures Giovanni gave about his experiences when he returned. His fellow Franciscan, Fra Salimbene, has described these sessions, when Giovanni's book would be read aloud, after which he would answer questions from his auditors.

(Continues...)