From the Historia Mongalorum itself one may gather that Carpini’s motivations in writing were to produce a work recognized as the true and full version of the journey and provide detailed practical information to aid in future dealings with Mongols. He lists European merchants and dignitaries whom the friars met while in Mongolian-controlled territory “to avoid any doubt arising in the minds of anyone as to our having been to the Tartars.”21 According to the chronicler Salimbene de Adam, who met with Carpini on two occasions after the latter’s return to Lyon, he saw him “carrying with him the book which he had written on the Tartars. And the friars read it in his presence; and he commented on and clarified to them those things which appeared obscure or difficult to believe.”22 In her comparison of the two main versions of Carpini’s text, Maria Cristiana Lungarotti shows how the second draft consistently expands upon the first for the purposes of clarification and to reemphasize its truthfulness.23 Around one-fifth of the second version is devoted to geographic and ethnographic material, another fifth to Mongol history and the rise of their empire, a quarter to military tactics and technologies, and the final third or so to the itinerary and experiences of the friars. The work is readable but was not designed for entertainment.
King Louis IX called upon another Franciscan, William of Rubruck from Flanders, to travel to the Mongols in 1253. Rubruck and his companions reached the camp of Möngke Khân at Karakorum on 27 December 1253.24 Like Carpini, Rubruck was a heavy man,25 and he, too, suffered physical hardship on his journey: “There is no counting the times we were famished, thirsty, frozen and exhausted.”26 His insistence on the Franciscan habit of going barefoot despite December snow near Karakorum suggests, however, that some of this suffering was self-inflicted.27 After almost six months at the Khân’s court Rubruck gained leave to depart, but his companion, Bartholomew of Cremona, could not face the journey home and elected to live out his days among the Mongols on the harsh steppes of the Khân’s empire.
The reasons for Rubruck’s mission are harder to determine than those of his predecessors. Rubruck’s own motivations seem to have been religious—to convert Mongols to Christianity and to console Christians under Mongol occupation—but Louis’s intentions, as a man persistently obsessed with crusading, were probably more political. In any case, Rubruck’s book bears similarities to Carpini’s as a record of useful information though is markedly different in form. Where Carpini’s book is part ethnography, part history, part military intelligence report, and part itinerary, Rubruck’s is mostly itinerary. Less than 10 percent of his book (chapters 2–8) is given over to direct ethnography; the remainder tells of his journey and personal experiences, with further ethnographic descriptions scattered throughout. Rubruck’s account of the Mongols is more negative than his predecessor’s but still relatively moderate; it could not be called an attempt at demonization. Rubruck’s work has appealed very much to some modern readers of “travel writing” (discussed in Chapter 3) but was little known in the Middle Ages, with only five manuscripts extant and one of those is merely a fourteenth-century copy of the oldest one surviving. These are all in Latin and of English origin and show his audience was primarily educated and monastic, including the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, St. Mary’s Abbey in York, and Simon Bozon, Prior of Norwich Cathedral Priory (1344–52).28
Furthermore, Roger Bacon interviewed Rubruck in Paris and used his geographical information in the Opus majus. Indeed, Bacon provides justifications for the inclusion of geographical knowledge in his work. It has value for missionary efforts and for eschatological forewarning:
This knowledge of the places of the world is very necessary to the state of the believers, and for the conversion of unbelievers and for opposing unbelievers and Antichrist and others. … For the most vigorous men sometimes through their ignorance of the places in the world have destroyed themselves and the business interests of Christians, because they have passed through places too hot in the hot seasons and too cold in the cold seasons. They have also met with countless dangers because they did not know when they encountered the regions of believers, or of schismatics, Saracens, Tartars, Tyrants, men of peace, barbarians, or of men with reasonable minds. He who is ignorant of the places in the world lacks a knowledge not only of his destination, but of the course to pursue.29
On the need to foresee what the end of the Second Age of the world might entail, “the Church should have excellent knowledge of the situation and condition of the ten tribes of the Jews, who will come forth in the days to come.” Alexander the Great found these nations dwelling in Hyrcania on the Caspian Sea and confined them more strictly behind high mountains:
Since, then, these nations shut up in certain localities of the world will come forth to desolate regions and meet Antichrist, Christians and especially the Roman Church should study carefully the location of places, that it may be able to learn the ferocity of nations of this kind and through them to learn the time and origin of Antichrist; for these races must obey him. … Friar William, moreover, whom the lord king of France sent to the Tartars in the year of our Lord 1253, when he was beyond sea, wrote to the king aforesaid that he crossed with Tartars through the middle of the gates that Alexander constructed.30
It seems relevant that the copy of Rubruck’s book held by the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds also contains a copy of the “Liber Methodius,” the influential seventh-century Syrian Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius.31
Missionaries and diplomats would continue to be among the chief witnesses in text of Asian civilizations to around 1500, but chronologically the next major contribution came from the son of a Venetian merchant. Marco Polo and his book, Le Divisament dou monde (Description of the World) (c. 1298), are exemplary of the unstable nature of medieval authors and books. There is no single manuscript representing the original text or even a “definitive version,” given the great diversity found among the approximately 150 extant copies, no two of which are exactly alike.32 Moreover, there is no book we can truly say is by an “author” called Marco Polo, given that the original version of our surviving texts was produced in collaboration with a professional romance writer, and the diversity among manuscripts demonstrates that individual scribes and translators often made free with the text, inserting editorial comment and even purportedly informative content without any apparent sense of transgression. It went by various names in medieval manuscripts: Divisament dou monde (in French, Devisement du monde) but also Le Livre des merveilles du monde, Li Livres du Graunt Caam, De mirabilibus mundi, and De condicionibus et consuetudinibus orientalium regionum. The Travels, however, is a postmedieval title.33 The book is a challenging prospect for editors, to put it mildly, and has prompted a vast array of scholarly studies. Even to attempt to supply a reasonably extensive bibliography would require a book in itself.34 Yet enormous riches await anyone who turns to the Divisament for its depiction of the Asian continent through medieval European eyes.
Marco (1254–c. 1325) was the son of Niccolò Polo, who with his brothers Marco and Maffeo owned a prominent Venetian family business. The Polos had a trading base at Soldaia (Sudak) on the Crimean Peninsula, and it was from here in c. 1260 that Niccolò and Maffeo set out to trade jewels at Sarai (near present-day Volgograd), seat of Berke Khân, who was then ruler of the Golden Horde. The Polo brothers found themselves forced farther northeast when violent Byzantine reprisals against Venetians followed the Byzantine recapture of Constantinople and fighting broke out between Mongol rulers of Persia and the Golden Horde. After three years in Bukhara (Buxoro) they accepted an invitation from an embassy from Persia to travel to the court of the Great Khân, Khubilai (r. 1260–94), and journeyed far to the north and east to an uncertain location in the Mongolian heartland. Khubilai saw an opportunity to make contact with the West and sent the brothers back to Italy with a letter to the pope requesting one hundred Christians to return east to teach Mongols about Christianity. Delayed by the papal vacancy of 1269–71, the brothers finally returned to Khubilai’s court with the blessing of the new pope, Gregory X, in 1271, accompanied not by one hundred missionaries but by Niccolò’s seventeen-year-old
