engagements with eastern cultures were varied, ranging from abjection to glorification and at times held up some Asian societies as offering models from which Europeans could learn and benefit.
Foodways of the Enemy
In the mid-thirteenth century, the Mongol Empire continued to represent a significant threat to European security. Although the immediate danger to western Europe had receded with the death of Ögödei in December 1241 and subsequent Mongol withdrawal from Hungary, the inhabitants of kingdoms and territories of the West could not be sure the terror would not come again. Moreover, the conquest of Russia and Batu’s establishment of the Golden Horde was in its early stages.6 “Tartars” remained a ferocious presence on the borders of western Europe. Yet it was only a few years after the Hungarian withdrawal that papal embassies led by Carpini, Ascelin, and Andrew of Longjumeau (1245–51) were sent to engage in dialogue with Mongol leaders and to return with precious information on the enemy.7
Though some Mongol groups practiced limited forms of agriculture and their territories included mountainous and forested regions, the vast treeless plains of their homelands were more conducive to nomadic pastoralism. Carpini says they are “extremely rich” in camels, oxen, sheep, goats, and especially horses and mares but lack pigs or other farm animals.8 The absence of trees, he says, requires food to be cooked at fires made with cattle and horse dung, and “[n]ot one hundredth part of the land is fertile, nor can it bear fruit unless it be irrigated by running water,” though water is itself in short supply. The land is adequate for grazing cattle but could not be called good for that. He writes, “To conclude briefly about this country: it is large, but otherwise—as we saw with our own eyes, for during five and a half months we travelled about it—it is more wretched than I can possibly say.”9
For our authors, food scarcity is among the most notable features of Mongolian life.10 Carpini, who attempts to list Mongolian good points alongside bad, praises their willingness to “share their food with each other, although there is little of it.” They are “also long-suffering. When they are without food, eating nothing at all for one or two days, they do not easily show impatience, but they sing and make merry as if they had eaten well.”11 Marco Polo makes similar remarks, telling how Mongols will live on the blood of living horses if need be, and the Spaniard Clavijo in the early fifteenth century concurs that “[t]hey suffer cold and heat and hunger and thirst more patiently than any other nation in the whole world,” gorging when food is available but subsisting on sour milk when it is not.12 Carpini’s vivid description of their markedly unfussy eating habits is less complimentary:
Their food consists of everything that can be eaten, for they eat dogs, wolves, foxes and horses and, when driven by necessity, they feed on human flesh. For instance, when they were fighting against a city of the Kitayans, where the Emperor was residing, they besieged it for so long that they themselves completely ran out of supplies and, since they had nothing at all to eat, they thereupon took one out of every ten men for food. They eat the filth which comes away from mares when they bring forth foals. Nay, I have even seen them eating lice. They would say, “Why should I not eat them since they eat the flesh of my son and drink his blood?” I have also seen them eat mice.13
The Tartar Relation repeats the tale of anthropophagous besiegers, tells another of Chinggis ordering the eating of one man in ten during an arduous desert trek, and echoes Carpini on Mongols’ unclean diet of wolves, foxes, dogs, carrion, afterbirths, mice, and human flesh.14 Joinville’s account of Tartars, probably drawing on reports by Andrew of Longjumeau, asserts Mongols eat no bread but live on flesh and milk, and favor horseflesh, which they lay raw between their saddlecloths and saddles until all the blood is pressed from it then eat it raw. Joinville interjects that he knew a Khwarazmian (an inhabitant of approximately modern Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan) who guarded him in prison and who had some of this meat in his bag: “[W]hen he opened his bag we had to stop our noses; we could not bear the putrid stench which came out.”15 Johann Schiltberger’s narrative repeats the detail about pressing salted meat beneath saddles; he adds that they will bleed their horses and cook and drink the blood.16 Rubruck, who offers a greater level of detail throughout his reports of Mongol eating habits, acknowledges a little more culinary discernment: they will eat mice with short tails, marmots, conies with long tails, and many other “little creatures which are good to eat, and which they are quite able to tell apart,” but they refuse to eat mice with long tails, giving them to their birds instead.17 He does not repeat the rumors about eating human flesh. Mandeville follows Vincent of Beauvais’s extracts from Carpini and Simon of St. Quentin, emphasizing the meagerness and meanness of their diets—eating dogs, lions, and even mice and rats—and their unclean habits, such as wiping their dirty hands on their clothes, eating without tablecloths or napkins, and failing to wash dishes. He omits the references to devouring human flesh, though he alleges a wartime habit of cutting off the ears of the slaughtered and sousing them in vinegar to eat.18 A crude illustration accompanying Mandeville’s Book in London, BL MS Harley 3954 shows a Tartar eating small black creatures, possibly rats, while a beast lies dead on the ground and three viewers gesticulate in horror.19
Many European food staples are said to be practically nonexistent among the Mongols. Carpini states they lack bread, herbs, and vegetables, and though they eat meat they have “so little that other people would scarcely be able to exist on it.” Their summer staple is mare’s milk “in very great quantities”; in winter they (except the wealthy) lack even this and instead drink water in which millet has been boiled, along with a little broth and meat in the evenings.20 Rubruck agrees, saying that in summer “as long as their comos [fermented mare’s milk, ayiragh in Mongol or kumis in Turkic] holds out, they care for no other food,” and “[w]ith the meat of a single sheep they feed fifty or a hundred men.”21 Carpini’s account of the journey to the camp near Karakorum shows the friars shared in their hosts’ hunger en route, eating little but millet with water and salt: “[W]e could scarcely keep alive, for the food provided for four was barely sufficient for one.”22 Rubruck also complains about the starvation rations: “Were it not for the biscuit we had, and God’s grace, we might well have perished”; his companion wails, “I feel as if I have never eaten.”23 Rubruck laments that during their long journey their guides gave them nothing to eat before evening but a little millet, though they had meat and plenty of broth in the evenings.24 In contrast, Pegolotti advises prospective merchants traveling from Tana to Cathay that although they should take enough flour and saltfish to last the journey, they would be able to procure sufficient other provisions, especially meat, along the way.25 Perhaps merchants would have taken a more southerly path through present-day Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and would have been spared the worst of the steppe conditions. What the Mongols lack in gluttony they allegedly make up in drunkenness, as Carpini, Rubruck, and Ricold all attest, imbibing extraordinary quantities of kumis when they could get it, drinking till they vomit then drinking again.26 Andrew of Longjumeau also comments that their favorite drink is horse’s milk brewed with herbs.27
Food scarcity is portrayed as such a potent presence in Mongolian life that wasteful habits meet with draconian punishments. To pour out any milk, food, or other drink on the ground is a serious evil, and, says Carpini, “if anyone takes a morsel and, unable to swallow it, spits it out of his mouth, a hole is made under the dwelling and he is dragged out by that hole and without any mercy put to death.” They avoid washing dishes, pots, or spoons, except to swill them with some meat broth then add this back to the meat pot, and even extract the marrow from bones before giving them to the dogs. Rubruck comments that they put meat bones away in their carry bags for gnawing on later.28 Carpini’s secondhand account of Chinggis Khân’s rise to power offers an historic explanation of waste prohibition. Returning from campaign the Mongol army
ran short of food and suffered great hunger. Then they happened to come across the fresh entrails of an animal; they took them and, putting aside only the dung, they cooked them and brought them
