life in Mongolian legend. The Secret History of the Mongols tells of his mother Hö’elün’s widowhood and tribal abandonment when he was a child and her attempts to nourish her children with whatever she could forage.30 The tremendous value of food is also apparent in Mongol religious practice. Carpini says they always offer the first milk from mares and cows and the first portion of each meal to their idols. They give the idol the heart of a slaughtered animal in a cup—though the next morning they thriftily take it back to cook and eat. Their veneration of the sun, the moon, fire, water, and the earth is marked by first offerings of food and drink. Dead men are buried in one of their tents, seated at the table with meat and milk before them.31
European accounts of Mongolian food and foodways are thus dominated by infertility of the land, lack of recognizable staple foods, willingness to eat unclean meats, habitual drunkenness, and subsistence on blood or even human flesh when necessary. With the exception of anthropophagy (which will be considered in more detail later in the chapter) and perhaps drunkenness, this seems a largely fair representation of Mongolian conditions but also has rhetorical value. No doubt Mongols acquired the ability to endure hunger interspersed with periods of gorging on high protein and calcium foods, given the severe continental conditions of much of their homeland and predominantly nomadic habits. Dependence on meat and milk is still a mark of Mongolian cuisine today and doubtless was even stronger 750 years ago. Yet if an army marches on its stomach, it is hard to see how even the staunch Tartars could have maintained their ferocity for long on a diet of horses’ blood, fermented mares’ milk, and the occasional small rodent.32 Remember Carpini’s remark that the land is “extremely rich” in horses, camels, oxen, sheep, and goats. Mongols were herders who moved over wide areas to gain pasture for their beasts; they were also keen hunters.33 Medieval travel writers emphasize scarcity and willingness to eat foods beyond perceived margins of edibility not only to represent reality but also to define and construct Mongol characteristics.
One rhetorical purpose is to heighten the impression of Tartars as the most hardy, ferocious, and belligerent of men. Despite Carpini’s measured tones in the ethnographic chapters of his book (chapters 2–4), his later warnings about the dangers they pose as untrustworthy and ruthless enemies are explicit: “It is the intention of the Tartars to bring the whole world into subjection if they can” (in this, Carpini was correct); on no account should Christian countries enter peace treaties with them because of the “intolerable” servitude to which they reduce conquered nations. They are “full of deceit,” speaking fair words at first but afterward stinging like a scorpion, though he also feels they can be defeated because of their small population and their weak bodies compared to those of Christians.34 His message is, therefore, somewhat mixed: the Mongols are a terrible foe, yet ultimately defeatable. The emphasis that he and other travelers place on capacity for hunger endurance and willingness to eat even vermin and carrion helps convey this dual message: the scarcity that signifies their toughness also indicates potential military weakness.
Connected to this characterization is the ancient image of the barbarian, though this is more often implicit than stated outright in our travelers’ books. The belligerence, cruelty, and deceit Carpini attributes to Mongols were also conventional traits of barbarians, as were their filthy eating habits.35 The Mongols’ lack of bread and dependence on flesh and milk are especially revealing. Bread is among the most venerable signifiers of civilization in western traditions. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the wild man Enkidu is tamed and civilized when brought in from the steppes where he has roamed with the beasts and lived by suckling their milk and taught to sit at a table, drink beer, and eat bread.36 In Homer’s Odyssey, danger befalls “men, eaters of bread” when they sail into the land of the lotus-eaters whose intoxicating food has the power to make them forget their families and the way home.37 In Mandeville’s and Witte’s descriptions of some eastern monstrous peoples (discussed in Chapter 8), failure to eat bread while instead living off meat, milk, or raw plants are common identifiers for the barely or partially human.38
Yet travelers do not impose a simple template of barbarian imagery on Mongol peoples. “Tartars” are not undisciplined or without law, which are other conventions of the trope. They may (according to Carpini) be “dirty in the way they take food and drink,” lack tablecloths and napkins, and wipe greasy hands on leggings or grass, but they are not devoid of dining etiquette.39 Rubruck comments on the formal dining arrangements witnessed at the imperial court.40 Hetoum, whose motive of persuading the pope to form an Armenian-Mongol-French crusading alliance made his account of the Mongols more positive, states they are generous and courteous in sharing their food and if others are not quick to share in return they do not hesitate to take supplies by force.41 A Mongolian law stating “[w]hen a wayfarer passes by people eating, he must alight and eat with them without asking for permission, and they must not forbid him this” echoes Hetoum’s account of Mongol hospitality.42
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