and colonization take different forms and do not always, even in the modern period, involve formal domination of a metropolitan center over a subjected territorial possession. “Informal” or “surrogate” empires, such as seen in nineteenth-century British relations with China, should be included in any history of colonialism and imperialism. Osterhammel also identifies a wider range of expansionary activities to be counted in a theory of colonialism: “total migration of entire populations and societies”; “mass individual migration”; “border colonization”; “overseas settlement colonization”; “empire-building wars of conquest”; and “construction of naval networks”; and he divides “colonies” into “exploitation colonies,” “maritime enclaves,” and “settlement colonies.”7 In recent years historians have amply documented processes of conquest and colonization within the boundaries of Latin Christendom and on its margins. Thus, taking some notable examples, Frankish crusaders in the Holy Land, Spanish Christians in Iberia, Normans in England, Anglo-Normans in Wales and Ireland, Germans in Bohemia, Catalans and Genoese in the Mediterranean, and Castilians and Portuguese in the Atlantic may all be viewed as medieval colonizers of some sort.8 Expansion and settlement were recurring features of medieval European experience. Yet despite flexibility in definition, it is difficult to identify examples of European colonialist ambition toward the distant East before the late fifteenth century. There were certainly western mercantile and missionary presences as far away as India and China from the later thirteenth century and those endeavors no doubt paved the way for later settlements, but it is hard to discern a European desire to possess and subjugate Asian territories in the fashion familiar to more recent epochs.
For these reasons, the book is envisaged as a contribution to an emergent “precolonial studies” rather than the better-established work on medieval “postcolonialism” that has emerged over the past decade and a half.9 Said’s theory of Orientalism was instrumental in the formation of postcolonial theory more broadly, although earlier works by Frantz Fanon and critics of the British Raj were also among its foundational texts. The theory takes awareness of the inequality and injustice inherent in relations in any given colonial context as its starting point.10 Medieval postcolonialism, far from being a “mind-bending” concept,11 is a valid and important field that still offers scope for more detailed studies. For example, early medieval societies, as some recent scholars have helped us see, possessed languages, buildings, law codes, and mental outlooks marked by their then recent status as Roman colonies.12 Many studies offer subtle engagements that problematize any rigid concept of what counts as “postcolonial” and critique the work of Said, Bhabha, and others. Yet chronologies may be synchronous; thus medieval society was at once “colonial,” with various colonialist enterprises under way in different times and places, and “postcolonial,” having gone through numerous such processes already, but also “precolonial,” in that not all of Latin Christendom’s encounters with other peoples were driven by a colonialist impulse.
Perhaps the closest medieval powers came to pursuing informal colonial enterprises in the distant East was in missionary endeavors and the expansionist ambitions of the popes directing them. From the mid-thirteenth to late fifteenth centuries, the papacy sent Franciscan and Dominican missionaries to convert Asian populations to the Catholic faith. We might argue for a culturally colonialist motive in these efforts at evangelization; however, we would also need to acknowledge that nothing close to actual dominance of the Christian faith was ever achieved. The missionary efforts were tiny and scattered among vast and mainly unreceptive Asian populations. The latters’ overwhelmingly indifferent response is notorious among Asian historians who point to the lack of oriental records of the western visitors. The notable exception was John of Marignolli (in China in the 1330s and 1340s), who made an impression on Chinese annalists not for the Christian message he sought to deliver but for the huge horse he brought as a present for the emperor.13 Moreover, although missionary work has often gone hand in hand with modern colonialism, we should recognize certain specific agendas and contexts among medieval missionaries.14 One of the chief concerns of Franciscans was a belief in an imminent apocalypse. Thus Franciscan missionaries to China, India, and other distant civilizations aimed to achieve the conversion of humankind to Catholic Christianity, even if it meant their own martyrdom, before the end of the world. Dominican friars, particularly active in central and west Asia and in India, regularly attempted to draw eastern branches of Christianity (such as Nestorian and Armenian Christians) into the Latin fold or to convert Mongols to Christianity to gain allies in crusades against Islam. The efforts of both groups might be read as ideological colonialism, but only with numerous provisos in place. The difference between medieval and more recent missionaries is well summarized by E. Randolph Daniel, who explains medieval Christians’ evangelizing efforts in light of concepts of societas christiana: When non-Christians “adopted Catholicism, they were accepted into the corpus christianorum. … This is not to be confused with the attitude of nineteenth-century missionaries who believed that they were civilizing as well as Christianizing Africans and Asians. Conversion to Christianity in the nineteenth century simply included the acceptance of the superiority of European civilization; it did not incorporate those converted into European civilization” in the way that medieval conversion assumed assimilation within the societas christiana.15 There are fundamental differences between medieval missions in Asia and more recent efforts accompanying economic, political, and settler expansion.
The absence of a true colonizing agenda among late medieval travelers to the distant East and their readers back home created a vision of Asia that admitted neutrality and often admiration as well as critique. This is hardly a new observation: there is a distinguished body of scholarship on different aspects of the topic.16 Its influence has begun to have some effect on medieval Europeanists beyond the fields of travel and encounter; for example, Georges Duby notes that in the wake of the testimony of emissaries to the Mongols, Marco Polo, and other travelers, “a few Europeans began to perceive that the extremities of the world were not all populated by cruel monsters and that order, wealth and happiness could prevail, under wise monarchs, in countries that were not Christian.”17 The goal here is to revisit the field with greater attention to some topics that have come into prominence with the rise of cultural anthropology. Alongside medieval travel writers’ efforts to paint eastern peoples and cultures as “Other,” we will find plenty of occasions when they noted sameness or at least similarities between East and West. Admiration and the willingness to learn are found, too, and where authors denigrated particular Asian cultures their attitude can be explained by the motives of authors and expectations of their audiences. For instance, much writing on Mongols up to the later thirteenth century was dominated by perceptions of ferocious enemies (actual or potential) and was additionally influenced by ancient prejudices against nomadic or non-urban “barbarians.” Some of the latter stereotypes also affected portrayals of rural southeast Asians down to the end of our period. In contrast, most medieval writing on China was full of admiration and appealed to audiences’ desire to revel in descriptions of natural bounty and civilized pleasures. Descriptions of India were varied, encompassing the full range of medieval responses to eastern contexts from enchantment to disgust.
Europeans had been traveling to ancient civilizations of the distant East long before they made journeys to the “new” worlds of the Americas and Oceania. Xenophon’s expedition to Persia c. 400 BCE and Alexander the Great’s advances across Persia and into India in the 330s–320s BCE endured in European memory. Alexander’s campaign was transformed into literature and mythology in Pseudo-Callisthenes’s Alexander Romance, composed in the third century CE and popular throughout the medieval period.18 Roman traders had sailed into the Indian Ocean from the first century CE and maintained trading posts as far as the Bay of Bengal. According to J. R. S. Phillips, “Roman products and occasionally even Roman subjects could be found as far afield as South-East Asia and China,” while Asian products including silk and spices were traded westward.19 Roman geographer Pomponius Mela wrote c. 43 CE, “The Seres [Chinese] are … a people full of justice and best known for the trade they conduct in absentia, by leaving their goods behind in a remote location.”20 Pliny the Elder stated he had heard from an Indian delegation that the Chinese “are of more than normal
