to medieval Latin Christians.
Orientalism”s lasting value is not in providing the answers but in offering a starting point for scholarship that can provide textured accounts of the complicated and many-layered views “westerners” of different eras have formed of Asian cultures. They have been wondering, curious, admiring, inquiring, envious, avaricious, possessive, superior, censorious, denigrating, stereotyping, and demonizing but not generally all at the same time. Medieval travelers knew nothing of the world that would succeed them. They could never have envisaged the extraordinary European takeover of later centuries. To them, Mongolia, China, the Indian subcontinent, Burma, the kingdom of Champa (southern and central Vietnam), and the multitudinous islands scattered across the ocean at the farthest reaches of their known earth represented new and fascinating worlds meriting diverse responses. The peoples of these places were variously regarded with fear, disdain, wonder, and awe and were the focus of wariness, curiosity, and pleasure. Conspicuously absent from medieval western responses to Asia was the urge so familiar in more recent times: the desire to possess.
Chapter 2
Travelers, Tales, Audiences
Travelers’ tales are often the preserve of the young, vigorous, and egocentric, yet it fell to an aging, overweight Franciscan friar to be among the first to travel into the heartland of a far Asian empire and return to tell his story. John of Plano Carpini (Giovanni di Pian di Carpine, c. 1180–1252), born in Pian di Carpine, now Magione near Perugia, was an early stalwart of the Franciscan order and near contemporary of St. Francis.1 He had spent the 1220s and 1230s traveling Saxony and Spain to help establish the new order in those places, gaining a reputation for trustworthiness and sound judgment, kindness, and piety. His fellow Franciscan Giordano da Giano left a vivid image of him as, in de Rachewiltz’s paraphrase, “a kind, genial and heavily built man, so heavy in fact that he used to ride a donkey instead of the prescribed horse, thereby attracting notice and sympathy wherever he went.”2 By 1245 he had surely earned some quiet and comfortable twilight years but instead was called by the new pope, Innocent IV, to head one of four diplomatic missions into Mongol territory. He was not the first—there had been some earlier Hungarian expeditions into Mongol-held territories—but he is distinguished for the distance traveled and for his account of the journey. Carpini, accompanied first by Friar Stephen of Bohemia, who fell ill en route and was replaced by Benedict the Pole, departed from Lyon on 16 April 1245 and took the route via Bohemia, Poland, and southern Russia. He reached the camp of Güyük Khân under Mongol escort just west of the capital Karakorum on 22 July 1246.
It was a heroic journey of several thousand kilometers into dangerous territory, strewn in places with “skulls and bones of dead men lying on the ground like dung.”3 They kept up a cracking pace with five or seven changes of horses every day in the later phases, traveling from dawn to nightfall with no stopping for meals and indeed often no chance to eat in the evenings as they made camp so late. Benedict the Pole tells how they bandaged their limbs to “bear the strain of continual riding.”4 Ruy Gonzáles de Clavijo, Castilian ambassador to Temür in the early fifteenth century, concurred that “it is scarcely to be believed, had we not ourselves seen it and thus we can vouch for the truth, what a distance these [Mongol] riders can encompass in a day. … By the roadside many were the dead horses we saw during our journey, which had been thus ridden to death and the carcass abandoned.”5 Carpini’s return journey took place through the winter of 1246–47, finally arriving at Lyon in November 1247. As he tells it, the friars slept on the freezing open ground, often waking to find themselves covered in snow. On reaching Europe, Carpini and his companions were greeted “as if we were risen from the dead.”6 Presumably Carpini no longer sported the corpulent figure for which he had previously been celebrated.
At the same time Lawrence of Portugal, also Franciscan, was to have approached the Mongols via the Levant but nothing is known of his journey; he may have died on the way or perhaps did not go at all.7 Two further missions via the eastern Mediterranean were headed by Dominicans, that of Ascelin and his companion, Simon of St. Quentin, who reached the camp of Baiju in the Armenian highlands in May 1247, and that of Andrew of Longjumeau, who traveled to a Mongolian encampment near Tabriz in Persia in 1245–47 and to the camp of the regent Oghul-Qaimish, widow of Güyük Khân, southwest of Lake Baikal at the request of King Louis IX in 1249–51.8 All these journeys required considerable courage, given the Mongolians’ reputation as ferocious warriors. As Peter Jackson and David Morgan comment drily, “The Mongol imperial government held a fairly uncomplicated view of international relations.” They believed Tenggeri (the “Eternal Heaven”) had granted the entire world to the Mongols, and it was the duty of all other rulers and peoples to submit to them or pay a terrible price.9
Carpini’s, Ascelin’s, and Andrew of Longjumeau’s missions resulted in written accounts of Mongol peoples and represent some of the earliest European ethnographic writing on Asia.10 However, descriptions of Mongols had already begun to circulate from the 1220s, when Europe was under threat of total conquest. Some of these were preserved in Matthew Paris’s Chronica majora.11 The papal emissaries offered less panicky descriptions that sought not to demonize but to warn and inform. Each of their accounts, however, has a complex textual and authorial history. Benedict the Pole, Carpini’s companion, left a short dictated account of their journey.12 Ascelin’s journey is represented by the record of his companion, Simon of St. Quentin, but this does not survive in any independent copy and is known only from extracts Vincent of Beauvais copied into his Speculum historiale (c. 1253) along with excerpts from Carpini.13 Likewise, Andrew of Longjumeau’s work has not survived independently, though copies of his translations of letters from eastern Christians and Mongols are in Papal registers. Parts of his record of the first journey and a little on the second are preserved in Matthew Paris’s Chronica majora, while Joinville’s Histoire de Saint Louis includes information from the latter.14 However, from the point of view of medieval as well as modern readers, Carpini’s book, titled Ystoria [Historia] Mongalorum in key manuscripts, is the most important. It was produced upon the friar’s return to Lyon in 1247 and survives in two main versions. The shorter is extant in twelve copies and contains the chief ethnographic and military chapters. The longer, which adds a lengthy final chapter narrating the friars’ itinerary, is in three manuscripts and is the version used here.15
Among variant versions of Carpini and Benedict’s itinerary, one, generally known as The Tartar Relation, was discovered in 1957. This became famous because of the manuscript’s inclusion of the so-called Vinland Map, reputed to be a fifteenth-century redrawing of a thirteenth-century original and depicting a large island labeled “Vinland” to the west of Greenland.16 This first excited the attention of book dealers and historians who believed it the earliest European cartographic depiction of North America, but it is now widely accepted as a twentieth-century forgery. However, the remainder of the manuscript, consisting of The Tartar Relation and a copy of Vincent’s Speculum historiale, is considered authentic.17 Coming from the pen of one C. de Bridia, The Tartar Relation was probably written down by someone who heard Benedict and/or Carpini speaking of their travels at some point on their homeward route.18 The text is close to Carpini’s but with plausible additions and variations: there is nothing to ring alarm bells over anachronism. Carpini himself says that versions were made on their journey home.
Many have suggested that one of Innocent IV’s motives in sending envoys to the Mongols was to investigate the possibilities of a joint Mongol-Christian campaign against the Saracens in the Holy Land, though Menestò, Carpini’s recent editor, finds no direct evidence for this. Rather, the missions were “diplomatic, but also exploratory.”19 With the Mongol threat to Latin Europe still very real and their bloody conquests ongoing, Innocent’s chief aim was to compile a dossier of useful information on their territories, way
