In 1241, Latin Christendom awoke to a nightmare. The horror wasn’t “on its doorstep” so much as it was kicking in the door and smashing the windows having first slaughtered the neighbours, burned down their homes, and taken their livestock.
It had arrived at a time when the two most powerful figures in Western Europe, Pope Gregory IX, who would die in August, and Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, were vying for power. It had arrived at a time when, leaving aside the Cathar stronghold still holding out in southern France and the state of the Reconquista in Spain, there were 4 separate crusades on the books: in the Holy Land, in Romania, in Novgorod, and against Frederick himself. It had come through the Carpathians into Hungary and Poland, and it had beaten down all that opposed it. And then it had left.
I am reminded of a scene from a slasher film, and I’m not sure which film exactly I’m thinking of here, maybe no particular one at all, but it’s a scene where you’re locked away somewhere with the protagonist, the bathroom let’s say, and they’re screaming in fear as the killer smashes the door and rattles its handle, and the volume builds and builds and builds until, suddenly, there’s silence. The killer is gone. And then the protagonist turns and there he is, right behind them, there in the room somehow. Except in our story it’s a little different. The Mongols arrived showing every sign of being unstoppable by any door or army that could be mustered against them, their raiding parties going as far west as Vienna and then, mysteriously, they didn’t come into the bathroom at all. They went away.
Hello, and welcome back. I’m Devon, and this is Human Circus. Today, we’re taking a break from Elizabethan voyagers for a look at a different kind of narrative. We’ll be following the journey of a 13th century Franciscan as he travels east in 1245 on an epic trek, pre Marco Polo, pre Niccolo and Maffeo Polo even. His name was Giovanni da Pian del Carpine and he went in search of Mongols. Why would one do such a thing? Let’s rewind a little.
By the time the Mongols enter our story, they are far from their humble beginnings as steppe nomads easily lost from view among other steppe nomads on the edges of Chinese imperial domains. They had defeated and then united their local rivals, the various “people of the felt-walled tents,” as The Secret History of the Mongols puts it; they had destroyed the Jin dynasty in China, then the Khwarezmian Empire in Persia and Central Asia, and they had overrun more peoples, princes, khans, and kingdoms in between than I care to list here, at times absorbing them relatively peacefully where submission was offered, and at others proceeding with massive devastation and massacres.
When Genghis Khan had died, his son Ogedei had succeeded him and armies had gone west under the command of Genghis’s grandson Batu and the legendary general Subutai. They’d defeated the Bulghars, the Bashkirs, the Kipchak, and the princes of Rus, sacking Kiev in the winter of 1240. They were on Latin Christianity’s borders... And by this point, “they” is pretty clearly not anything like a single tribe from the steppe. It was a diverse confederation encompassing a range of religious beliefs, bound by dynastic loyalty, and supported by auxiliaries and specialists from across the breadth of its conquests, from Persia to China. In 1241, they soundly defeated Hungarian and Polish-German armies, annihilated them really, just days apart from each other, and then, months later and for no apparent reason, this poorly understood nightmare withdrew.
From our vantage point here in the future, we have some idea of what was happening. Ogedei, the khan of khans, was dead. The reasons likely lay with his extremely heavy alcoholism though Carpine will report that the khan was poisoned by his sister. Whatever the cause, the Mongol leadership had to withdraw to address the succession; its notables needed to assemble at the kurultai to elect, or at least confirm, their new leader, and this transition of power was not going to be entirely smooth. It wouldn’t be until 1246 that Guyuk, one of Ogedei’s sons, would take power, and in the intervening years Ogedei’s second wife, Töregene would sit as regent. Batu, the khan presenting the most imminent threat to come west, had long been feuding with Guyuk and would not be pursuing plans to carve into central Europe, not for a while, nor would he be hurrying east to see Guyuk quickly installed on the throne and the business of empire once more advancing.
Batu’s failure to go and see to the succession has some led to believe that it was not in fact this business of installing a new Khan which halted westward Mongol expansion. I think that his trouble with Guyuk might explain that failure and the fact that other leaders around him, especial Subutai, did return to the east could account for his not pressing on with the invasions, but there is an interesting alternative hypothesis, that it was changes in the climate which led to the Mongols’ withdrawal from Hungary. A measurable turn for the colder and wetter was followed by spring thaws that would have left the Hungarian soil very marshy, posing military problems and making it difficult to find sufficient grazing land to support the army’s horses. And this was just as displaced populations, abandoned fields, and widespread destruction were all going to contribute to an imminent Hungarian famine. Perhaps it was simply evident to Batu and Subutai that this land would not support an occupying army of horsemen at that time. Whatever the cause, for the moment the tides had receded, and they’d left some breathing space. Into that space stepped Carpine.
So far, I’ve often found myself starting descriptions of our primary characters with phrases like “but we know nothing of his earlier life,” or something to that effect, but this time we actually do know a little. Born around 1180 near Perugia, in central Italy, Carpine was an early and rather important member of the Order of Friars Minor, the Franciscans. Apparently he’d actually been a contemporary and follower of St Francis of Assisi himself, a fellow Umbrian, and he’d taken posts in Saxony and Cologne, and been appointed as Provincial of Germany and then Spain. He was over 60 years old when he received his new call to serve, hardly a young man considering the road to which he was called. Pope Innocent IV was sending him east and into the unknown, to meet the Mongols and to learn everything he could of them.
It may seem an odd choice on the face of it. This was neither an explorer nor a skilled warrior, but he had other things going for him. The Mongol toleration of religion and religious figures meant he might safely travel where a soldier would be slain on sight, and he’d be in the position to urge and provide counsel on conversion to Christianity. In this endeavour, Carpine was following in the footsteps of other Franciscans on evangelical missions. He had apparently been responsible for sending friars out to Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, Denmark, and Norway. Others had gone to Islamic Spain, to the Slavs of Eastern Europe, and to North Africa, and they’d accompanied crusades into the Holy Land. Francis of Assisi himself had been an example for his order to follow and had travelled in his final years to meet the Ayyubid Sultan in Egypt and seek, unsuccessfully, to convert him.
And other Franciscans, and also Dominicans, were being sent out with messages for the Mongols: Lawrence of Portugal, Ascelin of Lombardy, Andre de Longjumeau, and Dominic of Aragon, but none of their stories were quite like Carpine’s. Dominic may have actually been sent as an envoy to the Armenians; Andre and Ascelin handed their letters off to Mongol lords, or perhaps the same lord, in present-day Iran; and Lawrence may or may not have actually gone on the road at all; we don’t know. We do know that none of them would ever go as far or see as much as Carpine would.
Carpine may not have carried a sword or had first-hand knowledge of the Asian Steppe, but, as a member of a mendicant order, he was no cloistered monk either. Apparently somewhat overweight and clearly not of an ideal age for going overland to China, he had diplomatic experience and, through his earlier work in establishing monasteries he had contacts among the lords of eastern Europe. Maybe Carpine could achieve through religious diplomacy what the armies of Poland, Hungary, and Russia, among so many others, had been unable to do: deter the Mongol threat. It was, unsurprisingly, one of the primary concerns of the First Ecumenical Council of Lyon which “advise[d], beg[ged], urge[d] and earnestly command[ed],” all to be mindful of the approaches to Christian lands and by all means possible to fortify those routes against the Mongols’ return. With another member of his order, a Stephen of Bohemia, Carpine set out from Lyon on Sunday the 16th of April, 1245.
In his writings, this was how he would assess the task before them, quote:
We feared harm because of the Mongols proximity to God’s church and so even though we feared death or permanent captivity by the Mongols or others, and though we feared hunger, thirst, cold, heat, injury and troubles beyond our strength, all of which happened to us many times and more than we would have believed earlier (except death and permanent captivity), we still did not dissuade ourselves from carrying out God’s will according the order of the Lord Pope, so that we might help the Christians, somewhat at least, to know the Mongols’ attitude and intent, and so we can show this to the Christians lest, by appearing very suddenly the Mongols should discover them unprepared, as happened once before through men’s sins, and do a great massacre of the Christian people.
Initially they made for the Bohemian king, Vaclav I, as a launching point, and yes, we are fast-forwarding ahead a little here, from France to Bohemia, but then that’s also what Carpine did in his account. Vaclav, also known in English as Wenceslaus, but not the “Good King Wenceslaus” you may be thinking of, had had his own brush with the Mongols, having brought an army close to engagement with them in 1241. He counselled a route that would take the friars through Poland and Russia, paid their immediate expenses, and provided them with letters of safe conduct. He saw them through his realms and, by way of his nephew Duke Boleslav V of Poland to a Duke Conrad of Lanciscia, a man with close ties to the Russian princes, and it was through Conrad that the friars, recently joined by a Brother Benedict of Poland, came into contact with the Russian prince Vasilko.
I’ve seen it suggested that there may have been hope in planning the journey, that through Conrad some anti-Mongol alliance with the Russian princes might be arranged, but that by this point the Russians were in no way inclined to rise up against their conquerors, having so recently suffered devastation at their hands. Whatever the truth of these expectations, Vasilko was at least able to arrange safe conduct for the group to travel on towards Batu Khan, the ruler whose ulus, or territory, included the Rus. Further, he was a good source of helpful advice thanks to his own dealings with the Mongols. Chiefly, this advice was that they must acquire some gifts, for appearing before the khan without generous presents would all but guarantee failure. So acquire some gifts they did, relying largely on charitable donations and the assistance of certain knights as well as of the Bishop of Krakow to amass a suitable collection of beaver and badger pelts. This accomplished, the three went on in Vasilko’s company, and as they did, we’re able to see their secondary, or perhaps tertiary, goal.
Vasilko arranged for them to meet a bishop, a man whose name and affiliation Carpine leaves unsaid; it’s clear though that this was a cleric of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and that in the recent disasters Pope Innocent had seen an opportunity. What we now view in retrospect as the Great Schism between East and West had lasted for roughly 200 years, but it was not a static situation. Events could move elements of the two sides towards or away from reconciliation and friendly relations; most recently, events would seem to have widened the gap: there had been the sack of Constantinople by crusaders in 1204 follow by the conversion of its holy sites, and its occupation was still ongoing as Carpine spoke to this bishop; and more recently there had been the extension of the Northern Crusades into Orthodox realms such as Novgorod. But the rather more impactful Mongol invasions might have change matters significantly. Come back to the unity of the Holy Mother Church, went the letter that Carpine read to this bishop and his lord; come back, it warned them. An immediate answer, Carpine writes, was impossible, and the party went on their way.
They were guided on the road to Kiev by one of Vasilco’s men, but safe conduct or not, there was still danger to be found. Lithuanians were known to regularly make raids in the region, and, it being now so depopulated after the Mongol invasion, there was little to prevent them from doing so as they pleased. By skill or good fortune though, the travellers suffered no such trouble, only terrible sickness.
Despite their poor health, they came to Kiev, and they saw what had become of it. The once great city of the region had been reduced, Carpine wrote, to almost nothing, “hardly two hundred houses.” In the fields that surrounded it were “countless human skulls and bones from the dead,” too numerous in comparison to those who remained for anything to have been done about in the intervening half decade. Years had passed, and those bodies had sat out there, outside what was left of the city.
Those that remained seem to have been very hospitable towards the travellers. When consulted, the local nobles warned the friars against proceeding any further with the horses they had brought with them. Those horses would not know to dig beneath the deep snows after the grasses beneath, as the Mongols’ horses did; there would be no straw, no hay, no fodder to be had for the animals, and they would starve and die, with the consequent death of the travellers themselves being a very likely possibility. This advice seemed wise, and with a little follow-up gift-giving and buttering-up, adequate horses were also forthcoming. Our travellers were ready. Carpine had already come some 2,000 km, or 1,200 miles, from Lyon as the crow flies, and still they had yet to encounter any Mongols.
The next step did not go entirely well; a local village prefect lured them into his domain, lying about its necessity if indeed they were ambassadors, and then, much to Carpine’s annoyance, aggressively milked them for gifts before allowing them to proceed. In a theme that will be familiar to those of you who listened to the episodes on English interactions with Ottoman officials, Carpine grumbles early and often in his writing about the great gift-greed of the Mongols and the problems it presents. Here, having parted with much more than they’d have liked, or could really afford, they were finally allowed to continue.
At sunset one night, a group of armed Mongols rushed upon them as they camped and demanded to know their business, surely an intimidating encounter out in the wild and far from any friendly assistance, but having been informed that they were papal emissaries, and taken a share of the travellers’ meal, the group let them be. The next day, officials of some kind who were responsible for the area, found them as they rode. Again, they were asked their business, and again they announced themselves, this time, rather assertively adding that the Pope had sent them because he wished all Christians to be the Mongols’ friends, that he wished the Mongols to be glorified in the eyes of God, that they should become Christians or not be saved, that the Pope was appalled by their slaughter of Christians, and that they should do penance and avoid any further such transgressions; further, the Mongols should submit in writing their future plans and intentions because he would very much like to know. How the Mongol officials received this declaration, he doesn’t say, but, again, gifts were given and the officials were at least convinced enough of their importance to lend them horses and bundle them off to the local lord, leaving Stephen behind. He was too sick to continue, and his personal adventure would be going no further.
Now this lord that Carpine and Benedict were being taken to was in fact a commander of some 6-8,000 men whose station was to guard against sudden attacks from Europe, and it won’t surprise you to learn that he was going to be asking for gifts. “What do you wish to bow with?” his followers asked of Carpine, meaning, “what gifts have you brought?” When the initial response to the question was deemed insufficient, more was sought, and the lord made it clear that he could be very helpful if only they would be appropriately generous. And so, of course, they had to be.
But I don’t want you to think that Carpine travelled overland from France to Mongolia and had nothing to say save for complaints. The pope would not have been pleased if Carpine had come home with nothing but grumblings over gifts, and Carpine clearly took the task of information-gathering extremely seriously. He was good at it too. He recorded remarkable details on a broad swath of topics related to the Mongols: their lands, lives, habits, religion, organization, tactics, and history.
So when our travellers get to this western Mongol lord, this demander of presents, we get other details too. We get the necessity of bowing three times upon the left knee before the tent doorway. We get the dire warnings not to step on the doorway threshold itself or else suffer death. We get the inconvenience arising when the interpreter, already paid in Kiev, turns out to totally incompetent and, having apparently over-promised on his linguistic abilities, is in fact useless for the task at hand. And, when our travellers are sent on their way despite the interpreter’s shortcomings, we get a peek at the Mongol practice of cycling through fresh horses when they travelled. That was what Carpine and his companions did, along with their Mongol escort, switching mounts 3-4 times a day and riding from morning to night, for roughly 4 weeks, eating up the miles to be sure, but making for rough going for a man in his mid-60s.
The way took them along the frozen Dnieper river which connects Kiev to the Black Sea, what Carpine knew as the Great Sea by which one may reach Constantinople. They crossed the Don river also and carried on. As they went, Carpine recorded not only the geography but also the local rulers and any important connections they may have had, that in one area a man named Mouci ruled, and in another, a prince who was married to Batu’s sister.
It was Batu Khan they were riding to, recent terrorizer of Eastern Europe, founder of the khanate popularly known as the Golden Horde, and the man identified by Carpine as the most powerful of the royal family save for the Great Khan himself. And Batu was waiting for them. He’d been forewarned of their arrival, and something of their purpose, and at his encampment his officers received them. What would they be bowing with? What gifts had they brought? Walk between these fires.
The fires in question were intended to purify, to carry away any poison or evil plans hidden within the gifts, in this case 40 beaver skins and 80 badgers, or the givers, and Carpine elsewhere describes a more elaborate variation of the process, quote: “They make two fires, and place two spears besides the fires, and a cord across the top of the spears, and on this cord they tie bits of fabric; and underneath the cord and rags, and between the two fires, men, beasts, and tents must pass. And there are two women, one on one side, the other on the other, who sprinkle water and sing charms; and if any cart breaks down while passing through here, or anything falls to the ground, the sorcerers take it.” Presumably, stumbling or falling while passing through and thus being found to be personally impure would lead to a result much worse than this taxation by sorcerer, sorcerer being Carpine’s term, in translation at least, and not mine.
This ritual of passing between the flames is also recorded when St Michael of Chernigov, a grand prince of the Rus, presented himself to Batu. Mikhail was called to go between the fires too, but unfortunately he then refused to bow in the direction of a dead man, of Genghis Khan in fact, finding it to be an un-Christian act of worship. As the Mongols would not shed the blood of a noble captive, Mikhail was promptly trampled to death.
Better things were in store for Carpine though after the fire. In his narrative he makes no mention of being asked to do any such thing before Genghis, but Benedict tells of “a chariot bearing a golden statue of the [Khan],” which it was customary to worship. The two friars, he says, would not do so, and were allowed to merely bow their heads, perhaps in a show of the well known Mongol tolerance for religious practitioners or simply out of respect for their status as representatives. In any case, they weren’t put to death, bloodlessly or otherwise, and a “shallow bowl of millet” was even provided to the visitors that first night, that and a pair of more adequate interpreters to translate the pope’s letters into Russian, Arabic, and the Uyghur script that the Mongols used. Some deliberation would then be required.
In the meantime, while Batu considered the Pope’s message, Carpine seems to have found much to admire in the khan, who he describes as “quite magnificent,” an emperor who sits on the highest seat in his beautiful linen tents, tents apparently taken from King Bela IV of Hungary no less. When he rides anywhere, a, quote, “canopy or little tent is carried over his head on a spear point,” a kind of delightfully battle-ready umbrella, we might say. “He is very good to his people…” Carpine writes, “yet they fear him greatly. He is most savage in battle and very wise and most clever in war because he has fought so much.”
Batu the “very wise and most clever” did not take long to make his decision. On “the day of the Resurrection of Our Lord,” the party was summoned and informed they were to be sent on to see Guyuk. I say “the party,” but they didn’t actually all continue their journey from Batu’s camp. It’s one of the footnotes to this story that some were urged to remain and to carry letters back to the Pope, but those selected were simply held after Carpine’s departure and not allowed to go anywhere until he returned. Sadly, there is not, so far as I know, any written record of the extensive time these men spent in Batu’s camp.
Of course Carpine was not among those held back; he wouldn’t be getting out of the trek ahead so easily. It had been a year since Carpine had left Lyon, and now they were starting the next stage of their journey in tears, he writes, unsure if they were going to their death, half starved on a diet of salted millet and melted snow, and so sick they could barely ride.
They were going into the unknown, to places where they were but a few steps removed from real edge of the map stuff, the other side of the wall of the Alexander Romance, the land of Gog and Magog, and the realms of Prester John. Carpine looks to the north and writes of the peoples and places in that direction. He gets to the Samoyedi and he writes that, quote, “after the Samoyedi are people at the edge of the ocean bordering a wasteland who are said to have dog faces.” The edge of the map was calling, but those two words, translated here as “are said,” are important here. As I’ve said, Carpine was on, among other things, an information gathering mission. We’ll see that it’s very clear in reading his report what material should be taken as his word and what is to be attributed to some less immediate source.
Where we really get to see this is in Carpine’s section on the history of the Mongols. It’s a quick run through the rise of Genghis as a unifying local leader and up to and including imperial expansion under Ogedei, and, obviously, this is territory that Carpine was not covering from personal experience. He was relying on what he was told, and for the most part that seems to have served him well; however, when we get to India, it all starts to get a little weird. Lesser India falls to the advance of one of Genghis’s sons without detail, but further advancement runs up against the king, Johannes Presbyter, the man you probably know as Prester John, the legendary priest-king who haunted the perimeter of the medieval European world.
When the Mongols clashed with Prester John’s army, they apparently faced ranks of deviously prepared dummies, copper horses filled with greek fire which, by way of pumps, was sprayed over their men and horses, burning many and filling the air with smoke and confusion. Volleys of arrows followed and drove back the Mongols who, we’re told, did not return. Of course, this is all quite some way from the reality of Mongol activities in the Indian subcontinent. The opposition they faced there took more the form of the Delhi Sultanate or the last Khwarezmian ruler who they pursued into India than it did armies of copper horses filled with greek fire and commanded by Christian priest-kings.
On the return journey from this defeat, the Mongols apparently passed through wastelands populated by female monsters, and I’m not sure what kind of monsters we’re talking about here; the text is not specific. Further inquiries led the Mongols to understand that the males of the land were in the form of dogs. These dogs were seen to gather in numbers. They would plunge into the water despite the fierce cold and emerge to roll in the dirt and then go back again into the water, forming dense layers of icy armour. Then they attacked. The armoured dogs rushed at the Mongol intruders. To their horror, the Mongols found that their arrows bounced from the ice as if from rocks, and that their other weapons were equally ineffective. Such was not the case for the jaws of the dogs which tore at them, killing many before driving them from those lands of dogs and monsters.
And there were other strange delights to be found off the beaten path of the Mongol invasions, as Carpine coloured in the periphery of a great unknown. There were the people whose mouths were too narrow to take in food and who instead took sustenance by inhaling the steam from meat and fruit. There were those who lived beneath mountains, beyond a vast wasteland, and did so for fear of the terrible noise the sun made when it rose above the horizon, a noise so fearful that it would cause death or insanity. There were others across the water whose human forms were bookended by the feet of cattle and the faces of dogs. There were, in a wasteland, quote:
...certain monsters (as was told to us for certain), who had only one arm and hand in the middle of the chest and one foot so that two of them shot as one person with a single bow, and they ran so fast that horses could not catch them. They ran jumping on this one foot and when they tired of going that way they would go on hand and foot revolving as in a circle.
Carpine seems to have found some of these details sufficiently dubious to specify that he heard them from a certain Ruthenian cleric. But, he and his companions had more immediate concerns than dog-headed men and ice-covered dogs. He had a hard ride ahead, so hard that they had to bind their limbs with bandages against the strain of constant riding and be tied to their horses, and he couldn’t be sure if the very human-headed men at the end of it all were going to be particularly hospitable. After he writes of what lies to the north, ending with the dog headed men, he turns south, to Constantinople, the Georgians, Armenians, and Turks, and he looks west to Hungary and Rus. “This land is great and wide,” he writes. He never writes of what there is to the east.
We’ll be finding out, next episode.
Sources:
Carpini, Giovanni. The Story of the Mongols: Whom we Call the Tartars, translated by Erik Hildinger. Branden Books, 1996.
The Mongol Mission: Narratives and Letters of the Franciscan Missionaries in Mongolia and China in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, edited by Christopher Dawson. Sheed & Ward, 1955.
The Secret History of the Mongols, translated by Urgunge Onon. Routledge Curzon, 2001.
Jackson, Peter. The Mongols and the West: 1221-1410. Pearson Longman, 2005.
Jackson, Peter. "Medieval Christendom's Encounter with the Alien." In Travellers, Intellectuals, and the World Beyond Medieval Europe, edited by James Muldoon, 347-369. Routledge, 2016.
Marshall, Robert. Storm from the East: From Genghis Khan to Khubilai Khan. University of California Press, 1993.
Morgan, David. The Mongols. Blackwell, 1986.
Rachewiltz, Igor de. Papal Envoys to the Great Khans. Faber & Faber, 1971.