Welcome back everyone. I’m Devon, and this is Human Circus. Last episode, I started a new series, but I didn’t really explain what I’d be doing. I guess I was just excited to finally be putting out something new after a pretty long silence. Anyways, I want to take a minute here to very broadly outline what’s to come. I’m going to be doing a set of episodes looking at travel narratives that illustrate the contacts between Western and central Europe and the Mongol Empire. I’m still sorting out how many episodes that will be and what I’ll be covering, but there are a number of really fascinating characters, really interesting stories of people going one way or another and recording what they saw. There are figures like Willem Van Ruysbroek, Friar Julianus, and Rabban Bar Sauma, and there are also some great side topics I might dig into too where they don't quite fit into the main narrative, so, vague as that may be, there will be good things to come.
Last episode, I started to talk about Giovanni Carpine, the 65 year old overweight Franciscan given the mammoth diplomatic task of converting the Mongol khan to Christianity and convincing him not to trouble Latin Christian Europe again, or, failing that, to at least learn something of him and his terrifying people. To that end, Carpine left Lyon in the Spring of 1245 and off he went, travelling overland to Bohemia, north into Poland, and then east, and then rather further east still, meeting with Batu Khan roughly a year after his initial departure.
And that was roughly where we left him last, contemplating the vastness of the world to the north, west, and south of him, and then going on, him, Benedict, and the rest of their nameless party. They went on the same as before, switching horses through the system of relay stations, or Yam, and apparently going through 5-7 of the animals per day. For 8 days they rode through what had been the lands of the Kipchaks, maintaining a punishing pace, and then for 20 days through those of of the Kankali Turks. There, they met few people, only deserts and the occasional salt marshes, and Benedict reports finding the skulls and of dead men scattered like dung across the ground. If the landscape needed to get any more ominous, both Benedict and Carpine would later note in their reports that when Grand Prince Yaroslav had gone that way, many of his followers had died of thirst and left their bones on the ground where the friars now rode.
They passed through what had been the Khwarazmian Empire, had been until some 25 years before when the Mongols had arrived at the door and, following some unpleasantness over slain emissaries, destroyed them utterly. Over the course of less than two years Genghis and his sons and generals, including Subutai, had conducted a campaign that is generally regarded as quite brilliant and extremely bloodthirsty. Now, as Carpine and Benedict rode where the shahs had ruled, they saw ruined cities and forts without number, and villages in which no sign of life was seen. They don’t seem to have seen Samarkand, Bukhara, or Nipashur; they were further north, along the edges of the shahs’ former domains, passing Otrar which Carpine calls Ornas, the city which held out for 5 months against an army commanded by Chagatai and Ogedei before falling in 1219.
And this all starts to take on the feel of a kind of travel guide to conquered nations, because next Carpine comes to the realms of the Qara Khitai, a former nomadic empire, and then after that to the city-less land of the Naimans, also since defeated and absorbed into the Mongol body. Still further east they went, getting closer now.
The land they describe was sometimes plains and sometimes mountainous, largely unfruitful, only rarely featuring water and streams, and beset by extreme acts of weather. Its midsummer brought lightning storms that Carpine says were responsible for many deaths, and also surprising quantities of snow. At times, the wind would blow so fiercely that travel became impossible, the strength of the wind and the blinding dust forcing them to fling themselves to the ground. At other times, hail fell in abundance, sometimes so much that the following thaw would create great floods. Carpine claims that one such flood swept away 160 men and many tents from an encampment. Overall, the picture was one of severe weather in nearly all its possible forms, which the friars were clearly unprepared for. The countryside to them was vast, wild, and, to quote Carpine, “much poorer than [they could] say.”
The Eurasian Steppe was, and in fact still is, an enormous strip of grasslands pinched into semi-distinct regions, occasionally interrupted by mountains, and stretching from China all the way to Romania with an offshoot in Hungary. With forested regions to its north and drylands to its south, it has, for thousands of years facilitated trade and the growth and spread of the nomadic and semi-nomadic communities who many people know best for their periodic intrusions, those the of Scythians, Huns, Magyars, Bulgars, and Seljuk Turks into other people’s history.
But of course, this was not, as it may have seemed to inhabitants of the northeast Achaemenid Empire or 13th century Hungary, a fantastical un-land of perpetual darkness which irregularly pulsed outwards in great, displacing surges of violence. And its people didn’t exist solely to sally out every few decades and knock around some Europeans. Gaining a better understanding of the Mongols seems to have been one of Carpine’s goals, and we’ll follow him into it, to see what it tells us of them, or perhaps him.
Though in the last episode I lingered over some of the more bizarre details which Carpine relates, he did make a significant contribution to a 13th century European understanding of Asia as what we might term a “real place,” not one of divine or monstrous possibility, of paradise or end-times related beings or fantastical legions, but rather one of mountains, rivers, deserts, forests, fortresses, and peoples, and the people he actually encountered, whether he seemed to like them or not, were decidedly human, not of the “monstrous races” out of Pliny. So let’s get to Carpine’s attempts at understanding the Mongol people, humanizing them really if not always in the most flattering terms.
“Their appearance is quite different from everyone else,” he begins. Clearly making some pretty broad generalizations along the way, he then goes on to describe hair-styles, eyes, waists, noses, “middle-size feet,” and cheekbones. He talks clothing, tunics, and the women's headdresses, outlined in wonderful detail, and then the hats which for whatever reason he finds totally indescribable. He writes of large felt tents with their openings to the sky to allow the passage of light in and smoke out, and of how some are easily dismantled for travel while others must be moved intact with ox-drawn carts. And horses, he writes of how they have so many horses that he had not known that there existed that number in the entire world.
Carpine also tries to understand and communicate their religion. He reports on its material manifestations: the shrine at the centre of every camp, the felt idols and images of men on their tents, the felt udders placed beneath the doorways to protect their flocks. He writes of idol-making ceremonies involving the most important women of the camp and the sacrifice of a sheep, its meat eaten and its bones burned. He writes of the use of those idols to heal the sick, and the offerings made to them of food, drink, the first of the mare’s milk, and the hearts of freshly killed animals. And he writes of the burial of their noblemen: either beneath the roots of plants, or in some place in the field, buried in their tents and at their tables with meat and mare’s milk, with horses, saddles, and hay all buried with them, and the bones of a horse burned for them.
From there Carpine expands into the Mongols’ beliefs. They believe in an afterlife much like this one, he explains, only much more abundant, where their flocks multiply and they eat and drink and do all that the living do in this world, but more so. They believe in the power of divination and of magic, and they speak with and hear the voice of their god. They believe in the power of the moon to which they pray, and believe it to be the child of the sun. They believe in the purifying power of fire, and are sensitive to the messages of falling stars. They believe in the power of shamans or sorcerers to intercede on their behalf. They believe in one god, a creator of all things.
Here, Carpine is taking on a difficult task, and he’s hindered at the outset by an apparent assumption that these people he’s trying to come to grips with in fairly short order actually have an overarching belief structure that is common to all, that all Mongols are followers of the same god and have the same beliefs. But they didn’t. They, if we’re understanding “they” to encompass the confederation centred around the Mongol royal dynasty, included Buddhists, Nestorian Christians, Muslims, and Daoists, along with the worshipers of Tengri, the sky god, the “one god” identified by Carpine. If he’d made it to Karakorum on his travels, as he very nearly did, he would have seen that the city included temples to all these religions. I wonder what he would have written then. Would his assessment have been different if he had seen these varied beliefs so publicly displayed? Maybe it would have made no difference at all. Carpine does note the Mongol toleration of diverse religious practices. Perhaps he just doesn’t regard those diverse practices as being Mongol. Still, that tolerance, along with the apparent monotheism, likely gave him hope in his task of converting the Great Khan and, in a top-down spiritual coup, his followers also. As we’ll see later, there was reason for at least a sliver of hope.
Some of that hope might have been diminished, however, when Carpine turned to consider those followers themselves. In one of the more fascinating sections of his report, he considers what he found to be good and bad in the customs, habits, and character of the Mongols with all the confidence of a man who’s spent months among his subjects.
First, the good, or at least Carpine’s good: they seldom argued or were brought to blows; there was very little murder and no theft or robbery to speak of; food was readily shared even when scarce; lost animals were dealt with in all fairness; there was an overall absence of envy and an incredible willingness to help one’s neighbours. These inclinations towards community survival and internal order, obviously beneficial for people living in a fairly harsh and unforgiving environment, were reinforced by some equally harsh punishments where waste or theft were concerned. Stealing could result in death, and Carpine noted that, quote, “if a piece of food is given to anyone and he cannot eat it and he spits it out of his mouth, a hole is made beneath the tent and he is drawn out through the hole and killed without mercy... And they have many similar customs that are too numerous to recount.”
But then the litany of Carpine’s complaints begins. The Mongols were arrogant beyond belief, treating all outsiders from lords on down as dirt beneath their feet. They lied easily to them too, were highly prone to treachery, and would think nothing of killing them. Quick to anger, when they were mild it was the subtle and cunning calm of a scorpion soon to sting. Furthermore, he says, they were unbearably filthy, absolutely refusing to wash their clothes, and their diet included such unappealing items as lice, mares’ afterbirth, and, in a seemingly unsupported accusation, human flesh. They drank to the point of illness and then continued drinking right next to the results of their illness. They greedily demanded gifts, yet they were terribly stingy in return. At one point Carpine just gives up on the job of cataloguing their shortcomings which he'd set himself and simply states “In short, because their evil habits are so numerous, they can hardly be set down.”
The final stretch of our travellers’ journey was hurried along by a desire to arrive in time for Guyuk’s election. They rode from morning until night without stopping for food or rest, and often they halted too late to eat, and would eat nothing until the following morning. Horses which tired were left behind, for they always had new ones to replace them. It was a hard ride, but they were going to arrive on time.
Ahead of them, the kurultai, the grand council to elect the great khan or khagan, was shaping up. And you may have noticed something here. If Carpine and co. were rushing feverishly to reach the gathering in time, rushing from Batu, then how was Batu going to get there on time? The answer was that he wasn’t. Batu would not be attending at all.
This takes us back to something I mentioned in the last episode, that Batu and Guyuk had a bit of history together. It seems they hadn’t entirely gotten along during the sweeping westward campaign that had begun in 1236 and carried them into Europe, and yes, Guyuk had been there. Though, as I’ve mentioned, it was Batu’s operation and Subutai is generally considered to have been the mastermind of the whole thing, there was a whole host of Mongol royalty on hand for the campaign, all of whose names I will now merrily butcher. There were Batu’s brothers Orda, Berke, Sinkur, and Siban; Chagatai’s son and grandson, Baidar and Bur; Tolui’s son Mongke; and Ogedei’s sons Kadan and Guyuk. This grand assemblage of Genghis’ grandchildren was, broadly speaking, pursuing the Mongol’s self-identified destiny of world domination, but it was also carving out Batu’s inheritance. And the issue of that inheritance, that line of descent from Genghis, leads us to a potential root of the discord between Batu and Guyuk.
I don’t want to get excessively bogged down here in Mongol genealogy, but Batu you see was the son of Jochi. Jochi’s mother was Genghis’ wife Borte, but he was born following her return after being held by the Merkits, a neighbouring tribal confederation destined to become part of the Mongol world, and there was always pretty deeply held suspicion that he wasn’t really Genghis’ son. To his credit, Genghis does seem to have treated Jochi as an eldest son and repeatedly affirmed this view, but rifts did develop between Jochi and the other children, coming to a head during the Khwarezmian campaign. There was anger, disagreement over the handling of a particular siege, and the replacement of Jochi by Ogedei as commander of that siege. After that, Jochi would take to his land near the Caspian, and he would refuse to come forth again, even at Genghis’ direct summons. Such was the situation until first Jochi then Genghis died in 1226, on the eve of apparent open hostilities.
So the Batu-Guyuk conflict is not just a matter of personal disagreement. It’s a matter of familial rivalry, the divide between the lines of Jochi and Ogedei, and, in the not too distant future, there would not be one united Mongol khanate, but rather a handful of competing ones: the Yuan Dynasty, the Golden Horde, the Chagatai Khanate, and the Ilkhanate.
But all of that was for the future. For now, the kurultai was going ahead, though not without without contention. It had been a long, drawn-out process; there had been a lot of support for Tolui’s son Mongke; and Batu, in open defiance of his family, was not there at all.
Such was the situation the friars were riding into, quite blindly, in July of 1246. Upon arrival, they were given a tent and their letters were received. They waited, attended court in a rather larger tent that Carpine estimated would hold 2,000 people, and generally experienced a wonderful outsider’s perspective of the whole series of events.
They hardly had a front row seat, were hardly of any importance at all to the proceedings, but they saw the leaders arrive, riding in with their men from the surrounding hills. Carpine saw that on the first day he watched, all who attended dressed in purple, on the second in red, in blue on the third, and on the fourth in their best silk. Within a great tent the leaders spoke of Guyuk’s elevation while outside the others drank. And Carpine and his fellows were made to drink with them. They were given ale because they did not care much for the fermented mare’s milk, and they were compelled to drink so much of it that they could not remain at all sober, complain as they might.
The Franciscans were not the only visitors from afar. There were Russian dukes, a Seljuk sultan, Korean princes, a pair of Georgian princes, an ambassador from the Caliph of Baghdad, and ones from ten other Muslim leaders, or so Carpine was given to understand. Actually, he claims that there were more than 4,000 ambassadors, lords, and governors there to bring tribute and gifts, and to submit to the new great Khan. All were made to drink together, and so they did for a good four weeks, hailing Guyuk each time he left the tent in the belief that he had just been elected.
In the bustle of comings and goings around the tent, and in Carpine’s state of enforced intoxication, he wasn’t sure exactly when the big moment of the kurultai occurred, or really what was going on within that tent at all, but the whole thing did eventually move to another site for the enthronement itself, a “beautiful plain next to a river between hills,” where multitudes gathered. On the day, all who were present faced south, while certain notables stepped before them and, to the complete lack of comprehension of Carpine and likely many other foreign observers, gave lengthy speeches. Then, all knelt in the direction of the south, but Carpine and Benedict quote, “did not know whether they made incantations and knelt to God or to other things [and] did not want to genuflect.” Guyuk was placed upon an imperial throne and his immediate leaders came forward to bow to him, and then all his people knelt, now to to him. Later there was cooked meat with broth and seasoning, and drinking, of course, tremendous quantities of drinking.
After the festivities, Carpine’s party was called forward to bend the knee 4 times and warned again not to touch the inner threshold of the tent. Guards searched them for weapons, and they joined the other emissaries within a large tent for the presentation of gifts. There were silks and other rich cloths of various kinds, gold-work, furs, and all manner of nice things. There was a kind of portable canopy covered in gems, a set of camels and matching decorated saddles, horses in iron or leather, and gold, silver, and silk enough to fill 50 wagons.
But celebrations and gift-givings aside, there was the business of diplomacy to be done, and the circumstances were not ideal. One might easily, as Carpine did, wander into the wrong cemetery grounds and narrowly escape the death penalty, or, as he managed to avoid, innocently take a stick from the wrong bush and, again, be faced with death. Alternatively, you might simply starve as you waited your turn to speak to Guyuk.
That’s what happened to Carpine and his party. They were given food for one which was to split between four stomachs, and there was no nearby market for them to trot down to pick up supplies; they had trouble finding any means to provide for themselves at all and might have even died of hunger if Guyuk’s goldsmith, a Ruthenian, had not intervened and supported them somewhat. Meanwhile, they were sent away from one potential appearance before the Khan because, or so Carpine was told, Guyuk intended to raise his standard against the west… so that was a little ominous.
No matter how experienced Carpine was, here he had been flung into a new and entirely unfamiliar situation, and he was not well prepared. The supply of pelts which they’d amassed for gift-giving had run dry, and now they were in the situation that their Russian advisor had warned them against before they set out for Kiev: meeting a Mongol leader with nothing to offer, nothing at all to pile onto those 50 wagons. How important could they, or the pope who they represented, really be, if they could not even manage the most meagre of gifts? It’s probably why they were kept waiting for so long. After all, Guyuk had already heard the purpose of their visit and would have felt no urgency to see them in person.
The waiting did give them more time to mix with those who came to bring their business before Guyuk and those who served the Mongols in one capacity or another, they were only too happy to speak with the friars. Carpine writes that they knew exactly what he wanted and did need not be asked, instead volunteering all kinds of information on the Mongols, their practices, and past. Perhaps it was one of these sources that provided Carpine with this optimistic assessment of Guyuk’s religious leanings.
The khan, who is rather flatteringly described as being serious, intelligent, and morally strict, with no mention of his possibly alcohol-related sickliness, was said to be very supportive of Christians, to pay their expenses and retain a Christian choir; in fact, they were absolutely expecting him to convert. There certainly were Christians around Guyuk. Though I’m sure there was much to their beliefs which Carpine would have found alien and strange, there were a great many Nestorian Christians who occupied positions of power with the Mongols, and the Franciscans point of contact with the new great khan was in fact himself a Nestorian, one named Chingai. However, we know now that conversion wouldn’t be happening, that there would be no such religio-diplomatic victory for Carpine and his pope, and actually that Guyuk did not have many years to live, but Carpine and Benedict waited with high hopes.
Things did finally move forward by November, and they demonstrate how capable the Mongols had become in dealing with foreign diplomats and communicating across the barriers of distance and language. Various meetings with Guyuk’s secretaries and ministers led to careful written translations of the Pope’s letters and of all that Carpine and his party had previously said before Batu. These materials were brought before Guyuk for his consideration, and then it was arranged for a letter to be recorded that they would carry back with them. Did the pope have people who could read the languages of the Rus, the Muslims, or the Mongols? He did not, they replied, or rather, quote, “there were Muslims in our part of the world, but they were distant from from the Lord Pope.” Translation on the spot thus being necessary, a letter was brought to them to be rendered into Latin, and once completed it was translated back word by word to insure its accuracy and Carpine was made to read it twice and be certain no questions remained. “See that you understand everything well,” they told him, “because it is useless if you do not understand something since you must travel to such distant lands.” “We understand everything well,” Carpine replied.
Actually Guyuk rather thought it would be a good idea for some Mongol representatives to return with them, but Carpine was less enthusiastic about this. Wouldn’t this just be an invitation for them to scout the lands they visited? And when they came and they saw the terrible divisions that existed within Latin Christendom, wouldn’t they be more encouraged to attack? Worse, what would happen if these representatives were to be harmed, killed even, while away? The Mongol response to the death of their ambassadors would be as predictable as it would be merciless. No, none of that sounded beneficial, so Carpine simply did not extend any such invitation.
Instead, he collected his pass, his letters signed with the imperial seal, and his gifts from Guyuk’s mother, fox fur cloaks with silk liners which were promptly grabbed up by the Mongols who had long been accompanying them, and he turned at last for home.
The return journey he relates in hardly any time at all. It was of less interest him, I suppose, and did not pertain to his mission, but it was again an impressive feat: proceeding overland pretty much from one end of the Eurasian landmass to the other, and travelling, Carpine writes, for an entire winter. The ground was often covered with snow, and when they paused to rest they stamped it down with their feet to make a little space for themselves to lie.
Their route is not entirely clear. Probably, they followed the same Yam system back, eventually coming to meet Batu again and being sent on. They met again with that particularly greedy local administrator, and he tried again to press them for gifts, only this time he had no success, for they had nothing. They arrived in Kiev in early July and were greeted as if they had returned from the dead, and one can certainly understand this reaction on the part of the city’s inhabitants: the elderly Franciscan and his company had crossed deserts of sand and of snow, traversed ludicrously large stretches of land, sometimes tied to their horses so as not to collapse from the saddle, and often on the most meagre of rations and in the worst of health. More than that, they’d been to visit the monsters who’d shattered the city completely just 5 years before, and then they’d come back.
They still had a long way to travel. They were bound for Lyon after all, where they were to present the Pope with Guyuk’s letter, and, if it seems like the bulk of the trip is behind them, it’s worth considering that they still had more than 1,200 miles to go. Carpine was going to make it though.
The closing section of Carpine’s narrative is among my favourites. It’s where he reaffirms that he is to believed, that he did indeed see these things or, where he had noted, hear of them from some credible person. And he lists off the people who witnessed their passing and could confirm their travels in one location or another: the merchants of Bratislava who accompanied them to Kiev, a Duke Oleg, Michael the Genoese, Manuel the Venetian, Renerius of Acre, and many more either named or less specifically cited. Any who doubted Carpine’s words need only consult these witnesses to be assured of their truth.
And Carpine was happy to tell any who would listen of what he had seen himself. The Italian friar Salimbene met Carpine in Lyon after he’d returned, and Salimbene wrote that Carpine could often be found describing his journey, holding forth until he could speak no more and then actually having his book read aloud and explaining any points that weren’t understood. He had a lot to talk about: his journey, interactions, observations, and all that he heard on a broad range of Mongol-related topics, including how they fought and how to fight them.
Yes, one thing I haven’t touched on so far, is that this plump, moderately elderly friar returned from his there-and-back-again with descriptions of the Mongol armies and their practices, and they are pretty recognizably what we think of when we think of Mongol military organization. There’s the decimal system, with its units of tens, hundreds, thousands, and so on, and there’s the fierce collective punishment these units faced for underperforming: if one of a group of ten flees, the rest are killed; if all of a group of ten flee, then the hundred to which they belong are killed. There are details on everything from the weapons of the Mongols, to the fashioning of their armour, to their method of cross rivers. There’s the consistent use of scouting parties who take nothing, only kill or injure if they can, to be followed by occupying forces and the deployment of skilled raiders to pluck the land clean. There’s the classic feigned retreat which followed initial attempts to overwhelm the enemy with the first rush of arrows, the fading back that so often drew Mongols’ opponents to their doom at a pre-arranged ambush point, as had happened to the combined Qipchaks and Rus in 1223.
Carpine points to the Mongols willingness to withdraw from large armies only to destroy them piecemeal once they’ve disbanded, the use of non-combatants or outright dummies on horseback to mislead as to numbers and deployment, the use of captives and other peoples front and centre with stronger forces circling round the wings, and the way, once the enemy was surrounded, that the Mongols gave them a path out, let them see freedom, and let them string themselves out in disorganized escape through the offered opening, only to close in and slaughter them as they fled. I’m sure Carpine had heard something of the Mongol victory over King Bela’s Hungarians.
Even strong fortifications were no guarantee of safety. When faced with such positions, Carpine writes, Mongol armies would press day and night with bows and siege engines, not allowing the defenders any rest while cycling their own men through in shifts. Greek fire could be used, even burning grease from the flesh of their dead enemies, an intimidating weapon which Carpine helpfully notes could be extinguished with beer or wine, or perhaps not helpfully at all if the results are anything like putting water on a grease fire. If a river was present, the Mongols might use it to flood the target. They might tunnel in and set fire to it. Ideally, they might politely but firmly request surrender, call everyone in the city out to be counted, and massacre them on the spot, saving only the skilled artisans and useful slaves. They “are most clever in war,” reads Carpine’s account, “because they have been at war for more than forty years with other people.” 40-something years of wildly successful warfare brings us on to Carpine’s next point: the Mongols, he said, were terrible to be ruled by, unbearable tyrants who were treacherous and would promise one thing but then take anything, abusing high and low born alike.
What then was to be done? Was Carpine’s message one of impending and unavoidable doom, that the people of central and western Europe should do best for themselves and their families by rushing to the Pacific and hurling themselves in? No, Carpine wasn’t simply fear-mongering. He was saying that it was the Mongols’ open intention to conquer the entire world, and that the Christian world was their most immediate target, that Guyuk himself had stated his intention to invade Prussia and Livonia. Given that they were, according to Carpine, vicious scorpions who would be intolerable to live under, preparations must be made. Carpine had solutions, or at least he had suggestions, and they’re pretty interesting too.
The first point concerned cooperation. It was a common theme of Mongol invasions that they would take advantage of local divisions and exploit them utterly, isolating their opponents and then defeating them bite by manageable bite. Christians must, Carpine insisted, band together as one body operating under one plan if they were to stand a chance. They should be armed pretty much as the Mongols were, with bows, arrow-tips tempered as the Mongols did, hooked lances for pulling riders from their horses, thick chest-plates, and armour for body and horse. They should organize their armies as the Mongols did with commanders of 1000s, 100s, and 10s. They should punish those who retreated from the line of battle as the Mongols did, or at least severely if not actually fatally.
There’s obviously a bit of a theme developing here, but “do as the Mongols do” wasn’t Carpine’s only advice. He also made good points about choosing battlegrounds next to thick forests so as to avoid easy encirclement on that side, making heavy use of scouts to monitor attempts at that encirclement, fielding armies composed of distinct battle groups rather than single bodies, keeping leaders in position to direct aid where it was needed, and, as many had learned too late, not following the Mongols when they retreated. And there’s more too, on the preparation of fortresses and of the countryside itself. Carpine was quite thorough. He had travelled among the Mongols, talked to them and those who had been devastated by them, and he seems to have come away from them with a mix of respect, fear, and disgust.
We will be returning to these Mongols again, following other figures who travelled one way or the other and created exchanges between 13th century Latin Christendom and the still united Mongol empire. However, here is where we’ll end things with our friend Friar Carpine, a man of toughness and intelligence whose greatest adventure in life came after 60. He wouldn’t be going east again, but he would become Archbishop of Antivari, in present-day Montenegro. His work on the Mongols and his travels among them would be read by many when reworked into part of Vincent of Beauvais’ great encyclopedia, but he’d die in 1252 in the midst of a legal struggle with a rival archbishop.
As we finish this episode, there’s one more subject I want to mention: Guyuk’s letter. I’m sure you’re wondering what the great khan wrote to the pope. Did he promise conversion to Christianity and assistance in retaking the Holy Land? Did he inform him that his end was near and that the Mongol armies would soon again be on his doorstep? Let’s end things off for today with that letter:
Having taken counsel for making peace with us, You Pope and Christians have sent an envoy to us, as we have heard from him and as your letters declare. Wherefore, if you wish to have peace with us, You Pope and all kings and potentates, in no way delay to come to me to make terms of peace and then you shall hear alike our answer and our will. The contents of your letters stated that we ought to be baptized and become Christians. To this we answer briefly that we do not understand in what way we ought to do this. To the rest of the contents of your letters, that you wonder at so great a slaughter of men, especially of Christians and in particular Poles, Moravians, and Hungarians, we reply likewise that this also we do not understand. However, lest we may seem to pass it over in silence altogether, we give you this for our answer.
Because they did not obey the word of God and the command of Genghis Khan and Ogedei Khan, but took counsel to slay our envoys, therefore God ordered us to destroy them and gave them up into our hands. For otherwise if God had not done this, what could man do to man? But you men of the West believe that you alone are Christians and despise others. But how can you know to whom God deigns to confer His grace? But we worshipping God have destroyed the whole earth from the East to the West in the power of God. And if this were not the power of God, what could men have done? Therefore if you accept peace and are willing to surrender your fortresses to us, You Pope and Christian princes, in no way delay coming to to conclude peace and then we shall know that you wish to have peace with us. But if you should not believe our letters and the command of God nor harken to our counsel then we shall know for certain that you wish to have war. After that we do not know what will happen, God alone knows.
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. RoutledgeCurzon, 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.