Hello, and welcome back. I’m Devon, and this is Human Circus.
It is written that in 1235 a member of the Dominican order set off from Hungary on a kind of quest. This Friar Julian had learned of another, older land of Hungarians, or Magyars, to the east, ones who had never left their ancestral homeland for what would be Hungary, so he went to look for them. In the course of his journey, it’s said that his entire party died one after the other, leaving him to go on alone, but he was ultimately successful, indeed finding a community of Magyars living in what he called Magna Hungaria and finding himself entirely able to communicate with them. And entirely able to hear from them of a storm approaching from the east, of an enemy that was beginning to threaten their borders. Friar Julian brought a warning to his king, Bela IV of Hungary, that they were coming, that they wanted world domination, that Rome was next, and that they were particularly aggrieved with Bela for his taking in the Kipchak refugees after their defeat by the Mongols.
Two years after his first excursion, he would be unable to return the same way, for that enemy had arrived and had shattered the Magyars, killing or taking them into captivity. And as we know from last episode, in 1241 they would be in Hungary itself. Bela’s army would be obliterated, and the king himself would be fleeing from town to town, desperately making deals to claw his way back into control over his kingdom. And Latin Christendom would have to take notice. There had been warnings before; the Queen of Georgia had apologized in writing for her inability to contribute to the 5th crusade because of a barbaric invasion from the east, but now they would be scrambling to understand the new reality. A big part of that would involve the gathering of intelligence and the delivering of pleas and demands, and that would require the great efforts of human individuals exposing themselves to the unknown in unfamiliar lands, realms which had to some extent receded from their view into the haze of Plinian fantasy, Alexandrian epic, biblical time, and the tantalizing promise of the priest-king Prester John.
Over the last two episodes, we heard about Euro-Mongol relations through the unlikely body of Friar Carpine. We’re going to continue with that theme today touching on a couple of different diplomatic missions to and from the Mongol empire. I’ll also be covering some of the history, some of the events occurring between the Carpine mission and that of our next major traveller. When we look at the khanate of this period, we’ll see another death, another interregnum, and a new khan. First though, let’s get ourselves caught up.
I didn’t spend much time last episode on saying who exactly the Mongols were save for who they were in Carpine’s view, but I think it might be helpful to quickly establish the basics here before continuing. Who are we talking about when we say someone is a Mongol? The answer to this question in a way depends on when you ask it.
You could ask the question in 1167, 1162, or maybe 1155. Those are some of the dates given for Genghis Khan’s birth. Then the answer would be something like this: A Mongol is a member of one of a number of independent nomadic clans seasonally migrating across a space in the north/northeast of Mongolia with the Kereyids to the south, Merkids to the northwest, Naimans to the east, and the Tatars, with whom they were constantly confused, to the southeast. There had been one before who had attempted to unite the Mongols, but there was no longer. Life revolved around the sheep and the horse: the former for meat, milk, and cheese, as well as for clothing and the construction of their tents, or gers; the latter for transportation, hunting, raids, warfare, and the fermented mare’s milk which they seem to have enjoyed so heavily. Religion was shamanistic, with powerful figures providing prophecies, facilitating ancestor worship, and liaising between the immediate world and the land’s spirits which pierced it, with the highest place given to Tengri the Eternal Sky. From The Secret History of the Mongols, we have a sense of a world of familial feuds and cycles of violence from which one could not entirely shield oneself, but only flee for one’s life.
Consider the circumstances of Genghis’ birth. A Merkid man is travelling on horseback. With him him on a cart is his new wife who he is bringing home, but to his folly, he is otherwise travelling alone. Happening to spot him is another man, a Mongol who is out hawking and who, seeing the unusual beauty of the woman in the cart, races off to gather his two brothers. Shortly after, the Merkid sees the three brothers riding towards him and has no doubts as to their intentions. Also seeing them, his wife speaks:
Do you see the look on the faces of those men? They wish to kill you. As long as you remain alive, there will be girls on the front seats of carts and women in the black-covered wooden carts. If you live, you will perhaps find a girl or a woman for yourself… Save yourself.
And that’s often how it seemed to be in these early Mongol stories. Faced with raids, the men who could do so would escape, would evade their attackers and hope to later retake what they had lost or just to strike a blow in return. So it was in this story, as the Merkid man rode off, eventually losing his pursuers over the hills. The hawker who had brought his brothers with him was Genghis’ father, the woman who was now led away on the cart, his mother. Years later, the Merkids would raid Genghis’ family, driving him from his home and seizing his wife Borte. And so the cycles went.
Born with a blood-clot clutched tightly in his fist, Genghis was given the name Temujin at birth, after a Tatar recently captured or killed, and his early circumstances were not auspicious for the future domination of much of the Eurasian landmass. When he was quite young, his father was poisoned by Tatars who recognized an old enemy; his little family group was abandoned by their clan, its member seeing no benefit in supporting two women and 7 children; he’d feel it necessary to murder his bullying older half-brother; and he’d be taken captive and enslaved by that former clan. No, it was not a promising start in life, all in all, and his early years in the Secret History tend more towards his mother’s foraging for birch-leaf pear and wild onion and his learning to fish or hiding in thickets than to terrifying towns, cities, and cultures into submission.
Thing were of course going to get better though, and my favourite description of this process is from writer David Morgan. This is his succinct summary of the tale of Genghis Khan. Quote, “First, individual followers are attracted by the young warrior’s personal qualities; then the support of a powerful patron is gained; ultimately there is a breach with that patron, and a gradual increase of strength is maintained as various tribes are one by one defeated and either killed, enslaved, or, in most cases, simply incorporated into the new Mongol military machine.” And that’s the whole story really. Sure, there are details missing, and taking the the whole thing as a story we might focus first on the relationship with his blood brother Jamukha, a close friendship leading to the bitterest of rivalries over Mongol leadership, but the general shape is there. After that, it’s just a matter of expansion.
I’m not going to rehash the Genghis/Temujin narrative in its entirety, but I do want to pause for moment over this one part of the Morgan quotation, that “various tribes… were … incorporated into the new Mongol military machine.” Again and again in those early conquests, Genghis wasn’t just leading the same Mongol force against a series of opponents; he was growing the Mongol force and, as he did so, changing what it meant to be Mongol. His, what we might call, anti-aristocratic attitudes would certainly not appeal to all and many would be killed upon their defeat, really an understatement of the violence of Mongol growth, but my point is that many also joined this swelling Mongol nation and not only, as would also happen in large numbers, as slaves to be spent without care. Those who joined bent in some ways, in allegiance to their new Khan and in lining up within his system of military organization, his rules and expectations for conduct, but they came as Tatars, Kereyids, Naiman, Merkids, and later as Uyghers, Tanguts, and Khitan; they came as Nestorians or Buddhists or Muslims; they came as stockbreeding nomads, as hunters and fishers, or as more settled agriculturalists. And they changed what it was to be Mongol. So when the Mongols are entering Central Europe, they are not quite the same Mongols who’d successfully overcome their neighbours in Northern Mongolia.
By this point when we ask the question, “what is a Mongol?” from an outsider’s perspective at least, our answer might be something more like this: one of a diverse many whose allegiance was to the khan and his family. Later still, the answer to our question would change again, as increasingly distinct reaches of Mongol rule became Persianized in the case of the Ilkhanate, or settled into China as with the Yuan Dynasty, or to some other corner of the great empire.
A fun example of this diversity in our period can be found in the European invasion, though it’s also a definite outlier not to be taken as indicative of the general run of things, and the source is not always reliable. I’m referring here to the writings of Matthew Paris, the 13th century chronicler of St Albans Abbey who records a letter sent to the Archbishop of Bordeaux from an Ivo of Narbonne. One the high points is this little tidbit: that eight Mongols were taken prisoner in fighting near Vienna and one of them, who had been employed by the Mongols as their envoy to the Hungarian King, was from England. There’s a little more in the letter of the Englishman’s history, of him being banished for crimes from England, losing all he had gambling in Acre, and wandering on lost to the world, only to be picked up by the Mongols who were impressed by his mastery of languages. I don’t know if any of this is true or not -there’s actually a highly speculative book on the topic of identifying this man if you’re interested- but it is a really scintillating possibility.
Matthew Paris has other material on the Mongol invasion of Europe, and what I find most interesting is the range of attitudes to the invasions which is revealed. In the same letter from Ivo which gave us the English Mongol, there’s an account of the unspeakable horrors of the attack, of brutal violence and its grisly aftermath including the cannibalism practiced by the Mongols’ dog-headed followers. More interesting to me though is the explanation of this disaster as resulting from the, quote, “heresy, and many other sinful things arising among us Christians,” that “the Lord has been roused to anger, and become an angry devastator, and most fearful avenger. This I say, because a fierce race of inhuman beings, whose law is lawlessness, whose wrath is fury, the rod of God’s anger, is passing through and horribly ravaging a wide tract of country, horribly exterminating with fire and sword everything that comes in their way.” If you listened to the Schiltberger series, you’ll already be familiar with this idea, that the successful enemy, Mongol or Turk, be considered God’s rod, an instrument of punishment for the sins and misdeeds of Christians.
Elsewhere in the Paris writings, the recent disasters are given more earthly causes. A Jewish conspiracy is trotted out by way of explanation, along with the claim that the Jews of Europe believed these invaders to be long lost kinfolk who had been sealed up by Alexander behind the Caspian Mountains and that some even sought to bring aid to the Mongols in the form of smuggled weapons. There is talk that the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II might have opened the door to the Mongols in seeking to use them to dominate the region and could thus dismiss them whenever he saw fit, but this is dismissed by Paris as only being said by those who were jealous of the emperor and not be believed. On the other hand, we have Frederick accusing the pope of turning Europe against him and thus dividing it, crippling its ability to respond to this danger. And the pope countered this accusation with his own, that Frederick had made some secret arrangement with the invaders, but of course, regardless of whether or not malicious intent or cooperation with the Mongols was involved, Europe was very divided. For example, Duke Frederick of Austria, a different Frederick, didn’t come to the aid of his neighbour in Hungary; he came to snaffle some free land, and that was really indicative of the possibilities of any united response, an expression of Carpine’s fears that Christian Europe would not be able to effectively cooperate, even in the face of such a fearsome adversary.
Another fascinating moment from Paris, if again not a well-supported one, is the arrival in England of a warning said to come from quite a surprising source. An embassy had apparently come to the French king and a representative sent on to the English telling of a monstrous and inhuman race that was a threat to them all, of men with outsized heads, and eaters of raw flesh, even human flesh. They were expert archers on swift horses, believed to have been sent forth as “a plague on mankind,” and only by combining all available forces in response to this terrible threat could it be overcome. Who had sent this warning, this call to armed cooperation? According to Paris, it was the Old Man of the Mountain, the leader of the Assassins. Rashid ad-Din Sinan, to whom the Old Man of the Mountain usually refers, was in fact dead in 1192, but it remains a possibility that a later Nizari leader sought allies in Western Europe, and in England in particular. They’d had diplomatic dealings with the Crusader States, and they certainly had every reason to be concerned about the Mongols.
Whoever it was that looked to England for help, Paris records the answer of the Bishop of Winchester, who “happened to be present,” and would not let them finish speaking, but rather interrupted, quote: “Let us leave these dogs to devour one another, that they may all be consumed, and perish, and we, when we proceed against the enemies of Christ who remain, will slay them, and cleanse the face of the Earth.” There would be no joint Anglo-Assassin anti-Mongol league born on that day.
We know what happened in Eastern and Central Europe next, how, if there had been warning signs before, the Mongols now well and truly stormed into Central Europe, and European consciousness. And then left. Paris seems to indicate they were beaten back out of Hungary, which is a bit of an optimistic assessment of the strategic situation, but however the circumstances were being read, there was concern enough on the pope’s part to dispatch the religious diplomat/spy, Friar Carpine, who we learned about over the last two episodes. And if you listened to those, then you’ll remember that Carpine did not return with reassurances. Rather, he came with testimony as to the menace the Mongols posed, if any were now needed, a disturbing ultimatum from Guyuk Khan, and Carpine’s own assessment that the khan’s special attentions would be turned towards Europe next. What was to be done?
As I also alluded to last episode, other embassies had been sent out. A pair of Dominicans, Ascelin of Lombardy and Simon de Saint-Quentin, had made their way to the commander Baiju’s camp west of the Caspian Sea around the same time that Carpine was dragging himself back through Kiev, and at least one of them managed to make themselves very unwelcome. It seems Ascelin would offer neither the thrice-bent knee nor any form of gifts or tribute, instead taking to the offensive in speaking of the greatness of the pope and demanding the conversion of his hosts. However, this did not have the desired effect, not at all. Baiju was apparently all for flaying the friars alive and maybe even returning their newly stuffed skins to the pope by way of reply, but perhaps through the intervention of his wife, he restrained himself. Still, it was only with the arrival of Eljigidei, who Guyuk had sent west with the command of his armies, that the Dominicans were really out of the woods. Eljigidei packed them off with letters that echoed Guyuk’s earlier sentiments and in the company of two Mongol envoys, exactly the thing that Carpine had saw the need to avoid. Aibeg and Serkis, the one possibly a Uyghur and the other a Syrian Nestorian, actually made their way to the pope in Lyon and met with him in 1248. Oddly, those particular Mongol agents seem to have left no great mark on history, but this was not the limit of Eljigidei’s diplomatic efforts. He also sent out representatives to King Louis IX of France, and Louis was not in France. Louis had ignored the pope’s pleas to stay and take on the emperor, pleas carried by our friend Carpine in fact. Louis was on crusade in the Holy Land.
Eljigidei’s representatives, a pair of Nestorians, caught up with Louis before he’d gotten properly settled into the business of crusading, actually intercepting him at Cyprus, and the picture they painted must have been an extremely enticing one. From them, Louis heard that the Great Khan and his mother were baptised Christians, that Eljigidei had been charged by Guyuk with the protection of Christians in his domain, that Eljigidei would even be willing to assist him in driving the Muslims from the Holy Land, and that if Louis landed in Egypt while the Mongols made for Baghdad, well then those two great Muslim powers would be unable to assist each other. It was a clever proposal on Eljigidei’s part, and how could Louis resist such an offer, especially when presented to him by Christians? He sent out Andre de Longjumeau as part of a duo of friars, as one does, and with them gifts, letters, a purpose-built tent chapel of fine scarlet cloth, chalices, books, and wood from the true cross... It would be two years before they returned to him, their arrival delayed by, among other things, temporary imprisonment by the Sultan of Aleppo.
In the meantime, Louis also had a rough go of things. For him, that was two hard years of crusading and included imprisonment by the Ayyubid Egyptians after defeat at the Battle of Al Mansurah because while the Mongols had not yet moved on Baghdad, Louis did actually land in Egypt. Did his friars bring good news?
Naturally, they brought a confused story of the Mongol nation’s origins on the edges of Prester John’s land, but also an account of travelling past one broken city after another, the bones of its people piled on the ground, so that they wondered that the Mongols should have overthrown so many and hold power over such a great distance. They brought Louis a gift of cloth and a letter, but it did not promise the assistance that he had hoped for, that he had been promised really. According to one source the letter went very roughly as follows:
A good thing is Peace; for in a land of peace, those that go on four feet, eat the grass of the field in peace; and they that go on two, till the earth whence all good things in peace proceed. This is for a warning unto you, for you can not obtain peace save from us. Prester John rose against us, and many other kings, and all of them have we put to the sword. Therefore we bid you send us so much of thy gold and of thy silver each year, that thou mayst keep our friendship. And if you do not, then will we destroy you and your people, even as we have done to those others.
Not totally supportive then.
Upon arrival, the Longjumeau mission had not been welcomed as that of an equal there to talk terms of an alliance. It had been received as a subservient power come to offer formal submission and the magnificent chapel-tent accepted as a gesture of tribute. Louis’ biographer records that the king bitterly regretted ever having sent the friars in the first place.
Some interesting information did come of it all however. There were tidbits on Mongol life such as their riding with raw meat below their saddle, the meat worked by the heat of the horse and weight of the rider and then either eaten or tossed in a bag for later, a bag which was said to emit a fairly repulsive smell. There was information on the route and on matters such as the German prisoners held by the Mongols, all of which was somehow passed along to Willem van Ruysbroeck to guide him on his own journey. There was the promising news of some Christian prince among the Mongols, so powerful as to have defeated the Emperor of Persia. There was the news that Guyuk Khan was dead.
And yes, this was not so long after Carpine had witnessed the kurultai for Guyuk’s elevation in August of 1246, less than two years after, in April of 1248. The exact cause of death is open to some debate, but the circumstances seem pretty well agreed upon. The tensions between Batu and Guyuk, those Jochi and Ogedei family tensions we talked about last episode, those had not gone away with Guyuk’s enthronement. In 1248, Guyuk and Batu had moved towards one another. Batu had been summoned, but he went cautiously; he must have been suspicious of Guyuk’s intentions to start with, and soon he received confirmation in the form of a warning. Then, as the pair closed, one of them died.
What had happened? Longjumeau has Guyuk dying as the result of some medicine, with the suspicion cast heavily on Batu, but Ruysbroeck would hear that Batu had sent his brother on ahead and that this brother and Guyuk had slain each other in an argument. Others have found it more likely that the great khan’s brutally unhealthy lifestyle combined with the hardships of the journey simply finished him off naturally. Either way, control of the Mongol Empire now passed again to a regent, this time to Guyuk’s widow Oghul Qaimish.
This itself is a really fascinating thread in the story of the Mongol Empire, that the wives of the dead great khans would rule for very substantial periods of time, and we touched on this in the Carpine story with regards to Guyuk’s mother. Qaimish’s reign would be less successful however; it was not going to lead to the elevation of her son. Instead, another powerful woman was going to fatally outmaneuver her.
The woman in question was Sorghaghtani Beki, the widow of Ghengis’ son Tolui. She had been administering to the Tolui family lands since his death in 1232 and had kept herself independent from Ogedei’s repeated attempts to join their lines either through himself or his son Guyuk. And this wasn’t her first act in direct opposition to the Ogedei line. She had suffered a loss in power and influence under Guyuk’s rule and had apparently been the one who had warned Batu that Guyuk was coming his way with ill-intent. Now, with Guyuk dead and the throne vacant, she was not looking to let Qaimish smoothly pass the title from the father down to the son. She had her own sons in mind, in this case Mongke, and she was going to call in the goodwill she’d presumably earned with Batu to do so. Batu meanwhile had no interest in seeing the Ogedei line continue to rule, and when Sorghaghtani sent Mongke to him, Batu received him favourably having likely been promised a great deal of autonomy in running his own not-so-little khanate-corner of the world.
A kurultai was called, a grand council of the Mongols, but it was not your normal kurultai. Batu called it in his home territory. He summoned the Mongol world to his own backyard to make Mongke the great khan, and some of that world came when he called. The Jochid line was represented of course, as were the Toluis, but of the Chagataid and Ogedeid lines all either left when they realized what was happening or never actually showed up in the first place, staving off the appointment. There is talk at this point in the chronicles of Persian historian Juvayni, of “those who spoke evasively and postponed on this matter, fabricating tales and inventing stories.”
Not to be dissuaded, Batu now sent his brother to call a second kuriltai to elect Mongke, this time in the Mongol heartland. Again, the Ogedei and Chagatai families were invited, but they still refused to endorse the validity of the event with their presence and participation. Some came late, while others dawdled to an almost unbelievable degree, stretching the bounds of acceptability to the breaking point. These were those not quite yet ready to admit defeat.
They came for Mongke with many armed men, a violent coup attempt disguised as the proper paying of respect to the new khan, and according to Juvayni, they might have been successful were it not for a man possibly named Keshik, though this might just be a corruption of a word descriptive of his role in the story rather than a name. In any case, this Keshik as I’ll continue to call him was a falconer who had lost his camel, and he was clearly not one who was quick to forget such a thing. While others feasted and toasted Mongke’s elevation, this Keshik searched tirelessly for his missing camel, and in doing so he happened upon a great caravan of men, animals, and wagons, the latter supposedly loaded down with food and gifts. Unconcerned, Keshik persisted in seeking that camel, asking after it among these men until he happened across a broken wagon and in aiding its driver found it to be full of weapons. “What’s all this,” he asked, or something of the sort. “The same as in all the other wagons,” replied the driver, still taking him for one of their own. Soon, Keshik had the truth of the matter, that these men planned to make violent mischief under cover of the drunken feasting which would surely be put on to welcome them. Still feigning indifference, he made off quietly, and then raced back to warn Mongke and the others. It’s worth noting that this is also pretty much the story that Ruysbroeck would be told in 1254
In Juvayni’s telling, Keshik’s urgent pleas that the festivities be set aside and that all make ready for impending danger are at first scarcely believed, such an act on the part of family members being beyond the limits of comprehension, but in all tellings, defensive rings are set up, making certain that none may approach or leave. Then a party is sent out to capture the offending parties, in particular Shiremun, Guyuk’s son and likely the Ogedei choice for succession, Shiremun who did not yet know his plan was ruined, that he already lost.
He and his followers were seized and brought before Mongke to receive their punishment. A whole host of advisors, administrators, and generals who’d guided Guyuk, and Ogedei before him, were promptly executed, including Chingkai who had Carpine dealt with in our last episodes. Ruysbroeck heard that 300 such notables were put to death, and that women were beaten with burning brands to elicit confessions before being killed. Another source puts it at 77 including the Eljigidei who had dealt so cleverly with King Louis. Shiremun was dispatched to China which would seem very lenient but he was then murdered or executed there. The Chagatai prince Buri on the other hand had argued violently with Batu on that European campaign and was turned over to him to be killed. And Oghul Qaimish, the regent who had failed to see her family continue to sit upon the throne, she was either wrapped in felt or sewn into a sack, and then she was thrown in the river to drown. There was little margin for error in seeking the Mongol throne, for yourself or for another.
These challenges turned aside, Mongke Khan’s position was solidified, and so I suppose was Batu’s. But it would be Mongke who would sit as great khan when Friar Willem van Ruysbroeck departed in 1253. And that’s the pair we’ll be discussing next: the one already making plans for further Mongol expansion into Song China and through Syria into Egypt, the other on a mission more religious than diplomatic in character and flung into one of the more cinematic debate scenes in written history. For that and more, I’ll see you next episode.
Sources:
Carpini, Giovanni. The Story of the Mongols: Whom we Call the Tartars, translated by Erik Hildinger. Branden Books, 1996.
Joinville, Jean. The Memoirs of the Lord of Joinville. John Murray, 1906.
Paris, Matthew. English History. From the Year 1235 to 1273, translated by J. A. Giles. George Bell & Sons, 1889.
The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck, translated by Peter Jackson. The Hakluyt Society, 1990.
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.
Man, John. Kublai Khan. Bantam, 2007.
Morgan, David. The Mongols. Blackwell, 1986.
Rachewiltz, Igor de. Papal Envoys to the Great Khans. Faber & Faber, 1971.
Waterfield, Robin. Christians in Persia. Allen & Unwin, 1973.