When last we spoke, Mongke Khan was cleaning up after his rise to power. He’d gained the support of the khan in the northwest, Batu the kingmaker, the most senior of the Genghisid royal family still remaining. He’d turned back the attempts, both political and more confrontational, of his cousins in the Chagatai and Ogedei lines. He’d violently disposed of the former regent, who sank beneath the surface of a river wrapped in cloth. And soon he’d be issuing orders for the next phases of the Mongol Empire’s expansion: sending his brothers out, Hulagu into Persia and Kublai further into China.
His counterpart in this story and the focus of this episode had also been busy, but with perhaps less grandiose impact upon the world. He’d been in Cyprus as 1248 turned into 1249. He’d travelled with King Louis IX’s army into Egypt. He’d parted with King Louis IX in Jaffa in 1253, had stopped in Acre, and then preached in crusader-held Constantinople on April the 13th of the same year, receiving a letter of introduction from the Latin Emperor Baldwin to the closest Mongol commander. And from there and then he had departed, to evangelize and to provide comfort and instruction, particularly to a population of German prisoners who were said to be held by the Mongols. Fortunately for us, he wrote a letter to Louis detailing his journey and all that he had learned, more a book really than a letter. His name is sometimes recorded as Willem van Roeysbroek and sometimes as William of Rubruck. I’ll be going with just William here.
Last episode, we saw the end of Guyuk Khan’s rule and covered some of the travellers who went east or west in his time to connect the empire to Latin Christendom: Ascelin of Lombardy, Andre de Longjumeau, the Mongol envoys David and Mark who met with Louis on Cyprus, and Aibeg and Serkis who travelled to the Pope in Lyon. For this episode, we will be following in the footsteps of Friar William as he makes his way across the Black Sea and to the east, towards the camp of Mongke Khan. We won’t quite get there today, but we will be meeting with Mongol royalty.
From the comparative luxury of Carpine’s fairly well documented origins, we must now return to a pretty vague picture of our central character. Let’s start with a date of birth. That was somewhere between 1215 and 1230, and that broad range gives us a pretty clear indication of how painfully un-clear this man’s early life is to us.
We do know that he was a Flemish Franciscan and that he either travelled with Louis on the crusades or, as there is some indication of, was already teaching in Nicosia and joined Louis there. But either way, he does seem to have been close to the royal family. There’s the implication that he counted the king among his quote/unquote “spiritual friends,” and his few belongings which he took on the trip included a beautifully illuminated bible given to him by the queen. We should also consider the purpose of William’s journey. It has sometimes been presented as a kind of undercover diplomatic mission on Louis’ behalf, the French king feeling understandably hesitant after previous efforts, but William’s own statements on the matter as well as his actions seem to indicate a more personally motivated religious mission.
Even so, when William departed, he did so with Louis’ clerk Gosset who carried coins donated by the king and a letter to Batu’s son Sartaq who, it had been widely reported, had converted to Christianity. William clearly had Louis’ support. Perhaps the king still held out hope that Christianity among the Mongol leadership might lead to cooperation, or maybe he just recognized the value of the kind of first-hand intelligence the mission might provide. As we’ll see, Friar William was an exceptionally observant fellow. From the practices of the Mongol shamans, to the physical traits he found so unappealing, to the day to day dietary concerns of his journey, he was going to provide no shortage of details to the man he addresses at the beginning of his report as “most Christian lord, Louis, by the grace of God illustrious King of the French.”
William did not go alone. With him were Gosset the aforementioned clerk, an Italian friar named Bartholomew of Cremona, a boy named Nicholas who they’d buy in Constantinople, and an interpreter who was going to cause him some trouble. This last member of the party is recorded by William as Homo Dei, or “man of god,” but some have suggested that his name may actually have been Abdullah/Abd-Allah, or “servant of god.”
The travellers entered the Black Sea on the 7th of May, 1253, and immediately, we know we are traversing a religious landscape, one alive with spiritual history and with miracles. There, on what we would call the Crimean Peninsula, was the city where St Clement was martyred, exiled from Rome around the end of the first century and executed by being thrown in the sea tied to an anchor. There, William writes, they sailed past “a temple said to have been built by the hands of angels,” said in fact to have risen in marble on the very spot where the saint had been cast into the water.
William also connects the area to more contemporary relations and trade. He notes the city of Soldaia, or Sudaq, where they landed, as being a gateway through which merchants passed between what he terms Turkia and the northern regions, carrying squirrel and other valuable furs to the south, and cotton, silk, and spices in the other direction. Further east was the city of Matrica, where Constantinople’s traders would come to buy dried fish, sturgeon, shad, and eel, and surrounding cities are also described in terms of whose territory they fall within and to whom they pay tribute.
In Soldaia, we get the first taste of what will become an ongoing and delicate issue for William and his colleagues. Were they envoys and official representatives of the king, and to be treated as such? Not according to William, but here, he was given little choice to define himself, for, contrary to his publicly stated words, a group of merchants had arrived in the city before him and let it be known that official ambassadors indeed were on the way; they warned William that if he contradicted them, he would not receive the safe-conduct which was provided to ambassadors.
As it happened, everything went smoothly in the city. Its prefects happened to be away delivering tribute to Batu, but their deputies welcomed the friars, putting them up in a church, and telling them “many favourable things about [Sartaq],” which, a trifle ominously, William notes “were not [his] own later experience.”
They also offered the party a choice, a choice which gives us a bit of a window in on the logistics and practicalities of this kind of arduous land journey. Would they prefer ox-drawn wagons or pack horses for their baggage? Choosing horses granted a plus 8 bonus to speed, but naturally their were also drawbacks to balance the game. William was advised that covered wagons would be best, or else they’d need to unload everything wherever and whenever they stopped to rest for the evening. The advice seemed sound to him, as it does to me, but he writes that they later regretted it. Instead of the one month the trip to Sartaq might have taken by horse, theirs was to take two.
But off they went, the five riding horses, and with them wagons containing wine and rich biscuit to give as presents, bedding, vestments, and presumably some food options other than the wine and biscuit if they weren’t to consume their presents before their arrival.
Two days after leaving Soldaia, they encountered Mongols. William writes:
When I came among them I really felt as if I were entering some other world. Their life and character I shall describe for you as best I can.
As best he could turned out be quite well. William was an observant traveller with a good eye for details. He described the breeches made of pelts, lined with silk for the wealthy and with cotton cloth or soft wool for the less fortunate; he noted the process for making the fermented mare’s milk and how it stung the tongue but left an appealing aftertaste of almonds and “a very agreeable sensation inside;” he expressed an uncharacteristic degree of alarm at the appearance of the Mongol women: “[They] are astonishingly fat,” he wrote. “The less nose one has, the more beautiful she is considered… .” And this won’t be the last we hear from William on the topic of Mongol women’s noses, which seem for some reason to have really bothered him.
William’s first encounter with the Mongols, the one that left him feeling as though he had entered some other world, appears to have gone reasonably well, though he might not agree. The party was surrounded and, being made to wait, they sat in the shade of their wagons for shelter from the sun. They were asked first if they had ever been in region before. The answer being a no, the welcoming committee demanded, quite brazenly William felt, some of their rations, so our travellers coughed up some of the biscuit and wine they’d brought from the city. Finishing the first flagon, the Mongols, number unspecified, pressed for more drink saying, “a man does not enter a house on one foot.” Exasperated, William and his colleagues gave it to them, indicating also that they could really give no more.
Other questions were asked, and the topic did eventually come around to the friars’ purpose, with William stating that they carried a letter to Sartaq and being very careful to avoid presenting himself as an envoy or giving any impression that he had been sent by the king. And there were questions as to what rich delights they might be carrying to Sartaq and whether they might bring them out to show; there were requests for bread and close inspection of all knives, gloves, purses, and belts in sight, but against all of this William stood firm, saying that the travellers still had too far to go to be unloading useful items now. At this, he was called an imposter, a pretty serious charge as we’ll see, but their interrogators let them pass with a 2-man escort and off they went.
As Carpine had before him, William grumbled at what he took to be an incurable greed carried out in “highly persistent and impudent fashion.” He complained that actually giving something to these people was entirely wasted, for it was met with no gratitude, while failing to do so could have consequence later were you to require some service. He took his leave of this group feeling, quote, “as if [he] had escaped from the clutches of demons.” Unfortunately for William, the journey to the heart of the Mongol empire was going to necessitate a series of such demons holding him in their clutches.
The next one was going to be a relation of Batu’s who William names Scacatai, and our travellers don’t find him encamped. They encounter him on the road, his dwellings carried on carts towards them, and they’re amazed at the sight of this rolling city passing over the land, at the great flocks of sheep, the vast herds of oxen and horses, and at the comparatively few men who could be seen steering it all. This Scacatai, they learned, had only 500 men beneath him, and half of them were elsewhere at another camp.
Despite the relatively modest number of his men, he was of course going to require some gifts. Such his interpreter made clear to them after first indicating that he himself would need some food and cloth for bringing them before his commander. Mustering another flagon of wine, a jar of biscuits, and a plate of fruit, the friars went forward to Scacatai’s tent on the 5th of June, 1253.
They found him seated at a couch with a guitar-like instrument in his hand and beside him his wife, and William presumably didn’t voice his reaction to her nose, that he was “really under the impression that she had amputated the bridge of [it].” And things went quite well really. Their somewhat apologetic offering was accepted and shared out on the spot, their intentions to go speak of the Christian faith with Sartaq were restated, and their letter from the Emperor in Constantinople was received and sent away to be translated. Until that translation was returned, they were to travel with Scacatai, and, again, two men were assigned to them
William’s time travelling with the commander was not without value. It brought the friars into contact with some interesting people and gives us a look at their religious work. First, was a group of Alans, a people of the Caucasus region and Christians of the Greek rite. These men were concerned, as William writes many Russian and Hungarian Christians were, that they might not be saved because of the life they led beneath the Mongols. They could not observe feast days, even if they knew when they were, and had to drink the fermented mare’s milk and eat what had been slaughtered by Muslims and, quote, “other infidels.” No mention is made here of the violence they were obliged to do to fellow Christians on behalf of the Mongols but presumably that also weighed on their minds. It was a tension that was not at all unique to the enslaved, that the life one was obliged to lead did not seem to correspond to Christian ideals. William unfortunately does not go into further detail here, only that he “set them right as best he could.”
The practical difficulties of living a religious life are immediately enforced in William’s story by the arrival of a Muslim who in the course of their conversation becomes interested in converting. Just on the cusp of baptism, he leaves hurriedly saying he would need to consult his wife, and when he returns, he is adamant that he will never convert; it is believed by Christians of the region that one could not be Christian and drink the fermented mare’s milk, and this man’s claim is that survival without the drink is not possible, that the local conditions and manageable diet do not allow it. William tries to convince the man that in fact it’s very possible to drink and be Christian - he’s already tasted the milk himself - but he cannot be convinced, and the episode ends with William in despair at the misinformation spread through the region about Christianity, a situation he blames squarely on the Russians.
Meanwhile, the translated letter had returned, and now the friars were sent on to Sartaq, their intended destination, with an escort, a goat, several skins of cow’s milk, and a little mare’s milk. And this was badly needed. Their wine had recently run out, and William credits only their biscuits and the grace of God for staving off death.
It was the 9th of June, and as they reached the edge of Scacatai’s territory, they felt they “had passed through one of the gates of hell.” The party travelled with the sea to their south, recording the geography that the Kipchaks had once inhabited. William writes:
As we headed east, then, all we saw was the sky and the ground and on occasions, to our right, a sea called the Sea of Azov; and also Kipchack graves, which were visible to us two leagues off, owing to their practice of burying members of one family all together.
He also notes the ceaseless and brazen thieving of their guides, but it wasn’t only the guides who were making matters difficult for them. When they stopped at encampments, they were pressed on all sides, quite literally and physically, by crowds who trampled over them to get a look at what they had, and all the while their limited food ran low.
Putting a cap on this bundle of negativity, William was extremely frustrated in his attempts to preach to the locals, the only possible saving grace of their mobbing round the party when it stopped. His interpreter was not at all up to the task of communicating religious ideas of any sort. Indeed, when William picked up some small amount of the Mongol language he’d realize the danger of communicating through the man at all, that whatever William or his companions said, this interpreter was just as likely to present it as something entirely different.
Additionally, it appeared that their guide was little better. A misunderstanding on his part led to them losing their animals, and though they managed to find replacement oxen, they would need to walk with the wagons. And they don’t seem to have known where they were going. They were exhausted, slogging through unfamiliar wilderness with no sign of other people. Only the appearance of a pair of horses, rushing at them out of nowhere, provided a bright spot and allowed the guide and interpreter to go off together in search of human habitation.
Finally, “like shipwrecked men coming into harbour,” they found people, found horses, found oxen, and found their way to the yam system, allowing them to hop from station to station and into Sartaq’s encampment on July 31st.
Sartaq was the son of Batu, and in just a few years, in 1256, he’d be very briefly inheriting command of Batu’s ulus, the House of Jochi, the Golden Horde. For now though he was encamped 3 days journey from the Volga river and to the northwest of the Caspian Sea. The friars’ particular interest in him was religious. It had after all been reported that Sartaq was a Christian, and this was why Louis was writing to him in particular. Was Sartaq a Christian though? Was he just a Mongol ruler whose territory saw many people of many faiths pass through, including religious figures who competed for influence at his court? Was he merely happy to receive gifts from all?
There are some indications that he was in fact a Christian. Firstly, he said so, or his chaplain did before the pope in 1254, a year after William met him. Of course, we can’t necessarily take his word on this; there may well have been other motives, but other people said he was Christian too. Contemporaries in the Syriac and Armenian Christian worlds viewed him as one of their own, and Muslims of the time also identified him as Christian. So what did William think?
William’s first impression was simply of an incredibly large camp, each of his 6 wives apparently having to themselves up to 200 wagons to start with. Their first audience was with a Nestorian named Quyaq, an important member of the court, and their guide was appalled to see they were bringing nothing to this Quyaq as a guest; perhaps it would reflect poorly on him. However, when they presented themselves to the man, as he sat with people dancing to the sounds of a guitar before him, he waived away their apologetic statement that “as one who had relinquished his own belongings, [William] could not be the bearer of what belonged to others.” Despite the guide’s misgivings, Quyaq found the explanation entirely proper, and after reassuring them that he would rather give them something of his own if they were in need, had them seated and served with milk. The meeting seems to have been friendly enough; Quyaq requested that they say a blessing for him, and they encountered one of the men who’d travelled to meet Louis back in Cyprus.
The next day they appeared for Sartaq himself, and they were requested to do so with their books and ornaments, and all their vestments. Quyaq seems to have initially believed that they intended to give it all to his master, but that unfortunate misunderstanding having been navigated, they came before Sartaq’s tent, looking, I’m sure, quite exotic to the Mongol court within, who had the felt hanging at the entrance thrown up for the viewing. William stood in his best vestments, a fine cushion held to his chest, the Bible given to him by Louis, and “a most beautiful psalter given [him] by … the Queen, containing very fine illuminations.” Beside him, Friar Bartholomew held a missal and a cross, while Gosset the clerk bore the thurible. They were told to chant a blessing and, dutifully singing the Salve Regina, they entered, and behind them came a crowd of Mongols who’d gathered round to watch the show.
Within the tent, there was a bench with drinks and goblets to the side and in front of them Sartaq and his wives, whose noses seem all to have escaped William’s critical eye. Quyaq passed around the Christian curiosities, to Sartaq first, and to the wife sitting next to him. They examined the thurible and incense, the psalter, the Bible, the cross, and they asked questions. “Does this contain the Gospel?” “Is this the image of Christ?” They seem to have been genuinely curious. William meanwhile, took a dim view of the Nestorian practice of not putting Christ on their crosses. The audience wrapped up with the presentation of Louis’ letter which was then, again, to be translated.
But it seems like Sartaq didn’t quite understand or believe that they weren’t there as ambassadors for King Louis, and there was a good reason why. The letter Louis wrote was supposedly a greeting from one Christian leader to another with the request that William and Bartholomew be allowed to stay and preach in the Mongol leader’s territory. However, William would later realize that somehow in translation it had become a request that the Mongols come to his aid against the Muslims. This rather more substantial matter was really something that Sartaq felt he couldn’t rule on independently; the issue needed to go higher up, so William and the rest were headed off to see the father, Batu.
They wouldn’t see Sartaq again on the way out the door, but they would be seeing more of Quyaq and his brother the priest. And irritations were in store there. On the day of their departure, Quyaq’s brother was going to be merrily pulling out the books and vestments from among their belongings. When they protested that they were supposed to appear before Batu with them, they were dismissed with a “Do not talk so much, and be on your way.” With there being no way for them to seek Sartaq’s intercession and with the unpleasant possibility that their somewhat suspect translator had made a generous gift on their behalf, they simply had to swallow their loss and be on their way.
So what did William make of his host’s supposed Christianity? Was his assessment coloured at all by being plundered on departure? William here relates an interesting thing he was told by Quyaq and a number of other court secretaries: “Do not say that our master is a Christian. He is not a Christian; he is a Mongol.” William took this to mean that they understood the term “a Christian” much as they did “a Frank,” as the name of a people, a people of which they were not a part. “Whether Sartaq believes in Christ or not,” William wrote, “I do not know. What I do know is that he does not wish to be called a Christian: in fact my impression is rather that he makes sport of Christians.” William believed that Sartaq’s professed Christianity was very much a product of being on a route taken by Christians and, when they passed through on their way to his father bringing gifts, he was entirely welcoming to them. His uncle Berka, on the other hand was on a route taken by Muslims and, low and behold, proclaimed himself a Muslim.
For what it’s worth, Sartaq’s Christianity was, as I mentioned, widely accepted by his contemporaries. Maybe when they said of him that “he is not a Christian; he is a Mongol,” they meant only that he was, above and beyond all else, a Mongol first, and that if challenged to define himself in one word, that word would not be “Christian.” Clearly, it would not be William’s first choice of words to define him.
As his journey into Mongol lands continued, William would grow more disillusioned with the Christian possibilities of his hosts, particularly those of the Nestorian Christians. In his issue with the Nestorians, specifically the Naiman people, he leads us back to our recurring companion, and eventual subject of a future series, Prester John. What was the connection there?
William speaks of a Christian King John among the Naiman, brother to Genghis’ benefactor and protector turned adversary Ong Khan. He says of the the Nestorians that “only a tenth of what they said about him was true.” He himself was going to pass through the very lands where this most glorious John had apparently ruled and find nobody beyond the odd Nestorian who even knew remotely who he was talking about; and this is not the limit of the misinformation he lays at the Nestorians’ feet. They were, he argues, more broadly prone to lies and rumour-mongering. It was they who had made it known that Sartaq was a Christian, that Mongke and Guyuk were Christians, “And yet,” William writes, “the fact is that they are not Christians.”
William was headed next to Batu, a man we’ve already visited on the Carpine journey, and he was not at all feeling confident about the trip. Just as Carpine had mentioned the risk of Ruthenians along the way, William and his party moved in some fear of imminent attack. There were Russians, Hungarians, and others who had been enslaved and then escaped, and in small groups they were very likely to kill any who they encountered. The friars’ guide was himself apparently quite scared of this possibility, and this can’t have been reassuring. That, and there were the legends of local “dogs so large and ferocious that they attack[ed] bulls and kill[ed] lions.” And if this weren’t enough, food or lack thereof was, as always, a source of worry. By biscuit now, they sustained life as they reached the Volga, the great river that was something of an elevator, bearing arrivals like themselves to whichever floor Batu then happened to be dwelling on.
Batu’s camp, you see, moved with the seasons. The grandson of the great khan Genghis, he was not so far removed from their nomadic traditions as to be settled in a static position, and he moved along the east bank of the Volga, upstream in the summer and then, as the friars found him, beginning to move downstream.
A boat carried them from a settlement Batu had established on the west bank for the purpose, it’s ferrymen finding the khan’s court on the east, and, again, William was amazed at the sight of a full Mongol camp. He’d seen one commander’s tents rolling towards him, then Sartaq’s, and both times he’d been quite taken by their appearance. Now, as he neared Batu’s camp, he was “struck with awe.” It was like a large city, stretching out lengthways in every direction for 3 or 4 leagues, every direction save for to the south of Guyuk’s residence itself, the direction which its entrance opened on.
The day after their arrival, they were called before Batu. They came before him, not, as William says Carpine had, adapted to local dress so as not to invite derision towards a representative of the pope, but in habits, with heads uncovered and in bare feet. They came to the centre of the tent, and they saw him there, on a sofa overlaid entirely in gold, three steps up from the ground and with one of his wives beside him, with his other wives on his left and men to his right. They stood before him, and William was struck by his red-blotched face and his bodily resemblance to the lord John of Beaumont, a man whose dimensions are sadly lost to us. They stood before him in silence, long enough William thought to recite Psalm 51, “Have mercy on me, O God … Do not fling me from thy presence.” The time passed. And then he told them to speak.
On one knee they went, and then it was signalled that they should be on both. What should one say in such a situation? How do you begin? Like interviewing for a job before a one-way mirror, the cultural divide, and the language divide bridged only by interpreters you could not entirely trust, would make it difficult to feel your way through the situation, to move reactively. You had to simply speak your piece, to present yourself as best you could and hope you got the job or at least that you were allowed to return with your head still attached. What to say?
Thinking himself on both knees as if at prayer, William said a rather pointed one:
My lord, we pray God, from whom all good things do proceed, that having conferred on you these earthly possessions, He will in time grant you heavenly ones, without which these are nothing. ... Be absolutely sure that you will not possess the things of Heaven without having become Christian. For God says, “He that believeth and is baptized, shall be saved: but that believith not shall be condemned.”
By other tellings, William told the Khan of the west that he “would perish eternally and be condemned to everlasting fire.” And there was laughter in response, maybe at William’s words or maybe at Batu’s response, that where a nurse allowed a few drops of milk to fall into the baby’s mouth, the sweet taste encouraging it to suck, this foreign teaching had been offered with the encouragement not of sweet milk but of everlasting punishment. There was derisive clapping, jeering probably, but all of this went untranslated over William’s head. He heard the laughter and saw his translator’s stricken face, but he pressed on. “I came to your son [Sartaq] because we heard he was a Christian, and brought him a letter from my lord the King of the French. He sent me here to you. You must know the reason.”
The interview eventually hit its stride, however uncomfortably it had begun, and William and his colleague were invited to partake of the ever-present mare’s milk and questioned as to their lord and who he was at war with. William didn’t know it then, but it was presumably a line of questioning that related specifically to their apparent request for military support.
They sat and drank in Batu’s company, and if we are tempted to think this a regular day at the office for William, its strangeness is underlined by the demands that they raise their heads. William didn’t know if it was simply because the Khan wanted to see their faces or because of belief in some kind of witchcraft, that a downturned or sad face in his presence foreshadowed evil, but he complied.
Again, though, the meeting was successful enough. Certainly, nobody would be losing their head, and the friars were not about to be firmly asked to vacate the Mongol domains. However, it brought new burdens. Batu had decided that they ought to present themselves to the Great Khan, Mongke, so that’s where they’d be headed next.
And that’s where we’ll be headed next episode. I hope you’ve enjoyed William’s journey so far, and I hope you’ve enjoyed our journeys together in 2017. It’s been fun to do these podcasts, to have some outlet for this reading and writing I like to do, and it’s much more so to know there is somebody, that there are somebodies, at the other end of this process listening. It means a lot to me. So I hope you’ve been enjoying it too.
Happy New Years, everyone. I hope you enjoyed your Christmas, your Saturnalia, your Festivus, or whatever other winter festival you choose or are obliged to partake in. Thanks all of you, and I’ll talk to you again in a few weeks.
Sources:
Carpini, Giovanni. The Story of the Mongols: Whom we Call the Tartars, translated by Erik Hildinger. Branden Books, 1996.
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.
Jackson, Peter. The Mongols and the West: 1221-1410. Pearson Longman, 2005.
Morgan, David. The Mongols. Blackwell, 1986.
Rachewiltz, Igor de. Papal Envoys to the Great Khans. Faber & Faber, 1971.