In 1253, the Mongol Empire was showing no sign of faltering or of falling inward under the now-solid rule of Mongke Khan. That was the year the khan’s brother Kublai conquered the Yunnan province and extended Mongol dominion further into China while at the other end of the empire, their brother Hulagu was soon to be embarking on an infamously bloody campaign to destroy the Nizari Ismailis, and the Abbasid and Ayyubid states.
To the northwest, it’s true that Mongke, or maybe Batu, seemed content with what had already been achieved, satisfied with a little push, pull, and occasional military action to keep the King of Ruthenia, the “Russian King,” in check. There were not the same immediate rumblings as there’d been under Guyuk Khan that armies of horse-archers would soon again come pouring through the mountains and into Central Europe. However, the Mongol question had hardly receded entirely from consciousness for those in the Latin Christian world. We’ve already seen the degree to which it was on King Louis’ mind while on crusade, and the year 1253 is actually also significant for the beginning of a new crusade: the papal legate and Abbot of Mezzano was headed into Poland to drum up support for just that very thing, though it wouldn’t come to much. Such was the situation as our Friar William made his way deeper into Mongol imperial territory to meet the khan of khans.
Hello, and welcome. I’m Devon, and this is Human Circus. At this time, I ask that if you’re enjoying the podcast, and I trust you’re not inflicting this on yourself if you’re not, that you please consider supporting it with ratings, reviews, shoutings about it from the rooftops, and donations of always-needed sushi money. And I want to express my gratitude to those of you who have donated. It really does brighten my day. Thank you. Also, a quick other note: this is a bit of a longer episode today than I have been doing. That’s just how the story worked out. If you’re like me, you’re listening on the way to work or while you’re doing dishes, or our walking somewhere, the length doesn’t matter too much, but if you’re just sitting and listening, hopefully you’re sitting somewhere comfortable. Now, let’s continue with the story of William’s journey east.
When last we talked, the friar and his companions, Bartholomew, Gosset, and the disappointing translator, had beetled their way across the Black Sea and into the encampment of first one Mongol commander and then another. They’d arrived before Sartaq, son of Batu, to deliver King Louis’ letter, and then to express their doubts as to the validity of Sartaq’s self-professed Christianity, and then they’d been forwarded to Batu himself, the man who’d put Mongke on the throne. Things with Batu had gone well enough - nobody had been slain or banished - but their journey was not at an end. William and his colleague Bartholomew were carrying on to see the emperor, Mongke Khan, and what we didn’t get to last episode, is that they were not to do so together.
Perhaps it should have come as no great shock to them as much the same separation had been demanded of Carpine’s party before theirs, but this last piece of news struck the travellers most unpleasantly by surprise, and it struck some a fair bit harder than it did others. On the one hand, the interpreter was upset to learn that he’d be travelling on to Mongke’s court with William, while Bartholomew kicked up quite a fuss at being informed that he wouldn't be. Faced with the prospect of returning to Sartaq’s camp to wait, he proclaimed that “he would sooner they cut off his head than [that he] be separated from [his fellow friar].” In the end, the pair remained united thanks to William’s intercession, for he was, in his own chronicle at least, very much the more capable of the two; on August the 14th, 1253, they left, taking their less enthusiastic interpreter with them and leaving King Louis’ secretary Gosset behind along with Nicholas, the purchased boy.
For our part, we will be following the Franciscans as they make their way towards the court of yet another member of Mongol royalty, this time that of the great khan himself. There were many miles ahead of them, of course, and also terrifying demons and frozen toes, crushingly awkward social situations in the khan’s encampment, and finally the great debate, an almost too good to be true scene of competing religious truths. It was going to be an eventful year.
The first part of their journey was in the company of Batu’s travelling court, but that doesn’t mean they proceeded in courtly luxury, with as much meat as they could stuff down and fermented mare’s milk to match. You see, they weren’t actually lodged with the khan; they were dispatched to another caretaker, one who apparently did not keep them quite as fed as they might have hoped and, having received no gift from them, “did everything with a bad grace.” For five weeks they rode along the Volga under this man's care, and William has Bartholomew saying, near tears, “I feel as if I have never eaten.” Either remarkably stoic, or content to play the part in his report to the king, William makes no mention of his own concerns.
Finally, in mid-September, they received a Mongol visitor, the son of a commander. The man informed them that he was to guide them to Mongke, but their first conversation hardly inspired confidence:
“I am to take you to Mongke Khan,” he said. “It is a four month journey, and the cold there is so intense that rocks and trees split apart with the frost: see whether you can bear it.” “My hope.” [William] replied, “is in God’s power to help us endure what other men can.” At that he said, “If you prove unable to bear it, I shall abandon you on the way.”
William understandably protested this, saying that they were after all being sent by the man’s master, Batu, but perhaps he was not so uncaring of their fate as his words indicated. He inspected their belongings and had them cast away all that he deemed unnecessary, and he returned the following day with coats and pants of sheepskin, boots of felt, and fur hoods. They were as ready as they’d ever be, and with a pair of pack-horses, they passed to the north of the Caspian Sea moving east.
They were in solidly nomadic country now, of city-less herdsmen, and William connected the land with the invasions of the past, those of the Huns, the Vandals, and the Bulgars. Sometimes, the travellers would be able to change horses two or three times in a day, moving quickly, while other days took them more slowly through uninhabited lands offering no such opportunities. When it came time to choose horses, the last picks were always those of William’s colleagues, the Mongols taking the best for themselves, but in a rare personal detail, William mentions that due to his great weight, he at least was always given a strong horse.
Of food, they had little, and they were “famished, thirsty, frozen, and exhausted.” It was millet broth or some other drink in the morning and nothing solid until the meat they'd eat when they stopped for the night. And they really had no choice in the matter. They were in no position to comment or complain as to how things were going, only to bear what William starts to term “severe trials,” days that left their horses exhausted so that the riders would beat them into continuing, trade off onto a pack-animal, or ride two men to a horse to rest another. It was all very much in the tradition of suffering and strain in the medieval travel narrative, and, I’m sure, required little or no embellishment to make it so. They were still new to this life, to this place, and William refers to himself and his fellows as “wretched folk” for whom their guides initially had nothing but contempt.
Despite that contempt, the Franciscans value did soon become apparent. Their guide took to bringing them by the camps of wealthy Mongols for whom they would pray. It does not seem that those they prayed for were Christians, at least as William understood the word, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t respect spiritual power, doesn’t mean they weren’t quite happy to have a holy person of one kind or another engage with the realm beyond on their behalf. Just as Timur more than one hundred years later would consult both Islamic and Shamanistic advisors before battle, maybe these “wealthy Mongols” would see the truth of a religious position born out in its utility and in its power in worldly events. It’s a theme we’re going to come across a few times in this episode; like Guyuk had written to the pope, what could man do to man if God were not on his side?
But William doesn’t give enough information for us to really know these people’s religious inclinations, didn’t have it himself actually, and was more than a bit frustrated by the situation. Here they were, being brought before Mongols of influence and power who wanted to be prayed for, and his interpreter was still as incompetent as ever, or else, as he puts it, “much good seed could have been sown.” William recognized that Genghis’ sons were multiplying and spreading across the great sea of the Eurasian Steppe; if only they could just be Christians as they did so. As a religious mission, the whole thing was proving extremely frustrating.
William and Bartholomew went where they were directed and said their blessings, turned down offers of gold, silver, and cloth, and they answered questions about where they’d come from. Was the Great Pope 500 years old? Did their countries contain much in the way of cattle, sheep, and horse? Small talk of this sort, their interpreter could apparently manage. On, the friars went.
Their travels show us something of the political situation between Batu and Mongke. The latter was ostensibly the superior, but the balance may actually have been something closer to equality or shared rule. There is reference to the governor of a town coming out to meet them with ale and cups as was done for all envoys of Batu and Mongke, as if the two were of similar standing, and then there’s also the point in their journey where they started to move among Mongke’s people. There, their guide was met everywhere with “singing and clapping,” a respect that was shown to all of Batu’s representatives by Mongke’s people as it was shown to Mongke’s by Batu’s. However, Batu’s people were apparently less quick to do so, less likely to think it necessary, and this attitude might have come down from their leader. Maybe Batu the kingmaker rather felt that having put Mongke on his throne, he needn’t bow before it quite so low as all the rest. On the other hand, we have the guide in Batu’s camp telling them that his lord was requesting they be allowed to stay in the country but that he had no power without Mongke. The situation was complicated.
In whatever way the balance of power was then aligned, William’s observations again foreshadow the divisions to come. Already, here was Batu’s khanate at least somewhat independent from imperial rule; one day not so long in the future, the Golden Horde, as it’s often called, would be entirely so.
The land the friars passed over now was itself being reshaped by Mongol dominion. One plain William mentions had once held many towns; however, they’d been destroyed to make way for better grazing, a pretty pressing concern for the horse people. And this was not the only instance of deliberate land conversion. During the invasions of China, farmlands were destroyed and allowed to revert to pasture, and there’s a story, maybe true, maybe intended to emphasize the Mongols as barbaric, that during Ogedei’s rule there were elements which spoke for the large scale killing of the conquered Chin population just to better facilitate this process.
That town where the governor greeted the travellers was not the only one they passed through in what is now southeastern Kazakhstan. In one, they were surprised to discover the inhabitants to be Persian-speaking Muslims, far from where they’d expect to find them. At another, William inquired into the fate of the German prisoners that Longjumeau had mentioned, but he learned nothing save that their master, Buri, had drunkenly offended Batu and lost his life for it. Then, at a place where many merchants converged at a market, the party stopped for an astonishingly luxurious 7-12 days, an unusually restful time even at the low end. There, in Qayaligh, they waited for one of Batu’s secretaries who was needed to arrange their visit to Mongke’s court, and there William went forth and into various temples, meeting Nestorians, Muslims, and “idolaters,” and trying to make sense of it all.
In particular, it was that last religious category that piqued his interest, at least to the extent that he wanted to see their, quote, “stupid practices.” Who were these “idolaters,” with their temples at which they laid lamps, incense, and offerings of bread and fruit before an altar, where there was a statue of a winged figure that reminded William of St Michael and others which looked more like bishops with their “fingers held as if in blessing.” Who were they? Our friar friend caught sight of what looked like a black ink cross on one man’s hand and took them all for Christians led astray by improper doctrine, but they were most likely Uygher Buddhists.
William visited their temples and found them in their shaved heads and belted saffron tunics, seated silently in rows upon the ground with benches before them on which they occasionally placed the books they held. He tried to get them to speak, by many means he says, and we can only imagine what absurd means he may have resorted to try to make them break their silence; however, they would say nothing, probably because they were meditating or something of the sort and, despite appearances to contrary, actually quite busy. He tried to ask about these silent, saffron figures around town, but the Muslims he spoke to took offence and were unwilling to tell him of this other religion.
Eventually, William did manage a bit of a dialogue inside a temple, and he found that many of the human figures, the statues which surrounded him, were actually effigies of the dead brought in by family members; thinking of the wider Mongol practice of making felt effigies, William erroneously concluded that all Mongols were part of this sect which he’d encountered in Qayaligh. Learning about new religions was hard, especially through the veils of language, culture, and the starting position that you were looking at what were essentially “stupid practices.” Despite his shortcomings though, I find this early record of European observations of Buddhism quite fascinating. I’ve actually seen this referred to as the first such record, but I’m not sure if that’s true. I’m curious though. Maybe one of you listening can let me know if you’ve come across an earlier one.
Not far outside of Qayaligh, that secretary apparently having finished his business by November 30th, they found a Nestorian settlement and celebrated their first church in a long time by marching straight in to a joyful chanting of the Salve Regina, and probably causing a bit of a disturbance in the process. Then, it was back to the wilderness for them. They passed a lake which seemed to them like an ocean, so choppy was its surface, and gales ripped through the valley so fiercely there was said to be danger of being carried down into the water. Across the valley, they turned north in early December towards what was likely the snow-covered peaks of the Tarbagatai range in eastern Kazakhstan. Along narrow mountain roads they went, finding little habitation but following the yam/iam horse stations and moving at great pace through increasingly intense cold for which they were given another layer of goatskin.
One particularly nightmarish evening, the party was entering a steep-cliffed pass when word came from their guide to prepare for demons. Along that pass, it was said to be commonplace for demons to appear suddenly, to seize men and to leave no trace. At times, they might take just the horse, leaving the rider behind; on others, it was the rider’s innards they were after, and the corpse would be left otherwise undisturbed on its steed. Now, William was skeptical about dog-headed men and the legends of Prester John, but he certainly believed in demons. With the threat of supernatural horrors hanging over the party, it was an uncomfortable ride through a cold and deepening darkness. The friars chanted the Credo in unum Deum as loudly as they could all the way through, and when they all reached the other side safely, their Mongol companions were most impressed. They requested written charms which they themselves could carry on their heads for safety, showing an openness to different religions, just so long as they worked in this world. William wrote them out a prayer and tried again to accompany it with instruction, but once more his efforts were frustrated by the translator.
They were closing in on Mongke Khan’s camp, and at this late stage of the journey, William learned something troubling from that secretary they’d waited for, something I brought up last episode. He learned that the letter Batu was sending to Mongke stated that King Louis was requesting military aid in the Holy Land. He knew the letter to be doing no such thing, only “urging [Sartaq] to be a friend to all Christians, to exalt the Cross, and to be the enemy of all who are enemies to the Cross,” and maybe that last point was the source of the confusion, but William did not think the confusion was accidental. He suspected that the letter’s Armenian translators had tweaked its contents deliberately and produced something more to their own liking than to Louis’ original, but wanting neither to endorse this new message nor to openly contradict Batu, he chose to say nothing for now.
Diplomacy was a difficult and dangerous business. Only the year before, a man had arrived from Acre under an assumed name claiming to be an envoy of the papal legate on crusade, and telling a story of a disobedient horse having carried off the gold-lettered message from heaven which he’d been sent to give Mongke. That man, whose story had ended in a Nicaean prison when he’d try his game on one too many rulers, had in fact also been pushing the idea that only some inconvenient Muslims separated Mongke from the friendship and loyalty of King Louis. Apparently, such false ambassadors were not uncommon, and the Mongols killed them when they could. William was going to need to be careful not to be taken for one when they reached the khan.
They’d left Constantinople in April, and now, finally, on December 27th, the friars arrived at the camp of Mongke Khan. At last, the party could rest, and this they did, their guide, the commander’s son, in a large dwelling where he received many visitors and drank from flagons of excellent rice ale, and William, Bartholomew, and their interpreter in something more modest, just large enough for themselves, their belongings, and a small fire.
Outside, Mongke’s camp was a pretty international place to be. They met Hungarians, Armenians, Greek knights, ambassadors from Nicaea and Korea, Chinese clergy, a Christian from Damascus who represented it’s Ayyubid sultan, and a woman from Metz, Lorraine who’d had the misfortune to be captured while on business in Hungary and since married a Russian builder who’d also been taken, the couple’s story a good reminder that the camp’s diverse character was hardly by the choice of its inhabitants.
The friars went about at first without shoes on the frozen, winter ground, and caused quite a stir, and it wasn’t only their deeply inappropriate bare feet that elicited confusion. What were they doing there? They’d put forward their story of coming to Sartaq because of his Christianity, and then being forwarded on and on. But why were they there, they were still asked. Did they want to make peace on Louis’ behalf? No, William answered. Louis didn’t need to make peace, for he had done no injury. At this, their interrogators were astonished and would repeat, “Why have you come, seeing that you did not come to make peace?”
William thought this a profound arrogance on their part, that they imagined that the world wanted nothing more than to come to them and beg for peace. If allowed, he said, he would have, “preached war against [the Mongols], to the best of [his] ability, throughout the world.” Fortunately, he kept his thoughts on the matter to himself and said no more of their intentions other than that they’d been sent there by Batu, but he was pretty optimistic about how that war would go if it happened. When he mentions the Teutonic Knights and their conquest of Prussia, he goes on to say that they would most certainly also easily conquer Russia if they tried, for if “the [Mongols] were to hear that the great priest - that is, the Pope - were launching a crusade against them, they would all flee to their wastes.” Of course, we know that the Pope was indeed launching a crusade and that the Mongols didn’t look ready to take their toys and go home, but William was not alone in this assessment. Matthew Paris and even Carpine with all his well-grounded reasons for concern had both voiced similar sentiments.
The friars, having answered all questions, now waited to be summoned. It was a strange world they found themselves in even after months of travelling through a harsh and alien environment. Remember that William had felt he’d already plunged into something quite different and barbaric in his first meeting with Mongols on the road. Now, he was truly submerged in it. In all this strangeness though, they would make an acquaintance who would really shape their time at Mongke’s court.
They were first drawn to the small cross on the dwelling’s roof, and in they went to find a richly decorated altar and an Armenian monk named Sergius. This Sergius greeted them, prayed with them, and told them his story. He’d been living as a hermit near Jerusalem when he had experience two visions of God, and in both of these, God had commanded him to go to the Mongols, but he had done nothing. On the third appearance, God had thrown him to the ground and threatened his life if he did not go; so he had went. He had travelled to Mongke’s court and, a little rashly it seems, promised that if the khan were to become Christian then all the “Franks and the Great Pope would obey him.” Now that the friars had arrived, he wanted William to say the same.
Before anything else, though, the friars needed to appear before the khan. On January the 4th, they stood before the door of his residence, and the felt before it was lifted. Their bodies were searched for knives, and, it being Christmas, they chanted A solis ortus cardine and entered a space covered in gold cloth. There was a small fire burning in the centre, and the khan sat on a couch dressed in fur with a wife beside him and children behind. William, displaying his usual nasal sensitivities, described Mongke as a snub-nosed man of medium build, and maybe forty five years of age, and then singled out an adult daughter for her ugliness; he doesn’t mention what exactly he found so unappealing about her, but I strongly suspect it was the nose.
While they waited, they were offered and accepted some sweet rice wine which they sipped at to show respect. Mongke took a moment to inspect some falcons, and then he called on the friars to kneel and to speak. William opened with prayer and praise, to God and then to Mongke, wishing he be granted a long life. And then he went into his now well-rehearsed explanation as to their presence, how one Mongol ruler had led to another completely naturally and innocently. He concluded by expressing the hope that they be allowed to stay and serve God on Mongke’s behalf and by apologizing for their lack of gold, silver, or precious stones to offer as gifts.
Mongke’s reply began as follows: "Just as the sun spreads its rays in all directions, so my power and that of Batu are spread to every quarter;” - and notice here we have Mongke speaking in what seem to be terms of shared power, at least in this translation - “and therefore,” he went on, “we have no need of gold or silver from you.”
So far, so good, but then Mongke continued speaking and while his interpreter also continued, William no longer had any idea what he was saying and realized to his horror that the man had not held himself back from the rice wine and was now completely and totally drunk. And then it seemed to him that Mongke too was drunk. William could just make out from his interpreter’s slurred delivery that the khan seemed unhappy that they had first visited Sartaq rather than coming straight to him, but he wasn’t sure. It was a kind of socially comedic nightmare, except that the consequences were potentially dreadful. Knowing the interpreter wasn’t up to much, William limited his words to a quick apology and then fell silent. Soon after, they were shown the way out.
It hadn’t been the best of audiences, and their interpreter had again made himself painfully conspicuous in the process, but at least they’d received the khan’s approval to stay in his lands, a request William had made on Bartholomew’s behalf. His colleague was far too physically weak now to consider travelling for home during the winter. The trip would have almost certainly killed him; he’d begged William to gain permission for them to remain, and Mongke, for all their bumblings before him, had granted it. The friars went back to their cold little home where they were brought some fuel for a fire and a little food. Their prolonged visit may have saved Bartholomew’s life, but it was still going to be a punishing time.
The weather was cold, very cold. Clear skies could turn to great snowfalls which needed to be cleared by wagon. By May, William writes, the ground would thaw in the warmth of the sun, but there in the thick of the winter it remained frozen all day. To their credit, the Mongols tasked with their care did provide them with extra layers when the weather turned particularly bad. William at first declined such offers, saying no to the sheepskin, but when the temperature dropped, he didn’t say no to the lynx fur; Bartholomew, on the other hand, appears to have accepted any and all offers of warmth, quite understandably I think.
Bartholomew, by William’s report, was having a bad time of it. His body seemed to be breaking down under the combined weight of arduous travel, an extreme and alien climate, and an unfamiliar and possibly insufficient diet. It was “millet with butter or dough cooked in water with butter or sour milk, and unleavened bread baked in cattle or horse dung.” Now, “dough cooked in water” sounds like pasta, and maybe it was, but he later describes “dough boiled in water” as producing a drinkable gruel, so maybe thinking of this as a pasta and butter diet would be a little misleading. Whatever the cereal cooking specifics were though, there were certainly no vegetables to be had, and while a “scrawny ram” was on at least one occasion provided, this just drew the starving to their home in droves, prompting William to, somewhat obnoxiously, declare that “it was there that [he] experienced what a martyrdom it is, when destitute, to give bountifully.”
Maybe it was his poor health that led poor Bartholomew to his near-fatal blunder at the khan’s tent. They’d been warned, after all, not to step on the threshold, just as Carpine had been before them; but Bartholomew, twisting to bow awkwardly on his way out the door and then turning too quickly to catch up with the others had stumbled right onto it. Some unpleasantries had followed; however, it was decided that there had been no interpreters present to tell the unfortunate friar, and he escaped with merely a lifetime ban from entering the Khan’s residences. The usual penalty of death was not applied. Poor Bartholomew was saved, but he may have been wasting away into nervous infirmity.
Meanwhile, their new friend Sergius the monk was claiming to subsist on a saintly, Sundays-only diet, a weekly meal of “dough cooked with vinegar for him to drink.” Really though, he was keeping a box of “almonds, grapes, dried plums and ... other fruits” below the altar, and he’d eat from it when nobody was around. When William and Bartholomew fell in with this Sergius, they unknowingly joined something like a cliquey school setting midterm, or maybe a prison. They were with him because he was a Christian, but being unquestionably part of that gang was not always going to be comfortable for them.
From the top down, the situation was like this. Mongke treated the different religions syncretically, which is to say that he was happy to receive blessings from a Christian, and even to accept their efficacy, but that he was also going to be consulting the charred shoulder-blades of a sheep because that too was powerful and useful. This kind of buffet-table religiosity was not William’s cup of tea, and we can easily see how it started to look to him like manipulative and cynical opportunism, which admittedly there may sometimes have been a little of.
On holy days, Mongke Khan would hold banquets. This meant that when shamans would pronounce a day to be holy, it would be so; when the Nestorians did the same, the results were much the same; and when they left after praying for the khan and giving their blessings, Muslims would immediately arrive and provide the same services. Mongke was, one might say, really hedging his bets on the religious issue, or perhaps simply did not see them as being at all mutually exclusive, in much the same way as one might now attend for example a Buddhist temple on certain occasions and a Daoist one on others. William, however, muttered darkly, or at least that’s how I’m picturing what he’s written, that, quote, "the Khan believes in none of them… And yet they all follow his court as flies do honey, and he makes them all gifts and all of them believe they are on intimate terms with him and forecast his good fortune.” Our friar was having none of it.
As part of the camp’s religious community, William made the rounds of the royal family with Sergius and the Nestorian priests. They’d drop in on a son of the khan, giving him their blessing then sharing a drink with him, and then it’d be on to the home of a wife who was sick in her bed where William was annoyed at his new colleague’s insistence that she drag herself out of bed for prostrations before the cross. Next was the home of royal daughter, who greeted them happily and called for drink and sheep’s meat. Once, “a good deal of drink [had been] consumed,” which William apparently declined to partake in, it was off to another woman of the court. There too, they were welcomed and she prostrated herself before the cross before calling for yet more drinks for the priests, again “a good deal to drink,” and at the next stop, an older wife, they drank again. Clearly, visiting each member of the royal family in turn was a pretty jolly affair for the Christians, and they rounded the day off with boisterous chanting and howling in the oratory which William reported was not locally disapproved of.
In mid-February, Mongke’s first wife Cotota’s (sometimes Qutuqui) condition worsened considerably, to the point of death. Sorcery, in Willliam’s terms, was first tried but did no good. Looking elsewhere for answers, Mongke turned to Sergius for help, and Sergius committed a bit of an over-promise. Of course, he could help Mongke and cure Cotota! Why, if he didn’t, then the Khan could cut off his head. It was rash, very rash, and William likely told him as much when the monk tearfully revealed what had happened and begged for their help.
For all his questionable behaviour, the Armenian was now part of the team, or they were part of his, so even as his religious practices, increasing belligerence and vanity, and elements of his personal appearance really started to bother William, they did help him with the cure. They were there with him for the all-night vigil, the mixing of holy water with some kind of rhubarb drink that Sergius made, and readings from the bible over the patient.
While she did get better, William observed with quiet condemnation that Sergius and these priests who ministered to her illness, did nothing for her soul, did not recommend baptism or offer religious instruction, did not dissuade the use of sorcery in placing four half-drawn swords around the bed and a silver cup full of ashes on the wall. He’d later be less quiet when he discovered that Sergius was treating yet another patient: “Either go about like an apostle,” he said, “genuinely performing miracles by the power of prayer and of the Holy Spirit, or play the physician in accordance with the art of medicine.” It was becoming very clear to the friars that Sergius was not like them.
And Sergius continued to stir up trouble. He’d had a bit of a fall from grace with Mongke and then tried to patch it up by suggesting he might travel to the pope and bring all of Latin Christianity in submission to the khan. Clearly having learned nothing in his narrow escape from his last reckless promise, he was soon questioning William as to the likelihood of it all: would the pope be willing to see him? Would he give him horses? Would King Louis go along with sending his son to Mongke? William again cautioned against making “fraudulent pledges.”
Unfortunately, this was not the only source of tension arising from the Armenian’s actions. There was an ugly bit of business when a senior Nestorian fell badly ill, and the man who was brought in to examine him arrived at the conclusion that, quote, “A lean man … who neither eats nor drinks nor sleeps in a bed is angry with him: were he able to obtain his blessing, he could recover.” Everyone involved immediately identified this as Sergius, which is pretty damning in itself, and friends and family begged him to give his blessing, but Sergius said to William “Let him be, for he and three others who will go the same sorry way had hatched the design of going to court and securing from Mongke Khan my banishment and yours from these parts.”
Sergius did eventually attend the sick man. However, this was only when he’d heard word of his improving condition, and he did not provide his blessing. He trampled on his bed and, in William’s absence, fed him with unknown medicines. The next day brought a noticeable relapse, and William was convinced to leave the man’s side so as not to be polluted by death and barred from Mongke’s presence - the Mongols being at times oddly squeamish about death, something that comes up quite a bit actually. Soon the man was dead, and when William spoke to Sergius, the monk, far from denying it, really took the credit: “Do not be concerned: it was I who killed him with my prayers. He alone was educated and was opposed to us; the rest are ignorant. In future, all of them, and Mongke Khan too, will be at our feet.”
It was becoming clear that their monk friend was a man of questionable morals, enormous ambition, intermittent manic recklessness, and, to William’s way of thinking, deeply unsound religious practices too. Piling into the negative column was the new revelation that Sergius was regularly consulting a man who may have been a Muslim geomancer and also had a Russian deacon divining for him. Now, William was truly “shocked at his stupidity,” but he still couldn’t really part ways; they’d been directed at some point, assigned even, to Sergius’s company by the khan himself. They would just have to put up with him for now.
And that meant putting up with quite a bit. The monk was now openly trash-talking Muslims, calling them dogs with no incitement from their end, and generally creating what one might term a really poisonous workplace. A confrontation occurred when a group of Muslims goaded Sergius in return, and unable to use reason in his defence, he attempted to lash out at them with a whip. Things were escalating.
Maybe Sergius’ provocations were partly responsible for bringing on the debate. Maybe it would have happened without him. Perhaps it had been William’s own verbal sparring with a Muslim seeking to be sent as an ambassador to King Louis that had been the cause. Whatever the case, the message came through on May 25th that Mongke wanted to see them all. “Here are you, Christians, [Muslims], and [Buddhists], and each one of you claims that his religion is superior and that his writings or books contain more truth.” The khan wanted to test those claims. He wanted the three sides to present their truths in discussion before him. He was concerned with power and efficacy in his religion and perhaps also with quelling the arguments within his camp, so the date was set and preparations were made.
William and the Nestorians gathered on May the 30th in the oratory. For all their shortcomings in his eyes, that was his team, and this was their locker room and soon their arena. The Nestorians had prepared some writings, the creation of the world, Christ, his ascension, and the coming judgment, writings which William naturally found fault with, and this is perhaps the part of the whole story where I find relying on William’s view most frustrating. I’d love to have all of this from the side of the Nestorians, who to start with would not name themselves after Nestorius the 5th-century archbishop of Constantinople, and when we get to the debate it would be wonderful to have some idea what a Buddhist thought of the whole thing, or a Muslim. But we don’t have that. So we have to settle for William being clever.
They talked strategy, and the Nestorians were all for going at the Muslims first, maybe due to the recent hostilities William and Sergius had been part of, but William shot that down right away. The Muslims were after all basically in agreement in regards to the one God, and it was better to have them for allies against the third side at the start. He then suggested a test-run, a little sparring session or role-play to prepare. I’ll be the Buddhists, he said, and assuming I deny that God exists, prove to me that he does. They tried, but it didn’t go well. Their efforts were entirely in the form of quoted scripture, and this, William pointed out, was never going to work. The Buddhists had their own scripture, he said, and were hardly likely to be swayed so easily by someone else’s: “If you tell them one story, they will quote another.” William decided it would be best for him to start things off.
Three secretaries arrived to serve as umpires, a Muslim, a Buddhist, and a Christian, and the ground rules were laid:
This is Mongke’s decree, and let nobody dare claim that the decree of God is otherwise. He orders that no man shall be so bold as to make provocative or insulting remarks to his opponent, and that no one is to cause any commotion that might obstruct these proceedings, on pain of death.
There was silence among the gathered throng, both participants and onlookers. The threat of death aside, it was all very polite.
And then it began. The Christians placed William at their centre and told the Buddhists to address him, and, kind of like the rumble at the end of The Outsiders, one of theirs stepped forward to meet him. “Friend, if you are brought to a halt,” he said, “you may look for a wiser man than yourself.” What was to follow was going to be messy.
Mongke appears to have done what he could, what with the referees and the ground rules. However, there were certain difficulties that were going to be hard to overcome. Language, in particular, was an issue. William had acquired the assistance of a more component translator, which helped; however, the debate to come would have had to accommodate Mongolian, for the benefit of the khan at least, and something in the range of Chinese, Persian, Arabic, Latin, and/or French for the participants. Furthermore, it would not be your garden-variety travellers’ small-talk. Complex religious ideas would be in play, ideas which are not always easily captured in a second language at the best of times.
And of course in looking at the text now, I’m at a further step or two removed, reading a translation of a 13th-century friar’s hopefully sincere attempt at reporting the translation of unfamiliar belief structures, likely reframing them within his own system of understanding as he did so. There’s even some question as to whether the “Buddhists” were in fact Buddhists; after all, William didn’t call them that, and some commentators have in the past taken them instead to be Daoists. We can only do our best.
How to start this kind of thing. William’s opposite number among the Buddhists asked if he’d like to begin with “how the world had been made, or what became of souls after death.” Neither, answered William. It was God over which they disagreed, and all things were from him, so that was where they should start. The umpires ruled this very fair, and the event rolled on.
The glimpses we get of what follows are fascinating. William relates that a child from China had been produced to illustrate the way souls could, quote, “escape after death to any place where they would not be compelled to suffer.” The boy was no more than three years old to look at but demonstrated himself to be rational beyond his years, able to read and write, and claimed to be a third incarnation. William doesn’t seem to have allowed himself to be distracted by such matters though. He kept the debate focused on the issue of God. Was there only one God in perfect unity? Were they as numerous as were the lords of different regions? If God was so good, why had he made so much evil? That last one, the theodicy question, caused William to answer that God had not created evil, and that all that existed was good. This caused amazement in many of the onlookers who apparently took special care to write that one down as a most obvious error.
Eventually, William’s strategic decision to go after the Buddhists first paid off as he scored a point, and earned gales of laughter from the Muslim side. His opponent had admitted to the belief that no god was all-powerful, and then been cornered by William’s incisive line of questioning, falling silent and refusing to continue even when urged to speak up by the khan’s referees. Of course William’s clever reasoning had won out; it was his report after all.
And if his effortless victory over the Buddhists doesn’t give us pause, then he has the Nestorians stand and make to open the next line of argument only to find that the Muslims have thrown in the towel and admitted to the truth of the Gospel and that they prayed to God that “they may die a Christian death.”
And we can picture what this scene might have been like: probably the most powerful man in the world at that time seated and looking on, while representatives of three massive religions debated the big truths before him. It was surely tense and, given the language barriers, full of misunderstandings. We can imagine that, as Peter Jackson and David Morgan have pointed out, the Muslims present may well have acknowledged their own belief in Jesus as prophet, or something of the sort; there may well have been some truth behind William’s implausible knockout punch. We can imagine a much more substantial conversation between faiths, but with William’s reading we can only imagine.
What importance did he himself give to his supposed great triumph? Perhaps surprisingly, not much. After the other contenders had surrendered the field, the Nestorians stood and held forth on the “coming of Christ in judgement,” and other matters. Nobody interrupted them; but then, nobody was convinced either. Nobody, in his words, stepped forward and said “I believe, and wish to become a Christian.” Like much else of his religious mission among the Mongols, the episode has to be counted a disappointment, whether or not he filed it under the win column. As the gathering neared its inevitable conclusion, Nestorians and Muslims alike were singing boisterously while the Buddhists sat silent, and then “everyone drank heavily.” I have to think the friar counted it an empty victory.
And that’s about where we’ll finish things off for today. First, though, we’ll bid a very fond farewell to Sergius. We’re going to start next episode with the end of the friars’ stay with Mongke, but we’re leaving our Armenian friend here. What a odd monk, you may have thought at times during this story. Well, as it happened, he wasn’t one. William was going to discover on his way home that Sergius was an illiterate cloth weaver, just another oddball opportunist making himself a new life out on the steppes. And there’s one more thing I want to mention before we part. You might have wondered since our protagonists arrived at Mongke’s camp, what became of that troublesome letter, the one in which King Louis had supposedly requested Mongol military aid, the one that had pushed William to near-silence as to the reason for their very presence. Well, it would turn out that the letter had been lost, and Mongke had forgotten what it said. That left a relieved William pretty free to present himself as he saw fit, and it also tells us that maybe the Christian crusaders, and their potential as foes or friends, just weren’t that important to the Mongols after all.
Thanks for listening everyone. I’ll talk to you again in a few weeks, and we’ll cover William’s departure from the Mongol camp and his return journey, and we’ll catch up on the wider world and take a look ahead.
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.
Gladysz, Mikolaj. The Forgotten Crusaders: Poland and the Crusader Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, translated by Paul Barford. Brill, 2012.
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.