As the painfully cold December of 1253 became the still-painfully-cold January-through-March of 1254, Friar William settled into life at the court of the Mongol emperor, Mongke Khan. But as that turned to May and to June, he began squirm. Mongke had granted them a two month stay on the 4th of January, but though they were never made to feel unwelcome, by early summer they were really pushing things to the point of impoliteness.
William wasn’t quite ready to leave yet though. He waited in hope of hearing news of those German prisoners that Andre de Longjumeau had spoken of, the ones who had been moved when their master had fallen afoul of Batu and lost his life for it. But no word of them arrived. He waited in hope of the King of Armenia’s appearance. But that wouldn’t come until later in the year, after he’d left. Finally, as neither German nor king materialized, his thoughts turned to the journey home. Having weathered one Mongolian winter in Mongke’s camp, he did not relish the thought of waiting long enough to travel home during another, and he sent word to the khan to inquire about their situation. Soon, he’d be headed home with us following behind, but he wasn’t entirely done in the khan’s camp.
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Last time we talked, William was coming to grips with the nature of his new Armenian monk colleague and taking part in the great inter-religious debate of 1254. Today, we’re going to start in and around that period, covering some of his time with Mongke’s court before turning back west with him to recover some of what he had lost, cross an Alexandrian divide, and consider the future of both the crusades and Latin-Mongol relations.
The Mongol court was not still during all that time of squabble, strife, and popping in to the khan’s nephew’s for a drink which we witnessed last episode; the company was mobile, maintaining their nomadism even as they ruled over enormous stretches of the world, and around the beginning of April, 1254, they reached the area of Karakorum, the Mongol administrative capital established by Ogedei. Immeasurable wealth in treasure and material culture had been dragged back there, had been brought to this new-born centre of the world from an empire which spanned from Korea to Poland. And it was apparently all quite underwhelming.
William rated the city as “not as fine as the town of St. Denis,” and the St. Denis monastery as “worth ten of [Karakorum’s] palace,” but we are here to talk about Karakorum, not St. Denis. The Mongol city was surrounded by mud walls set with four gates at which different kinds of trade occurred, in grains, sheep and goats, cattle and wagons, and horses respectively. Within those walls were a Persian quarter where traders gathered, a Chinese quarter full of craftsmen, palaces for the court secretaries, and twelve temples, two mosques, and one church.
More impressive to William’s eye, was the khan’s great palace, biannual home to his drinking sessions of Easter and June and set amongst cruder, barn-like structures housing treasure and supplies. William thought the palace like a church, with its “middle nave,” its “two rows of pillars and three doors on the south side.” At the north end, the head of the church, sat the khan, and a flight of stairs ran up towards him from either side.
Perhaps the most striking feature of the palace sat at the entrance and had only just been completed. It was the work of a Parisian silversmith who’d been captured by the Mongols, and it sounds like quite the contraption. William describes silver branches, leaves, and fruit affixed to a “large tree made of silver, with four silver lions at its roots, each one containing a conduit-pipe.” And there were four pipes to match these leading into the tree, all topped by serpents with their tail curling around the trunk. What was this all for? Well, one pipe was for wine, another refined mare’s milk, a third for a honey drink, and a fourth for rice ale.
When the khan called for something to drink, the word would be passed along by servants to a man concealed within the trunk of the silver tree, and that man, either overjoyed to have something to do or terribly bleary from having just been woken up, would blow on a pipe causing the angel atop the tree to sound its trumpet (apparently bellows had initially been experimented with but then a human found to be necessary); then, some servants would pour the appropriate liquids into their pipes up above, while others down below would catch them in basins and bring them off to the khan for his enjoyment. It was all delightfully cumbersome, unnecessary, and silver.
While in Karakorum, the friars celebrated Easter with a great crowd of “Hungarians, Alans, Russians, Georgians, and Armenians.” William heard public confessions, and he preached a fairly dangerous message, one which spoke to an issue I’ve mentioned before, that conflict between Christian ideals and the life one had to live: the Mongols had carried off much of other people’s belongings, William said, and thus, these conquered people before him, forced to live among the Mongols, might permissibly steal from them the “necessities of life.” However, they were on no account excused in attacking fellow-Christians “and should sooner let themselves be killed.” He makes no mention of how this last injunction was received, only that he rather suspected that the Nestorians would soon denounce it to Mongke, and expecting them to do so, he proclaimed himself willing and ready to state the same before the khan himself. All considered, the occasion was held to be a happy one, for more than 60 people had been baptized by the Nestorians on Easter Eve.
There were other sources of community there too; the friars dined one night with that Parisian artisan who’d crafted the khan’s silver booze tree, joining a company that included a man named Basil whose father was English and a Hungarian-born woman whose mother was French. There is no mention of what they ate, but William counted it a “most jovial dinner.”
However, jovial or not, they were going to need to be moving on at some point. William, as I said, got the ball rolling, and soon he heard back from the khan’s secretaries, inquiring again as to why he and Bartholomew had been visiting them this whole time, a question one might have thought settled over the last 5 months. But as it turned out, and as I mentioned at the end of last episode, Louis’ letter was lost and with it the khan’s memory of the whole matter. So William explained again how they had come to be there, adding, now that the letter no longer hung over his head, that he had come because it was his duty to preach the gospel to all.
The next day, he received his answer:
The lord khan says you have been here a long time. He wishes you to return to your own country and asks whether you would be willing to take his ambassador with you.
Just as Carpine had before him, William refused, politely explaining that being but a poor monk, he would be unable to protect the ambassador in the hostile lands they would need to pass through and that, therefore, he could not risk it. Whether this was his only motivation or he was mindful of the threat posed by such Mongol visitors, as scouts for an invasion to come, he does not say.
William did have one last audience with Mongke, one that Bartholomew with his lifetime ban could not attend. There, on the eve of the friar’s departure, the khan spoke on the topic of religious belief, drinking four times while he spoke William thought, and William waited for the translation:
We [Mongols] … believe that there is only one God, through whom we have life and through whom we die, and towards him we direct our hearts. … But just as God has given the hand several fingers, so he has given mankind several paths.
And then he turned accusatory:
To you God has given the Scriptures and you Christians do not observe them. You do not find in the Scriptures, … that one man ought to abuse another, do you? … And likewise you do not find that a man ought to deviate from the path of justice for financial gain. … So, then, God has given you the Scriptures, and you do not observe them; whereas to us he has given [shamans], and we do as they tell us and live in peace.
Mongke made it clear that he did not include William in his accusations - and a secretary spoke up to vouch for the total lack of greed William had displayed even when given opportunities for blameless gain - but it was also pretty clear that the khan wouldn’t be seeking baptism any time soon.
Mongke promised provisions for the friar’s journey and an escort to the kingdom of Armenia and asked in turn that William take a letter with him. Then, he said “There are two eyes in one head, and yet in spite of being two they have only one sight, and where one turns its glance so does the other. You came from Batu, and by way of him, therefore, you must return.” Far from a subservient position, Mongke firmly placed Batu as his equal neighbour in the great skull of Mongol leadership.
As their time together drew to a close, William asked if he might have the kahn’s approval to return again, once more referencing the missing Germans as he did so. Mongke said it was certainly acceptable for him to come, if his masters were to send him. But William pushed on. What if he was not sent? Whether or not envoys were going be sent, did he have the khan’s own permission to return. After a long silence, Mongke replied “You have a long journey ahead: recruit your strength with food, so that you may reach your own country in good health.” The friar left, feeling powerless and wishing for the strength to make miracles and humble the great emperor.
In the following days, the letter was prepared, and William generally took in the goings on of the court. An ambassador from India happened through, with 8 leopards and 10 greyhounds, and an envoy from the Seljuk Sultan with rich gifts, gifts to which the khan apparently replied that presents were all very well, but what he really needed was men. And then there was the envoy from the Abbasid caliph of Baghdad. The caliph had less than 4 years to live, and his dynasty would be ended, his city sacked, and its inhabitants massacred when the Mongols besieged it in 1558. For now though, the future was uncertain. William heard talk from some that they had made peace and that the caliph had pledged to provide 10,000 horsemen; others claimed that Mongke had demanded the Abbasids destroy their fortifications, to which their ambassador was said to have retorted: “When you remove all your horses’ hooves, we shall destroy all our fortifications.”
Eventually, the letter was ready. It addressed itself as an edict, as a command, to “King Louis, ruler of the French, and to all other rulers and priests and to the great Frankish people,” Frankish here standing standing in for a much broader category than the people of France. Interestingly, the letter then seems to have set out to erase all previous communications: “The order of the everlasting God was issued to Genghis Khan,” it read, “but neither from Genghis Khan nor from anyone else after him has this order reached you.” The 1248 embassy to King Louis was written off as that of a liar, while the letter that Longjumeau brought back was discounted because it had come from the late Guyuk’s wife, and Mongke told William that she “was the worst of witches, and that with her sorcery she had destroyed her entire family.”
Finally, after establishing the context of the letter and its delivery, it got down to business:
It is the order of everlasting God that we have made known to you. When you hear and believe it, if you are willing to obey us, you should send your envoys to us: in that way we shall be sure whether you wish to be at peace with us or at war. When in the power of the everlasting God the entire world … has become one in joy and in peace, then it will emerge what we shall do. But if, on hearing and understanding the order of the everlasting God, you are unwilling to observe it or to place any trust in it, and say, ‘Our country is far away, our mountains are strong, our sea is broad,’ and relying on this you make war upon us - how can we know what will happen? He who has made easy what was hard, and brought near what was far distant, the everlasting God - He knows.
After all that effort to supersede previous communications, this one doesn’t seem to establish anything particularly new. Be at peace with us or suffer what God alone can know, for wherever in the wide world you may be, you are on our land. It was by now a pretty well trod path, with “peace” really meaning submission, and Guyuk had said something very similar in the letter Carpine had taken home. However, that embassy to Louis which Mongke dismissed as a liar’s work had been sent by someone who Mongke had done away with in his violent cleansing of Ogodei partisans upon coming to power. Additionally, remember that this “liar’s” embassy was the one that had sounded the king out on the idea of military cooperation and let it be known that Guyuk Khan and certain of his family members were baptised Christians. Mongke Khan had in the end made it pretty clear to William that he was not a Christian, and, however a Christian may have taken the repeated reference to “everlasting God,” in his letter to Louis and the lords of Europe, he did the same.
Message received, William was ready to head home, and he found out just before his departure that Bartholomew wasn’t coming with him. Winter or not, the other friar simply couldn’t face the return trip, and without William’s knowledge he’d gained permission to remain in Karakorum with the Parisian silversmith. “You are not leaving me,” he told William, whose first reaction was to say he would stay there by his fellow-friar’s side. “I am leaving you, since if I accompany you I see danger to my body and my soul, for I cannot face the unbearable hardship.”
So it was that on July 8th or 9th of 1254, William took tearful leave of his colleague and made to go, together for the first three weeks with the Indian envoys who were taking the same route, and then with just his interpreter, a Mongol guide, a servant, and an order entitling them all to a sheep every four days, if they could find someone to give them one. They were taking a different route than they’d come by, and for more than two months, they travelled towards Batu with no “trace of any construction other than graves.” They passed only one town on the way, a small village which could provide no food, and for two and sometimes three days in a row they consumed only mare’s milk. Maybe Bartholomew had made the right choice.
They reached Batu’s camp on September 15th, a year after they had left it, and there they found the unfortunate Gosset, their servants, and, presumably, Nicholas the purchased boy. Gosset and the others were alive, but they were in rough shape. It was a potentially pretty miserable limbo they’d been caught up in, awaiting another’s return, and a reminder of all the inglorious side stories found at the edges of history, many of them irrecoverable. We don’t know much about that year in their lives, but William does say that it was only the King of Armenia’s intervention, drawing their plight to Sartaq’s notice, which had saved them. It was starting to be generally assumed that the friars were dead and never coming back, and Mongols were already asking the stranded Gosset and co. if they “knew how to tend cattle and milk mares.” Before William’s reappearance, they’d been beginning to appear available.
Batu asked William where he wanted to go, and if William had only known that Louis was by that point already home in France, he might have made his way quickly there, from Batu’s territory into Hungary; but he didn’t.
It would be a month before Batu could find them a guide, and even then the man in question seemed concerned more than anything with maximising his gain out of the whole transaction. There were to be no payments forthcoming from William, so despite the Franciscan’s instructions to the contrary, the guide made arrangements to escort them to the Seljuk Sultan in Anatolia, where he hoped he would be generously rewarded.
On October the 18th they headed south, travelling along the Volga and its branches, and compelled to cross them 7 times by boat. Along this stretch, William reconnected with some of the belongings he’d been forced to leave behind with Sartaq’s people on the way east. He recovered most of their vestments, their silver vessels, and their books, but he never got back that illuminated psalter which the queen had given him.
Early November brought them to the mountains of the Alans, who still held out against the Mongols. The threat of raiders emerging to attack their livestock necessitated Mongol guards watching over the passes and an armed escort for William and his company, 20 men who brought them to the Iron Gate. They were now on the coast of the Caspian Sea in present-day Dagestan, and between the water to their east and the impassable mountains of the North Caucasus to the west was a small plain barred entirely by a long and narrow walled city through which travellers were forced to pass. Beyond the city was the remains of another barrier, one with a history that stretched into legend. William identified it as the Gates of Alexander.
And this was of course Alexander the Great he was referring to. In particular, what we’re talking about is from the Romance of Alexander, the collection of legends telling of his origins, his wars with Persia, invasion of India, and the miraculous deeds and encounters with strange beings in between. These legends had captured the medieval imagination with images of Alexander pulled through the sky by griffins, moving beneath the water in variations on the submarine, and confronting my favourite monstrous humans, the blemmyae, the headless people with faces on their chests. The barriers the travellers now crossed were said to be the ones which Alexander had put up to keep out the barbaric tribes and monstrous races, and also, William briefly mentions, to wall out the Jews. William had now been to the lands beyond the barriers, and while his travels seem to have left him skeptical of any dog-headed men, just the sort of thing which featured heavily in the stories, this great act of Alexander’s, the barring of the uncivil from the civilized world, is treated as truth and fact which had now been lived in a new way. He had been on the other side of that divide, and it hadn’t made him cease to believe in it. What did he now think of what was found on the other side?
His time with Mongke’s court had given him access to people who had travelled there from every direction, and he’d heard many things from them. In one conversation, he spoke with a priest who had come from China. Unfortunately, he didn’t get any more specifics as to what kind of priest this was or where he had come from, but he that’s not to say he learned nothing at all. He learned of a people who lived in the north and “tie[d] varnished bone under their feet and skate[d] over the frozen snow and ice at a speed that enable[d] them to catch birds and animals.” From another Chinese priest, this one dressed in “the finest red,” he heard of a place in the east where the rocky cliffs were inhabited by “creatures who [were] built like human beings in every respect except that their knees [did] not bend and they move[d] along in a kind of hopping, and … the whole of their little body [was] covered in hair.” These little monkeys of some sort were apparently lured out and made drunk on rice ale, so that they could be non-fatally bled in their slumber for the making of a purple dye. He also heard, though he did not believe it, that there was a place beyond China where you did not age but remained just as you were when you had arrived. And what of the monsters, William wanted to know. Had any of the monstrous races been seen? He was told they had not.
William had been on the other side of the Alexandrian divide and had seen no dog-headed men, but that does not seem to have shaken his belief in the story of Alexander’s Gate. If he had not seen much in the way of monsters, there had certainly been barbarism enough for his tastes, as he’d made clear from his first encounter with the Mongols, and there’d been demonic activity too. There was that pass the party went through on the way to Mongke’s encampment where demons were said to prowl, and then there was the demon William identified as the cause of Mongke’s wife’s sickness. And he heard stories of other demons. When he writes about what he’s learned of the shamans and their roles in Mongol society, demons, from his perspective, play a part in that too, being conjured up to dispense oracles or shouting over a dwelling to warn of an escaped Hungarian who hid within. All of that was on the other side.
They came down into the Mughan plain of what is now Azerbaijan. They crossed a bridge of boats secured to an iron chain where the Kura and Araxes rivers met, and then they followed the Araxes, going southwest, and stopping in for wine at the home of Baiju, the commander that Ascelin of Lombardy had met with in 1247. From November they followed the river, extremely thankful, I’m sure, to not be spending their winter in the Mongol camp, but it was wintery enough still for William to regret not being able to visit the source of the Euphrates because of the great snowfalls which had made such side-ventures impossible. William and Gosset celebrated the Christmas feast as best they could in a tiny Armenian church, one of what had once been 800 but was now only 2, in a once “very large and beautiful city,” “reduced by the [Mongols] almost to a wilderness.” The next day, its priest died.
Now, on this side of Alexander’s walls, they were in a world permeated by magic of a different kind. They were near the Church where St Bartholomew had been martyred, and St Judas Thaddaeus too, and not far away was the mountain where it was claimed Noah’s ark had come to ground and wood brought down from it to the church by an angel. And from an Armenian bishop, he heard of a prophecy. He had heard it before, from Armenians in Constantinople, but now he gave it more attention.
It was said that a great race of archers would come and conquer the entirety of the east; they would take everything from north down to south, would come to Constantinople itself, and would take its harbour. But then, one of them, known as the Wise Man, would enter the city. He would would see the churches there and he would see himself baptized before advising the Franks on how to kill the Mongol leader. Chaos would then reign in the Mongol empire, and Franks and Armenians alike would take up the pursuit of the shattered enemy, resulting in Frankish rule in Persia. “Then [would] follow the conversion to the Christian faith of all the people of the east and all the unbelievers, and such peace [would] reign in the world that the living [would] say to the dead, ‘Alas for you who have not lived to see these times.’”
“Just as the souls in Limbo [were] waiting for the coming of Christ so as to be set free,” the bishop told William, “so we are waiting … in order to be delivered from this slavery we have been in for so long.” The Armenians had a while still to wait.
For another 3 weeks the snow held them before they could journey on. They reached the north east of present-day Turkey at the beginning of February, arriving at Ani, “the city of 1001 churches,” and capital of the old Armenian kingdom, and William noted that indeed it had “a thousand Armenian churches” and two mosques. From there it was west to Erzincan where a terrible earthquake that year had that killed 10,000, “not counting the poor;” the ground visibly split open where they rode and earth piled down from the mountains to clog valleys. More earthly violence was ahead at the sight of the Mongols’ 1243 victory over the Seljuk Sultanate. There, the quake had opened up a great lake on the plain where battle had occurred and William seemed to savour the thought that, quote “the whole [plain] had ‘opened her mouth,’ to swallow now the blood of the [Muslims].”
By the end of April, they were in Sivas, or Sebaste, the sight of the Forty Martyrs, the Christian Roman soldiers who had been executed by exposure on the frozen lake in the 4th century, and William visited their grave.
The travellers were not proceeding as quickly as they might. Their guide was intentionally holding them back so as to be able to make the most of the requisition order he carried, and when they were in areas where it didn’t apply, it was worse. He’d pocket the money intended for food and then seize a sheep by force when the opportunity presented itself. William didn’t complain though. He was too concerned about the possibility of he and the servants being slain or sold into slavery.
They did eventually reach Konya, the Seljuk capital, around the 19th of April, 1255, and their guide presented them there to the sultan. Between the sultan and a helpful Genoese trader, Friar William and his company were dispatched on to the coast despite their lack of gifts to their guide, and now William was only a few hops from the end of his journey. It was Cyprus on June 16th and Antioch on the 29th, and from these he travelled in the company of another friar, arriving at Tripoli in time for the meeting of their chapter on the 15th of August. It was 27 months since he’d embarked on the Black Sea.
William didn’t want his journey to end there. At least in writing he expressed the wish that he could report to King Louis in person, which would have meant travelling to France to see him, but the Minister of his order wouldn’t have it; maybe it was discomfort over William’s coziness with the king, maybe the pressing need for him to the remain in the region and work; maybe William didn’t really want to do any more travelling at all. Whatever the cause, now that he had returned, he was to teach in Acre and could communicate whatever he needed to the French king in writing. Just as well for us that that was the case, or perhaps we would not have such a record to go by.
The Franciscan wrapped up his report with an assessment of the Anatolian situation. It was overwhelmingly not Turkish, he reassured his king; it was Greek and Armenian, and the Seljuk Sultanate was weakened by scheming, plotting, infighting, and defeat by the Mongols; “Hence it is,” he said, “that Turkia is ruled by a boy, possessed of no funds, few warriors and numerous enemies. [The Nicaean Emperor] is sickly and is at war with the [Bulgarian Tsar], who is likewise a mere lad and whose power has been eroded by the [Mongol] yoke.”
It would be so easy, he was telling the king, for Christian forces to pass through or conquer all these regions. The time was ripe, and it was but forty days’ journey with wagons to reach Constantinople from Cologne and fewer than that to then travel on to Armenia; and you didn’t need to pay the costs of travel by sea or endure its dangers. Finally, if the Christian peasants were only “willing to travel in the way the [Mongol] princes move[d] and to be content with a similar diet, they could conquer the whole world.” The friar was extremely enthusiastic for King Louis to return to the crusade, and Louis would be back eventually, but not until 1270. Even then, he would not be going overland into Anatolia as his friar friend had suggested; he would take the sea route, and he would die of dysentery outside Tunis, roughly a month after landing.
What else had William reported? Unlike Carpine, he had little to say of tactics, capabilities, or recommendations on military matters of any kind, but he did cover other points extensively, giving information on the various peoples who lived within the enormous Mongol domains, their religious practices, the Christians of the east if through a distorted glass, the political positions of Batu and Mongke, and their reception of embassies and other missions.
Potential crusades and the Mongol use of weapons were not the main thrust of his journey after all. What was William’s conclusion as to his religious expedition among the Mongols? First, we should note that he failed to find those German slaves which he’d been asking after. He passed quite close, but knew nothing of it at the time, only later learning that they had all been relocated and employed in mining and in the making of weapons, another abandoned splinter of written history, to my knowledge at least.
Then there are his thoughts on further religious ventures. In Ani, that city of 1,001 churches, he’d met a party of Dominicans who were on their way to Mongol lands with letters from the pope to Sartaq and Mongke asking that they be allowed to remain and preach; it was very similar to what William and Bartholomew had been doing, but astonishingly, they had “only one serving-lad in poor health, who knew Turkish and a few words of French.” That didn’t scream success, and William had a pretty good idea of what kind of welcome they’d receive. He told them of his own experience, that the letters would indeed get them through safely if that was what they wanted, but that if their only reason for being there was to preach then they would be listened to by nobody, especially without a capable interpreter, William by now really understanding the value of good translation.
In the conclusion of his audience with Mongke and in the closing words of his report to Louis, William further emphasised this idea that a purely religious mission to the Mongols was pointless. In that final exchange with the khan, he’d bemoaned that as he was not an ambassador he was not free to say what he would like to. An ambassador could speak his mind and would always be asked if there was more he wished to say. As a simple visitor invited to appear before the khan, the friar could only answer the questions which were put to him.
And his report ended with much the same thought, that no friar should make any further journey of the kind he had made to the Mongols, for to do so was futile. William had shown up in costume, with beautiful books and sacred objects, and chanted in song, but it had made no dent in their courtly attitude of curiosity. Friar William had been received as but another exotic tidbit washed up on the Mongols’ beach. Now if the pope were to send a bishop as an official ambassador and make a real show of it, to do so “in some style,” and to answer the Mongols’ letters in strength, then that would be useful. However, he concludes, the effort would need to be supported by “a good interpreter - several interpreters, in fact - and plentiful supplies.” No more shoestring operations, in other words, featuring friars in ones or twos to appear as humble little figures before the emperor; what was called for was the big gesture, a grand show of power to match that of the khan and to address him on equal footing, a difficult thing to project all the way to Karakorum.
Finally, we can look at William’s words as he left Mongke’s encampment, a quantitative summary of his time: “We baptized there a total of six souls.” It was no great turning of the tide.
And that’s where we’ll leave Friar William to his teaching in Acre. There are other stories in his report, and maybe I’ll return to them at some point. I’d love for example to do something from the perspective of the apparently incompetent interpreter Homo Dei / Abdullah, but that would need to be more speculative than what I’ve been doing here. Then there’s the khan having learned that 400 of the Assassins had been sent in disguise to kill him, which is clearly the plot for a movie. And there’s more too, but that’ll have to be for another time. Thanks for listening, everyone. I hope you’ve been enjoying this run of episodes on the Mongols and travellers to them because there will be more on the way. In fact, the most famous of travellers among the Mongols is still to come, and I’ll soon be starting in on the story of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. But we need to get there first, so next episode, we’ll set the table with the rise of the brothers Hulagu and Kublai. Talk to you then.
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.
Rachewiltz, Igor de. Papal Envoys to the Great Khans. Faber & Faber, 1971.