The Pope sent a friar to the Great Khan. The reply: come and submit

When

March 1241 – 1242

The witness

Rogerius, a canon of Oradea

A detail

600 Germans from Rudana taken as guides

The lines run through the places Rogerius and Rashid al-Din's chronicle name; the paths between them are reconstructed.

In March 1241 Mongol armies entered the Kingdom of Hungary by several routes at once. On 12 March King Béla IV's palatine fought them at the “Russian Gate”, a pass in the northern Carpathians, and escaped with only a few men. Batu, who led the campaign, came through it towards the Danube plain. In April the king's army was destroyed by the River Sajó.

Another commander, Kadan, marched three days through the forests “between Rus' and Cumania” and reached Rudana, a rich town of German settlers with the king's silver mine, which historians usually identify with Rodna. The townsmen came out to fight, Kadan pretended to flee, and they sat down to drink. In the end the town surrendered, and Kadan took Count Aristaldus and 600 armed Germans as guides.

With them leading the way, the Mongols came out of the forest and crags near Oradea. Rogerius, a canon of the cathedral, refused to shut himself in the citadel and fled into the woods. The citadel was broken with seven siege engines. The women who had taken refuge in the cathedral burned with it.

A third force, led by a man Rogerius calls Bochetor, crossed the Siret into “the land of the bishop of the Cumans”, east of the Carpathians, and defeated those who gathered to fight. It is Rogerius's only sentence about the Mongol advance east of the Carpathians. In Rashid al-Din's Persian chronicle a prince named Böchek crosses the mountains into “Kara-Ulagh” and defeats the “Ulagh”, a name historians usually read as the Vlachs.

In 1242 the Mongols withdrew. Rogerius, by then their prisoner, went with a column that passed “beyond the forests” (ultra siluas, the phrase behind Transylvania's Latin name) and left the land “desolate and empty” before crossing into Cumania. After escaping he reached Alba, probably Alba Iulia, where he found “nothing but the bones and skulls of the slain” and stones “still red with blood”.

Rogerius says only that the Mongols “were suddenly recalled”. Four years later the Pope would write to ask them what had moved them to destroy so many peoples, and what they intended next.

When

16 April 1245 – 24 August 1246

On the map, from the start

7,700 kmat least, through the places named

A detail

fresh horses “five times or more” a day on the Cuman steppe

Pope Innocent IV was at Lyon. In March 1245 he wrote to “the king and people of the Tartars”, as Europeans called the Mongols: he was astonished that they laid waste so many lands “sparing neither sex nor age”, and asked them to say what they intended. The letter was entrusted to John of Plano Carpini, a Franciscan from near Perugia and one of the first members of the order. A Franciscan chronicler says he was a corpulent man who rode a donkey.

Carpini left Lyon on Easter Day 1245, 16 April. At Wrocław another Franciscan, Benedict the Pole, joined him as companion and interpreter. Before Kyiv, at Danilov, he fell ill “to the point of death”, but had himself carried on in a cart through the cold and deep snow. In Kyiv, which the Mongols had destroyed, “barely 200 houses remained”, and the fields were strewn with “countless heads and bones of dead men”.

On 4 February 1246 they left Kyiv for the Mongol outposts. From there they were taken to Batu on the Volga, riding “as fast as the horses could trot”, with fresh horses three or four times a day, from morning until night. All through Lent they ate only millet boiled with water and salt and drank melted snow. In Batu's camp Carpini saw linen tents that had belonged to the King of Hungary.

They left Batu on Easter Day, 8 April 1246, “with many tears, not knowing whether we were going to death or to life”. They crossed the Cuman steppe changing horses “five times or more a day”, except in the deserts, where they were given stronger ones. There they found “many heads and bones of dead men lying on the ground like a dunghill”, and further on ruined cities in Central Asia. On 22 July 1246 they reached Güyük, son of Ögedei, who “had not yet been elected” and was not yet taking part in the business of the empire.

The camp was called Syra Orda. Carpini describes a white tent that could hold more than 2,000 people, “more than 4,000 envoys” according to the camp's officials, a Rus' duke, two sons of the King of Georgia and the envoy of the Caliph of Baghdad. The election was held there over some four weeks. On 24 August 1246 Güyük was set on the throne and the chiefs knelt before him, “except us, who were not their subjects”. On a hill stood more than 500 carts full of gold, silver and silk.

Karakorum, the Mongol capital, was close. But Carpini writes: “we did not see it, but we were within half a day of it.”

When

11 November 1246 – autumn 1247

On the map, from the start

15,400 kmat least, through the places named

A detail

two copies: one in Latin, one in Persian

On 11 November 1246 Carpini and Benedict were called to court. The khan's officials translated his reply to them “word for word”, and they wrote it down in Latin. The officials then wrote it out in Persian as well, so that someone in Europe would be able to read it. On 13 November they received the letter, sealed with Güyük's seal, and leave to go.

The Persian letter survives. It was found in 1920 in the Vatican archives, labelled on the back, in a 16th-century hand, “n° 80. Arabica”. It is a strip of paper 1.12 metres long and 20 centimetres wide, written in the last days of Jumada al-Thani in the year 644, between 3 and 11 November 1246. The Mongol seal is stamped on it twice in red ink. The French orientalist Paul Pelliot translated it in 1923. This is what Güyük told the Pope:

Their Mongol escorts told them the khan was thinking of sending envoys back with them, and wanted the friars to ask for it. Carpini answered “that it was not for us to ask it, but that if the Emperor of his own will sent them, we would with God's help guide them safely”. He did not want them to come, and gives his reasons: the envoys would see “the dissensions and wars among us” and be encouraged to march on Europe, they were probably spies, and they would be killed, “for our peoples are arrogant and proud”.

They travelled all winter, often sleeping in the snow: “in the morning we would find ourselves completely covered by snow the wind had driven over us”. They reached Batu at Ascension, 9 May 1247, and Kyiv in early June. The people came out to meet them and congratulated them “as if we had risen from the dead”. Through Poland and Cologne they got back to the Pope at Lyon in the autumn of 1247.

Carpini wrote a book about the Mongols, and a friar who met him says he had it read aloud whenever he grew tired of telling the story himself. A whole chapter explains “how they may be met in war”. The Mongols, he writes, intend “to subdue the whole world” and were planning a new campaign westwards, with one army through Hungary and one through Poland. His main advice is that the princes of Europe must unite.

When

7 May – 27 December 1253

On the map, from the start

6,500 kmat least, through the places named

A detail

nearly every day, about as far as Paris to Orléans

Where Möngke's winter camp stood is unknown; Rubruck only says it was ten days from Karakorum.

William of Rubruck was a Franciscan from Flanders who had gone to the Holy Land in the years of King Louis IX's crusade, and had a Bible from the king for the road. But no one sent him as an envoy. On Palm Sunday 1253, 13 April, he preached in Hagia Sophia in Constantinople that he was “not an envoy, neither yours nor anyone's”, but was going among unbelievers under the rule of his order. He did carry a letter from the king to Sartaq, a son of Batu rumoured to be a Christian.

On 7 May 1253 he sailed into the Black Sea, and on 21 May he reached Soldaia in Crimea. There were five of them: William, Friar Bartholomew of Cremona, Gosset who carried the presents, the interpreter Homo Dei and a boy, Nicholas, bought in Constantinople. When he first met the Mongols, he writes, he felt he “had been transported into another world”. He saw a house on a cart drawn by 22 oxen, and at his first taste of cosmos, fermented mare's milk, he “broke out in a sweat with horror”.

Sartaq did not want to be called a Christian. “You must not say that our lord is a Christian. He is not a Christian, but a Moal,” his men told him. Rubruck was sent on to Batu on the Volga, who made a sign to him to bend both knees, which he did, “not wishing to dispute over it”. Batu could not decide on his own and sent him to the Great Khan, Möngke. The rich Mongol who was to take him there told him: “The journey is a four months one, and it is so cold on it that stones and trees are split by the cold. Think it over whether you can bear it.”

They set out on 16 September in sheepskins. Nearly every day, by Rubruck's reckoning, they covered about the distance from Paris to Orléans, some 110 kilometres, “and sometimes more”, depending on the supply of horses. The interpreter drove him to despair: “when I said one thing, he said a totally different one”, so he decided to keep silent. At Cailac, in today's Kazakhstan, he saw Buddhist temples for the first time.

On 27 December 1253 he reached Möngke's camp, ten days' ride from Karakorum.

When

5 April 1254, Palm Sunday

On the map, from the start

6,700 kmat least, through the places named

A detail

“not as big as the village of Saint-Denis”

Möngke received Rubruck in early January 1254. He was “a little man, of medium height, aged forty-five years”, and seemed to Rubruck “tipsy”. The interpreter was drunk too. On Palm Sunday, 5 April 1254, Rubruck entered Karakorum “with raised Cross and banner”.

The city disappointed him. Leaving out the khan's palace, he writes, “it is not as big as the village of Saint Denis”, and the monastery of Saint-Denis is “ten times larger than the palace”. It had a Muslim quarter with the markets and a quarter of craftsmen from China, twelve temples of different peoples, two mosques and a single Christian church “in the extreme end of the city”. Its mud wall had four gates: millet was sold at the east gate, sheep and goats at the west, oxen and carts at the south, horses at the north.

Europeans taken captive lived around the khan's court as well. A woman from Metz, Paquette, captured in Hungary, fed them as best she could and told them that “there was in Caracarum a certain master goldsmith, William by name, a native of Paris”, surnamed Buchier, whose brother she believed still lived on the Grand Pont. Guillaume Boucher had been taken at Belgrade, then a town of the Hungarian kingdom, and his wife was “a daughter of Lorraine, but born in Hungary”, who spoke French and Cuman well.

For the khan's palace Boucher had made a great silver tree. At its roots four silver lions poured out mare's milk. Four pipes ran up inside the tree and bent downwards at the top: one flowed with wine, one with clarified cosmos, one with mead, one with rice mead. Between them stood an angel with a trumpet, and under the tree, in a vault, a man sat hidden. When drink was wanted the head butler called to the angel, the man in the vault blew into the pipe that led up to it, the angel sounded its trumpet, and servants in the cellar poured the drinks into the pipes.

Here too Rubruck learned about Cathay, that is China, whose people he took to be the Seres, the silk people of ancient books. He noted that there “the common money is a paper” stamped with a seal, and that people “write with a brush” and make “in one figure” a whole word.

When

30 May 1254, eve of Pentecost

On the map, from the start

6,700 kmat least, through the places named

A detail

any quarrel or insult punishable by death

The debate is known only from Rubruck's account; he took part in it. No other source mentions it.

At the end of May 1254 Möngke's men came with a message: “You are here Christians, Saracens and Tuins”, Rubruck's word for Buddhist monks, “and each of you says that his doctrine is the best.” The khan wanted them all to meet, compare their beliefs and write them down, so that he could know the truth.

Rubruck agreed a plan beforehand with the Nestorians, the Christians of Asia: he would speak first, against the Buddhists, and they should not attack the Muslims at the start, since they too believe in one God. On 30 May 1254, the eve of Pentecost, they met in the Christians' chapel. Möngke did not come. He sent three secretaries as umpires, a Christian, a Muslim and a Buddhist, with the order that no one should quarrel with or insult another, “on penalty of his head”.

The Buddhists put forward a learned man from China. Rubruck's interpreter was the son of the goldsmith from Paris. The Buddhist wanted to begin with how the world was made, or with what becomes of the soul after death. Rubruck insisted they speak first of God. In the end the Buddhist said that no god was omnipotent, and the Muslims burst out laughing.

When the Nestorians turned to the Muslims, the Muslims declined to argue: “We concede your religion is true […] so we do not want to argue any point with you.” Rubruck records that “no one said: ‘I believe; I want to become a Christian.’” And the ending: the Nestorians and the Muslims sang loudly, the Buddhists kept silent, “and after that they all drank deeply”.

The next day, Pentecost, Möngke called Rubruck in. “We Moal believe that there is only one God,” he said. “But as God gives us the different fingers of the hand, so he gives to men divers ways. God gives you the Scriptures, and you Christians keep them not.” Later he added: “He gave us diviners, we do what they tell us, and we live in peace.” The khan drank four times, Rubruck believes, before he finished.

When

July 1254 – 15 August 1255

On the map, from the start

14,700 kmat least, through the places named

A detail

a year and two months on the road back

Möngke gave Rubruck a letter too, for Louis IX. Rubruck took it down “as well as I could understand through an interpreter”. The commandment of God, it begins, is that “in Heaven there is only one eternal God, and on Earth there is only one lord, Chingis Chan”. If the king will obey, he should “send your ambassadors to us”, so the khan may know whether he wants peace or war. And if the French tell themselves “our country is far off, our mountains are strong, our sea is wide” and make war, “you shall find out what we can do”.

Rubruck left in early July 1254. Friar Bartholomew stayed behind in Mongolia with the goldsmith: “we separated with tears”. In two months and ten days on the road to Batu they “never saw a town, nor the trace of any building save tombs, with the exception of one little village”. On 16 September he reached Batu, on the same day of the year he had left him.

He went back by Sarai, the town Batu was building on the Volga, then south along the Caspian through Derbent, “the Iron Gate, which Alexander the Macedonian made”. He spent Christmas at Nakhchivan. On 2 February 1255 he passed through Ani, with its “thousand churches of Hermenians”, then crossed Anatolia and Cyprus to Tripoli, where his order “held our chapter on the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin (15th August)” 1255.

There the head of his order told him to stay at Acre and would not let him go to the king. So he wrote down for Louis everything he had to say. That report is the text we read today. The English philosopher Roger Bacon read it and says he talked with its author, but it was first printed, only in part, around 1600, in England.