The Valois’s Cuman Ancestry: Migration and Marriage

The origins and early history of the Cumans are shrouded in mystery.² They spoke a Turkic language and lived across a vast swath of territory north of the Black and Caspian Seas.³ To the Mongols they were known as the Kibca’ut, to the Arabs and Persians as the Kipchak, to the Russians as the Polovtsy. The Latin word Cumanus is of unknown derivation but may come from “Qun,” an ethnonym that the Cumans used for themselves.⁴ Early Hungarian chronicles refer to the Cumans and other mounted nomads as “Cuni,” or the name may come from the Turkic word for “pale.”⁵ While they shared a language and customs, the Cumans were spread across a vast territory, divided among different rulers, and did not form a coherent polity.⁶

The Cumans appear in European historiography for the first time in the late eleventh century in the chronicle of Adam of Bremen, and they were probably raiding Hungary by this period.⁷ They are mentioned in twelfth-century crusade chronicles as fighting both alongside and against the crusaders. In the late twelfth century, central European lords were enlisting the Cumans as military auxiliaries. They were part of the force sent by the Duke of Bohemia against Thuringia in 1198.⁸ There were fourteen thousand Cumans among the army with which King Kaloyan of Bulgaria defeated Emperor Baldwin I of Constantinople at Adrianople in 1205.⁹ The account of this battle and description of the Cumans composed by the French knight Robert de Clari in 1216–1217 are among the most vivid European portraits we have of them and explain why their fighting skills were so appreciated. According to Robert, the imperial forces disdained the Cumans because of the hides they wore, but the Cuman attack was so rapid and fierce it routed the enemy.¹⁰ Although they wore no armor, the Cumans were nonetheless capable of defeating trained and armored knights en masse with their bows and arrows; in this way they foreshadowed the Mongols. The Cumans’ military prowess explains why in 1211 King Andrew II of Hungary asked the Teutonic Knights to help defend his kingdom against them.¹¹

The chain of events that led to larger Cuman migrations into Europe in the 1230s and 1240s began in the Far East. Genghis Khan’s consolidation of power brought him into conflict with the Merkit people and their leader, Toqto’a. In 1208 or 1209, Toqto’a was killed and many of his people fled west to territory inhabited by the Cumans; they were followed in 1211 by another Merkit group led by Qudu, one of Toqto’a’s three sons. In 1216, a Mongol force went in search of Qudu and by the following year had defeated him and subdued his people, who were still on Cuman lands.¹² This campaign likely saw the first clashes between Mongols and Cumans, when the Mongols encountered a detachment from the army of the Khwarazm-shah Ala al-Din Mohammed II. The shah’s mother was a Cuman or Qangli, and these peoples made up the bulk of the Khwarazmian army.¹³ As we saw in chapter 1, the Mongol invasion of Khwarazm began in 1219 and ended in May 1223 with the battle of the Kalka River, where the Mongols defeated a combined Russian and Cuman force.

After the Mongols’ conquest of Khwarazm and first invasion of the Pontic steppe, the next act in the Mongol-Cuman drama opened in 1227. Alberic of Trois-Fontaines writes that in that year, Hungarian bishops baptized more than fifteen thousand Cuman men.¹⁴ It is possible that this mass conversion was the result of the death of Genghis Khan in the same year and the Cuman fear of renewed attacks by new Mongol leaders. The eastern Cuman territories, which the Mongols already occupied, were bequeathed by Genghis to his eldest son Jochi, who was also promised the rest of the Cuman steppe. The Cumans appear to have known that another campaign against them was imminent, and they accepted baptism as a way of demonstrating their good faith and desire for an alliance to King Andrew II of Hungary, their erstwhile enemy. Alberic also reports that in 1228 a new bishopric was established in Cumania by Archbishop Robert of Esztergom.¹⁵

Less than a decade later it became evident that the Cumans’ fears about the Mongols’ expansionist intentions were justified. As discussed in chapter 2, in 1235 the Great Khan Ogodei decided to send an army to the far west to conquer the lands that Genghis Khan had granted to Jochi, now deceased.¹⁶ Led by Jochi’s son and successor Batu, who was accompanied by future khans Guyuk and Mongke, this was the campaign that brought the Mongols into central Europe for the first time.¹⁷ The Mongols swept across the Russian steppe, devastated Kyiv in 1240, and in 1241 invaded Poland and Hungary simultaneously.

The same year that Ogodei announced the western campaign, Béla IV was crowned king of Hungary. Béla declared himself rex Cumaniae (king of Cumania), by which he meant the lands east of the Carpathians.¹⁸ This title declared his territorial ambitions, recognized his kingdom’s deepening relationship with the Cumans, and likely reflected the belief that to the east there lived aboriginal Hungarians in need of conversion. Yet Béla knew that he would have to contend with the Mongols sooner or later in “his” Cumania. Late in 1237 or early in 1238, just as the Mongols reached the Russian principalities, Friar Julian, a Dominican missionary who had visited the regions east of Hungary, sent a report to Béla and Pope Gregory IX. He gave an account of Mongol history and military practice, and he included a letter from Batu addressed to Béla that had been taken from captured Mongol messengers.¹⁹ In this letter, Batu expresses his surprise that while he has sent messengers to Béla thirty times, none has returned, nor has Béla sent any of his own. “I know that you are a rich and powerful king, and that you have many soldiers under you, and that by yourself you govern a great kingdom. It is therefore difficult for you to submit to me voluntarily,” Batu writes. Then Batu comes to the most serious sticking point:

I have further learned that you keep the Cumans, my slaves [servos meos], under your protection. Whence I charge you that henceforward you not keep them with you, and that you not make me your enemy on their account. For it is easier for them to escape than for you, since they, having no houses and continually on the move with their tents, may possibly escape. But as for you, living in houses and possessing fortresses and cities, how can you flee from my grasp?

This letter is remarkable on several accounts, but for my purposes it is important for what it shows about how the Mongols understood, and exploited, the Cumans. In Batu’s mind, the Cumans in the west were already his subjects, like those in the eastern steppe who had been under the Mongols since the days of Genghis Khan. Batu’s letter complements a declaration ascribed by the Persian chronicler Juzjani to Batu’s father Jochi. Of the Cuman steppe, Jochi was reported to have said that “in the whole universe, there could not be a more delightful land, a more pleasant climate, softer water, meads more verdant, and pasture-land more extensive.”²⁰ As Batu’s letter makes clear, the Mongols wanted not just the land but its people too. The letter also declares that Béla’s sheltering of the Cumans is a casus belli.²¹ Batu’s letter was a classic example of Mongol intimidation meant to frighten Béla and disrupt any Hungarian-Cuman alliance.

In fact, it seems that most Cumans remained on the steppe during the Mongol invasion and submitted to Mongol overlordship.²² Yet a considerable number did flee. As Roger of Torre Maggiore reports, the Cuman “king” Koten sent notice to Béla IV to declare that he and his people would become his subjects and convert to Catholicism if Béla would allow them to settle in Hungary with all of their possessions.²³ Roger states that Béla was overjoyed at this news and the prospect of winning so many souls for Christ, and he accepted Koten’s offer. Koten was certainly a major leader among the Cumans, and Roger writes that he brought forty thousand men and their families with him.

Immediately on their arrival in Hungary, the Cumans were viewed with fear and suspicion by the local population. This wariness is evident in the accounts of Roger of Torre Maggiore and Alberic of Trois-Fontaines. Roger describes the Cumans as “dura et aspera subdi nescia [cruel and violent and ignorant of submission].”²⁴ Alberic either received a false report about the pact between Béla and Koten or misinterpreted his source(s), but his distortions are nonetheless instructive. He writes that the Cumans disguised themselves as “Tartars” to terrify the Hungarians and then attacked, but they were defeated, their king “Cutanum” was captured, and several thousand deceitfully (“dolose”) accepted baptism.²⁵ Alberic appears to have heard of the main charges the Hungarian populace made against the Cumans: that they were spies for the Mongols or the vanguard of the Mongol army, and that their conversion was not sincere. These fears, along with tensions over pasturage and property boundaries, disputes and violent encounters, and the inability to communicate or to understand each other culturally, created an unbridgeable gulf between the Hungarians and the Cumans. The situation boiled over in 1241, when Koten and a number of his people were massacred. The Cumans fled the kingdom, ravaging in revenge as they went.²⁶

The Mongols flooded into Hungary from different directions in 1241 and overwhelmed the army led by Béla IV on the plain of Mohi in April of that year. Béla was forced to flee, and the Mongols pillaged his country and enslaved his people.²⁷ Just when it seemed that Hungary would be brought under the “Tartar yoke,” however, the Mongols withdrew in 1242.²⁸ Béla had avoided capture and returned to a devastated country, traumatized no doubt but also wiser. He had learned that he could not count on his Christian neighbors or the papacy for aid in defending his kingdom against the Mongols.²⁹ He would need to develop a strategy to strengthen his military forces and defenses, and to increase his domestic authority, in the event the Mongols returned—which he was certain they would.

In 1246, Béla called the Cumans back to Hungary and put them once again under his personal protection. His goal in doing so was to create a military force loyal only to him that would strengthen him vis-à-vis his restless nobles, his neighbors, and the Mongols. To cement his alliance with the Cumans and prevent a repeat of the violence and expulsion of 1241, Béla married his son Stephen to Elizabeth, the daughter of a Cuman chieftain. Elizabeth was baptized as a necessary precondition for the marriage and as a sign of her, and her people’s (or at least the Cuman elite’s), submission to the Hungarian political and religious order.³⁰ In this she followed an established custom, as we saw with the Cuman conversions of 1227 and 1239. The exact date of Stephen and Elizabeth’s marriage is unknown, but it can be placed between 1246, the year of the Cumans’ return, and 1254, when Béla sent a letter to the pope explaining why he arranged the marriage.³¹ A copy of Plano Carpini’s account in a northern French manuscript from the last quarter of the thirteenth century (Bibliothèque nationale de Luxembourg, MS 110) contains a passage relating Plano Carpini’s meeting with Béla on the monk’s way back to France from Mongolia (187r). The passage states that after hearing from Plano Carpini about the Mongols’ plans for a new invasion, Béla wed his son to the daughter of the Cuman “king.”³² Confirming this account is Béla’s letter of ca. 1247 to Pope Innocent IV in which he expresses his amazement that the pope had allowed Louis IX to go on crusade in the Holy Land when a Mongol attack on Latin Christendom was imminent.³³ It thus seems likely that the marriage between Stephen and Elizabeth took place in 1247, or in 1248 at the latest.

Stephen took the throne after the death of his father in 1270 and reigned as King Stephen V, while Elizabeth became queen of Hungary. That same year Bernard, abbot of Montecassino, went to Hungary to arrange the marriages of two of Stephen and Elizabeth’s children with two children of Charles I of Anjou, king of Sicily (and brother of King Louis IX).³⁴ Stephen and Elizabeth’s eldest son and the heir to the throne, Ladislas, married Charles’s daughter Elizabeth, while Charles’s heir, the future Charles II, married Stephen and Elizabeth’s daughter Mary. Charles II and Mary were the maternal grandparents of King Philip VI of France. Stephen V died in 1272 and was succeeded by his son, who reigned as Ladislas IV.

Throughout Ladislas IV’s reign, his mother Elizabeth wielded considerable power because the Cumans were the principal base of Ladislas’s authority. Indeed, he was known as Ladislas the Cuman. Elizabeth navigated between a hostile Hungarian nobility and populace (who were suspicious of her conversion), an unpopular monarch son, and a Cuman population to which she belonged but from which she was also estranged because of her status and conversion. As Berend observes, through her donations, court personnel, respect of government, and iconography (e.g., on her seals), “Elizabeth acted like a Christian queen” and strove to maintain her own and her son’s legitimacy.³⁵ This task was greatly complicated by Ladislas’s adoption of Cuman clothing and hairstyle, his abandonment of his Angevin wife for a Cuman woman, and his Hungarian subjects’ impression that he was more Cuman than Hungarian and actively hostile to Christianity. Just as political and cultural divides had undone Béla IV’s plans to welcome Koten and his people in 1241, so they undid Ladislas IV. He was assassinated in 1290—by Cumans—and Elizabeth died the same year.

Queen Elizabeth of Hungary and the French Imagination

As far as I know, Queen Elizabeth of Hungary left no trace in medieval French writing. This absence is on the one hand unremarkable and can be explained by the ideology of patrilineal succession. Monarchal legitimacy in France derived from paternal, not maternal, lineage. In official and unofficial historiography, the king’s paternal ancestors were the only ones who mattered—it was they who made history. Elizabeth belonged to King Philip VI’s maternal lineage and therefore did not merit attention. Yet this explanation for Elizabeth’s absence is not entirely satisfactory. Elizabeth’s marriage to Stephen of Hungary was certainly a notable and widely known event that could have been included in the Grandes chroniques like other happenings in Hungary. Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, canonized in 1235, receives an entire chapter in the French royal chronicle, and an account is given of the devastation of Hungary by the Mongols in 1241–1242.³⁶ The Grandes chroniques also include an account of a battle between King Béla IV and the king of Bohemia in 1260, in which Béla “avoit en son ost de diverses nacions orientales de paiens environ XI mile hommes de cheval [had in his army around eleven thousand horsemen from various eastern nations of pagans]”³⁷—the “pagans” in question being the very Cumans who had been led by Elizabeth’s father, as we saw in the previous section. There can be little doubt that from 1270 members of the French elite knew of Elizabeth, given that she was the mother-in-law of two of Charles of Anjou’s children—that is, two of the first cousins of King Philip III of France.

Another way to approach Elizabeth’s archival absence is through French views of and contact with the Cumans. We have already seen that the Cumans played an ambiguous role in twelfth-century crusade chronicles, where they are described as fighting both with and against crusaders. As noted above, Robert de Clari produced an early account of the Cumans that noted their apparent primitivism but also their exceptional martial skill. Crusade and settlement abroad brought other French knights into sometimes intimate contact with the Cumans. According to Alberic of Trois-Fontaines, in 1240 Narjot of Toucy, the regent of the Latin Empire of Constantinople, married one of Koten’s daughters, and he arranged for Guillaume de Merry and Baldwin of Hainaut to marry daughters of the Cuman leader Soronius in order to cement an alliance with the Cumans.³⁸ Narjot’s son Anselin had a Cuman squire.³⁹ His other son Philip told Joinville of the ceremony that sealed the Cuman-Byzantine alliance, which involved mixing blood from members of the two camps with wine and drinking it to become “blood brothers,” and hacking a dog to pieces as a sign that whoever broke the pact should be so treated. Philip also described how the favorite horse and best servant of a deceased Cuman lord were buried alive with him.⁴⁰ These marriages and stories suggest that while the Cumans were viewed as exotic, they were not necessarily perceived negatively—or at least that Latin elites recognized the necessity and utility of allying with them, both to pacify them and to have a bulwark against the Mongols. King Béla IV’s decision to marry his son to Elizabeth was thus part of a broader Latin strategy for allying with the Cumans.

The French also had at their disposal much accurate information about the Cumans in the reports of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck, who describe Cuman geography, history, language, religion, burial practices, and of course their subjugation by the Mongols.⁴¹ Yet in practice, these accounts were not likely to have had much influence. Plano Carpini’s account circulated as part of the Speculum historiale, in which the Cumans were but a very small part of a vast tableau. As we have seen, William’s report may not have circulated in France at all. In the Flower of the Histories (1307), Hayton gives a brief description of Cumania. He notes that the Cumans, after their defeat by the Mongols, fled to Hungary and that many live there to the present. He also describes how the Cumans were acquired as slaves by the sultan of Egypt, rebelled, and took control of the country.⁴² Beyond this he has little to say about them, and he makes no mention of Queen Elizabeth. The few references to the Cumans that we have suggest that while French elites may have had an idea of who the Cumans were, little information about them circulated in France in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.⁴³ These texts also indicate the Cumans’ liminal status in the French imagination: caught between Latin Christendom and the Mongols, nomadic in origin but now Christian, exotic yet familiar, and neither entirely trustworthy nor an existential threat.

Of all French literary genres, the Cumans are most prevalent in chansons de geste, which, as I discuss in chapter 1, are epics of conflict between Christians and “pagans,” primarily Muslims. Chansons de geste offer another conceptual framework with which to understand how Queen Elizabeth and the Cumans might have been viewed by medieval French society. The Cumans appear in eight of the roughly seventy-five chansons de geste composed between 1150 and 1300.⁴⁴ In seven of these, the Cumans are among the pagans the French fight; in one, they are a monstrous but harmless people. From the few references to the Cumans in these epics, we may deduce that French writers and their audiences had little notion of them beyond the fact that they were not Christian—an assumption that was false for certain Cuman groups, as we have seen.⁴⁵ Furthermore, the chansons de geste suggest that Queen Elizabeth would have been understood as an epic archetype: the pagan princess who converts to Christianity and marries a Christian knight. Elizabeth was likely unknown in France by the time Philip VI was crowned in 1328 because over the preceding two hundred years, the Cumans had been demonized and marginalized, while the story of the converted princess had become a common motif. The chansons de geste suggest that Elizabeth is absent in French literature because she was either viewed negatively and erased, or she was a familiar type whom French writers found unremarkable.

A brief survey demonstrates the Cumans’ marginal place and largely negative role in chansons de geste. The Cumans are almost always listed among the Christians’ infidel enemies. In Gerbert de Metz (1185–1210), part of the Lorraine Cycle and the earliest chanson de geste to mention them, the Cumans are named twice among the infidels who besiege Cologne.⁴⁶ In Guibert d’Andrenas (first quarter of the thirteenth century), the Cumans are “une jent qui Deu ne croient mie [a people that does not at all believe in God].”⁴⁷ In Anseïs de Carthage, a sequel to the Song of Roland composed 1230–1250, the Cumans are allies of Marsile, the Muslim king of Spain.⁴⁸ In Adenet le roi’s Beuve de Commarchis (after 1271), a group of Christian knights is imprisoned in the castle of Barbastre in Spain, but they break out and seize control of the fortress. The Muslims prepare to fight: “Si vous dirai conment Persant et Arrabi / Et Turc et Achopart et Conmain et Luti / S’en vont droit vers Barbastre de guerre aaati [Now I will tell you how Persians and Arabs, and Turks and Achoparts and Cumans and Leutices, set out straight for Barbastre, ready for war].”⁴⁹ The Cumans are thus part of the infidel universe and figure as one more group in enumerations of “pagan” antagonists.

With two slight exceptions, the chansons de geste are indifferent to the Cumans’ origins. In Gerbert de Metz, the Cumans are listed not among the enemies who come from overseas but with the Hungarians and Danes. In Adenet le roi’s Les Enfances Ogier (after 1273), Queen Constance of Hungary sends a message informing Charlemagne that Duke Godfrey of Denmark has greatly helped her by keeping the Cumans from doing any damage to her lands.⁵⁰ These authors seem to have been aware that there were Cumans located in, or on the borders of, eastern Europe. Yet as we have just seen, in Beuve de Commarchis, Adenet locates the Cumans in Spain, as do other authors. In Les Enfances Renier (second half of the thirteenth century) they also appear in France, where they are part of the “pagan” army that besieges the port city of Morimont in the south.⁵¹ Important to the chansons de geste was not where the Cumans came from but that wherever they were, they were a threat to Latin Christendom.

The only chanson de geste in which Cumans are not portrayed as belonging to a hostile infidel community is Huon de Bordeaux (1260–1268). This was one of the most popular chansons de geste, its success due in large part to its fantastic and romantic elements. On his travels, Huon “entered the land of the Cumans. They are a people who eat not wheat but raw meat, like mad dogs. They always lie in the wind and the breeze, and are hairier than hounds or wild boars; they are completely covered by their ears. The knight Huon feared them greatly, but for no reason, because they do no harm. He departed from there as quickly as he could.”⁵² This is the only reference to the Cumans in this text, and it assimilates them to the marvelous peoples of the Alexander Romance rather than to enemies in other chansons de geste. This description also recalls that of Robert de Clari, who notes that the Cumans eat meat but no grain and wear animal skins.⁵³ In Huon de Bordeaux, an ethnographic core has been wrapped in orientalist fantasy, but not for the purposes of religious polemic as in other chansons de geste.

As we see, the Cumans were not major figures in the chansons de geste but nonetheless appeared repeatedly over multiple generations. It seems likely that neither the authors of the chansons de geste nor their audiences had any idea who the Cumans were. Aside from Les Enfances Ogier, none of these texts situates the Cumans in eastern Europe, and Guibert d’Andrenas goes so far as to locate Cumania in Spain. Judging from chansons de geste, the meaning of “Cuman” was vague in thirteenth-century France, and when it was used it usually had pejorative connotations.⁵⁴ “Cuman” likely signified not through a commonly shared denotative meaning (“a nomadic Turkic tribe from central Asia”) but through its association with traditional names of “pagan” antagonists: Arabs, Persians, Turks, and so on, all of whom fell under the umbrella term “Saracen.” The Cumans’ association with other traditional “Saracen” groups marked them as religiously and racially other.⁵⁵ Yet because its meaning was not fixed, “Cuman” could also signify a harmless monstrous people in Huon de Bordeaux. Huon’s portrayal may reflect the ambivalence Latin Christians felt about the Cumans—the understanding that they were primitive and racially inferior but not necessarily a threat to Latin Christendom.

These chansons de geste raise the possibility that Queen Elizabeth is absent from French literature because her Cuman origins were known and she was perceived as an unworthy “pagan” whose connections to the French Crown needed to be erased. In this scenario, her absence is an example of the whitewashing necessary to preserve the racial and religious purity of the Valois. However, these works also point to another possibility. Chansons de geste expose the ideological mechanism by which foreign noblewomen were incorporated into the Latin Christian racial and religious community. Although Queen Elizabeth of Hungary was not a fictional character, her story of conversion and queenship corresponded closely to a character type that appears in several chansons de geste: the “pagan” princess who converts to Christianity for love of a Latin knight. It may be that Elizabeth’s story was of no interest to French writers not because she was perceived as foreign and inferior, but because she was a convert who had become Christian and European.

According to de Weever, of the roughly seventy-five chansons de geste produced between 1150 and 1300, fifteen include a Muslim princess who betrays her father by converting to Christianity and marrying a Christian knight (and who in some cases helps the knight fight her father).⁵⁶ The converted princess appears in six of the eight chansons de geste in which the Cumans are mentioned: Guibert d’Andrenas, Folque de Candie, Anseïs de Carthage, Les Enfances Renier, Huon de Bordeaux, and Beuve de Commarchis.⁵⁷ The princesses themselves are not Cumans, but the Cumans figure among the peoples who fight in their fathers’ armies against the Christians (except in Huon de Bordeaux). These examples demonstrate that the converted princess motif is principally about race, religion, and territory. These women are not true “Saracens” because of their whiteness, and through conversion and marriage they help preserve newly won territories for the Christians. Queen Elizabeth’s resemblance to such characters may explain why she was not considered remarkable by contemporary or later French authors.

Each of the princesses in these six chansons de geste is what de Weever dubs a “white Saracen”: that is, each possesses ideal features according to European canons of racial beauty.⁵⁸ Augaiete (Guibert d’Andrenas), Anfelise (Folque de Candie), Gaudisse (Anseïs de Carthage), Ydoine (Les Enfances Renier), and Esclarmonde (Huon de Bordeaux) all have a “vis cler” (bright/white face), while Malatrie (Beuve de Commarchis) has blond hair. These women are not dark-skinned like the pagan warriors whom the Christians fight; they are racially coded as white. This whitening of the “Saracen” princess reflects fear of racial others and the ideology that equated whiteness with moral and spiritual worth. These figures also show how contingent racial identity could be. By the logic of the chanson de geste, these princesses are always already white, Latin Christians—they just have to find the right knight to reveal what they truly are. It is precisely for this reason that Queen Elizabeth may not have struck French writers as unique or interesting. Although Cuman by birth, she was highborn like the princesses of the chansons de geste, and she proved through her marriage to Prince Stephen that she was always meant to be a Christian queen. Although we know that it sealed a strategic alliance, Elizabeth’s marriage to Stephen could also have been interpreted as an act of love because she was the convert. As in chansons de geste, she remade herself in the spiritual image of her Christian husband.

Moreover, the interracial and cross-cultural marriages and couples in chansons de geste reflected the reality of the crusade era. As we saw earlier in the cases of Narjot of Toucy, Guillaume de Merry, and Baldwin of Hainaut, French (and Frankish) noblemen settled abroad and married women from outre-mer—even those who were not white or Latin Christians—to secure lands and positions. From the French perspective, the marriage of the Hungarian prince Stephen to Elizabeth the Cuman would have been nothing extraordinary, but simply an effective way to ensure a political alliance and territorial defense. This may be another reason neither the marriage nor Elizabeth were noted by French writers.

Thus far I have focused on a variety of French texts expressing cultural paradigms that might explain why Queen Elizabeth, and the Valois’s Cuman ancestry, were absent from the French archive of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Aside from the (mainly anonymous) male writers implicated in this analysis, there is of course one more person to consider: Elizabeth herself. I have already noted that she adhered strictly to the codes of Christian queenship. Unlike her son Ladislas IV, she does not appear to have displayed any attachment, through dress or otherwise, to her Cuman heritage. The one exception is the seal she had made ca. 1273 during her turbulent regency. The seal reads “Elizabeth by the grace of God, queen of Hungary and daughter of the emperor of the Cumans.”⁵⁹ The invocation of the Cuman emperor was intended to highlight not Elizabeth’s foreignness but her political legitimacy in terms Latin Christians would understand. Through the seal Elizabeth conjured a “Cuman Empire” whose power she could incarnate and project onto her restless subjects. In need of a legitimizing past, she created one using terms of her adopted kingdom and religion. A later seal from 1280 no longer mentions the Cuman emperor. Elizabeth deployed her Cuman origins when she needed to, in a moment of crisis, but thereafter she was apparently very careful about evoking this identity, at least among the Hungarian elite. In this behavior we may have another key to why Elizabeth was absorbed into history unremarked by the French: through her own agency and volition, she so effectively assumed the role of queen of Hungary that her Cuman identity was replaced by one that was royal, Christian, and European.

Despite her absence from the medieval French archive, Queen Elizabeth merits attention because she raises fundamental questions about who the Valois were and what France was in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As Moore argues in her discussion of cross-cultural marriages in the medieval Mediterranean, “ ‘Medieval France’ is an extendable idea.”⁶⁰ Her focus is on those families of French origin who strongly identified with France but established themselves abroad. These people lived, fought, married, procreated, and died outre-mer, thereby creating hybrid French identities and an international French multiculture.⁶¹ Queen Elizabeth, on the other hand, represents the movement of foreign lineages into the heart of the French kingdom. Foreign queens were of course nothing new to France, but none came from as culturally or geographically distant an origin as Elizabeth. She and her descendants are an important reminder that the international marriage network of which medieval France was a part extended not only around the Mediterranean but into the Caucasus and the Cuman steppe. This network gave the French nobility and Crown—to say nothing of those French commoners who settled abroad—family ties to Africans and Asians who were not Latin Christians, or not Christians at all. More to the point, the Valois were in part Cuman, and their lineage highlights how the mass migrations caused by the Mongols influenced all levels of Eurasian society in profound and lasting ways—whether by severing relationships or causing new ones. Whether Charles of Valois and his son King Philip VI were aware of the Valois’s Cuman roots we cannot know, but they certainly understood that they and their kingdom were deeply implicated in Eurasian affairs. Their recognition of this entanglement and the consequent influence on the Mongol archive are the subject of the rest of this chapter.

How Marco Polo’s Description of the World Became a Crusade Text

In 1307 an emissary of Charles of Valois was in Venice, where he received a copy of Marco Polo’s Description of the World (Devisement du monde) from Polo himself. It was apparently this encounter that led to the Description’s initial arrival and transmission in France. As a member of the royal family—son of King Philip III, brother of King Philip IV, and father of the future King Philip VI—Charles of Valois had extensive contacts among the French elite. The Description was soon in circulation in the kingdom: in 1312, Charles’s cousin Mahaut of Artois paid for the copying, illuminating, and binding of a copy of Polo’s text. Thereafter the Description had a long life in France, with manuscript copies produced until ca. 1530. Charles of Valois was thus responsible for two of the most extraordinary contributions to the Mongol archive: through his marriage to Queen Elizabeth’s granddaughter Margaret of Anjou, he founded the Valois dynasty; and through his diplomatic and military efforts in the Mediterranean, he brought to France Polo’s Description—one of the most thorough accounts of Mongol China produced in medieval Eurasia, and a text whose influence on European knowledge and consciousness in the medieval and early modern periods we are yet to fully appreciate.

The oldest surviving copy of the Description produced in France is a manuscript made in 1335–1336 in Paris for King Philip VI (London, BL, Royal 19 D 1). It has long been recognized that this manuscript was produced as a contribution to Philip’s (ultimately fruitless) crusade preparations.⁶² Largely because of Royal 19 D 1, it has become received wisdom that the Description was a crusade text—that it was read by those interested in or planning crusades, and that its content was relevant to militant Christianity.⁶³ Here I reconsider this proposition. It is not immediately obvious that the Description should be pertinent to the Crusades. Polo does not call for a crusade, and his comments on religion are strikingly neutral for a Latin Christian of his time. His text focuses on the Mongols of China, not on the ilkhans of Persia who sought to ally with Latin Christians against the Mamluks. Moreover, it seems that for several years after its appearance, the Description was not viewed as a crusade text. Marino Sanudo Torsello, the most prolific proponent of crusade in the early fourteenth century—who was a younger contemporary of Polo and like him a Venetian—does not mention Polo in his great crusade treatise. The crusade compilation made ca. 1325 for King Charles IV of France (BnF, lat. 7470) does not contain the Description, nor do there survive any copies of the Description made for the last four Capetian kings (who reigned 1285–1328), even though the text was certainly in their orbit. It is thus worth asking why the Description was included in Royal 19 D 1 and what its inclusion says about the development of France’s Mongol archive.

To answer these questions, we first have to consider what the Mongols meant in France in the decades after Louis IX’s death in 1270. As I noted at the end of the previous chapter, it seems that in the last years of his reign, Louis IX decided that the Mongols were a matter for the church and that he would not engage in direct diplomacy with them. Nonetheless, Louis’s first crusade had established a precedent for treating with the Mongols. The importance of this diplomacy is evident from the Grandes chroniques, the French royal chronicle begun ca. 1274 and continued until ca. 1381.⁶⁴ The Grandes chroniques translate and adapt Guillaume de Nangis’s Gesta Ludovici regis Franciae, which in turn draws on Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale. The Grandes chroniques relate Louis’s exchanges with the Mongols while he was on Cyprus in 1248–1249 and reproduce the letters from Eljigidei and Smbat that were included in Odo of Chateauroux’s letter to the pope.⁶⁵ While the Mongols appear elsewhere in the Grandes chroniques, the passages on Cyprus are the single largest section devoted to them, and they end with the departure of the Christian embassy from Cyprus in 1249. The chronicle makes no mention of Oghul Qaimish’s imperious reply or Louis’s regret over sending the embassy as reported by Joinville. Rather, it leaves the impression that the Mongols were open to an alliance and conversion, and it reinforces this impression in later passages.

The French view of the Mongols in these decades was also deeply influenced by the church. The Second Council of Lyon (Lyon II), called by Pope Gregory X in 1274, reset church policy on the Mongols.⁶⁶ In one of history’s great coincidences, Gregory had met with the Polos—Marco, his father Niccolò, and his uncle Maffeo—in 1271 in Acre, both before and shortly after his election as pope, and he had given them official letters for Kublai Khan, Genghis Khan’s grandson and the ruler of the Yuan Empire.⁶⁷ Gregory, who spent nearly a year in Acre, was well aware of the benefits that an alliance with the Mongols against the Mamluks could bring to Latin Christendom.⁶⁸ An embassy of sixteen people came to Lyon II on behalf of the ilkhan Abaqa.⁶⁹ Among this group was the English Dominican David of Ashby, who had lived in Persia since 1260 and apparently served at the courts of Hulegu and Abaqa. David brought a report on the Mongols (Les faits des Tartares [The Deeds of the Tartars]) that, judging from the few excerpts that survive, was an ethnographic analysis in the spirit of Plano Carpini and other clerical ambassadors.⁷⁰ However, where earlier writers had warned against the Mongols, David’s account was “doubtless written with joint military action in mind.”⁷¹ The embassy also included Friar Richard, Hulegu and Abaqa’s interpreter, translator, and scribe, who submitted a report to the council that recounted the history of the ilkhans’ overtures to the Latins, their support for Christianity, Hulegu’s secret baptism (as related to Friar David), and Abaqa’s commitment to fighting the Mamluks.⁷² Humbert of Romans, the Dominican master-general, prepared for Lyon II his Opus Tripartitum, in which he wrote that the church should retain hope for the conversion of the Mongols, and that the Mongols wished to fight with the Christians against the Muslims.⁷³ The council ended with a decision to pursue a military alliance with Abaqa and to send envoys to him to make arrangements.

Kings Philip III and Philip IV of France followed the examples established by Louis IX and Pope Gregory X. Between 1277 and 1305, there were at least five diplomatic contacts between the French Crown and the ilkhans of Persia. In 1277 Abaqa sent two ambassadors to the papal, French, and English courts to offer his aid should the Latins attack the Muslims.⁷⁴ In 1287 Arghun’s ambassador, the Nestorian bishop Rabban Sauma, spent several weeks in France, where he met with King Philip IV and visited Saint-Denis and the Sainte-Chapelle.⁷⁵ The following year, Philip IV sent envoys to Arghun in Rabban Sauma’s company. In 1289 Arghun sent Buscarello Ghisolfi of Genoa to Paris with a declaration of Arghun’s support for Christians and an offer of military assistance, including thousands of horses, should Philip bring an army overseas.⁷⁶ The last direct contact between a French king and the Mongols for nearly a hundred years was Oljeitu’s embassy to Philip IV in 1305, which again sought a commitment for joint military action against the Mamluks.⁷⁷

Remarkably, these embassies had very little influence on the Mongol archive in France. The Grandes chroniques, which we would assume would be attentive to such exceptional encounters, are largely silent about them. The embassy of 1277 is described in the chronicle, which notes that the ambassadors acted “comme bons crestiens et parfaiz, selon ce que il monstroient et le faisoient à savoir [like good and perfect Christians, judging by what they showed and said].”⁷⁸ Thereafter, however, the only other Mongol embassy that is mentioned is that from Oljeitu in 1305, which is erroneously dated to 1303.⁷⁹ The chronicle’s silence is particularly noticeable given that letters to Philip IV from the embassies of 1289 and 1305 survive to the present.⁸⁰ The former has appended to it a note in French written by Buscarello concerning Arghun’s plan of attack against Syria. To the letter of 1305 is joined a translation in Pisan.⁸¹ Neither document is mentioned in the Grandes chroniques, which moreover claim that in 1303 the envoys declared that the “sire de Tartarie [lord of Tartary]” and all of his people would convert to Christianity were the king of France and other Christian lords to come fight the “Saracens” in the Holy Land.⁸² If such a message was indeed transmitted, which seems highly unlikely, it was orally and not in writing. Why three of these embassies were considered unworthy of mention by the Grandes chroniques’ authors is unclear. Perhaps it was because the embassies did not lead to crusades or to any other events that overtly affected France, or because the chroniclers were more concerned with matters closer to home.

A much more significant contribution to the Mongol archive in the decades after Louis IX’s death and Lyon II are the nearly thirty recuperatio treatises composed between 1291—the year of the fall of Acre, the last crusader stronghold in Palestine—and 1336.⁸³ Almost half of these mention the Mongols and were definitely or likely known contemporaneously in France. Certain writers apparently had direct or reliable secondhand knowledge of the Mongols: Fidenzio of Padua, Ramon Lull, Fulk of Villaret, Hayton, William of Adam, Marino Sanudo Torsello, and the authors of the Via ad Terram sanctam, the Memoria, the Devise des chemins de Babylone, and the Directorium ad faciendum passagium transmarinum. Other writers—Pierre Dubois, William of Nogaret, Henry II of Cyprus, and Garcias de Ayerbe—drew on earlier treatises or other sources. Whether they had direct or indirect knowledge of the Mongols, almost all of these authors supported some kind of an alliance or coordinated military effort with them, or cited them as a positive martial example. The only exceptions are Lull, who was of two minds about the Mongols, and the Memoria, which rejects outright the idea of cooperation.

These treatises are important to the history of the Mongol archive in France for two main reasons.⁸⁴ The first is that several of these works were written for French nobles and kings, or were known to be in their possession shortly after appearing, or were likely known to the French lay and clerical elite.⁸⁵ Ramon Lull wrote to King Philip IV and may have met him during his stay in Paris in 1287–1289.⁸⁶ The treatise by Fulk of Villaret and other Hospitallers was written for Pope Clement V as he and Philip IV were discussing crusade plans and likely made its way to the king.⁸⁷ Pierre Dubois was a royal advocate under King Philip IV; he gave Philip a revised version of his treatise in 1308 and may have given him a copy of the first iteration.⁸⁸ Hayton’s Flower of the Histories was written in Poitiers in 1307 at the request of Pope Clement V; of all the recovery treatises it survives in the most manuscript copies.⁸⁹ Evidence for its rapid distribution comes from the Anonymi Descriptio Europae Orientalis, which was composed in 1308 for Charles of Valois and cites Hayton as an authority on the East.⁹⁰ The Informatio of Henry II was written for the Council of Vienne (1311), to which William of Nogaret, a key advisor to Philip IV, also contributed a crusade treatise.⁹¹ Marino Sanudo Torsello spent several months in France in 1322–1323 and addressed copies of his treatise to Kings Philip V, Charles IV, and Philip VI.⁹² The treatise of Garcias de Ayerbe was likely written for Charles IV.⁹³ The Directorium was addressed to Philip VI. The kings of France thus inspired and attracted a considerable percentage of these treatises (and related works and letters). Given the Mongols’ presence—if not prominence—in these treatises, and the need to emulate Louis IX, French monarchs from Philip III to Philip VI had no choice but to factor the Mongols into their plans for the eastern Mediterranean and regions beyond.

The second reason that these treatises are important to the history of the Mongol archive is that they all see the Mongols as a means to an end. For Latin Christian leaders and intellectuals, the Mongols were tied almost entirely to plans for recovery of the Holy Land.⁹⁴ Fear of a Mongol invasion had subsided, as the Mongols had not attacked Europe since 1260, and the primary European concern was whether they would be trustworthy allies in the fight against the Muslims. The Latins worried about the Mongols’ “paganism” and unwillingness to convert to Christianity—or worse, the possibility of their conversion to Islam. Hence the Latins’ wishful thinking, in the form of rumors and legends about the Mongols’ capture of Jerusalem or Mongol conversions to Christianity, one of which—concerning the ilkhan Gazan’s conversion—is recorded in the Grandes chroniques.⁹⁵ Aside from Hayton (and Torsello, who cites Hayton extensively), no treatise author was concerned with the Mongols’ origins, history, culture, or motives in any meaningful way. The days of the scholastic ethnography of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck were past.

While King Philip IV (r. 1285–1314), during whose reign most of these treatises were composed, centralized his kingdom and deftly deferred a crusade, his brother Charles of Valois pursued his own grand ambitions in the Mediterranean. Charles’s second wife, Catherine of Courtenay, whom he married in 1301, was the titular Latin empress of Constantinople. With the support of his brother Philip IV, Pope Clement V, and King Charles II of Naples, Charles of Valois sought to conquer Byzantium and restore Latin rule.⁹⁶ In 1306 Charles sent Thibaut of Chepoy to Venice to oversee construction of ships and negotiate with the Catalan Company, a mercenary group whom Charles hoped to employ.⁹⁷

Charles’s plans came to naught but are nonetheless of great historical import because they led to the acquisition of Marco Polo’s Description of the World by the French nobility. We know this thanks to a colophon that appears in three copies of the Description, according to which Thibaut of Chepoy received a copy of Polo’s account from Polo himself in Venice in 1307 and brought it back to France.⁹⁸ As the colophon states:

ledit sire Marc Pol, comme tres honnourable et bien accoustumé en pluseurs regions et bien moriginé et lui desirans que ce qu’il avoit veu fust sceu par l’univers monde et pour l’onneur et reverence de tres excellent et puissant prince monseigneur Charles, filz du roy de France et conte de Valois, bailla et donna au dessusdit seigneur de Cepoy la premiere coppie de son dit livre puis qu’il l’eut fait, et moult lui estoit agreables quant par si preudomme estoit avanciez et portez es nobles parties de France.

[The aforementioned Sir Marco Polo, being most honorable, and very familiar with many lands and well mannered, and desiring that what he had seen be known to all the world, and for the honor and reverence of the most excellent and powerful prince my lord Charles, son of the king of France and count of Valois, granted and gave the said lord of Chepoy the first copy of his aforementioned book when he had completed it, and it pleased him greatly that it was procured and carried to the nobles of France by such a nobleman.]⁹⁹

The colophon may be an accurate account of a report given by Thibaut of Chepoy, although it is hard to know how to interpret “premiere coppie de son dit livre puis qu’il l’eut fait.” The book had apparently been written in 1298, and it seems unlikely that Polo had not distributed other copies in the intervening nine years.¹⁰⁰ The simplest explanation for the mention of the “premiere coppie” is that it was a respectful falsehood intended to make Charles feel as if he were the first person to receive a copy of the Description.¹⁰¹ There are different theories as to why Polo gave Charles this copy, all of which may be correct. Charles, through Thibaut, may have requested it;¹⁰² as the colophon says, “Veez cy le livre que monseigneur Tybault … requist que il en eut la copie a messire Marc Pol [See here the book of which my lord Thibaut requested a copy from Sir Marco Polo].” Polo may have wished to make himself known to Charles in the event Charles was successful in conquering Byzantium, as Venice—and the Polo family—had much to gain from a relationship with the new emperor.¹⁰³ Another possibility is that the Description was akin to a CV, and that Polo hoped it would secure him employment in some appropriately high position in Venice, elsewhere in Europe, or in Asia.¹⁰⁴ It is possible too that Polo simply wished to share his knowledge and saw Charles as an excellent avenue for spreading the Description in France.

The colophon goes on to state that after Thibaut’s death (in 1311 or 1312),¹⁰⁵ his son John had the text copied for Charles of Valois and for friends who requested it. While the identities of these friends are unknown, one of them may have been Mahaut of Artois, who, as noted earlier, in 1312 paid for a copy of the Description. Her councilor Thierry of Hirecon, bishop of Arras, did the same in 1315.¹⁰⁶ Mahaut could have acquired the Description either from her cousin Charles of Valois, with whom she had frequent contact, or from Thibaut or John of Chepoy, since Thibaut had served Mahaut’s father and received money from Mahaut herself.¹⁰⁷ The vassalic and family connections between the Chepoys, Charles of Valois, Mahaut of Artois, and Thierry of Hirecon are in any event suggestive of the kinds of networks through which the Description was likely transmitted once it arrived in France.

There can be little doubt, given Charles’s and Mahaut’s intimate ties to the Crown, that the Description was known to King Philip IV and to his three sons, the last three Capetian kings. Yet no copy of the Description commissioned by or for these kings survives, either alone or in a compilation. This absence is particularly striking given the enduring relevance of the Mongols in crusade planning of this period. It is of course entirely possible that there were copies of the Description made for these kings and their circles that have not survived. However, it is also possible that no such copies were ever made. For example, it is noteworthy that BnF, lat. 7470, a crusade compilation produced for King Charles IV between 1322 and 1328, does not include the Description.¹⁰⁸ This manuscript contains Vegetius’s De re militari, the “Possumus ad presens” (“a collection of extracts from the … Secretum secretorum ‘and other philosophers’ ”), Guillaume Durand’s Informacio brevis, Garcias de Ayerbe’s recovery treatise, the De statu Saracenorum of William of Tripoli, and the Devise des chemins de Babiloine.¹⁰⁹ The last four of these are crusade texts, three of which mention the Mongols—the only one that does not is Durand’s.

Rouse and Rouse argue that Guillaume Durand, who was bishop of Mende and a “high-ranking leader of Charles IV’s crusade preparations in 1322–1323,” was responsible for preparing lat. 7470.¹¹⁰ In addition to their evidence for his patronage—the inclusion of his treatise in this manuscript, his reference in his treatise to Vegetius, his familiarity with Parisian manuscript makers, his relationship with Charles IV—I would add his apparent lack of interest in the Mongols. Durand himself does not factor them into his crusade plans, and the Mongols appear in this collection in their usual guise as potential allies against the Mamluks. Although Durand certainly had the texts of Polo, Hayton, and Torsello at his disposal, he did not include any of them.¹¹¹ He considered Vegetius and the Secretum, despite their antiquity, more relevant to the king than near-contemporary insights on the Middle East and Asia. Conservative in its conception, Durand’s collection did not reach beyond customary crusade geography or topics.

Lat. 7470 is indicative of the traditionalist idea of crusade at the highest levels of the French government and church in the first decades of the fourteenth century. One might dub this the “stick only” approach, as it was focused on warfare and other aggressive actions (e.g., economic blockades, excommunication of Christians who traded with the Mamluks, war with the Greeks).¹¹² However, there existed another understanding of crusade that is exemplified by another royal manuscript compilation: BL, Royal 19 D 1. This codex was made in 1335–1336 for King Philip VI as he prepared a crusade. It contains: (1) the Old French Prose Alexander; (2) the Venjance Alixandre by Jean le Nevelon; (3) Polo’s Description of the World, in French; (4) the Merveilles de la terre d’outremer, a French translation of Odoric of Pordenone’s Relatio; (5) the excerpts from John of Plano Carpini and Simon of Saint-Quentin’s accounts of their embassies to the Mongols from Book XXXII of Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale; (6) the Terre des Sarazins; (7) the Directorium ad faciendum passagium transmarinum by an anonymous Dominican; (8) excerpts from the lost Chronique by Primat of Saint-Denis; and (9) excerpts from the Bible historiale.¹¹³ Texts 4, 5, 7, and 8 were all translated by Jean de Vignay, apparently for this manuscript (with the exception of the Speculum historiale, which Jean had translated a few years earlier).¹¹⁴ The manuscript is adorned with 164 miniatures, almost all of which are by the Parisian libraire Jeanne de Montbaston.¹¹⁵ In contrast to lat. 7470, Royal 19 D 1 represents a holistic vision for Christianizing not only the Middle East but the whole world. Crusade is but one part of this vision, which involves other tools aside from the sword.¹¹⁶

Royal 19 D 1 arose from Philip VI’s multiyear effort to launch a crusade. As the first king of a new dynasty, Philip VI was challenged both by his own subjects and, most significantly, by King Edward III of England. Acutely aware of the need to strengthen his political position, Philip declared at the beginning of his reign that he would go on crusade, and for the next eight years he made repeated declarations to his subjects and promises to the pope to this effect.¹¹⁷ Philip’s crusade activities, which in addition to public pronouncements included the gathering of intelligence, raising of funds, diplomatic negotiations, and the outfitting of a fleet, allowed him to demonstrate his “family resemblance” to royal crusader forebears such as Louis VII, Philip II Augustus, and Louis IX. Royal 19 D 1 includes Polo’s Description among an eclectic collection of works that were intended to aid Philip in his crusade planning. The manuscript was a textual complement to the councilors who advised the king.¹¹⁸

The question remains, though, as to why the conceptualizer of this manuscript decided on such a diverse compilation that is so different from lat. 7470. And more to the point, why was Polo’s Description—a layman’s account of Asia—included to the exclusion of crusade treatises? How did the Description become a crusade text? The answer, I believe, lies in the identity of Royal 19 D 1’s compiler. Scholars have long wondered who planned this manuscript. Ross assumed that it was a man and that his intention was to combine texts on exploration and travel with crusade propaganda.¹¹⁹ Quigley is similarly noncommittal and writes that it was made “at the behest of a member of Philip VI’s court.”¹²⁰ The Rouses have suggested that it was commissioned by King Philip VI himself or his queen, Jeanne of Burgundy.¹²¹

I propose that the compiler was Pierre de la Palud (ca. 1275–1342), a Dominican who studied in Paris and became a master of theology there, was a cousin of the Joinvilles, and was appointed patriarch of Jerusalem in 1329.¹²² Pierre was well known to the French elite. He was among the arbitrators who in 1318 settled the issue of the succession of Jeanne, daughter of King Philip V and granddaughter of Mahaut of Artois; he was named by Queen Jeanne, widow of King Philip V and daughter of Mahaut of Artois, as a coexecutor of the queen’s will in 1319; in 1325 he was sent by King Charles IV on secret business to the Count of Blois; and in 1329 he was one of the commissioners who settled the dispute over Thierry of Hirecon’s will by finding in favor of Mahaut of Artois. Pierre was also a diplomat and crusade preacher in the early years of Philip VI’s reign. In 1329 he and Guillaume Durand—the likely planner of lat. 7470, who was a friend of Pierre’s—went to Cyprus and thence to Cairo to negotiate with Sultan al-Nazir Mohammed over the return of the Latin Church to the Holy Land, without success.¹²³ Durand died in Cyprus on the return journey. Upon his return to France, Pierre had an audience with Philip VI, who allowed him to preach the crusade before the king’s extended council. This sermon appears to have been decisive in convincing the king and his lords to take the cross, as Philip immediately asked the pope to allow Pierre to preach the crusade in France.¹²⁴ Over the next six years, Philip and Pierre were in close contact not only to organize the crusade but also regarding the Artois succession and the beatific vision controversy.¹²⁵ By all accounts, Pierre was a trusted advisor of Philip VI between 1331 and 1336.

Another reason to tie Pierre de la Palud to Royal 19 D 1 is that only a few years prior to Royal 19 D 1’s production, Pierre prepared a crusade compilation titled Liber bellorum Domini pro tempore Nove Legis (The book of the wars of God in the era of the new law). I have already mentioned this compilation in chapter 1, as its second part contains Jacques de Vitry’s seventh letter and parts of his Historia orientalis. Opinions differ as to when and why this anthology was produced. Fournier thought it might have been after Pierre’s return from the mission to Cairo, when he began preaching the crusade, but Dunbabin argues that it was before 1329, possibly at the request of Pope John XXII, and that the Liber bellorum may have contributed to the pope’s selection of Pierre for the patriarchate.¹²⁶ For my purposes, the portion of the Liber bellorum preserved in Vatican Library, Reginensis latinus 547 is important because like Royal 19 D 1 it draws on a wide range of sources, among which are the Speculum historiale and the work of Primat, which also appear in Royal 19 D 1.¹²⁷ And just as Royal 19 D 1 includes Polo, so does the Liber bellorum use the work of a layman: the Liber Secretorum Fidelium Crucis, composed by Marco Polo’s younger contemporary and fellow Venetian Marino Sanudo Torsello. Moreover, the Liber bellorum includes references to the Mongols from the Speculum historiale and Torsello. The book’s seventy-fifth articulus, on Saint Louis’s first crusade, includes the letters of Eljigidei and Smbat. Article 76 relates the Mongol advances in the Middle East in the 1250s, article 104 King Hayton of Armenia’s alliance with the Mongols, and article 105 the conflicts between the Mongols and Mamluks from 1300 to 1313.¹²⁸ Granted, the Liber bellorum is in Latin, and its division into articuli is very different from Royal 19 D 1’s structure. It nonetheless demonstrates Pierre’s deep interest in and familiarity with crusade history and sources, not to mention his willingness and ability to produce such an anthology.

The final indication that Pierre de la Palud planned Royal 19 D 1 is that he was a Dominican, and this manuscript bears a mendicant, if not Dominican, imprint. Among the authors in Royal 19 D 1, Vincent of Beauvais, Simon of Saint-Quentin, and the anonymous author of the Directorium were Dominicans, while John of Plano Carpini and Odoric of Pordenone were Franciscans. References to Dominicans appear in the excerpt from Primat’s chronicle.¹²⁹ Moreover, the Dominicans were crucial to the preservation and transmission of Polo’s Description, which was translated into Latin by the Dominican Francesco Pipino between 1310 and 1322.¹³⁰ Pierre de la Palud was in Florence in 1321 for the Dominicans’ general chapter, where he could have learned about the Description’s utility from his brethren.¹³¹ He may have chosen to include the Description in a crusade compilation for the king because the text had been given the imprimatur of his order, whose members were using the book as a source for exempla and chronicles at exactly the moment Royal 19 D 1 was being compiled. Pierre could easily have procured a copy of the Description in French, as it had been circulating in France since at least 1312 and belonged to the Valois and Artois—families whom he knew well. We should also bear in mind that as an elite representative of both the Dominican order and Latin Christendom, Pierre himself traveled widely for a man of his time. He may have identified with those travelers whose accounts are collected in Royal 19 D 1, to which he could add his own stories of his time abroad in his discussions with King Philip VI and the royal council, and in his sermons.

To summarize the evidence tying Pierre de la Palud to Royal 19 D 1: Pierre had deep knowledge of the history of and situation in the Holy Land, and had himself traveled to Egypt and met with the Mamluk sultan; he was friends with Guillaume Durand, whose compilation in lat. 7470 may have inspired Pierre; he knew people who owned Polo’s Description; he preached the crusade and was an advisor to King Philip VI on crusade and other matters; he produced a crusade compilation before Royal 19 D 1; and he was a Dominican. All of this evidence is circumstantial, of course, but it is also highly suggestive, and it reasonably explains how such a unique crusade compilation came into being. Pierre was certainly in favor of a holy war against the Muslims, but as a Dominican he also believed that the church needed to pursue Christianization on a global scale, which would require not only swords but also preaching, instruction, diplomacy, and example.¹³² For such a project to succeed, Europe’s leaders required as much information as possible about foreign realms.

I suggest that the royal archive already preserved a traditional crusade compilation in lat. 7470, and that Pierre—or whoever the conceptualizer was—wished to broaden the discussion with an updated and more varied vernacular compilation. Thus Royal 19 D 1 was designed to inspire King Philip VI’s martial ambition with examples of royal warriors from the three ages of history: the Hebrew Bible (the excerpts from the Bible historiale), pagan antiquity (the Alexander texts), and the Christian era (Saint Louis and Philip III—Philip VI’s great-grandfather and grandfather—in Primat’s Chronique). The manuscript gave the king up-to-date advice and information for crusading from a Dominican familiar with the Holy Land in the Directorium. And with Plano Carpini, Simon of Saint-Quentin, the Terre des Sarazins, Marco Polo, and Odoric, the manuscript showed the king and his council where Christian communities were in the world, where and what the key Asian and North African realms were, and where the mendicants had already traveled or made inroads. Aside from the Directorium, Royal 19 D 1 has very little to do with the earlier tradition of crusade treatises. It articulates a multifaceted vision of Christianization, as if to remind Philip VI and his barons that conquest of the Holy Land was but the first step in a much longer and geographically broader campaign. It was this vision that made Marco Polo’s Description of the World a crusade text.¹³³

As a contribution to and record of the Mongol archive in medieval France, Royal 19 D 1 is of the greatest importance. Five of its texts mention the Mongols: Marco Polo’s Description, Odoric of Pordenone, the Speculum historiale excerpts, the Directorium, and the excerpt from Primat’s chronicle.¹³⁴ Royal 19 D 1 preserves the oldest surviving copy of the Description produced in France. It also preserves the earliest French translation of Odoric of Pordenone, a portion of the earliest French translation of the Speculum historiale, the earliest French translation of the Directorium, and the only excerpt from Primat’s lost chronicle in either Latin or French. The contrast between this manuscript’s representation of the Mongols and that of earlier crusade treatises and compilations, such as lat. 7470, is considerable. The only crusade treatise included here is the Directorium, which predictably argues for an alliance with the Mongols. Otherwise, unlike in most recovery treatises, the Mongols are depicted as a complete society. The accounts included in Royal 19 D 1 encompass Mongol realms in Persia, Mongolia, and China, and give voice to the Mongols even if the authors are critical of them.

Whoever the conceptualizer of this manuscript was, there is an unprecedented emphasis on the Mongols in Royal 19 D 1, and it seems that they were crucial to the conceptualizer’s vision of global Christianization. I can only speculate as to why this was so: the accounts showed that the Mongols ruled large Christian communities, or memorialized mendicant missions across Eurasia and showed the progress already made; the Mongols offered useful moral examples both good and bad; or the conceptualizer felt that Philip and other Christian leaders should know as much as possible about the Mongols if they wished to ally with them. The irony is that the conceptualizer’s apparent desire to inspire a Christian-Mongol alliance was always doomed to fail, as the ilkhanate collapsed in 1335 with the death of the ilkhan Abu Said at exactly the time Royal 19 D 1 was being planned and made in Paris. The manuscript is nonetheless important as a testament to a profoundly different conception of crusade and of the Mongols’ relationship to it.¹³⁵

Royal Ideology and the Description of the World

I conclude this chapter by considering another reason why Marco Polo’s Description of the World might have appealed to elite French readers in the fourteenth century. Many studies have addressed the different ways in which the Description can be read and classified. What has been almost entirely overlooked are the parallels between the Description’s account of the rise and organization of the Yuan Empire and the French elite’s understanding of its own kingdom. I believe a significant reason for French interest in the Description is that it expressed many of the same ideological assumptions the French had about their own realm. I focus on three areas of congruence: territorial expansion, centralized administration, and good government. The Description echoed a French ideology that grounded political legitimacy in a conquering royal lineage whose battles, government, and ethical example knit disparate regions into a single realm. Polo’s Yuan Empire was a distant mirror of the French kingdom in that it, like French historiography and political theory, showed that history tended toward the political unification of disparate territories under a dynastic monarch and his centralized administration.¹³⁶

In his foundational studies of Mongol-French relations of 1822 and 1824, Abel-Rémusat saw a resemblance between the two realms:

Deux systèmes de civilisation s’étoient établis, étendus, perfectionnés, aux deux extrémités de l’ancien continent, par l’effet de causes indépendantes, sans communication, par conséquent sans influence mutuelle. Tout-à-coup les événemens de la guerre et les combinaisons de la politique mettent en contact ces deux grands corps si long-temps étrangers l’un à l’autre.

[Two systems of civilization had been established, expanded, and perfected at the extreme ends of the ancient continent, as a result of independent causes, without communicating, and thus without mutual influence. Suddenly war and political maneuvering put these two large entities, for so long unknown to each other, in contact].¹³⁷

The idea of coincidental resemblance between Eastern and Western civilizations has been repeated over the years by other scholars fascinated by what Lieberman refers to as the “strange parallels” in medieval Eurasia (although Lieberman discusses parallels between Capetian France and medieval Vietnam, not Mongol realms).¹³⁸ Prazniak has compared and contrasted Paris and Hangzhou.¹³⁹ Phillips discusses the interest in cities and civility that is common to the cultures of medieval China and medieval Europe. As Phillips observes, the point of such comparisons is not to argue for a common cause behind apparent parallels but to examine why certain themes in European accounts of Asia might have resonated with European audiences.¹⁴⁰

While I cannot point to common causes for the expansion and centralization of Capetian France and the Yuan Empire, I do think we can speak of Eurasian textuality: cultures of writing with similar subjects and goals that overlapped and networked across the continents.¹⁴¹ In the same way that court cultures across Eurasia had essential anthropological similarities and allowed for cross-cultural exchange and hybridization, so too did the production and use of texts. This is not surprising, since in many ways textual culture was an extension of court culture. And perhaps no text is more emblematic of Eurasian textuality than Polo’s Description, for several reasons. The first concerns Polo himself. As generations of scholars have observed, and as Polo writes, he was Kublai Khan’s servant, messenger, “man.”¹⁴² It is conventional wisdom within Polo studies that he saw the world through Mongol eyes.¹⁴³ Opinions vary as to what his precise role and status were—was he an ortog (imperially protected merchant), a noyan (minor lord), an inspector for the salt department, a diplomat, a spy, an accountant, all of these?—and on how close he truly was with Kublai, but there is general agreement that he worked in the imperial government and traveled on the khan’s behalf.¹⁴⁴ Polo was himself a Eurasian hybrid—a Venetian with an elite Mongol worldview—and his Description reflects his double identity.

Another reason to understand the Description as an example of Eurasian textuality is that it seems to be influenced by Asian genres and writing practices. Although opinions vary as to which genres might have shaped Polo’s text and to what degree, many scholars have argued for such influence, while others note the similarities between the Description and Asian writing without positing a causal connection. It has been suggested that the Description resembles a Chinese ambassadorial report; Chau Ju-kua’s Description of the Barbarous Peoples; Chinese road guides, itineraries, and maps; “the Chinese tradition of travel, observation and reconnaissance reports”; and “small talk, a genre of minor quasi-historic work in the Chinese narrative tradition.”¹⁴⁵ Central to this discussion is the question of whether Polo spoke Chinese, on which there is disagreement (though most scholars assume he did not).¹⁴⁶ Even if Polo did not speak Chinese, he could still have been influenced by Chinese textual culture—for example, its valorizing of historical and geographical writing—and could have absorbed Chinese textual practices and attitudes.¹⁴⁷ Moreover, the Yuan government comprised scores of different departments, many of which oversaw exactly those things—canals, censuses, grain storage, paper money, roads, salt, way stations, and so on—addressed in the Description.¹⁴⁸ Nor is Mongol China the only realm that may have influenced Polo’s writing. While he likely did not speak Arabic, he probably spoke and read Persian, through which he could have become familiar with the Arabic and Persian geographical traditions.¹⁴⁹

At the same time that the Description is an Asian document, it is also a work of European literature. Gaunt provides a list of some of the European works and genres to which the Description has been compared or on which it has been seen as drawing: “the merchant’s manual, the crusading tract, the encyclopaedia, the missionary manual, ethnography and/or geography, the wonder book, vernacular writing about the Orient (e.g., the Roman d’Alexandre), Old French romance and/or the Old French chanson de geste, [and] travel writing,” to which he adds Old French chronicles, and to which one could also add the bestiary, mirrors for princes, hunting treatises, autobiography, hagiography, and Venetian ambassadors’ reports.¹⁵⁰ It is often assumed that certain parts of the text, such as the accounts of battles and descriptions of courts, were shaped by Polo’s amanuensis Rustichello of Pisa, who wrote an Arthurian compilation in French before working with Polo.¹⁵¹ Their collaboration is also apparent in the Description’s narrative voice, which alternates between the first-person singular for Polo and Rustichello, the first-person plural for both together, and the third-person singular for Polo.¹⁵² Rustichello presumably helped organize the work and acted as Polo’s first reader-reviewer—one who could evaluate his account from a European perspective and prepare it for a European readership.

All of these factors—Polo’s experience, the influence of Asian and European textual cultures, Rustichello—explain why a text as unique and multifaceted as the Description came into being. Judging by the wide variety of texts with which the Description was compiled and its diverse audience, it was indeed read in many different ways in the late Middle Ages.¹⁵³ However, as concerns the Description’s initial reception in France, I agree with Heers that it is a work on power written for power.¹⁵⁴ More to the point, the Description gave an account of royal authority and state formation that resembled the French situation so closely that the parallels would have been evident to elite French readers. It was after all a deeply ingrained interpretive practice in medieval Europe to look for edifying examples from the past and from foreign lands. By the time the Description appeared in France, the Mongols had already served as positive and negative moral and military examples for decades.¹⁵⁵ The Description may be understood as the single greatest contribution to this “exemplary Mongol” tradition, both in the quantity of its information and the extent of its encomium.

The Yuan Empire the Description portrays is an ideal realm whose origins and organization corresponded to French royalist understandings of and ambitions for France. To appreciate how the Description could be read in light of French history and political thought, it is first necessary to examine how the understanding of “France” developed in the thirteenth century. The territory controlled by the Crown quadrupled in size under King Philip Augustus (r. 1180–1223), with gains continuing until the end of the Capetian dynasty in 1328. This expansion altered both ideas about legitimate authority and the material and institutional means by which royal power was organized and exercised. Despite the considerable differences in language, legal customs, and culture that existed among the kingdom’s territories, there evolved the notion that French subjects and lords inhabited one realm—a distinct place coterminous with the king’s authority. On the material level, extraordinary means were deployed to display and exercise royal authority: the construction of castles and other infrastructure, the multiplication of royal officers throughout the kingdom, inquests, censuses, royal visits, and the use of force against rebellious lords or populations. The king transformed from a suzerain to a sovereign largely unbound by feudal obligations, while the realm was imagined as an affective community defined by mutual love between monarch and subjects. From Philip Augustus on, the Crown’s objective was to establish “facts on the ground” in the form of laws, infrastructure, and administration that created a new kingdom in both the minds of subjects and the places they inhabited.

The ways in which the idea of France changed in the thirteenth century are particularly evident in the Grandes chroniques de France, which were first completed around 1274 and updated thereafter until ca. 1381. On their face the Grandes chroniques tell the story of how the kings’ actions created France, but they also reveal how royal ideology imagined France as a distinct political entity.¹⁵⁶ Because of their cultural status and concern with the expansion of royal power, the Grandes chroniques offer useful insight into elite French ideology at the time of the Description’s arrival in France. An essential attribute of the Capetian monarchs in the Grandes chroniques is the desire to expand the realm’s territory, which is almost always among the first characteristics mentioned when a king is introduced into the narrative. To take the most significant, the passage recounting the birth of Philip II Augustus announces his future conquests: “Ce fu cil Phelippes qui tant fu sages et viguerous que il se defendi de ses enemis et conquit Normendie, Anjou et Poitou et Auvergne sor le roi Herry et Richart son fil, et les chaça en Angleterre [It was this Philip who was so wise and energetic that he defended himself against his enemies and took Normandy, Anjou, Poitou, and Auvergne from King Henry and his son Richard and chased them back to England].” Philip II is later described as “moult … curieus de l’acroissement dou regne et de ses lieus soustenir et amender [very attentive to the expansion of the realm, and to the maintenance and improvement of its lands].”¹⁵⁷ According to the Grandes chroniques, the story of France is that of kings who heroically and tirelessly acquire more territory for the Crown in the face of unjust opposition from their own barons and from the eternally inimical English.

The Description’s accounts of Mongol history offer striking parallels with the Grandes chroniques and demonstrated to French readers that territorial expansion and monarchal sovereignty were universals, as were the challenges they faced. Like Hugh Capet, the progenitor of the Capetian dynasty, Genghis Khan is elected king (“roy”) and becomes the founder of his dynasty. Having consolidated his power among the Mongols, Genghis Khan immediately embarks on the conquest of neighboring territories. After this initial campaign succeeds, “si pensa de conquester une grant partie du monde [he then decided to conquer a great part of the world].” Territorial expansion thus becomes a primary objective of Mongol rulers, as it was for French kings in Francia. Just as the English show contempt for French authority, so does Genghis Khan face the opposition and disdain of Prester John, who rejects Genghis’s offer to marry his daughter and declares to the khan’s messengers that the khan is his “homme et … serf [liegeman and serf].”¹⁵⁸ Similar to William the Conqueror’s death fighting the French as described in the Grandes chroniques, Prester John underestimates the Mongols’ military abilities and is killed in battle against them.¹⁵⁹ Genghis Khan subsequently conquers all of Prester John’s lands and continues with his campaigns, much as the French conquered English territory on the Continent. According to the Description, Genghis Khan’s grandson Kublai Khan shows heroic resolve when faced with the rebellion of his uncle Naian early in his reign. Kublai is unable to muster his entire army because under him Mongol imperial expansion continues, and many of his forces are away “en estranges contrees et provinces conquester par son commandement [in foreign lands and regions conquering at his command].”¹⁶⁰ Kublai nonetheless confronts his uncle’s superior host, and he wins because God and right are on his side.¹⁶¹ Kublai has Naian killed, and the rebels pledge anew their fealty to the khan. Like many French kings, Kublai overcomes opposition, consolidates his position, and expands his realm.

The second way in which the Description echoed thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century French political history concerns the use of royal agents to administer the realm, and of documents to enable and record their activity. The French kingdom’s territorial expansion required the government to adapt to a new geographical and social reality.¹⁶² The thirteenth century witnessed rapid growth in royal recordkeeping, in inquests, and in the number of permanent royal officers (bailiffs, seneschals, etc.).¹⁶³ Increased administrative activity, whether for judicial, fiscal, or military purposes, led to a concomitant increase in the production of documents addressed to or originating from the Crown, and thus to an enormous increase in the amount of information the Crown possessed about its kingdom. Perhaps the most extraordinary example of the royal government’s transition into this “information age” is the “Etat des paroisses et des feux” (“The census of parishes and hearths”) of 1328.¹⁶⁴ The “Etat” is a fiscal memorandum that lists the number of taxable hearths in the royal domain; the total comes to nearly 2.5 million hearths in 32,500 parishes. The “Etat” is one of the most detailed lists of inhabited places in the French kingdom in all of medieval history—a textual map as well as a census.¹⁶⁵ It expresses in a single document the vast infrastructure—institutional, human, and material—that represented the kingdom to the Crown.

Polo’s Description portrays a very similar administrative situation in the Yuan Empire. Polo is himself an imperial agent. As the Description states, Polo “metoit … moult s’entente a savoir et a espier et a enquerre pour raconter au Grant Seignour [diligently applied his intelligence to learning, spying, and investigating in order to report to the great lord].” Especially noteworthy here is the use of the verb enquerre, which is the same word used for the actions of the French kings’ enquêteurs (investigators) when they conducted inquests. The French government’s administrative institutions find their counterparts in another passage in the Description that tells how the khan has assigned twelve barons to oversee all of the empire’s regions. Each baron resides in a palace in the capital city of Khanbaliq, where he is joined by a judge for each of the regions he oversees, and by many scribes (“plusieure escrivainz”).¹⁶⁶ In an arrangement that echoes the organization of the French government, the imperial government is centralized around the khan and consists of a council of lords, a judicial corps, and scribes to produce the requisite documentation.

Like the French government, the Yuan government wishes to know about its population. The Description notes the number of “feu” (hearths) in the city of Quinsai (Hangzhou). According to the Description, throughout the empire the head of every household writes the name of all of his domicile’s inhabitants (including slaves) and the number of animals he possesses on the door, “si que en ceste maniere scet le Seigneur quantes gens il a en chascune cité [so that in this way the khan knows how many people he has in each city].”¹⁶⁷ Imperial surveillance extends to travelers, whose names and dates of residence are recorded in every inn.¹⁶⁸ However, the most significant parallel with French administration may be the Description’s emphasis on place as an expression of power. With its list of cities, regions, and realms that are ruled by or owe tribute to the Great Khan, the Description is an administrative mirror of the Yuan Empire. Like the “Etat des paroisses et des feux” and so many other royal documents, the Description is the expression of a “géographie administrative” that would have been very familiar to the French elite.¹⁶⁹

The final parallel between French political culture and the Description that I wish to discuss concerns ideas about good government. There is disagreement within Polo studies as to whether the Description is a mirror for the prince. The pros note Polo’s emphasis on Kublai, who is himself a marvel whose wealth and power surpass all other rulers on earth.¹⁷⁰ The cons note that there is little ethical commentary in the text, and that Kublai can also be seen as an anti-example because he is not a warrior and leads a life of indulgence.¹⁷¹ Whatever Polo’s intentions were, I believe it was easy, and probably necessary, for elite French readers to understand the Description as a mirror for the prince. The reason is that, as the French king’s power grew in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there developed too an extensive literature on kingship in France. Even works that are not theoretical or aimed at educated elite readers, such as romances and chansons de geste, can nonetheless be understood as participating in the broad discussion about monarchy.¹⁷² Certainly encyclopedic texts such as the Description were read as anthologies of royal exemplarity. Nor did the rulers’ different titles—French kings versus Mongol emperors or khans—impede didactic comparisons. A central tenet of Capetian ideology was that the king of France was equal to the Holy Roman Emperor and himself possessed imperial power through his descent from Charlemagne.¹⁷³ The formula “Le roi est empereur en son royaume [The king is emperor in his kingdom]” had been used since the reign of Louis VI (d. 1137) and was used with growing frequency during the reign of Philip IV—precisely when Polo’s Description arrived in France.¹⁷⁴ Polo’s alternative vision of imperial power and its manifestations spoke to the zeitgeist.

The most expansive justification of royal power in medieval France was Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum (within four years translated into French and titled Li livres du gouvernement des rois et des princes [The book of the government of kings and princes]). Composed between 1277 and 1279 for the future King Philip IV, it appears to have had the fastest and widest distribution of any medieval work of political theory.¹⁷⁵ Giles writes that (1) the king must know about the “particular conditions” of his kingdom; (2) the king should have plentiful possessions—animals, birds, buildings, furnishings—to support himself and his household; (3) it is right that victors are lords over the vanquished; (4) many cities should be ruled by one king; (5) the king should know what is owed to him, and if he is taxing anyone unjustly; and (6) the king must know if his cities are vulnerable to foreign attack. A combination of Aristotelian scholasticism and royalism, Giles’s treatise portrays the good king as one who seeks the common good, unlike the tyrant who seeks only personal gain.¹⁷⁶

The khan in Polo’s Description can easily be read as the Mongol version of Giles’s ideal monarch. To take the preceding summary of Giles’s treatise point by point: As we have seen, the khan uses agents such as Polo himself to learn about the conditions in his empire. The khan has vast numbers of animals and sumptuous palaces at his disposal, as do the members of his family and the lords who serve him. The Mongols famously claimed that their victories showed God was on their side and gave them the right to rule. As the Description demonstrates, the Mongols understood their empire as a network of cities united under the khan, and they had detailed information about populations and taxation. Of course the Mongols were a military power and attentive to the defense of their territory. According to Polo, Kublai is very generous to his subjects: he gives of his own grain, seed, and animals to those in need, does not demand tribute from regions hit by famine, and builds grain storage facilities to prevent famine. The khan also gives alms to the poor and feeds the hungry at his palace.¹⁷⁷ The Kublai of the Description is no tyrant, and in many ways he behaves in the manner of an ideal Christian king. It is as if Kublai governed according to the very principles articulated by Giles of Rome.

Despite the different societies and histories from which they arose, French royalist ideology and Polo’s Description were shaped by similar assumptions and inspirations that help explain why the Description appealed to elite French readers. Both were concerned with the creation and expansion of their respective realms through warfare, the acquisition of information about and the centralized administration of these realms, and ethical leadership. The Description offered a history of realm making that was both a complement and a unique addition to medieval French historiography and political theory. In an era of intense reflection on the nature of monarchy in France, the Description confirmed that royal sovereignty was natural and a universal phenomenon across cultures.¹⁷⁸

Queen Elizabeth of Hungary and Marco Polo exemplify the remarkably diverse ways in which the Mongols influenced French society and culture. Elizabeth is an important reminder of the biological ramifications of Mongol expansionism—not only within the human community but also as concerns the distribution of animals and plants and their products as well. Elizabeth’s story is but a small chapter in a biohistory of the Mongol age that is yet to be written. Polo’s life and work may seem distant from Elizabeth’s saga, springing as they do from commerce and government administration. Yet Polo’s story too is very much about the ways in which people, animals, and plants, among other “resources,” moved about and were used within the Mongol Empire and beyond. Polo’s legacy is textual, but his Description of the World is about embodied experience in global political and economic systems.

The period I examine in this chapter, 1270 to 1336, is a paradox for the Mongol archive. On the one hand, this era witnessed direct diplomatic contact between the French and the Mongols, and tremendous growth in the number of works produced or kept in France that mention them, including the single most historically significant: Polo’s Description. On the other, this period saw the end of this contact by 1305 and the beginning of a new phase in which the Mongols became fossilized in a handful of works that determined their image for centuries to come. Polo’s portrait of the Yuan Empire was no longer accurate even as he composed it, as Kublai had died in 1294. Hayton’s and Odoric’s accounts became authoritative references in subsequent generations, although their accounts too were quickly out of date. These works remained canonical largely because the French considered the Mongols in relation to ongoing crusade and conversion efforts. Yet by the time BL, Royal 19 D 1 was completed in 1336, crusade had become impossible in France because of a lack of popular enthusiasm, strategic hurdles, expense, and finally conflict with England. Very quickly, the Mongols were no longer of immediate interest or concern.

The Mongol archive was nonetheless firmly established by the end of this period. The royal archives and library, to mention only these, held numerous documents about the Mongols. The Mongols had become a part of royal historiography with their inclusion in the Grandes chroniques and would appear in subsequent copies and updates of the chronicle. Polo’s Description was a Valois family heirloom that would continue to figure in royal and noble inventories for generations. Hayton and Odoric would also continue to be copied for elite French readers into the fifteenth century and used in The Book of John Mandeville. As I will show in the next chapter, the Mongols remained a small but significant part of book production during the reign of King Charles V (r. 1364–1380). They invite us to consider Charles V’s library from a Eurasian perspective and appreciate the extraordinary breadth of places and peoples that the king’s manuscripts and maps represented.

1. On these migrations, see Allsen, “Population Movements”; Sweeney, “Spurred On.”

2. On the history of the Cumans, see Berend, At the Gate of Christendom; Curta, Eastern Europe, 169–178; Korobeinikov, “Broken Mirror”; Spinei, The Romanians; Vásáry, Cumans and Tatars.

3. The Codex Cumanicus (ca. 1300–1330) is an extraordinary record of their language and its place in Eurasian commerce, diplomacy, and missionary efforts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. See Golden, “Codex Cumanicus”; Ligeti, “Prolegomena”; Schmieder and Schreiner, Il Codice Cumanico.

4. Vásáry, Cumans and Tatars, 5.

5. Berend, At the Gate of Christendom, 190–191; Curta, Eastern Europe, 171.

6. As Golden observes, the Cumans and other nomads of western Asia “remained confederations and never achieved statehood” in the era before the Mongols (Ethnicity and State Formation, 45).

7. Berend, At the Gate of Christendom, 69; Curta, Eastern Europe, 171.

8. Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 9; Richard, “À propos de la mission,” 116.

9. Richard, “À propos de la mission,” 116.

10. Robert de Clari, La conquête de Constantinople, 128–129. Curta claims that Robert’s description of the Cumans was added later and that “he may have never seen the Cumans” (Eastern Europe, 175), but the Cuman passages are written in Robert’s dialect and style, fit perfectly into the flow of his narration, and are historically plausible. Moreover, Philippe Mouskes’s chronicle (ca. 1242) echoes Robert in its account of the death of Emperor Baldwin I, who “conquist la tière environ, / Puis furent o lui si baron / En un estour, ou fu soupris / Des Coumains et à force pris. / Et si ot moult des barons mors, / Dont moult fu grans li desconfors. / Ensi li Blak et li Coumain / En lor prison et en lor main/ Orent le conte Bauduin, / Et s’i l’ocisent en la fin [conquered the surrounding lands, and was then with his lords in a battle where they were surprised by the Cumans and taken by force. And thus did many of the lords die, and there was great grief over them. And so did the Vlachs and the Cumans keep Count Baldwin in their prison under their control, and there they ended up killing him].” Mouskes, Chronique rimée, 2:308, ll. 20455–20464.

11. Berend, At the Gate of Christendom, 213.

12. I am following the chronology in Rachewiltz, Secret History of the Mongols, 2:1047–1049. See also Buell, Historical Dictionary, 25–26, who dates Qudu’s death to 1209.

13. Rachewiltz, Secret History of the Mongols, 2:845; Morgan, The Mongols, 43, 60.

14. Alberic of Trois-Fontaines, Chronica, 920.

15. Spinei, The Romanians, 154; Alberic of Trois-Fontaines, Chronica, 921. The bishopric did not last long, however; see Curta, Eastern Europe, 170; Spinei, The Romanians, 154–156. On the missions to the Cumans, see Bezzola, Die Mongolen, 37–53; Dörrie, “Drei Texte”; Richard, La papauté, 20–33.

16. On this campaign, see Morgan, The Mongols, 120–125.

17. Guyuk quarreled with Batu and withdrew from the army before it reached Europe. Morgan, The Mongols, 72.

18. Sweeney, “Spurred On,” 39.

19. The Latin text of the letter is in Dörrie, “Drei Texte,” 179; a German translation is in Göckenjan and Sweeney, Der Mongolensturm, 107–108, and an English translation in Sinor, “Diplomatic,” 344. The quotations here are from Sinor’s translation.

20. Spinei, The Romanians, 152.

21. Batu surely felt that the killing or detention of his messengers was also grounds for war.

22. Berend, At the Gate of Christendom, 70. As Buell observes, the Mongol Empire “provided a political and economic backdrop utterly favorable to the life and migrations of nomadic peoples of every persuasion, including Turkic-speaking groups” (“Mongol Empire and Turkicization,” 200).

23. Anonymous and Master Roger, Deeds of the Hungarians, 136. An annotated German translation of Roger’s account is in Göckenjan and Sweeney, Der Mongolensturm, 127–223 (passage here at 141).

24. Anonymous and Master Roger, The Deeds of the Hungarians, 138; Göckenjan and Sweeney, Der Mongolensturm, 142. See also Berend, At the Gate of Christendom, 87–88.

25. Alberic of Trois-Fontaines, Chronica, 946.

26. On these events, see also Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 61–63, 69.

27. As noted in chapter 2, Plano Carpini saw Béla’s tents at Batu’s camp, and William of Rubruck met slaves who had been captured in Hungary.

28. See the discussion in Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 71–74.

29. Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 65–68.

30. Berend, At the Gate of Christendom, 143–144, 98, 106; Berend, “Cuman Integration.”

31. On Elizabeth’s father, who was probably Zeyhan (not Koten, as earlier scholars thought), and the date of the marriage, see Berend, At the Gate of Christendom, 88n56; Klaniczay, Holy Rulers, 439. Vásáry states that Elizabeth was the daughter of “Seyhan” (Cumans and Tatars, 99). Sinor notes that Hungarian historians usually date Stephen and Elizabeth’s marriage between 1252 and 1254 (“John of Plano Carpini’s Return,” 205).

32. Sinor, “John of Plano Carpini’s Return,” 203. Plano Carpini’s warning is in his report: “Venient autem in tribus vel in quatuor annis usque in Comaniam. De Comania autem insultum facient in terras superius annotatas; ignoramus tamen utrum incontinenti post terciam hyemen veniant, vel ad tempus adhuc expectent, ut melius venire possint ex improviso [They (the “Tartars”) will come as far as Cumania in three or four years. From Cumania they will attack the aforementioned lands (Hungary and Poland); however, we do not know if they will attack in three years in the winter, or if they will await a more favorable moment, the better to attack without warning]” (Pian di Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 295).

33. Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 104.

34. Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 197. On the subsequent history of the Angevins in Hungary, which is beyond the scope of this chapter, see G. Le Goff, L’Europe des Anjou, 152–201.

35. Berend, At the Gate of Christendom, 261–263; Berend, “Cuman Integration.”

36. Viard, Les grandes chroniques, 7:53–58, 104–105.

37. Viard, Les grandes chroniques, 7:219–220.

38. Alberic of Trois-Fontaines, Chronica, 947, 950; Longnon, “Les Toucy en Orient,” 36–37; Richard, “À propos de la mission,” 117–118.

39. Lock, The Franks, 298.

40. Joinville, Vie de Saint Louis, 438–443.

41. Simon of Saint-Quentin makes only two brief references to the Cumans (Histoire des Tartares, 31, 47) and one to the Mongol conquest of Cumania (76).

42. Hayton, La Flor des estoires, 124, 161, 226.

43. Polo makes one brief reference to the Cumans, explaining that they and other peoples, not “Tartars,” were enclosed by Alexander behind the “Porte du Fer [Iron Gate]” (Le Devisement du monde, 1:139).

44. As Short notes, there are over a hundred chansons de geste extant in around three hundred manuscripts (Short, La Chanson de Roland, 12). The genre’s heyday was the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; thereafter, few were composed, though they were still copied.

45. In addition to the episodes already mentioned, other evidence for Cuman conversion comes from Plano Carpini, who writes that at Batu’s court he met Sangor, a Cuman convert to Christianity. Sangor was surely Orthodox, as he accompanied the son of Duke Yeroslav (Pian di Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 331). William of Rubruck met a Cuman who had been baptized in Hungary by the Franciscans (Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 135–136).

46. Taylor, Gerbert de Metz, 103 (79 in Guidot’s modern French translation), ll. 3857–3859; 104, ll. 3879–3880 (not in Guidot’s modern French translation).

47. Melander, Guibert d’Andrenas, 52, l. 1301.

48. Alton, Anseïs von Karthago.

49. Adenet le roi, Les Oeuvres, 2:97, ll. 1822–1824. The Achoparts are a “peuple païen d’Afrique [pagan people of Africa]” (Moisan, Répertoire, vol. 1.1, 109). The Leutices were a Slavic people of the Baltics and northern Germany (Moisan, Répertoire, vol. 1.1, 656).

50. “Et des Coumains fist tel mortalité / K’en moult lonc tans ne furent recouvré [And he caused so many deaths among the Cumans that for a very long while they did not recover from it]” (Adenet le roi, Les Oeuvres, 3:325–326, ll. 7985–7986).

51. Dalens-Marekovic, Enfances Renier.

52. “ens le tere des Conmains est entré. / C’est une gent qui ne goustent de blé, / Mais le car crue, comme gainon dervé / Tot adès gisent au vent et a l’oré, / Plus sont velu que viautre ne sengler; / De lour orelles sont tout acoveté. / Li vasaus Hues les a moult redotés; / Por nient les crient, car il ne font nul mel. / Plus tost qu’il pot, s’en est outre pasés” (Guessard and Grandmaison, Huon de Bordeaux, 87, ll. 2896–2904). The description of the Cumans’ eating habits echoes somewhat a passage in William of Rubruck (which predates Huon), but not enough to make plausible an argument for influence. William writes that after the Mongols invaded, the Cumans “would eat one another, the living those who were dying: so I was told by a merchant who saw the living seizing on and tearing with their teeth the raw flesh of the dead, as dogs do with corpses” (Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 70).

53. Robert de Clari, La conquête de Constantinople, 78–79.

54. Scribal behavior may offer another indication that the word “Cuman” had little currency in France. In a manuscript of Folque de Candie, “Comain” has been written “Romain” (BnF, fr. 774, 116v). Sinor writes that “Roman” is a “not unusual variant” for “Cuman” (“John of Plano Carpini’s Return,” 203n1).

55. On race in the chansons de geste, see de Weever, Sheba’s Daughters; Heng, Invention of Race, 110–256; Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries, 15–73; Ramey, Black Legacies; Ramey, Christian, Saracen, and Genre.

56. de Weever, Sheba’s Daughters, 5. On miscegenation in medieval French literature, see also Ramey, Black Legacies, 64–88; Ramey, Christian, Saracen, and Genre.

57. Schultz-Gora, Folque de Candie, vol. 1.

58. de Weever, Sheba’s Daughters, xxi.

59. Berend, At the Gate of Christendom, 263.

60. Moore, Exchanges in Exoticism, 8.

61. See Lock, The Franks.

62. This observation was first made by Ross, “Methods of Book Production,” 64. See also Ciccuto, “Marco Polo alle Crociate”; Cruse, “Stories for the King”; Hong, “Le projet de croisade,” 259–272; Quigley, “Romantic Geography”; Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and Their Makers, 1:244–247.

63. See, for example, Airaldi, “Autobiografia di Marco”; Ciccuto, L’immagine del testo, 41–62; Ciccuto, “Marco Polo alle Crociate”; Espada, Marco Polo y la cruzada; Espada, “Marco Polo, Odorico of Pordenone”; Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 340; Vogel, Marco Polo Was in China, 31.

64. Hedeman, Royal Image, xxi.

65. Viard, Les grandes chroniques, 7:121–132.

66. On Lyon II and the Mongols, see 1274 année charnière, esp. 31–102; Abel-Rémusat, “Mémoires … Second Mémoire,” 344–345; Aigle, “De la ‘non-négociation’ ”; Aigle, “Letters”; Bird et al., Crusade and Christendom, 448–473; Boyle, “The Il-Khans of Persia and the Princes of Europe”; Brunel, “David d’Ashby”; DeWeese, “Influence of the Mongols”; Leopold, How to Recover the Holy Land; Richard, “D’Algigidai à Gazan”; Richard, “La coopération militaire”; Roberg, “Die Tartaren”; Schein, Fideles Crucis; Schmieder, Europa und die Fremden; Wolter and Holstein, Lyon I.

67. Laurent, “Grégoire X et Marco Polo,” 139.

68. On Acre as a center for information on the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, see Paviot, Projets de croisade, 9–15; Rubin, Learning in a Crusader City.

69. Richard, “Chrétiens et Mongols au Concile,” 36–37.

70. On David of Ashby, see Brunel, “David d’Ashby.”

71. Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 168; Richard, “Chrétiens et Mongols au Concile,” 38.

72. Aigle, “Letters,” 152–154; Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 168, 175; Richard, “Chrétiens et Mongols au Concile,” 37–38; Roberg, “Die Tartaren”; Sinor, “Interpreters in Medieval Inner Asia,” 315.

73. On the Mongols in the Opus Tripartitum, see DeWeese, “Influence of the Mongols,” 58–59; Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 201, 264–265; Schein, Fideles Crucis, 30; Schmieder, Europa und die Fremden, 133.

74. Boyle, “The Il-Khans of Persia and the Christian West,” 558; Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 168.

75. On Sauma’s life and embassy, see Rossabi, Voyager from Xanadu.

76. Boyle, “The Il-Khans of Persia and the Christian West,” 559–561; Chabot, “Notes,” 593, 604; Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 175, 178; Petech, “Les marchands italiens,” 562–565; Richard, “D’Algigidai à Gazan,” 64.

77. Boyle, “The Il-Khans of Persia and the Christian West,” 562; Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 171, 178, 182–183; Petech, “Les marchands italiens,” 566–567.

78. Viard, Les grandes chroniques, 8:74. The chronicler writes that these ambassadors were Georgians, but Jackson believes they were probably Greek (The Mongols and the West, 168).

79. Viard, Les grandes chroniques, 8:218.

80. Abel-Rémusat, “Mémoires … Second Mémoire”; Mostaert, “Une phrase”; Mostaert and Cleaves, Les lettres; Mostaert and Cleaves, “Trois documents mongols.”

81. On this translation, see Bertolucci Pizzorusso, Scritture di viaggio, 269–290.

82. Viard, Les grandes chroniques, 8:218.

83. The only treatises written before the fall of Acre in May 1291 are that of Fidenzio of Padua and, possibly, the Via ad Terram sanctam. On these treatises see Leopold, How to Recover the Holy Land, esp. 111–119, on the Mongols as allies; Paviot, Projets de croisade; Schein, Fideles Crucis; Schmieder, Europa und die Fremden, 109–122.

84. I leave aside these texts’ strategic content and value, which have been discussed extensively elsewhere. See William of Adam, How to Defeat the Saracens; Leopold, How to Recover the Holy Land; Paviot, Projets de croisade; Schein, Fideles Crucis; Torsello, Book of the Secrets.

85. On the crusade planning of the last Capetians, see Tyerman, “Sed nihil fecit?”

86. Fidora and Rubio, Raimundus Lullus, 56–62.

87. Leopold, How to Recover the Holy Land, 28; the text is reproduced in Paviot, Projets de croisade, 221–233.

88. Dubois, Recovery of the Holy Land, 7.

89. On Hayton, see Burger, “Cilician Armenian métissage”; Dörper, Die Geschichte der Mongolen; Hayton, La Flor des estoires; Jackson, The Mongols and the West; Leopold, How to Recover the Holy Land.

90. Leopold, How to Recover the Holy Land, 46.

91. Boutaric, “Notices et extraits,” 199–205; Paviot, Projets de croisade, 281–292.

92. Edson, “Reviving the Crusade,” 149–151; Roddy, Correspondence; Torsello, Book of the Secrets; Tyerman, “Marino Sanudo Torsello.”

93. Rouse and Rouse, “Context and Reception,” 218.

94. Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 165–195.

95. Schein, “Gesta Dei per Mongolos”; Viard, Les grandes chroniques, 8:185.

96. As noted earlier, Charles of Valois’s first wife was Margaret of Anjou, daughter of Charles II. Charles II was also the first cousin of Charles of Valois’s father, Philip III.

97. On Charles’s Mediterranean enterprises and ambitions, see Carr, Merchant Crusaders, 28–29; Georgiou, Preaching the Crusades, 21–25; R. Hughes, Catalan Expedition; Laiou, Constantinople and the Latins, 52–54; Leopold, How to Recover the Holy Land, 33; Longnon, L’Empire latin, 295–298; Moranvillé, “Les projets de Charles de Valois”; J. Petit, Charles de Valois; J. Petit, “Un capitaine”; Rubió y Lluch, “La Compagnie Catalane”; Rubió y Lluch, Documents.

98. Polo, Le Devisement du monde, 1:24–28, 115–116 (colophon text). When his Mediterranean sojourn ended, “Thibaut de Chepoy revint en France rendre compte de sa mission à Charles de Valois qu’il trouva le 29 avril 1310 à Saint-Christophe-en-Hallate [Thibaut of Chepoy returned to France to recount his mission to Charles of Valois, whom he found on April 29, 1310, in Saint-Christophe-en-Hallate].” J. Petit, “Un capitaine,” 236.

99. Polo, Le Devisement du monde, 1:115.

100. “Lequel livre … fist retraire par ordre par mesire Rasta pysan … au temps que il couroit de Crist. MCCXCVIII. anz de l’Incarnation [The which book he (Polo) had written in order by Mister Rustichello of Pisa when 1,298 years had passed since the incarnation]” (Polo, Le Devisement du monde, 1:118). The editor Ménard reads the prologue as indicating that the book was begun in 1298 but not necessarily completed in that year (1:22).

101. As Gadrat observes, “Il est possible que l’histoire ait été un peu enjolivée pour rehausser le prestige du cadeau fait au frère du roi de France [It is possible that the story was a bit embellished to heighten the prestige of the gift given to the brother of the king of France]” (“Le rôle de Venise,” 66).

102. J. Petit, Charles de Valois, 113.

103. Polo, Le Devisement du monde, 1:115 (quotation), 26.

104. Critchley, Marco Polo’s Book, 38–42; Psaki, “The Book’s Two Fathers,” 89.

105. J. Petit, “Un capitaine,” 238.

106. Gadrat-Ouerfelli, Lire Marco Polo, 118. Neither Mahaut’s nor Thierry’s manuscript survives.

107. J. Petit, Charles de Valois. Of particular note is that Charles of Valois was among those who acquitted Mahaut of the murder of the infant king John I in 1316 (172); Charles and Louis of Evreux ruled Artois while the dispute between Mahaut and her son Robert was under examination (183); and in 1318 Charles was a member of the Parliament that found in Mahaut’s favor against Robert (184). Furthermore, Charles and Mahaut were both great-grandchildren of King Louis VIII, Charles was King Philip V’s uncle and Mahaut the king’s mother-in-law, Charles was King Charles IV’s uncle and godfather while Mahaut was Charles IV’s mother-in-law and godmother, and both Charles of Valois and Mahaut were among the principal patrons of the Confraternity of the Hospital of St-Jacques-aux-Pèlerins (Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and Their Makers, 1:264). On the Chepoys’ relationship with Mahaut, see J. Petit, “Un capitaine,” 225, 237.

108. On this manuscript, see Rouse and Rouse, “Context and Reception.”

109. As the Rouses discuss, what they title the Devise des chemins de Babiloine is sometimes considered two separate texts by other scholars, even though both were apparently different parts of the same report prepared by Fulk of Villaret and the Hospitallers. “Context and Reception,” 219–220. See also Kedar and Schein, “Un projet,” which discusses the texts as a single unit; and Paviot, Projets de croisade, who publishes them separately (Devise on 199–220; Coment la Terre saint puet estre recouvree par les Crestiens, 221–233). The first part, devoted to a description of places and forces in Egypt, does not mention the Mongols.

110. Rouse and Rouse, “Context and Reception,” 224–225.

111. Torsello wrote to Durand multiple times, including in 1326, around the time lat. 7470 was produced (Leopold, How to Recover the Holy Land, 49).

112. Menache, “Papal Attempts.”

113. This manuscript has been scanned in its entirety and before the cyberattack of October 2023 was accessible at British Library, http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Royal_MS_19_D_I. In addition to these texts, there is also a chapter inserted by Jean de Vignay on miracles of Saint Louis that he witnessed or heard of (229v–230v). I take this opportunity to correct two inaccuracies that are often repeated about this manuscript. The first error is the observation that the translation of Mongol material from the Speculum historiale (148v–162v) includes only excerpts from John of Plano Carpini. This section also includes Simon of Saint-Quentin and thus follows the original text of Vincent of Beauvais (as Hong, “Le projet de croisade,” 265, also notes). On this mixing of sources, see Guzman, “The Encyclopedist.” The second error: almost everyone who has written on Royal 19 D 1, myself included, has overlooked the Terre des Sarazins (162v–165v), which as Pitts notes is placed at the end of the Speculum section (“La terre des Sarazins,” 315n17).

114. On Jean de Vignay, see Brun and Cavagna, “Pour une édition”; Cavagna, “Jean de Vignay”; Knowles, “Jean de Vignay.” Jean had completed his translation of the Speculum historiale by the early 1330s at the latest (Brun and Cavagna, “Pour une édition,” 378).

115. O’Doherty, The Indies, 122–126; Quigley, “Romantic Geography”; Ross, “Methods of Book Production”; Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and Their Makers, 1:234–260; Saurma-Jeltsch, “Metamorphic Other.”

116. See Hong, “Le projet de croisade,” 262–263, for a fuller comparison of lat. 7470 and Royal 19 D 1.

117. On Philip’s crusade, see Georgiou, Preaching the Crusades, 67–73; Hong, “Le projet de croisade,” 249–253; Tyerman, “Philip VI.”

118. Cruse, “Stories for the King.” Royal 19 D 1 was not the only crusade document prepared for Philip VI. See the “Avis du conseil du roi sur la route que Philippe VI de Valois devra suivre pour la croisade projetée [Advice of the king’s council on the route Philip VI of Valois should take for the intended crusade]” (ca. 1332), which drew on records related to previous crusades and rejected the Directorium’s suggestion of a land route to the Holy Land in favor of a sea route (printed in Delaville Le Roulx, La France en Orient, 2:7–11). Hong argues that Bnf, Rothschild 3085 was also produced to aid Philip VI’s crusade planning (“Le projet de croisade,” 254–259).

119. Ross, “Methods of Book Production,” 63–64.

120. Quigley, “Romantic Geography,” 54.

121. Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and Their Makers, 1:245.

122. On Pierre’s life and work, see Dunbabin, Hound of God; Fournier, “Pierre de la Palu.”

123. Dunbabin, Hound of God, 98–99, 126, 138, 166–167.

124. Dunbabin, Hound of God, 173; Georgiou, Preaching the Crusades, 141–153. It would nonetheless be two years before Philip officially took the cross.

125. Dunbabin, Hound of God, 178–187.

126. Fournier, “Pierre de la Palu,” 82; Hong, “Le projet de croisade,” 250, repeats this assertion. Dunbabin, Hound of God, 127–128.

127. The Liber bellorum cites the Grandes chroniques, while Royal 19 D 1 copies a translation of Primat’s lost chronicle.

128. Riant and Giorgi, “Description,” 306, 313, citing Torsello, book 3, part 13, chapters 2, 10–11 (see Torsello, Book of the Secrets, 371–372, 385–387).

129. For example, the Dominicans (or “friars preachers”) are mentioned in the letter Philip III writes to the churches of France to inform them of his father Louis IX’s death: “nous envoions en divers lieux noz amez hommes religieux, frere Gautier de Biaulieu et frere Guillaume de Chartres de l’ordre des preescheurs [We are sending to different places our beloved clerics Brother Gautier of Beaulieu and Brother Guillaume of Chartres of the order of preachers]” (223v). In an inserted note, Jean de Vignay explains that he will recount the holy deeds and miracles of Saint Louis because, although he has translated “selonc ce que frere Vincent de l’ordre des preescheurs l’ordena et fist [according to what Brother Vincent of the order of preachers arranged and wrote],” Vincent and Primat speak too little of Louis’s holiness (224r).

130. On the Description, Pipino, and the Dominicans, see Conte et al., “Ad consolationem legentium”; Dutschke, “Francesco Pipino,” 100–261; Gadrat-Ouerfelli, Lire Marco Polo, 165–188; Gadrat-Ouerfelli, “Marco Polo.”

131. Dunbabin, Hound of God, 120.

132. For example, Odoric writes about how deeply the people of Tana, and later their emperor, were impressed by the fortitude and miracles of the four Franciscans martyred there (137r–139v), while the chronicle of Primat describes how Saint Louis remained firm in his faith while imprisoned and near death in Tunis (226r–226v).

133. For a broader discussion of the Description and Odoric’s account as crusade texts, see Espada, Marco Polo; Espada, “Marco Polo, Odorico of Pordenone.”

134. In Primat’s chronicle, while Philip III is still in Tunisia he receives an embassy from the ilkhan and the king of Armenia (230v).

135. Royal 19 D 1’s influence reached beyond France in the Middle Ages. It was probably with King John II when he was captured at Poitiers by the English in 1356. Thereafter it was taken to England where, in the early fifteenth century, its Description text was copied into a manuscript containing the Roman d’Alexandre; the alliterative Middle English Alexander and Dindimus was also added at this time. This manuscript is today Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 264, on which see Cruse, Illuminating the “Roman d’Alexandre”; Cruse, “Romancing the Orient”; Dutschke, “The Truth in the Book”; Harf-Lancner, “From Alexander to Marco Polo”; Strickland, “Text, Image, and Contradiction.”

136. I will be citing the edition of the Description text in Royal 19 D 1, since it is the earliest extant from France and securely tied to the royal court.

137. Abel-Rémusat, “Mémoire … Second Mémoire,” 411.

138. Lieberman, Strange Parallels, 2:177.

139. Prazniak, Dialogues across Civilizations, 49–75.

140. K. Phillips, Before Orientalism, 148–171, esp. 148.

141. See, for example, Britnell, Pragmatic Literacy.

142. According to the Description, as Niccolò presents Marco to Kublai he says, “il est mon filz et vostre homme [he is my son and your man]” (Polo, Le Devisement du monde, 1:129).

143. To cite but a few examples: Heers, Marco Polo, 225–272; Heng, Invention of Race, 327; Jackson, “Marco Polo”; Larner, Marco Polo, 85; Olschki, Marco Polo’s Asia, 134; Pelliot, Notes on Marco Polo, 2:834; Petech, “Marco Polo”; Rachewiltz, “Marco Polo Went to China,” 80–81; Racine, Marco Polo, 157–192; Reichert, Begegnungen mit China, 115; Tucci, “Marco Polo, mercante,” 326; Vogel, Marco Polo Was in China; Wolfe, “Marco Polo”; Zhang, “Marco Polo,” 284–285.

144. On ortogs, see Allsen, “Mongolian Princes”; Endicott-West, “Merchant Associations”; Rachewiltz, “Marco Polo Went to China,” 80–81. On Polo as a noyan, see Petech, “Marco Polo,” 24.

145. On ambassadorial reports, see Critchley, Marco Polo’s Book, 78; Deluz, “Villes et organisation,” 167; Haw, Marco Polo’s China, 45–46; Olschki, Marco Polo’s Asia, 128. On Chau Ju-kua, see Hirth and Rockhill, Chau Ju-kua, 39; Kinoshita, “Traveling Texts,” 240. On Chinese maps and travel reports, see Larner, Marco Polo, 85; Vogel, Marco Polo Was in China, 28. On small talk, see Zhou, “Small Talk,” 1.

146. Haw is the exception: “I would suggest that there is better evidence that [Polo] had some knowledge of Chinese and of Turkic than there is for his knowledge of Persian” (“Persian Language,” 10).

147. “The establishment of the National History Office in the early 1260s and its charge to preserve and compile historical records and documents … marked the beginning of a significant phase in the Mongol response to the Chinese cultural tradition” (Chan, China and the Mongols, 58). “The Yuan followed the practice of compiling a comprehensive geographical work at the start of the dynasty to express the unification and huge size of the empire. It also set the precedent of calling such works Da yitong zhi (Great unified comprehensive treatise), which was the original title of what is now known as the Da Yuan da yitong zhi. The edict commanding the secretariat to compile such a work was issued by Kubilai Khan in 1285 and makes clear the original purpose: ‘Make a big collection of the gazetteers and maps from all over the empire and create a single work in order to demonstrate that the territories within the borders of the mighty Yuan have no equal in the world’ ” (Wilkinson, Chinese History, 219).

148. On the Yuan government, see Farquhar, Government of China.

149. This in any event has been generally accepted since the nineteenth century; see the discussion in Morgan, “Persian as a Lingua Franca.” On Persian in the Mongol era, see Atwood, “Marco Polo’s Sino-Mongolian Toponyms”; Ford, “Uses of Persian”; Haw, “Persian Language”; Morgan, “Persian as a Lingua Franca”; Shijian, “Persian Language in China.” On Polo and the Arabic and Persian traditions, see Kinoshita, “Reorientations”; Kinoshita, “Traveling Texts”; Kinoshita, “Worlding Medieval French.” Two excellent sources that convey the scope of the Description’s overlap with foreign sources and use of non-European languages are Cardona’s Indice ragionato in Polo, Milione. Versione toscana, 489–761, and Pelliot, Notes on Marco Polo.

150. Gaunt, Marco Polo’s “Le Devisement du monde,” 29–30. See also K. Phillips, Before Orientalism, 35–38; Vicentini, “I generi in Marco Polo.” On Polo and Venetian diplomatic reports, see Jackson, “Marco Polo,” 91.

151. On Rustichello’s role in the Description’s composition, see Bertolucci Pizzorusso, “Lingue e stili”; Polo, Il Milione, 1:xiii–xxvii; Psaki, “The Book’s Two Fathers”; Rieger, “Marco Polo.” On Rustichello’s Arthurian work, see Cigni, Il Romanzo Arturiano.

152. On narrative voice in the Description, see Gaunt, Marco Polo’s “Le Devisement du monde.”

153. See the list of Description manuscripts and their contents in Gadrat-Ouerfelli, Lire Marco Polo, 357–381.

154. Heers, Marco Polo, 292.

155. Two of the earliest examples appear in the accounts of Plano Carpini, who says the Mongols are more obedient to religious and secular authorities than any people in the world (Pian di Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 245), and of William of Rubruck, who writes that the Latins would conquer the world if they imitated Mongol military tactics (Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 278).

156. As Krynen notes, after 1200 “dans les chroniques, et dans les diplômes royaux, les expressions regnum Franciae et rex Franciae commencent à se substituer à celles de regnum Francorum et de rex Francorum [in chronicles and royal documents, the expressions regnum Franciae (kingdom of France) and rex Franciae (king of France) begin to replace regnum Francorum (kingdom of the Franks) and rex Francorum (king of the Franks)]” (L’Empire du roi, 67). See also Wood, “Regnum Franciae.”

157. Viard, Les grandes chroniques, 6:86, 116.

158. Polo, Le Devisement du monde, 2:25, 26.

159. The rubric for this chapter reads: “Comment le roy Guillaume d’Angleterre desiroit à avoir le royaume de France … et comment il fu occis soudainement d’une saiette par la divine vengance [How King William of England wished to possess the kingdom of France and how he was killed suddenly by an arrow, by divine vengeance]” (Viard, Les grandes chroniques, 5:85).

160. Polo, Le Devisement du monde, 3:60.

161. “Cele bataille dura du matin jusques a midi, mais au derrain, si comme il plot a Dieu et a la raison du Grant Caan, ot il la victoire [This battle lasted from morning to noon, but in the end, because it pleased God and the Great Khan was in the right, victory was his]” (Polo, Le Devisement du monde, 3:63).

162. Collins, “State Building”; Lot and Fawtier, Histoire des institutions, vol. 2; Krynen, L’Empire du roi; Wood, “Regnum Franciae.”

163. On recordkeeping, see, for example, Baldwin, Government of Philip Augustus, 402–423; Gasparri, L’écriture; Guyotjeannin, “French Manuscript Sources”; Guyotjeannin, “L’intégration”; Guyotjeannin, “Les méthodes de travail”; Guyotjeannin, “Super omnes thesauros”; Guyotjeannin and Potin, “La fabrique de la perpétuité”; Potin, “L’État et son trésor”; Potin, “La mise en archives”; Tessier, “L’enregistrement.” Inquests were temporary investigations that sought sworn testimony for the purpose of redressing wrongs or improving government; see Dejoux, Les enquêtes de Saint Louis; Dejoux, “Gouvernement et pénitence”; Dejoux, “Gouverner par l’enquête en France”; Gauvard, L’Enquête au moyen âge. On royal officers, see Carpenter and Mattéoni, “Offices and Officers”; Guenée, “Y a-t-il un État.”

164. Contamine, “Contribution à l’histoire d’un mythe”; Fawtier, “Comment le roi de France”; Lot, “L’État des paroisses”; Revel, “Knowledge of the Territory.”

165. On other examples of such geographical lists, see M. Desjardins, “Les savoirs des notaires.”

166. Polo, Le Devisement du monde, vol. 1:131, 3:98–99.

167. Polo, Le Devisement du monde, vol. 5, 120–121. As the text states, “Et ce fait il par toute la prouvince du Mangy et du Catay [And this (the census) he does throughout the provinces of Mangy (southern China) and Catay (northern China)]” (121).

168. Polo, Le Devisement du monde, 5:121.

169. On administrative documentation across Eurasia, see Britnell, Pragmatic Literacy.

170. Heng, Invention of Race, 329–330; Kinoshita, “Marco Polo’s Le Devisement du monde,” 68; Legassie, Medieval Invention of Travel, 41–45.

171. See, e.g., Racine, Marco Polo et ses voyages, 263; Wetzel, “Il Milione di Marco Polo,” 108.

172. See, e.g., Botero García, Les Rois; Cruse, Illuminating the “Roman d’Alexandre”, 103–144; Delogu, Theorizing the Ideal Sovereign.

173. The assimilation of royal and imperial power is expressed in the first line of the Song of Roland: “Carles li reis, nostre emperere magnes [Charles the king, our great emperor].” It is worth noting that in BL, Royal 19 D 1, Kublai is depicted in battle with his uncle Naian on folio 83r. He wears a crown on his helm, and on his shield and caparison are the royal arms of France. The text below this miniature reads: “It is true that this Kublai is the direct imperial descendant of Genghis Khan, the first lord.” Whether the artist intended to evoke a resemblance between Kublai and the French Crown is unclear—the Montbastons were neither deep nor subtle illustrators, and these arms are not applied to Kublai consistently (they reappear on 103r, but not in other miniatures); see Saurma-Jeltsch, “Metamorphic Other.”

174. Bossuat, “La formule”; C. Jones, “Rex Francie”; Krynen, L’Empire du roi, 49–51, 348–352, 384–387; O’Meara, Monarchy and Consent, 44–48.

175. See Krynen, L’Empire du roi, 179–187.

176. Molenaer, “Li Livres du gouvernement,” 251, 254, 271–272, 334–335, 311.

177. Polo, Le Devisement du monde, 2:104, 106, 107–108.

178. See Gaunt, “Coming Communities.”