Introduction
The Mongol Archive in Late Medieval France
In 1403, King Charles VI of France (r. 1380–1422) received an embassy led by Archbishop John of Sultaniyeh, who brought letters to the king from the Central Asian conqueror Tamerlane and his son Miran Shah. In his reply, Charles congratulated Tamerlane for his victory over the Ottoman sultan Bayezid the previous year at the battle of Ankara. He also thanked Tamerlane for allowing Christians and merchants free movement in his realm “just as in the time of our worthy predecessors [veluti tempore bonorum predecessorum nostrorum].”1 This short phrase is easily overlooked, but the fact that Charles was able to refer to “our predecessors” is due to one of the most remarkable archival projects in medieval Europe, if not all of medieval Eurasia. Charles could evoke a common history between his realm and Tamerlane’s because for the previous 160 years, French clerics, kings, and lords had been amassing information about the Mongols. Their efforts resulted in the creation of one of the largest documentary collections on the Mongols in all of Europe—a vast Mongol archive.
This book is a study of the cultural ramifications of contact between the French and the Mongols in the late Middle Ages. While the history of Franco-Mongol interaction has received much attention from scholars since the nineteenth century, the long-term influence of that interaction on the intellectual, political, and literary culture of France has not. The history of representations of the Mongols in late medieval France, and of the transmission and interpretation of these representations, is yet to be told in a comprehensive manner. French encounters with, interest in, and fear of the Mongols appeared in chronicles, crusade treatises, embassy reports, encyclopedias, letters, manuscript illuminations, maps, poems, prophecies, romances, sermons, and travel accounts. Some of these works, such as poems by Rutebeuf and Eustache Deschamps, contain only brief mentions of the “Tartars” or “Tartary.” Others, such as the report of John of Plano Carpini or Marco Polo’s Description of the World, revolutionized European understandings of the Mongols—and indeed of the world. Although the works in the Mongol archive were never housed together in a single place, they were in dialogue with one another either directly, through citation and paraphrase, or through reference to common sources and subjects, and they represent a robust discourse not wholly captured in the surviving material record. The Mongol archive in late medieval France is thus not a physical repository but a network of thematically related works.
In addition to the portrayal of the Mongols, this book is more broadly concerned with what Franco-Mongol contact can reveal about France’s place in medieval Eurasian history. Viewed as one among the many interconnected realms of Eurasia, France appears as a very different actor from the European power with which we are most familiar. Franco-Mongol contact becomes the product of the coeval expansionist ideologies of Latin Christians and Mongols that would drive their exchanges for generations and reshape the globe. A comparison of French and Mongol courts reveals the similarities that allowed meaningful communication but also highlights why the Mongols’ cosmopolitanism made them more effective conquerors and administrators. The Valois dynasty is European and, through its descent from Queen Elizabeth the Cuman of Hungary (ca. 1240–1290), had genealogical connections with the Asian world. The library of King Charles V (r. 1364–1380) is a monument to Eurasian intellectual culture, while Charles’s Catalan Atlas portrays a Mongol empire that is distant by land but close by sea. The Book of Marvels (ca. 1410), likely the largest illustrated vernacular compilation on Asia produced in medieval Europe, is a precursor to the explorer compilations and cosmographies of the early modern era. A lens that treats French understanding of and relations with the Mongols in this way further demonstrates how a global perspective transforms our understanding of late medieval France.
Taken together, these two approaches—the examination of works about Mongols and a conception of France in a Eurasian context—integrate France into what S. A. M. Adshead refers to as the “Mongol information circuit.”2 The product of this integration is gathered in appendix A, which is the foundational data set for this book.3 Appendix A lists the more than 130 texts composed, copied, or archived in France between 1221 and 1422 that include mention of or treat extensively the Mongols.4 This list also includes nearly forty embassies, councils, and works of art, and two manuscripts of major historical significance. Its chronology extends from the composition of the Relationes de Davide, the first European texts that refer to the Mongols, to the end of the reign of King Charles VI (d. 1422), the last French monarch to have direct contact with a “Tartar” lord. Appendix A distills to the essentials two centuries of Franco-Mongol contact and of Mongol-related writing and archiving in France, and thereby demonstrates the extent to which the Mongols figured in late medieval French culture.
Viewed as an ensemble, the works in the Mongol archive reveal the ways in which the Mongols transformed France’s understanding of its own place in global affairs and global history. This transformation began in 1221, when clerics and crusaders in Damietta on the Fifth Crusade received reports of an invincible conqueror in Asia named King David. This king was in fact a composite of different central Asian rulers, one of whom was Genghis Khan. Thereafter, the Mongol invasions of Europe of the 1230s and early 1240s, and European embassies of the 1240s and 1250s, launched one of the most remarkable chapters in European intellectual history as European secular and ecclesiastical elites tried to situate the Mongols in Western epistemological systems. This proved exceedingly difficult: it was not at all clear to which peoples mentioned in the Bible and by the ancient authors the Mongols corresponded, if any, and the places they and many of their subjects inhabited, and the languages they spoke, were largely if not entirely unknown to European tradition. Who and where the Mongols were, and what they wanted, motivated decades of information gathering that revealed to Europeans a world far larger than they had imagined and in which they were relatively marginal. The Mongol archive is in part a record of this emerging awareness of European marginality, and of the French and broader Latin Christian response to it.
Of Mongols and Archives
I have given a brief explanation of what I mean by the “Mongol archive,” but more should be said as both “Mongol” and “archive” are words with long histories and multiple meanings. Historians faced with the inaccuracy and insult of medieval European terminology for the Mongols have had to contend with the effects of medieval European ignorance about this group.5 Variants of the word “Mongol” appear rarely in European texts. The usual term is “Tartar”—and that for their land “Tartary”—a deformation of “Tatar” that acquired a pejorative connotation early on through linking the Mongols with Tartarus and thereby demonizing them. Already in the 1250s, the Mongols told the Franciscan William of Rubruck that they were called “Mongols,” not “Tartars,” yet the misnomer stuck.6 In this book, I use the term Mongols and, less frequently, “Tartars”—the latter in quotation marks to acknowledge this term’s negative connotations. For most of the period under examination, the “Tartars” constituted a single ethnic group for the Western writers included in this study. These authors usually did not distinguish between different Mongol groups, or between the Mongols and those whom they had conquered or with whom they made alliances. There are notable exceptions; as I discuss in chapter 3, certain writers were aware that the Cumans, Turkic nomads who lived in the steppe north of the Black and Caspian Seas, were not Mongols. And crucially, authors did distinguish between the Mongols and other “infidel” peoples, although here too the issue is complicated. European terms often had as much to do with political entities as with ethnicity. European writers recognized that the Mongols were not Seljuk or Anatolian Turks, or Mamluks, and that these groups were frequently the Mongols’ enemies. The question of how to designate specific groups or individuals continues to bedevil modern historians, who in some cases—through no fault of their own—may not have a better grasp of the medieval ethnic situation than did their medieval predecessors. As David Morgan observes, Mongolian tribes in the twelfth century were already “Turko-Mongol”—the distinction between the two peoples, and between the Mongols and others with whom they came into contact, at times remains enigmatic.7
The Mongol archive at the heart of this book is, as already indicated, not a single collection, institution, or location in late medieval France. Instead, I use the term “archive” in the sense of a documentary grounding that forms the basis of received knowledge and has implications for epistemology, for truth claims, and for power. In its broadest sense, this archive is the totality of artifacts and events that connect the kingdom of France to the Mongols. These connections may be textual: I include in the archive any known document produced or housed in France that mentions the Mongols even once, and even if that reference is erroneous or imaginary (e.g., it situates the Mongols in a land they never encountered or in a fantastical setting). The Franco-Mongol connections recorded in the archive may be visual: manuscript illuminations that purport to portray the Mongols, such as illustrations of Marco Polo’s Description of the World or Hayton’s Flower of the Histories, belong to the Mongol archive (chapter 5). Or the connections may be material (chapter 2, appendix B), although the relationships of individual objects to the Mongols are often conjectural. For example, the Chinese sword hilt depicted on the mid-thirteenth-century tomb of a knight from the d’Aluye family likely came into the possession of its French owner thanks to global trade networks facilitated by Mongol conquests.8 But is this also true of the pourpoint of Charles of Blois, a fourteenth-century padded and quilted doublet of cloth of gold that may not have been produced in or transited through a Mongol khanate?9 Finally, the Mongol archive also includes people and their encounters. Marco Polo gave a copy of his Description of the World to a Frenchman, Thibaut of Chepoy, when the latter visited Venice in 1307 (chapter 3). Hayton of Gorigos, a member of the Armenian royal family who fought with the Mongols against the Turks and later became a Premonstratensian monk, went to France in the early 1300s and composed his Flower of the Histories while in Poitiers. In chapter 3, I discuss the Cuman ancestry of the Valois, whose forebear Queen Elizabeth of Hungary fled Cumania when the Mongols attacked. Given the close contact between the French elite, particularly the Burgundians, and Italian bankers and merchants, it is possible, even likely, that there were “Tartar” slaves in France in the late Middle Ages.10
From a material perspective, then, there were a number of relevant repositories preserving information about the Mongols in late medieval France. Foremost were the royal archive and royal library. Many of the texts, manuscripts, and objects I discuss in this book were produced for or preserved by the monarchy, and for this reason several survive to the present. Other repositories existed in the libraries and art collections of the nobility, notably those of the Burgundians and of John of Berry. Monastic, cathedral, and school libraries and the personal libraries of ecclesiastics also gathered and preserved these materials. By the fourteenth century, textual sources also found their way into the libraries of merchants and patricians. It was in part thanks to these lay readers’ taste for exotic tales that The Book of John Mandeville became the most successful work, by number of surviving manuscripts, in the Mongol archive.
In arguing that the Mongols occupied a significant place in late medieval French culture and imagination, I do not mean to imply that they were less important in other parts of Europe. On the contrary, Mongol archives could be found across Latin Christendom and beyond, and a comparative study of them would likely yield useful insights into many aspects of the global history of the late Middle Ages. England, like France, received a constant stream of information about, and some embassies from, the Mongols. One of the most significant early sources on the Mongols produced in Latin Christendom is the Chronica majora of Matthew Paris, a monk at Saint Albans.11 Some works that were part of the French Mongol archive, copies of which made it to England, were not preserved in France and survive only as recorded in Matthew’s chronicle. English readers both lay and clerical were likewise interested in learning about the Mongols throughout the late Middle Ages, as copies of Polo’s Description and of Mandeville produced or archived in England make clear. However, unlike the kings of France, in this period the kings of England did not accrue a significant private library, rendering it difficult to assess what Mongol-related texts they had.12 Elites in Spain were also interested in the Mongols, as indicated by copies of Polo’s Description and the Catalan Atlas, which was produced in Majorca and is likely the earliest surviving map to employ Polo’s geography (see chapter 4). The lords and prelates of central and eastern Europe, threatened as they were by the Mongols, had reports on and diplomatic exchanges with them from the 1230s. Indeed, the Mongols loomed large in imaginary and diplomatic sources across Europe.
The largest Mongol archives were surely those in Italy. The papacy possessed an immense number of letters and reports about the Mongols. These ranged from exchanges with lords throughout Latin Christendom about Mongol threats and attacks, to ambassadorial accounts, to the missives and reports of missionaries who proselytized in realms under Mongol rule, to letters to and from the Mongols.13 Between 1310 and 1322, the Dominican Francesco Pipino translated Marco Polo’s Description into Latin, and thereafter Dominican friars used the Latin text for sermons and chronicles.14 The cities of Genoa and Venice, because of their colonial, commercial, diplomatic, and military activity in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, produced an extraordinary amount of documentation, generating their own archives. In letters, registers, and reports, the Genoese and Venetians recorded negotiations with Mongol rulers, commercial transactions with Mongols and those who owed them tribute, and the sale of Mongol slaves.15 Other Italian cities were involved in international trade and likely had gathered extensive information about the Mongols. One famous example is the handbook of the Florentine Francesco Balducci Pegolotti, known since the eighteenth century as La Pratica della Mercatura. Completed ca. 1340, it provides data on commercial centers, commodities, prices, and routes across Eurasia and in North Africa, and thus offers a portrait of the world system that the Mongols made possible.
The Italian archives are in many ways the opposite of France’s Mongol archive. Whereas the latter became fossilized by the mid-fourteenth century—that is, it preserved a largely outdated and static image of the Mongols—the Italians documented the Mongols in the present. The Italians’ economic, political, and religious objectives meant that they needed to know as much as possible about the Mongols’ military might, political situation, and strategic planning, which led to the constant updating and archiving of their Mongol-related records. The Mongol archives of the French and Italians ultimately reflect the different roles played by, and the trajectories of, the kingdom of France and Italian cities in global affairs in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: with a few notable exceptions, the French withdrew into northwestern Europe, while the Italians expanded their activity in North Africa and Asia.
Objectives of This Book
As noted in the preface, one inspiration for this book was a fascination with the global connections that appear in medieval art. This study also grew out of an interest in the reception of Marco Polo’s Description of the World in late medieval France, which I came to realize could not be understood without grappling with the broader intellectual and epistemological framework of the French literate elite. The Mongols were already known to French nobles and clerics when Polo’s text arrived in France around 1310. To fully appreciate the shock of his text, and why French elites were interested in it, one must begin with the earliest European encounters with the Mongols. Likewise, to understand Polo’s influence in France, one must consider the later history of Franco- and European-Mongol contact. In the meantime, Christine Gadrat-Ouerfelli’s magisterial Lire Marco Polo au Moyen Age was published and told much of the reception story. Polo remains central to this book but has become part of a much larger analysis.
Equally important have been those scholars who have emphasized the global dimensions of medieval French language and literature. As Sharon Kinoshita has amply demonstrated, many medieval French works of all genres were not set in France or related to France.16 David Wrisley’s digital projects and publications mapping locations referenced in medieval French literature have revealed the extensive geographical imagination of French authors.17 Other scholars have shown the extent to which medieval French literature was in dialogue with, or an extension of, Eurasian textual culture. Research on the Alexander Romance, Barlaam and Josaphat, the fabliaux, and Kalila and Dimna (among others) underscores France’s connections to the global networks through which stories, like people and goods, circulated in the Middle Ages.18 Much attention has been paid as well to the presence of written and spoken French far beyond France.19 All of this scholarship is relevant to understanding the Mongol archive, which similarly reflects and arises from wide-ranging literary and geographical imaginations, information networks, travel in its many forms, and multilingualism, particularly involving many dialects of French.
This study contributes as well to scholarship on Eurasian history, and especially on European-Mongol contact, going back to the nineteenth century. Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat’s two articles of 1822 and 1824, “Mémoires sur les relations politiques des princes chrétiens, et particulièrement des rois de France, avec les empereurs Mongols” (Essays on the political relations of Christian princes, and particularly of the kings of France, with the Mongol emperors), remain foundational references, as does Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy’s article on Charles VI’s correspondence with Tamerlane, also from 1822. Paul Pelliot and Jean Richard devoted much of their careers to Euro-Asian relations in the premodern era. Peter Jackson has likewise shown how important the Mongols were within medieval history with his magisterial The Mongols and the West. The interdisciplinary scholarship of Janet Abu-Lughod, Thomas Allsen, Gian Andri Bezzola, Geraldine Heng, Axel Klopprogge, Philippe Ménard, Felicitas Schmieder, and Denis Sinor, among others, has greatly expanded our understanding of Euro-Mongol relations and of European portrayals of the Mongols.
This book is structured chronologically. Each chapter examines the meaning and importance of salient texts, objects, or encounters in the Mongol archive. Chapter 1, “The Origins of the Mongol Archive in Late Medieval France,” opens with a discussion of writing on Asia in France in the twelfth century, with a focus on those texts that anticipated or influenced the Mongol archive’s subsequent development. It then addresses the founding of the royal archive under King Philip II Augustus (r. 1180–1223), since many works in the Mongol archive were produced for the Crown. The third section discusses the history and early expansion of the Mongols to the death of Genghis Khan in 1227. The last two sections analyze the three texts, each known as the Relatio de Davide, that were the first European works to mention the Mongols. I discuss the origins of these reports, their content, and their transmission to and preservation in France.
Chapter 2, “Louis IX, the Mongols, and International Court Culture,” analyzes three case studies that demonstrate the importance of courts in enabling and shaping Franco-Mongol contact between 1237 and 1270. The first part focuses on the earliest reports in France about the Mongol invasions of Europe and the French response to them. The second part examines John of Plano Carpini’s and Simon of Saint-Quentin’s descriptions of the spatial, ritual, and material features of Mongol courts. Despite linguistic and cultural barriers, the friars produced insightful, if pessimistic, portraits of Mongol courts and society. The next section is a study of the embassy that Louis IX sent to the Mongols in 1249, with a focus on the tent-chapel he had made for the khan’s court. The tent’s production, and its appropriation by the Mongols, reflect the many variables that both facilitated and complicated intercultural communication. The final section examines William of Rubruck’s account of his mission to the khan Mongke as an attempt to make Louis IX appreciate the extent to which he and the French kingdom were implicated in Mongol affairs.
Chapter 3, “Eurasian France: The Cumans, the Valois, and Marco Polo,” first discusses Cuman migration, starting with the birth of Mongol expansionism under Genghis Khan and ending with the definitive settlement of the Cumans in Hungary in 1246 and the marriage of King Béla IV’s son Stephen to Elizabeth the Cuman in 1247 or 1248. Stephen and Elizabeth were maternal great-grandparents of King Philip VI of France (r. 1328–1350), the first Valois king, which means that the Valois dynasty had Cuman ancestry. The next section examines the representation of the Cumans in French literature to understand French attitudes toward them, and particularly the reasons for Queen Elizabeth’s absence from French historiography. As I argue through an analysis of chansons de geste, her erasure was likely the result of patrilineal ideology, religious and racial prejudice, and her conversion to Christianity. I then discuss the reception of Marco Polo’s Description of the World in France in the early fourteenth century. The third section discusses London, BL, Royal 19 D 1, the remarkable “crusade compilation” of King Philip VI. Produced in Paris in 1335–1336, this manuscript preserves the oldest copy of Polo’s Description of the World in the langue d’oïl. I argue that the Description became a crusade text in Royal 19 D 1 because of the vision of this manuscript’s planner, the Dominican Pierre de la Palud, for whom crusade was but one part of global Christianization efforts. The last part of this chapter argues that in addition to its relevance as a crusade text, the Description was of interest to elite French readers because its portrayal of imperial authority was very similar to royalist ideology in France.
Chapter 4, “The Mongol Archive and the Library of King Charles V,” begins with a brief overview of the library’s history and function. An essential instrument of Charles’s governance, the library entertained and instructed the king and his family, provided a resource for his councilors and administrators, impressed subjects and foreigners, and preserved and expanded the cultural and intellectual legacy Charles had inherited from his predecessors. The second part of this chapter discusses the place of the Mongols in the library’s collection, with a focus on Polo’s Description and its relationship to other works in the library; on major works that make brief mentions of the Mongols; and on The Book of John Mandeville, the most popular text on the Mongols in late medieval Europe. The final section analyzes the Catalan Atlas (ca. 1375). Famed for its use of Polo’s Description and its detailed depiction of the world, the Atlas complemented Charles V’s interests and library. It is possible that the map’s innovative representations arose from Charles’s influence.
Chapter 5, “The Mongol Archive during the Reign of King Charles VI,” begins with an examination of the portrayal of the Mongols in the work of Philippe de Mézières (ca. 1325–1405). For Philippe, the Mongols were both historical actors and an allegorical entity that existed beyond time. In his Songe du Vieil Pelerin, treatises for his crusader Order of the Passion of Jesus Christ, and Epistre lamentable et consolatoire, Philippe used the Mongols as examples for Christian lords and warriors. At the same time, Philippe anticipated conflict with them and thus expressed an ambivalence often evident in the Mongol archive. The chapter then turns to the embassy of Archbishop John of Sultaniyeh to Paris in 1403 on Tamerlane’s behalf and the biography of Tamerlane he composed there. One of the most significant items in the Mongol archive, John’s account is a rare example of contemporary documentation on the “Tartars” produced by a source in France. The final section discusses The Book of Marvels (BnF, fr. 2810), a famed and richly illuminated compilation whose texts all mention the Mongols or describe them at length. Commissioned by Duke John the Fearless of Burgundy and produced in Paris around 1410, The Book of Marvels reflects John’s identity as a member of the Valois dynasty, crusader and captive, and traveler. It is also a monument to the Mongol archive’s long and rich history.
I conclude with a brief consideration of the Mongol archive’s afterlife. Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy inherited works in the archive, commissioned new copies and translations of them, and ordered new reports on eastern Europe, the Black Sea region, and the Middle East that included information on the “Tartars.” Works in the Mongol archive were also preserved in early modern print culture and frequently appeared in compilations devoted to exploration and cosmography. In addition to the complete list of Mongol-related texts and events in appendix A, appendix B discusses objects that embody Franco-Mongol contact in this period.
Although my aim is to offer a full account of the Mongol archive, this book is certainly not a comprehensive study of Franco-Mongol contact during these centuries. Missing from these pages, for instance, is considered discussion of the Italian Angevins, the dynasty founded by Louis IX’s brother Charles I that ruled in southern Italy in the late Middle Ages. The Angevins’ interactions with and records of the Mongols deserve their own monograph.20 Similarly, I discuss only minimally other European and Asian realms’ contacts with the Mongols, even though these contacts were often known to French elites and were in some cases decisive in the development of France’s Mongol archive. While appendix A demonstrates the consistent presence of the Mongols in French literary production, it lists only two manuscripts: London, British Library, Royal 19 D 1, and The Book of Marvels. Because it does not list more individual manuscripts, appendix A does not give a true sense of the scale and distribution of the Mongol archive in late medieval France. Works such as Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale, the Description of the World, Hayton’s Flower of the Histories, and The Book of John Mandeville circulated in many copies and were housed in many libraries. Many more people than those discussed in this book, both clerical and lay, men and women, were familiar with the Mongols.
Although I focus on elite culture in this book, it should be kept in mind that the Mongols also belonged to the broader French imaginary in this period. This book only hints at the place the Mongols occupied in popular culture, rumor, and folklore in late medieval France. Rutebeuf may have reflected popular sentiment in 1262, expressing fear of Mongol invasion in his “Complainte de Constantinople” following the fall of the Latin Empire of Constantinople in 1261.21 In 1266 and 1268, Gerard of Abbeville proposed a quodlibet at the University of Paris on the question of whether the pope could grant a dispensation to a consecrated virgin from her vow of chastity in the case where a pagan tyrant was going to kill the faithful unless she married him. The question probably indicates that news of the marriage in 1265 of the ilkhan (the title for the ruler of the ilkhanate [see map 1], meaning “subordinate or lesser khan”) Abaqa to the daughter of the Byzantine emperor Michael VIII Paleologos had reached Paris.22 The Grandes chroniques, alongside other sources across Europe, recount the rumor that the ilkhan Gazan and a multitude of his people had converted to Christianity in 1300.23 Philippe de Mézières, who died in 1405, claimed to have met Europeans who had lived in China. These and other references in the Mongol archive indicate the extent to which the Mongols became part of the collective consciousness in late medieval France, to be resurrected as circumstances dictated.
No single portrait of the Mongols emerges from France’s Mongol archive. Already in Plano Carpini’s account we find lists of the Mongols’ virtues and vices. Simon of Saint-Quentin believed they were in league with the devil, while Marco Polo called Kublai Khan the greatest potentate on earth. The humanization of the Mongols in the 1240s was followed by decades of uncertainty about their intentions vis-à-vis the Holy Land, Europe, and Christianity. While there were many serious and successful attempts to learn about them, the Mongols nonetheless remained a protean subject. The variety of portrayals of the Mongols is itself significant because it reveals the ambivalence—the curiosity and fear, the intellectual openness and traditionalism—of the French elites who gathered information about them. Ultimately the meaning of the Mongols in late medieval France depended on the perspectives of those who commissioned and produced texts and images. Frequently these works were more about French anxieties or ambitions than they were about the Mongols themselves, who often became symbols divorced from historical reality. The Mongol archive was both a map describing the world beyond Latin Christendom and a mirror reflecting French knowledge of and belief about that world.
1. Clavijo, La route de Samarkand, 298.
2. Adshead, Central Asia in World History, 70–73.
3. See also the maps that show the locations of places important to this book.
4. The Chronographia regum Francorum was completed ca. 1429 but begun during the reign of Charles VI and contains an account of his reign, so I have included it.
5. Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William of Rubruck, 10–11; see also the overview in Schmieder, Europa und die Fremden, 22–24.
6. Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William of Rubruck, 10–11.
7. Morgan, The Mongols, 50. As Rachewiltz notes, “Mongolia was the cradle, home and stamping ground of both those peoples [Turks and Mongols], so that they shared from remote times a common way of life, the same spiritual, i.e. shamanistic, background (with related cults and customs), and exchanged words, terms and titles as the occasion arose.” Rachewiltz, Secret History of the Mongols, 1:xxv.
8. Boehm and Holcomb, Jerusalem, 211; Nickel, “Crusader’s Sword”; and appendix B.
9. Donzet and Siret, Les fastes du Gothique, 399–400; Rosati, “Panni tartarici,” 83–85; and appendix B.
10. On the Mongols and the slave trade in the Black Sea region, see H. Barker, That Most Precious Merchandise.
11. Reed, Matthew Paris.
12. Stratford, “Early Royal Collections.”
13. Richard, La papauté et les missions; Tanase, “Jusqu’aux limites du monde.”
14. Dutschke, “Francesco Pipino”; Gadrat-Ouerfelli, “Marco Polo.”
15. H. Barker, That Most Precious Merchandise; Di Cosmo and Pubblici, Venezia e i Mongoli; Jackson, The Mongols, 290–328.
16. Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries.
17. Visualizing Medieval Places, About page, https://visualizingmedievalplaces.wordpress.com/about/; Wrisley, “Locating Medieval French”; Wrisley, “Spatial Humanities.”
18. Gaullier-Bougassas, Les Romans d’Alexandre; Lopez and McCracken, In Search of the Christian Buddha; Luyster, “Conversion of Kalila and Dimna”; Stoneman, History of Alexander the Great. The fabliau “Bérengier au long cul” shares motifs with the Mongol tale of Siddhi-Kur. See Rossi and Straub, Fabliaux érotiques, 241.
19. See Kleinhenz and Busby, Medieval Multilingualism; Morreale and Paul, The French of Outremer; Stahuljak, Les fixeurs au Moyen Age; the work of Laura Minervini; and the website Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France (https://medievalfrancophone.ac.uk/), among many other studies and resources.
20. Monti, Da Carlo I, 17–36.
21. Rutebeuf, Oeuvres complètes, 1:366–367, ll. 154–156.
22. Sullivan, “Quodlibeta,” 371.
23. Schein, “Gesta Dei”; Viard, Les grandes chroniques, 8:185–186.