The Mongol Invasions Seen from France

The Mongol archive had lain dormant for nearly sixteen years when in the late 1230s the first reports reached France of the “Tartars” and their invasion of Cumania, the steppe region east of Hungary and north of the Black and the Caspian Seas. Thereafter a stream of letters arrived in France describing attacks on Hungary, Poland, Bohemia, and Germany until, in 1242, the invasions came to a halt. If the Relationes de Davide represent the first chapter of the Mongol archive’s story, the period between ca. 1237 and 1242 marks the second. In these years, the Mongols became firmly implanted in the French imagination as a menace to Latin Christendom. They were also a mystery, as the French remained in the dark as to their place of origin, religion, and objectives. This phase of the Mongol archive records a remarkable moment in world history: the first direct contact between Latin Christians and Mongols, European fear and bafflement in the face of this new threat, and the earliest attempts to learn who the Mongols were and what they wanted.

To understand why the Mongols invaded Europe in 1237, we must return to the reign of Genghis Khan. As we saw in the previous chapter, the westward campaign of 1219, reports of which provided the core of the Relationes and the King David legend, brought the Mongols into the Cuman steppe and Russia for the first time. There they discovered plentiful pasturelands and cities from which they could demand tribute. This region Genghis Khan intended to give to his eldest son Jochi, who died a few months before his father in 1227. The bequest therefore went to Jochi’s son Batu.

In 1235, Genghis’s son and successor Ogodei decided to send an army to the far west to conquer the lands that had been granted to Batu.⁸ Led by Batu, this was the campaign that brought the Mongols into Europe for the first time. It began with the invasion of the Cuman steppe in 1236. By 1240, the Mongols had captured the Russian cities of Ryazan (1237), Vladimir (1238), and Torzhok (1238), and subdued the steppe peoples. They then swept across the Russian steppe and captured Kyiv on December 6, 1240. The Mongols were now on the border of Latin Christendom.

In early 1241, the Mongols launched a five-pronged attack into the heart of Europe. Two detachments invaded Poland, two Hungary, and one Bohemia. The primary objective was the Hungarian steppe, but the multifront strategy was intended to confuse and dilute European forces and to acquire booty. Once the Europeans had organized a military response, two major battles occurred. At the battle of Liegnitz on April 9, 1241, the northern Mongol army defeated a force of Poles and Teutonic Knights. Two days later, the main Mongol army vanquished the Hungarians at the battle of Mohi, and King Béla IV of Hungary was forced to flee. The Mongols advanced to Wiener Neustadt in eastern Austria before stopping to winter in Hungary.

In late 1241, Ogodei’s death brought the Mongols’ westward advance to a halt. The election of a new khan required a quriltai, the customary assembly of notables at which major decisions were made. It is assumed that Batu stopped fighting because he wished to participate in the quriltai. Not only would he have felt it his right and duty, but he would have understood that if he stayed in Hungary he risked losing power, influence, and possibly more, especially since the leading candidate for khan was Batu’s rival Guyuk.⁹ It is also possible that despite contemporary European fears, as well as the counterfactual imaginings of later scholars, Batu had no intention of going any farther west. As the Mongols knew from their experience with the Chinese, their lifestyle and military culture were not suited to cultivated land and urbanized territory. In 1242, the Mongols retreated to the Cuman steppe, and King Béla returned to his devastated kingdom.

It is possible that the French had news of the Mongols’ invasion as early as 1237. The Cistercian Alberic of Trois-Fontaines wrote in his chronicle that in 1237 the “Tartars” killed their lord Prester John and forty-two bishops in Armenia, invaded “Comania” east of Hungary, and intended to invade Hungary itself. Four Dominicans were sent from Hungary on a journey of a hundred days to “veterem Hungariam [old Hungary],” which they discovered was already occupied by the Mongols.¹⁰ This and other entries suggest that Alberic was receiving reports directly from Hungary, which is not surprising given that in 1237 King Béla IV had monks from the abbey of Trois-Fontaines come to his realm and settle in Petrovaradin.¹¹ Alberic’s chronicle indicates that he, and likely other clerics in France, was informed of the Mongol threat well before the invasions of eastern Europe. Whether these reports made their way to King Louis IX we cannot say, but it seems that the Cistercians and the mendicants with whom he was in contact were among the first in France to know of the Mongols.¹²

Other evidence for early reports about the Mongols in France comes from the Chronica majora of Matthew Paris.¹³ Although written and preserved in England, the Chronica is nonetheless a major source of information on the Mongol archive in France in this period. Matthew writes that in 1238 the “Old Man of the Mountain” (the leader of the Ismaili sect, or Assassins) and other “Saracens” sent envoys to the kings of France and England to request aid against the Mongols. Matthew does not record the French response to this embassy. However, if his account is reliable, and if indeed Louis was aware of the reports from Hungary, then it is possible that by 1238 the king knew that the Mongols threatened both eastern Europe and the Middle East.¹⁴

Matthew’s Chronica is also an important source for the reports of the Mongol invasions that circulated in France beginning in 1241. He records two letters of 1241 from Henry Raspe, Count of Lorraine, to Duke Henry II of Brabant, in which Raspe describes the Mongol invasions of Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia, and then appeals for aid. Matthew mentions that Henry II forwarded Raspe’s warnings to William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris, in 1241. The Chronica majora reproduces a letter requesting help against the Mongols dated July 3, 1241, from Emperor Frederick II to “the Christian princes” (among whom was Louis IX, as Matthew notes).¹⁵ Matthew copies two other letters destined for France from the invasion period. The first, from 1241 or 1242, was sent by Yves de Narbonne to the archbishop of Bordeaux and describes the siege and rescue of Wiener Neustadt; the other, dated April 10, 1242, from an anonymous Hungarian bishop to William of Auvergne, recounts what the bishop learned from his interrogation of two Mongol captives.¹⁶

The chronicles of Alberic of Trois-Fontaines and Matthew Paris show that there was more and more news of the Mongols in the circles with which Louis IX was connected. The earliest report addressed to the king himself is a letter written in French in 1241 or 1242 from Ponce d’Aubon, preceptor of the Templars in France, which describes the Mongol invasions of Hungary, Poland, and Germany.¹⁷ It therefore appears that secular and ecclesiastical leaders of France, including the king himself, were informed early on about the Mongols by reliable (and powerful) sources. It also seems that French ecclesiastics mobilized quickly in response to the reports. In 1240 or 1241, Odo of Chateauroux, the chancellor of the University of Paris and a close associate of Louis IX, wrote a sermon against the Mongols.¹⁸ While the circumstances of this sermon’s transmission are unknown, Odo gave another sermon “pro negotio Tartarorum” (on the problem of the Tartars) between August and October 1241 to a church council in France called by Pope Gregory IX to respond to the Mongol threat. The papal order for the council was addressed to both ecclesiastical and secular leaders.¹⁹

Another record of the ecclesiastical response may be the Livre of Moses ben Abraham. An abridgment and translation into Old French of the Sefer Yosippon, which was the Hebrew adaptation of the first-century Antiquitates iudaicae and the Bellum iudaicum of Flavius Josephus, the Livre is one of the most remarkable records of the invasion period and deserves much more study.²⁰ The Livre refutes the identification of the invading “Tartars” with the Ten Lost Tribes and thereby attempts to counter the European Christian belief that the Jews were in league with the Mongols because of their kinship.²¹ Moses ben Abraham writes that a former captive of the Mongols spoke to the Duke of Brabant about them and then made his way to Paris. Rachetta argues that the Livre was prepared for William of Auvergne in 1244, and that it demonstrates the information gathering and analysis that the Mongol invasions prompted in Paris.

Much has been made of Europeans’ terror at the news of the Mongol invasions, and there was surely anxiety in France. As a preface to Ponce d’Aubon’s letter, the chronicler writes that “people abandoned much business in France out of fear of the Tartars,”²² while Ponce d’Aubon writes that if the German forces are defeated, the Mongols “will find no one who can resist them all the way to your realm.”²³ In his letter of 1241, Frederick II also states that if German resistance falters, “the rest of the world will then feel the thunder of the suddenly-coming tempest.” By 1242, Louis IX and the French elite seemingly had ample warning that the Mongol invasions could threaten France. Fear among the French elite is vividly portrayed in Matthew Paris’s account of the exchange between Louis IX and his mother, Blanche of Castille. Filled with dread at the news of the invasions, Blanche calls for Louis and asks him what is to be done about the “Tartars.” Louis replies that “either we will thrust them back into the regions of Tartarus … or else they shall send all of us to heaven.”²⁴ Whether an invention, speculation, or informed gossip, this anecdote speaks to the tenor of the times. The Louis of this episode acknowledges the severity of the Mongol menace, but he is resolved to face it and is firm in his faith. Matthew Paris seems to express the general fear of Latin Christians and the hope they placed in their leaders.

A common theme of all of these works, from Alberic’s chronicle to Ponce d’Aubon’s letter, is ignorance about the Mongols’ origins and objectives. As Matthew Paris writes, “Where have such people, who are so numerous, till now lain concealed?” Frederick II writes that he does not know exactly where the “Tartars” come from, but they have launched their attacks from southern regions.²⁵ Matthew Paris rejects this notion and speculates that they may descend from the Ten Lost Tribes who were enclosed behind the Caucasus mountains by Alexander the Great.²⁶ He also notes that the “Tartars” resemble Hyrcanians and Scythians, and he implies that like them the “Tartars” may come from the “mountainous and rugged regions of the north.”²⁷ In fact, there were Latin Christians who knew that the Mongols came from steppes far to the east. In late 1237 or early 1238, the Dominican Julian prepared a report for Pope Gregory IX and King Béla IV of Hungary after traveling to the Ural region, where he interviewed two captive Mongol envoys.²⁸ There is no indication that Julian’s information was transmitted to France.

This speculation about the Mongols’ geographical origins, like the dehumanizing and demonizing discourses about them, echoed long-standing traditions. Since Herodotus, nomads had been viewed as barbarians in the European intellectual tradition.²⁹ The seventh-century Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius highlighted nomads’ past destruction and apocalyptic role in the future. For many European observers, the Mongols were divine punishment, their violent, rushing masses likened to floods, winds, storms, and animals. The Mongols seemed to act in concert instinctually, without central direction, as if they were an unthinking force of nature.³⁰ Numerous texts identify the Mongols as Gog and Magog or as other apocalyptic peoples (including the Ten Lost Tribes) who had burst from their captivity to subjugate the world. A concordance of European letters and reports about the Mongols composed between the invasions of the 1230s–1240s and those of 1259 would show the same terms and formulas employed repeatedly: verbs of motion (furere [“rampage”], ingredi [“to enter”], invadere, prosilire [“to burst forth”]), cities and regions ruined, and peoples killed and enslaved.

Despite sermons, letters, and reports about the invasions, and despite the anecdote recounted by Matthew Paris, it seems that between 1237 and 1245 Louis IX perceived the Mongols as a distant peril.³¹ He does not appear to have planned or taken any direct action against the Mongols, or to have prepared for a possible invasion of his kingdom. It is worth pausing here to consider why Louis did not respond more forcefully. In 1242 the Mongol threat may have abated, but unlike in 1221, the Mongols did not disappear from Europe’s view. They were now a permanent presence in eastern Europe and a direct threat to Latin Christendom and particularly to Hungary, as Louis well knew.

I see several reasons for Louis’s lack of immediate response. One is that before 1245, Louis, like other European leaders, did not understand who the Mongols were and what they wanted. Without more information, Louis could not formulate a plan against them. Since he did not perceive them as an existential threat, he did not feel the need to organize a response. Given the distance and the many realms that lay between France and the Mongols, Louis also probably felt that the Mongols were a problem for the church and other Christian lords.

Moreover, to the extent that Louis was concerned with foreign affairs, his focus was on the defense of Byzantium and the Holy Land. The visit in 1237 of Emperor Baldwin II of Constantinople, who requested aid for his beleaguered realm, made a deep impression on Louis.³² Baldwin was threatened not by the Mongols but rather by Orthodox Christians and Muslim forces. He agreed to give Louis IX relics from the Byzantine imperial treasury, including the crown of thorns, in exchange for financial assistance. Little could Baldwin or Louis know that in 1242 Baldwin would fight twice against the Mongols, winning the first battle but losing the second. Thereafter, while Baldwin maintained diplomatic contact with the Mongols, he did not become their subject.³³ In the eleven years that followed Baldwin’s visit, Louis IX prepared himself, his government, and his subjects for a crusade that he would lead to the eastern Mediterranean to liberate the Holy Land. His enemies would be Muslims, not Mongols.³⁴

This is not to say that Louis was indifferent to or remained uninformed about the Mongol threat. As we will see in the rest of this chapter, Louis was an essential node in the international networks that gathered information about the Mongols. Louis did not attend the church council of 1245 in Lyon, at which responses to the Mongols were discussed, but he was nonetheless deeply implicated in it. He had representatives there, and the council decided that he should lead a crusade in defense of the Holy Land. Louis’s associate Andrew of Longjumeau was among those sent by Pope Innocent IV on embassies to the Mongols just before the council began. Louis met with John of Plano Carpini, another papal ambassador recently returned from his stay with the Mongols, before departing on crusade in 1248. Louis himself met ambassadors from the Mongol commander in Persia while in Cyprus, about which he and his entourage informed the pope and people in France. Louis sent a reply embassy in 1248–1249 headed by Andrew of Longjumeau that I discuss below.

Moreover, Louis contributed to the creation of one of the most significant compilations of information on the Mongols in Latin Christendom: the “Tartar” sections in Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale, part of his massive encyclopedia titled Speculum maius.³⁵ Vincent was a Dominican who spent his career in Paris as a lector (master) in the order’s studium (school).³⁶ The order’s heads had Vincent produce the Speculum maius so that the friars would have a resource for learning and preaching. The Speculum maius was a florilegium, a portable library, a book of books, a summary of knowledge, and an act of devotion. Louis IX gave Vincent funds to produce the first part of the Speculum historiale, a copy of which Vincent presented to the king in 1244.³⁷ When Vincent revised the book around 1250, he excerpted and combined John of Plano Carpini’s and Simon of Saint-Quentin’s ambassadorial reports, thereby saving a good portion of Simon’s account from oblivion since it survives only in the Speculum.³⁸ Paulmier-Foucart and Duchenne suggest that the Dominican monastery of Saint-Jacques had its own Mongol archive, which in addition to the two ambassadorial reports included letters and documents related to Louis IX’s contacts with the Mongols while on crusade.³⁹ Be that as it may, the Speculum historiale shows that these early reports about the Mongols circulated in Paris only a few years after their composition. If initially Louis IX does not appear to have done much in response to the Mongol invasion, he subsequently played an important role, directly and indirectly, in gathering information on them and expanding the Mongol archive in France.

Latin Ambassadors at Mongol Courts

Who were the Mongols and what did they want? These were the dominant questions among the elite of Latin Christendom in the invasion period and immediately thereafter. To answer them, Pope Innocent IV organized a council (Lyon I, 1245), embassies, and fact-finding missions that delivered an enormous amount of information. Louis IX followed suit by encouraging William of Rubruck to visit and write a report on the Mongols a few years later. As a result of these endeavors, the Mongol archive in late medieval France ballooned significantly and became a major repository of knowledge about the Mongols. Because of this intelligence gathering, the period between 1245 and 1257 is perhaps the most significant in the history of contact between Latin Christendom and the Mongols. In these years, the perception of the Mongols among the Latin European elite was largely demystified and humanized.

From the Latin Christian perspective, it was initially not clear that the Mongols formed an ordered society and were capable of diplomacy. This impression was in part the result of the anger and contempt noted earlier that equated the Mongols to animals. It also arose from ignorance. In the same way that they did not know whence the Mongols came, so did Latins not know about their social structure. As the papal ambassador Ascelin explained to the Mongol lord Baiju’s chamberlain in 1247, the pope knew nothing of the Mongols’ leadership.⁴⁰ It was to remedy this situation, and to invite eastern Christians to unite with Rome, that Innocent IV sent three embassies to the Mongols in 1245, all of which appear to have left before the Council of Lyon began.⁴¹ The embassy led by the Franciscan John of Plano Carpini traveled to Mongolia through eastern Europe and central Asia, witnessed the enthronement of Guyuk, and returned to Lyon in November 1247. Those of the Dominicans Andrew of Longjumeau (returned to Lyon mid-1247) and Ascelin of Cremona (returned by summer 1248) made for the Mongol armies in the Near East.⁴²

Each of these embassies produced reports that circulated in one form or another. Two versions of Plano Carpini’s report survive, plus summaries by his traveling companion Benedict the Pole and by another Franciscan named C. de Bridia.⁴³ However, the most widely distributed version of Plano Carpini’s account is the excerpted text that Vincent of Beauvais included in the Speculum historiale.⁴⁴ A summary of Longjumeau’s embassy and observations survives in Matthew Paris’s Chronica majora.⁴⁵ Also extant are three letters addressed to the pope, Emperor Frederick II, and Louis IX, respectively, which Longjumeau brought from Simeon Rabban-ata, a Syrian cleric based in Tabriz whom the khan Ogodei had appointed as leader of the Nestorian Christians in 1235.⁴⁶ Ascelin’s embassy was chronicled by his traveling companion Simon of Saint-Quentin, whose text again survives only as excerpted by Vincent of Beauvais in the Speculum historiale, where it is combined with Plano Carpini’s.

The discovery that the Mongols did in fact possess a social hierarchy and court culture occurred because the papal envoys were educated monks with diplomatic experience. The friars were excellent observers thanks to their scholastic training and their ethnographic approach.⁴⁷ Equally important, however, was their prior experience in courts, which shaped how they interacted with the Mongols and depicted their missions. Plano Carpini, who belonged to the first generation of Franciscans, spent twenty years establishing the order in eastern Europe and defending the Franciscans before kings and princes.⁴⁸ He was likely chosen to lead an embassy because of his close relationships with lords in Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary, who provided valuable aid and had direct contact with the Mongols.⁴⁹ Nothing certain is known of Ascelin of Cremona or of Simon of Saint-Quentin beyond Simon’s account, but it seems likely that they had diplomatic experience.⁵⁰ Richard believes that Simon was chosen to join Ascelin because he resided abroad and knew foreign languages.⁵¹ Louis IX knew Andrew of Longjumeau, whom Louis had sent to Constantinople to retrieve the crown of thorns in 1238.⁵² According to Matthew Paris, Longjumeau spoke Arabic and “Chaldean,” which Pelliot interpreted as either Syriac or Persian.⁵³ It is possible that several members of these embassies had more experience in courts beyond Europe than in those of Europe.

Another reason the friars were able to read Mongol courts has to do with their monastic formation. Like the churches and monasteries with which they were intimately familiar, courts created meaning through the organization and symbolization of space, behaviors, and objects. The friars inhabited a world in which everything from the orientation of buildings, to eating and walking, to clothing and liturgical items had symbolic associations. They were aware of the signifying potential of posture and gesture.⁵⁴ The envoys’ backgrounds meant that they knew when they were confronted with the “symbolics of power,” and they were attentive to the formal expressions of Mongol hierarchy and majesty, even if they did not understand all of the meanings of such expressions.⁵⁵

Moreover, although they belonged to an ostensibly “sedentary” culture, the envoys did not imagine the court as a fixed place.⁵⁶ As Vale observes, in medieval Europe “[power] ultimately lay with and around the ruler, and that was where the court was…. If the ruler was hunting, for instance, the court—or at least its nucleus—was with him. All courts therefore travelled.”⁵⁷ For most of the Middle Ages courts in Europe were partially or wholly itinerant, and there existed an entire sphere of laws, rituals, and material culture devoted to the peregrinations of lords. That the Mongols lived in tents struck the friars as primitive, but it did not preclude the Mongols from having court culture, as European lords also held court in tents, particularly during military campaigns.⁵⁸

In contrast to the apocalyptic and inhuman portraits of the Mongols in earlier reports, the embassy accounts demonstrated that the Mongols possessed a strict social order. Plano Carpini refers to the khan Guyuk as “imperator,” and to Mongol lords as “duces” and “magnates.” He never refers to the khan as “rex” but speaks of the Mongol “imperium.”⁵⁹ Plano Carpini apparently had no doubt that the Mongols possessed imperial power, having witnessed the immense terrain and various populations they ruled. Simon of Saint-Quentin, on the other hand, only went to Persia; the Mongols wished to send Ascelin on to the khan, but he refused. Simon writes that “khan” translates as “emperor or king,” an ambivalence that may indicate that he did not have as profound a sense of Mongol hierarchy and power as did Plano Carpini.⁶⁰ Nonetheless, Simon observed that Mongol society included princes and “barons,” and he describes the pyramidal division of Mongol forces into units composed of multiples of ten. Similarly, Andrew of Longjumeau, who like Simon only went to Persia, refers to a “rex Tartarorum,” not an emperor, and also gives a detailed account of the Mongols’ decimal organization.⁶¹ All of the envoys’ accounts thus established that the Mongols were indeed an organized society whose vertical structure resembled that of feudal systems, not a leaderless, demonic, or supernatural horde.⁶²

Moreover, the friars showed that the Mongol nobility inhabited courts. Plano Carpini explains that the curia maior (great court) of the emperor is called the syra orda and that orda is the term for the stationes (camps) of the emperor and his princes.⁶³ Plano Carpini clearly intends curia to mean “court,” not simply “residence” or “personal possessions,” as the curia is always associated with the khan and his lords (“curia imperatoris,” “curiis principum”).⁶⁴ He writes that Mongol custom was to never dissolve the courts of dead lords but to give widows resources for the courts’ maintenance. Salimbene of Adam writes that Plano Carpini told him he had been treated “curialiter” (courteously) by the Mongols.⁶⁵ Simon of Saint-Quentin too uses curia for the courts of Baiju and the khan.⁶⁶ There are fewer references to curiae in Simon’s writing, probably because the text is truncated, and because Ascelin’s party did not go beyond Persia and thus encountered fewer Mongol courts.

Plano Carpini and Simon of Saint-Quentin further demonstrate that this court culture expressed a cosmological vision and allowed the Mongols to communicate with their empire and the world beyond it. The friars came to these conclusions through the observation of many phenomena, three of which stand out: spatial arrangements, rituals of access and reverence, and material display. Plano Carpini gives the first European account of the imperial encampments of the Ormetegu region, which, he observes, were within a day’s ride of each other.⁶⁷ At the first camp that Plano Carpini visited, the syra orda, the quriltai tent was surrounded by a wooden palisade on which images were painted, outside of which the populace had to remain under pain of beating or death. This restricted zone was also patrolled by guards. Plano Carpini’s description echoes the passages in the Secret History that relate how Genghis Khan established a forbidden precinct for the khan’s living quarters.⁶⁸ Genghis’s memory was also preserved in the imperial zone by the placing of an “idol” of him in a cart before the emperor’s tent.⁶⁹ Such displays, and their explanations, led Plano Carpini to appreciate Genghis’s foundational role for the Mongol Empire and to devote most of his fifth chapter to his conquests. Plano Carpini subsequently visited two other sites with imperial tents: the golden orda, where Guyuk was enthroned and received the envoys, and a third site, with a tent in which Guyuk’s throne had been placed and he dispensed justice.⁷⁰ Despite linguistic and cultural barriers, Plano Carpini understood that these were culturally significant and functionally organized sites of power that expressed the khan’s relationship to the dynastic past, his people, and the Mongols’ native territory.⁷¹

Mongol social organization was also evident in the arrangement of tent interiors. Plano Carpini writes that Batu’s seat was elevated like a throne, and that next to him sat one of his wives. This regal seating was particularly appropriate given that Batu was Genghis Khan’s grandson and one of the greatest princes in the Mongol Empire.⁷² Batu’s brothers, sons, and officers sat on a lower bench in the center of the tent. All others sat on the floor behind these men, with the men and women divided. On their way to the khan, Plano Carpini and his companions sat on Batu’s left, but on the return trip they sat on his right. Inside the third imperial tent, Guyuk’s throne was placed on a raised wooden platform whose rear portion was circular, and around which were erected benches at various heights. The highest were off-limits to everyone, and people sat according to their rank and gender.

Plano Carpini highlights those features of Mongol courts that were comprehensible and visualizable for an elite European readership.⁷³ He understood that an audience with the khan allowed him to sit on Batu’s right, as if the imperial presence were a form of blessing. Plano Carpini may have noted this custom because it confirmed the Mongols’ official discourse, according to which the khan was the “son of God” or acted with the “power of God.” The elevated thrones of Batu and Guyuk, and ranked seating of family and subjects, were spatial expressions of hierarchy that resembled secular and ecclesiastical practices in Europe. Plano Carpini may have associated the circular platform for Guyuk’s throne with the world or the universe. All of these elements spoke to the court’s role as a microcosm of the empire, a sacred site, and an expression of the Mongols’ universalist ambitions. Plano Carpini anticipated that the educated elite for whom he wrote would understand these cosmological meanings and see that the Mongols employed a symbolic logic that was in many ways familiar and rational.

Plano Carpini and Simon of Saint-Quentin were also attentive to the proximity to Mongol elites that they were granted, and to the customs governing this access. Plano Carpini knelt for his audiences with Corenza, Batu, and Guyuk. In contrast, in an oft-cited episode, Ascelin was told that he must genuflect three times before Baiju.⁷⁴ Guichard of Cremona, a member of Ascelin’s party from the Dominican monastery in Tiflis, explained that it was not an idolatrous act that Baiju demanded but a political gesture signifying the church’s submission to the khan. The friars decided they would rather be decapitated than kneel before Baiju. The prospect of execution was real: as Plano Carpini reports, Duke Michael of Russia was killed for not bowing before the “idol” of Genghis Khan.⁷⁵

Scholars have commented on Ascelin’s lack of diplomatic tact, which seems all the more evident when compared to Plano Carpini.⁷⁶ However, this criticism ignores a crucial dimension of these diplomatic encounters. As monks and diplomats, the envoys understood the potential of posture and gesture to be what linguists refer to as “performative”: able to change the nature of a substance, identity, relationship, or situation.⁷⁷ In the court as in liturgical and devotional practice, the very position or motion of the body could effect profound transformation.⁷⁸ Genuflection was particularly charged for the friars, equated as it was with feudal homage and worship. Yet Plano Carpini did not kneel out of submission or veneration, but out of duty and respect. It is often overlooked that Plano Carpini did not kneel when the newly elected khan Guyuk first appeared before the public: as he explains, he thought it was a religious ceremony and would be idolatrous to do so, and he was not Guyuk’s subject.⁷⁹ Plano Carpini was willing to kneel before Corenza, Batu, and Guyuk in their tents because he was an envoy in the physical presence of foreign lords, and kneeling was necessary for access to their persons and for the fulfillment of his mission. He certainly did not believe kneeling was an act of submission.

Ascelin, on the other hand, thought that for the Mongols genuflection was performative: that in their minds it would make the pope their subject, and Ascelin would therefore have failed in his mission. As he saw it, genuflecting would also undermine the church’s standing in Asia.⁸⁰ In the same way that Ascelin would not kneel, he also would not travel to the khan when told to by Baiju. Yet Ascelin still sought to fulfill his mission. As he explains to the Mongols, he means no offense and is willing to make the same sign of reverence he would to a European lord by removing his cowl and bowing his head. He declares that he and his companions will even kiss the soles of Baiju’s feet and those of his men if Baiju is willing to convert to Christianity. Baiju and his men debate killing Ascelin and his companions, but in the end they are spared. However, Ascelin is never called before Baiju, which, as Simon of Saint-Quentin sees it, was a breach of custom.

The accounts’ references to kneeling are far from anecdotal. These episodes concretized that both the church and the Mongols were animated by universalist ideologies that brooked no refusal or resistance and demanded the other’s submission. As Biran observes, “The Mongols were unwilling to accept the coexistence of rival claimants to universal rule.”⁸¹ Ascelin’s embassy was not a failure or a case of mutual incomprehension, as is sometimes suggested.⁸² Rather, it showed that the parties understood each other very well. Both Ascelin and Plano Carpini knew that diplomacy with the Mongols was a high-stakes performance and that one misplaced word or gesture could greatly weaken the church’s position. It was essential to the friars, as the embodiment of the church, that they demonstrate the limits of Mongol power over them, and by extension over Latin Christendom.

Just as spatial layout and rituals of reverence expressed the Mongols’ imperial court culture, so too did material display. Mongol wealth spoke the universal language of sumptuosity and might.⁸³ Chief among the riches that Plano Carpini saw at Mongol courts were textiles. The first imperial tent that he saw was made of a huge quantity of precious white material and could hold more than two thousand people.⁸⁴ The second had baldachin, by which he presumably meant cloth of gold, lining the sides and ceiling of the interior.⁸⁵ The Mongols wore clothing of different colors—white, red, blue, and baldachin—on each of the four consecutive days of the imperial election. The innumerable gifts given to Guyuk upon his election included silks, satins, baldachins, and silk belts embroidered with gold.⁸⁶ On their departure, Plano Carpini and his companions were given furs and pieces of fine fabric by Guyuk’s mother. Simon of Saint-Quentin writes that when the friars arrived in Baiju’s camp, Baiju and his men were dressed in golden cloth.⁸⁷ Each time Baiju’s men returned to the friars, they changed outfits.

The friars were impressed by these textile displays and knew that they were of paramount importance to understanding the Mongols. Cloth was a form of treasure that was exchangeable for other commodities and spoke to the Mongols’ immense wealth (fig. 5).⁸⁸ The textiles the friars saw often came from elsewhere and thus represented the Mongols’ power to compel tribute and gifts across a vast territory. Simon of Saint-Quentin writes that when the Turks sued for peace in 1245, they sent the Mongol king great quantities of precious cloth and promised more as annual tribute.⁸⁹ Textiles were also a manifestation of imperial might because they were often produced by workers who had been captured and moved by the Mongols.⁹⁰ The friars understood too that textiles were a form of payment and reward that bound subjects to Mongol lords. The wearing of the same color or fabric was a sartorial manifestation of Mongol hierarchy and unity that echoed practices in Europe such as livery and the dress of religious orders.⁹¹

The splendor of Mongol courts was evident in other costly materials and objects that highlighted the Mongols’ ability to buy goods or coerce their provision. Plano Carpini remarks on the omnipresence of gold and silver: in the pitchers in Batu’s tent, the horse tack at the first imperial encampment, the golden plaques affixed with golden nails to the poles of the second imperial tent, and the more than five hundred carts full of gold, silver, and silks given as tribute.⁹² Guyuk also had a parasol decorated with gems and a carved ivory throne decorated with gold, gems, and pearls.⁹³ As Plano Carpini writes, “Imperator, duces, et alii magnates in auro et argento et serico et lapidibus pretiosis et gemmis multum abundant [The emperor, dukes, and other grandees abound greatly with gold, silver, silk, precious stones, and gems].”⁹⁴ Simon of Saint-Quentin writes that when Guyuk was elected khan, he sat on a golden seat amid his barons as they asked him to be emperor. They then brought him an enormous amount of gold, silver, and gems to be divided between the khan, his princes, and their men. Although neither author mentions it, they may have been aware that gold was the Mongols’ imperial color and therefore had special symbolic associations and uses.⁹⁵

Such descriptions were as much geopolitical assessments as they were ethnographic accounts. Gold, silver, and gems, like the Mongols’ sumptuous textiles, both symbolized and enabled the Mongols’ imperial expansion and administration. Plano Carpini remarks on the Mongols’ bottomless desire for riches: “They demand and seize gold, silver, and all else they want, whenever and however much they please, with no opposition.”⁹⁶ Simon of Saint-Quentin enumerates the vast treasure that the Mongols gained after the victory of Kösedagh over the Seljuk sultan in 1243.⁹⁷ Both friars recognized that the precious materials they saw at Mongol courts were the direct result of conquest and enslavement, and confirmed Mongol proclamations that their expansion would continue. As we saw in chapter 1, Mongol expansion is usually explained by historians as resulting from the need for land and wealth. Plano Carpini and Simon of Saint-Quentin understood this. Their appreciation of the Mongol need to sustain the influx of tribute was surely one of the friars’ most penetrating insights.

The friars’ impressions of Mongol courts led them to two important conclusions. The first was that the Mongols were human beings with an organized society, a collective memory, and a capacity for reason. The second was that, precisely because the Mongols were rational (in their way), unified, rapacious, and motivated by a universalist ideology, warfare between them and Latin Christendom was inevitable and necessary. Plano Carpini believed that the Mongols sought to destroy the nobility of all other lands.⁹⁸ Once their conquests were complete, theirs would be the only courts in existence. Simon of Saint-Quentin saw similar ambitions but connected them to the Mongols’ alliance with demonic powers and to God using the Mongols to punish humanity. The friars were no doubt impressed by the material splendor they encountered but viewed Mongol courts above all as warning of a clash of civilizations.

The Matter of Diplomacy: Louis IX’s Embassy to the Mongols

The embassy accounts had a profound influence on Louis IX’s first diplomatic overture to the Mongols, which occurred while he was on crusade.⁹⁹ Louis departed France in August 1248, arrived in Cyprus on September 17, and spent the winter there. He was a distant cousin of King Henry I of Cyprus, through whom he was related by marriage to the Armenian royal house.¹⁰⁰ Henry I’s brother-in-law Smbat, brother of King Hethoum of Armenia, had been sent to pledge submission to the Mongols. He had written a letter to his family that arrived in Cyprus in the summer of 1248 and was shared with Louis. Smbat claimed that the people of Mongolia and “Cathay,” including the khan and his circle, were Christian and venerated the Magi.¹⁰¹ In December 1248, two envoys from the Mongols arrived in Cyprus with a letter addressed to Louis from Eljigidei, the Mongol general in command of Persia. Eljigidei wrote that he wished Louis’s armies success and that he had been sent to Persia by the khan to ensure the well-being of Christians. The two envoys, Christians from Mosul, told Louis that Eljigidei had long been a Christian and that the khan Guyuk had recently been baptized and intended to aid the Latin Christians in the conquest of Jerusalem. In reply, Louis sent Andrew of Longjumeau—who had recently been a papal ambassador to the Mongols—at the head of an embassy to Guyuk in the company of the envoys.¹⁰² The party quit Cyprus in February 1249.

From the papal envoys’ experiences and Mongols’ messages, Louis IX knew that Latin Christians and Mongols had competing accounts of global history and their roles in it. Complicating matters further was the fact that in 1249, Louis IX was on the verge of launching an invasion that would bring him into what the Mongols considered their sphere of influence. As Louis and his advisors considered their response to Eljigidei’s embassy, they surely contemplated what had happened to those lords who had incurred the Mongols’ wrath. Nor had the French forgotten that the Mongols still threatened Latin Christendom and that France itself was vulnerable. They also knew that the claims of Eljigidei’s envoys about his and Guyuk’s conversion were to be taken with a grain of salt. The French response had to be formulated in a manner that expressed resolve and confidence but did not antagonize the Mongols. It had to simultaneously establish limits and invite collaboration in the fight against the Islamic powers.

The result was a combined embassy from Louis IX and the church, both of whom encouraged the Mongols to embrace Catholicism. This message was conveyed in three ways: by the Dominicans Andrew of Longjumeau, Guillaume, and Jean de Carcassonne;¹⁰³ by liturgical and devotional gifts from the king; and by letters from Odo of Chateauroux, who accompanied Louis on his crusade.¹⁰⁴ The friars were joined by two clerics and two royal officers.¹⁰⁵ It is possible and in fact likely, given the presence of the king’s men, that the embassy also carried a separate spoken message from Louis in response to Eljigidei’s invitation to a military alliance, but this was not recorded.¹⁰⁶ Although Eljigidei’s embassy to Cyprus had addressed Louis alone, Louis replied as a representative of Christendom rather than, or in addition to, the kingdom of France. In essence, the reply embassy’s goal was to establish the precondition for an alliance (Mongol conversion) and frame the European-Mongol and Franco-Mongol relationships in terms favorable to Latin Christendom (the Mongols would recognize papal authority).

At the same time that it reflects the geopolitical strategy of Louis and his advisors, the embassy of 1249 is also significant as an example of the use of diplomatic gifts in European-Mongol relations. According to Odo, Louis dispatched the friars with a piece of the true cross, a scarlet tent on which were images of Christ, and liturgical objects.¹⁰⁷ Joinville adds that the tent’s imagery depicted the Annunciation, Baptism, Passion, Ascension, and Pentecost, and that the objects included chalices and books.¹⁰⁸ The Grandes chroniques state that the messengers declared to Louis that the “roy Cham” (Guyuk) greatly desired “une tente en laquelle il eust une chapelle [a tent in which there was a chapel],” and that Louis had one made.¹⁰⁹ The chronicle also states that Louis sent pieces of the true cross to Guyuk and Eljigidei. The accounts agree sufficiently to confirm that the king was the giver of these gifts and that they consisted of liturgical and devotional objects and nothing else.

Louis’s gifts were a remarkable example of the discursive objects that complemented the oral and written messages traded between Latin Christians and Mongols. They reveal much about how Louis perceived himself and the Mongols, and about what expressive forms he thought would be most comprehensible and compelling to them. Louis and his advisors did not send sumptuous courtly objects—jewels, fabrics—which, as they knew from previous embassies, could easily be perceived as tribute. Instead, the gifts were intended for didactic and ritual purposes, and they reified the relationships between Louis, the Mongols, the church, and God. Joinville implies that the Dominican ambassadors were ordered to instruct the Mongols in the use and meaning of the objects and could thereby proselytize the Mongol leadership as part of their regular diplomatic activity. Louis knew from the papal reports that his ambassadors would have limited and surveilled contact with the Mongol elite, and therefore he provided the gifts to allow the friars to make the most of these interactions. Louis also hoped that his donation to the Mongols would be interpreted as a recognition of the Mongols’ potential for salvation, not a sign of submission. In effect, his gifts were a lure and a “starter kit” intended to encourage and enable the Mongols’ conversion.

The tent-chapel was the most symbolically complex of the objects sent by Louis to the Mongols. Thanks to the accounts of Odo and Joinville, we can form a fairly accurate idea of what this was and how it signified. Both Odo and Joinville speak of it as a tent of scarlet (“tentorio de scarleto”; “une tente faite en la guise d’une chapelle … toute faite de bone escarlate finne [a tent made in the form of a chapel … made entirely of good, smooth scarlet]”). The Grandes chroniques describe it as “mout belle d’escarlate vermeille, à pommiaus dorez, toute brodée de riches oevres [most beautiful, of red scarlet, with golden balls on top, the whole thing richly embroidered].”¹¹⁰ Tente was the broadest term for a shelter composed of fabric held up by poles and guylines; there were different kinds depending on their size and use.¹¹¹ A tente was meant to shelter several people at a time, as opposed to a tref, which might only shelter one. Joinville’s statement that the tent was “made in the form of a chapel” indicates that it combined the two forms, rectilinear and conical, common in European tentage. That is, it apparently joined a rectangular “nave” section with a rounded or conical “choir” section, and thus imitated the form of a chapel or church. Such a design would have been a way to instruct the Mongols in the nature and symbolism of Latin Christian architecture.

The “scarlet” of which this tent was made was also important to its meaning and use, as suggested by the fact that Odo, Joinville, and the Grandes chroniques mention it. “Scarlet” initially denoted a kind of fine woolen broadcloth dyed with kermes, which was “extracted from the eggs of oak-feeding Mediterranean shield-lice” and produced a durable reddish tint.¹¹² Other dyestuffs could be mixed with kermes to produce scarlet cloth in a range of colors. By the twelfth century, the association of the cloth with the red of kermes had expanded scarlet’s semantic field to encompass the dye’s color.¹¹³ The scarlet of Odo’s, Joinville’s, and the chronicle’s accounts, however, refers to the cloth, which was “good” and “smooth” because it had been repeatedly shorn to attain a light and even consistency. It is unlikely that this cloth came from the Mediterranean, since for northwestern European writers, “scarlet” implied a cloth made of English wool, the only one they knew of able to withstand the intense shearing to which scarlets were subjected.¹¹⁴ Rather, the probable source of the scarlet was northern France or the Low Countries.¹¹⁵ There is no doubt that Louis and his army traveled with reams of cloth and with textile workers to maintain sails, tents, and other fabrics; cloth was also needed for gifts, payment, and rewards.¹¹⁶ Joinville himself traveled with fine woolens: he reports that when Empress Marie of Constantinople arrived in Cyprus having lost her baggage in a storm, he sent her drap (cloth), fur, taffetas, and a tiretaine to make a new dress.¹¹⁷ Tiretaines were cloth combined of wool and another fabric such as linen, could be dyed with kermes, and were one of the main products of the Parisian wool industry in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.¹¹⁸ Based on Joinville’s references to scarlet and tiretaines, it seems reasonable to assume that Louis and his lords traveled with bolts of fine wool cloth produced in northwestern Europe.

Louis ordered that this scarlet, once made into a tent in the form of a chapel, be ornamented with scenes from the life of Christ. Where exactly these images were placed and what they were made of are not clear from the sources. Odo writes of a “tentorio de scarleto, cui affixae sunt bordaturae [a tent of scarlet, to which were attached images on the hems],” while Joinville says that “le roy … leur fist entailler en la chapelle toute nostre creance [the king … had them put images of all of our beliefs in/onto the chapel].” Odo’s text may imply that the images were separate objects affixed to the edges of the tent—perhaps around the entryway, in imitation of the imagery on church portals. Joinville, on the other hand, seems to suggest that the images were attached to the fabric of the tent’s interior. Just what these images were made of we will never know, in part because of the polyvalence of entailler. It could mean to sculpt, chisel, or engrave. Yet the tent of Adrastus in the Roman de Thèbes (ca. 1150) is also “entaillé” with images, which seems to suggest that they are made of fabric.¹¹⁹ The images on Louis IX’s tent-chapel may thus have been small weavings or embroideries; the historiated panels on ecclesiastical vestments could provide an analogy. It is possible too that the images in question were steatite carvings sewn onto the tent.¹²⁰ Odo appears to emphasize Passion imagery, while Joinville indicates that the entire life of Christ and Pentecost were depicted.¹²¹ As for the Grandes chroniques, after stating that the tent was “toute brodée de riches oevres,” they continue: “et fist portraire dedenz comment les III roys de Tharse aourerent Nostre Seigneur, et comment il reçut mort pour nostre rachatement [and he (i.e., Louis IX) had portrayed within how the three kings of Tarsus/Tarshish venerated our lord, and how he died for our redemption].”¹²² The chronicle thus agrees with Odo and Joinville that there were Christological scenes on the tent, and it states clearly that the images were inside the tent. This of course makes sense, as it would have protected the images from the elements and allowed for ritual and private contemplation. Given that Louis ordered the tent-chapel’s production after receiving Eljigidei’s ambassadors, these images were likely acquired, and possibly produced, in Cyprus.¹²³

Louis’s tent-chapel was thus very likely composed of wool from England, which was processed and dyed in northern France or the Low Countries (with kermes from somewhere in the Mediterranean),¹²⁴ and decorated with Cypriot or Byzantine embroideries, to be sent to the khan in Mongolia. Its very materiality embodied Louis’s global mission and ambitions, just as its fine facture and iconography declared his wealth, power, and piety. But the tent signified on much deeper levels for the king. It was another expression of Louis’s place in a long line of kings and prophets who had served the Lord and received his favor. In Exodus, God commands Moses to make the Tabernacle of “hangings of finely woven linen, and violet, purple, and scarlet yarn, with cherubim worked on them” (26:1); the Tent of Meeting of animal skins to cover the Tabernacle (26:7, 26:14); “a curtain of finely woven linen and violet, purple, and scarlet yarn, with cherubim worked on it” to shield the Ark (26:31); and “a screen of finely woven linen, embroidered with violet, purple, and scarlet” for the tent’s entrance (26:36).¹²⁵ The echoes with Louis’s tent-chapel are evident (fine cloth, embroidery), and the repeated color formula in the biblical text—“violet, purple, and scarlet”—offers another clue to the color of Louis’s tent, which was red or purple (the “vermeille” of the Grandes chroniques could mean either).¹²⁶ Like Louis’s Sainte-Chapelle, which was a reprise of Solomon’s temple, his tent-chapel was a renewal of Moses’ tents: the latter sheltered the tablets of the “old law,” while Louis’s gift enabled the celebration of the Mass and signified the “new law.”¹²⁷ A new Solomon, Louis was also a new Moses who, as a crusade leader, literally led his forces to the promised land.¹²⁸ Like Moses, Louis’s primary goal was to ensure the salvation of his people through his own penitential and pious exertions, crucial to which was his support of missionary efforts such as the embassy to the Mongols.¹²⁹

While the tent expressed Louis’s conception of sacral kingship, it also reflected his desire to communicate effectively by creating something that the Mongols would understand and appreciate. From the earlier embassies, Louis knew that the Mongols endowed tents with spiritual and political meaning. The tent-chapel was thus a form of material and cultural translation—a rendering of Christ’s life in a format familiar to the Mongol audience. From Louis’s perspective, its images were particularly useful because they would give elite Mongol viewers immediate access to the central story of Christianity once it had been explained to them.¹³⁰ Such visual contemplation was something the king himself prized, as evidenced by his illuminated manuscripts and the Sainte-Chapelle.¹³¹ While the books, chalices, and other ritual objects that Louis sent required clerical mediators to be of use, the embroideries and relic of the true cross could speak directly to the Mongols in the absence of clergy.¹³²

Rich with personal, spiritual, and didactic meaning for Louis IX, the tent-chapel was interpreted quite differently by the Mongols. As we know from an oft-quoted passage in Joinville, Louis’s hopes for the embassy of 1249 were dashed when he received the Mongol reply in 1251. Oghul Qaimish, the widow of the khan Guyuk and imperial regent who received the embassy, demanded annual tribute in gold and silver. In the message reported by Joinville, she makes no allusion to the tent, other gifts, or conversion, and she threatens Louis by mentioning that the Mongols had killed Prester John and many other kings.¹³³ In the words of Joinville, Louis “se repenti fort quant yl y envoia [greatly regretted that he had sent to them].”¹³⁴ Yet despite the best efforts of Louis and his ambassadors, circumstance and culture had always made it likely that the gifts would be perceived as tribute. When Oghul Qaimish received Louis’s embassy, she was locked in a fierce succession struggle, which she eventually lost along with her life.¹³⁵ Joinville reports that she sent for several kings who had not submitted to the Mongols, erected Louis’s tent before them, then declared that the king of France had become a Mongol subject and that she would send him to destroy them if they did not yield.¹³⁶ This has a ring of truth to it, given the difficult position in which Oghul Qaimish found herself. Her letter to Louis suggests that she chose to interpret his gifts as tribute to burnish her own image among her people and show herself to be in control. Had Guyuk lived, or had his successor Mongke already been elected, Louis’s embassy may well have had a different reception.

Or perhaps not. As Joinville suggests, another factor working against the embassy was, ironically, the tent-chapel itself. As we have seen, fine textiles and gold were among the objects most coveted by and meaningful to the Mongols. Tents were particularly potent symbols of the Mongols’ imperial success. In the tents of Mongol elites, the contrast between the felt exterior and sumptuous cloths of the interior “served as a dramatic reminder of the historical path trod by the Mongols in realizing their imperial ambitions.”¹³⁷ The felt symbolized the nomadic past, while fine textiles represented the Mongols’ conquests of and domination over sedentary civilizations. The capture of enemy tents was a prized exploit and sign of victory for the Mongols. Plano Carpini writes that Batu erected at his camp the tents of King Béla IV of Hungary, whom he had defeated.¹³⁸ Andrews gives examples of other captured tents and observes that the red velvet tent given by the Chinese, which Plano Carpini saw in Mongolia, “was no doubt yielded up under duress of some kind.”¹³⁹ Thus tents, and especially foreign ones of fine cloth, were totems of conquest to the Mongols. It is reasonable to assume that Joinville’s informants (who were probably the ambassadors Andrew and Guillaume themselves) were correct, and that the Mongols (or Oghul Qaimish) did indeed interpret Louis’s donation of a scarlet tent as a sign of submission. Moreover, it is likely that the liturgical objects Louis sent reinforced the impression that Louis was offering tribute. If not made of pure gold, the chalices and liturgical objects were almost certainly gilded, and the books likely had at least some gold leaf in them.¹⁴⁰ As noted earlier, gold was the imperial color to the Mongols. These objects too could easily have been interpreted as recognition of Mongol supremacy rather than as sacred artifacts offering salvation.

Despite Oghul Qaimish’s aggressive response to the French embassy, Louis’s gifts were in fact not a complete diplomatic failure. In 1262, the ilkhan Hulegu sent a letter to Louis requesting an alliance against the Mamluks.¹⁴¹ In it, he mentioned explicitly the chapel (“capellam vestram, divino nomini dedicatam [your chapel, dedicated to the divine name]”) that Louis, despite having received nothing from the Mongols, had sent “for our special comfort” and “as a special sign of friendship.”¹⁴² This passage is open to several interpretations. It could be that the tent had never left Persia and still existed in Hulegu’s possession in 1262; or that someone in Hulegu’s entourage, if not Hulegu himself, remembered the chapel; or that the tent-chapel was listed in an inventory or mentioned in a chronicle.¹⁴³ Olschki speculates that the tent made its way to the Great Khan and was the one that William of Rubruck saw in use during his visit to Mongke.¹⁴⁴ The important point is that the chapel had made a lasting impression on the memory of the Mongol elite, and that they (or their advisors) had in fact understood the tent in exactly the terms Louis had intended: as a religious object, a spiritual comfort, and a sign of peaceful intent, but not as tribute. Hulegu’s reference to the tent was a recognition of past contact and an appeal to a shared Franco-Mongol history, which the ilkhan hoped to build on. His letter demonstrates how diplomatic gifts could provide anchors for the dynamic and complex relations between Europeans and Mongols. Louis’s tent-chapel created an opening, however small and fleeting, for a Franco-Mongol narrative based on commonalities rather than antagonistic universalism. But for reasons I discuss below, Louis—if he received Hulegu’s letter—apparently did not reply.

William of Rubruck and Louis IX’s Global Duty

From Cyprus, where Louis met the Mongol ambassadors, Louis proceeded with his army to the coast of Egypt. In June 1249 the crusaders captured Damietta. After waiting for the Nile to recede, in November they marched south with the goal of taking Cairo. They were eventually stopped by a combination of Egyptian resistance, loss of supplies, lack of reinforcements, and disease, and Louis was forced to surrender in April 1250. After Louis’s release from captivity in May 1250 he went to Acre, where he wrote a letter in August to the people of his kingdom announcing that he would stay in the Holy Land to reinforce its defenses and seek the release of captives. He also called for his subjects to take the cross and join him.¹⁴⁵

In 1251, the Dominicans Andrew of Longjumeau and Guillaume returned from their embassy and met Louis in Caesarea, bearing the letter from Oghul Qaimish.¹⁴⁶ Despite his disappointment with the Mongol reply, Louis still had ambitious plans for the Holy Land and realms farther east. He wrote to the pope to suggest that Latin bishops be named in the lands ruled by the Mongols and Muslims. In response, the pope sent a bull on February 20, 1253, to Odo of Chateauroux authorizing him to consecrate bishops for the vacant sees in the caliphate of Baghdad, and to choose among Franciscan and Dominican missionaries slated to visit those regions.¹⁴⁷

Louis’s next overture to the Mongols came in the spring of 1253, when the Franciscan William of Rubruck set out from the Holy Land with a letter from Louis for the Mongol lord Sartach, who was based in the Volga region and rumored to be a Christian.¹⁴⁸ William ended up traveling to Mongolia and spending six and a half months at the court of the khan Mongke and in the city of Karakorum. After returning to Acre in 1255, William composed an account of his journey that he sent to Louis; he may have visited the king in Paris ca. 1257. Probably of Franco-Flemish origin, William appears to have studied in Paris before moving to the Holy Land at an unknown date. He was definitely with the king in Cyprus in 1248–1249, because he writes that at Sartach’s camp he recognized a member of Eljigidei’s embassy.¹⁴⁹ William also accompanied the king and his army to Egypt, but he appears to have stayed in Damietta with Queen Margaret, who gave William an illuminated psalter that he took on his journey.¹⁵⁰ William knew of Andrew of Longjumeau’s embassy of 1249–1251, but we do not know if he read a report of it, met Andrew personally, or both. As William writes, his goals in undertaking his journey were to comfort Germans enslaved by the Mongols, about whom he had learned from Andrew, and to preach to the Mongols. He writes that Louis expressly told him not to say that he was Louis’s ambassador. Yet his account is in effect a long letter to the king in which William states, “You told me, when I left you, to put in writing for you everything I saw among the Tartars, and further urged me not to be afraid of writing you at length.”¹⁵¹ Whether or not Louis had a hand in motivating William’s mission, he certainly facilitated and took advantage of it.¹⁵²

William’s account has attracted much scholarly attention since the nineteenth century, most of it from a historical perspective.¹⁵³ More recent analyses have focused on William’s self-representation, ethnographic sensibility, and “self-extension toward the other.”¹⁵⁴ Often overlooked, however, is the extent of Louis IX’s influence on the text. Although it is a first-person narrative of William’s experiences, it is a highly curated account—not only because such is the nature of any memoir or travel account, but primarily because the text was meant for the king.¹⁵⁵ William’s focus was on those episodes and descriptions that he thought would be of interest to Louis as a defender of his kingdom and of Latin Christendom, or which would speak to the king on a personal level. He wrote to make Louis feel implicated in Mongol affairs, and to aid the king in charting his relations with the Mongols and with other peoples in the Middle East and Asia.

A principal goal of William’s account was to demonstrate that Louis IX’s reputation, influence, and obligations extended all the way to Mongolia. In Sartach’s camp, an official asks William to name the “chief ruler among the Franks [Latin Christians].” When William replies that it would be the emperor if he ruled unchallenged, the official responds that it is not the emperor but “the king” (Louis IX), as he had heard from an envoy of Emperor Baldwin II of Constantinople. From Sartach’s camp William travels to that of Sartach’s father Batu (whom Plano Carpini had also met), who informs William that he is aware that Louis has left his country with an army and asks whom he is fighting. On arriving at Mongke’s court, William is asked if Louis wishes to make peace with the Mongols.¹⁵⁶ Ambassadors from the emperor of Nicaea ask William if Louis is at peace or at war with their emperor.¹⁵⁷ William relates the story of the monk Raimund, who had set out from Cyprus with Andrew of Longjumeau in 1249 and continued from Persia to the court of Mongke in Mongolia. There he called himself Theodolus and claimed to be an envoy of Bishop Odo, by whom he meant Odo of Chateauroux. When “Theodolus” offered to lead a Mongol embassy to Bishop Odo and to Louis, Mongke gave him a message for Louis. Theodolus never made it to France—he was imprisoned as an impostor in Nicaea, where he died.¹⁵⁸ William himself is given a letter for Louis from Mongke, and on his return trip, William receives from Sartach a silk tunic for Louis. William’s report thus confirmed that Louis and his kingdom continued to figure in Mongol strategy and diplomacy.

Another reason that William emphasized the Mongols’ knowledge of and interest in Louis was to convey the threat that they posed not only to Christendom but to France in particular. As William leaves court after his first audience with Mongke, the khan’s secretaries and interpreter ask him “numerous questions about the kingdom of France: whether it contained many sheep, cattle and horses—as if they were due to move in and take it all over forthwith.” Thereafter the Mongols asked him more than once about the riches and resources of France. Mongke gave a bow and two silver-tipped arrows to “Theodolus” and his Mongol traveling companion, and instructed them to ask the king of France if he wished to ally against the Muslims. If he refused, the Mongol was to tell Louis “that with bows like this we shoot far and hit hard.” The khan further instructed the Mongol emissary to reconnoiter “the routes, the terrain, the towns and castles, and the people and their weapons.” Mongke’s letter to Louis, which Rubruck includes in his text, is a standard Mongol claim of universal authority and demand for submission. It is addressed to “King Louis, ruler of the French, and to all other rulers and priests and to the great Frankish people,” and ends:

If, on hearing and understanding the order of the everlasting God, you are unwilling to observe it or to place any trust in it, and say, “Our country is far away, our mountains are strong, our sea is broad,” and relying on this you make war upon us—how can we know what will happen? He who has made easy what was hard, and brought near what was far distant, the everlasting God—He knows.¹⁵⁹

Any refusal to submit was equivalent to a declaration of war: the French would not need to launch an attack to be perceived as enemies by the Mongols.¹⁶⁰

William further highlighted the extent to which Louis was implicated in the Mongols’ imperial program by describing the European and Christian slave captives whom he met, in passages that personalize the human cost of the Mongols’ conquests.¹⁶¹ There are the anonymous Hungarian whom William meets when he first arrives at Mongke’s camp, Pascha from Metz who had been captured in Hungary and enslaved, her Russian husband and three little boys, the nephew of a Norman bishop, the German slave girl of one of Mongke’s concubines, Basil (born in Hungary but the son of an Englishman), and most famously the goldsmith William Buchier of Paris, his wife (who was born in Hungary but whose father was from Lorraine), and their adopted son, slaves of Mongke’s brother Arigh Böke.¹⁶² William mentions too that he was never able to see the German slaves “who were my chief reason for going there.” Buchier is particularly important because he becomes a hero for the help he gives William and his companion. For William of Rubruck, Buchier’s French origin, family in Paris, virtue, and artisanal skill make him a crucial bridge between Louis IX and the Mongol imperium: “Master William [Buchier], at one time your subject, sends you a strap decorated with a precious stone that they wear to counteract thunder and lightning, and greetings without number, and prays for you. My gratitude to him I could not find words adequate to express either to God or to you.”¹⁶³ Despite his enslavement, Buchier has retained his Christian virtue and devotion to Louis, and has even managed to thrive.¹⁶⁴ However, implicit in William’s account is a condemnation of the fact that such a good Christian, devoted Frenchman, and fine artist should be forced to serve the Mongols. William felt affection and pity for Buchier, and hoped to arouse these feelings in the king and others.

The European captives whom William mentions were privileged because the Mongols valued their skills, and because they lived in the imperial camp. The eastern Christians whom William confessed, on the other hand, were destitute and justified theft as necessary for their survival, since their masters did not provide them with enough clothing and food.¹⁶⁵ His account echoes those of Plano Carpini and Simon of Saint-Quentin, who also relate the misery of the Mongols’ slaves. Such descriptions were both naturalistic and formulaic, recalling the appeals to help captive and enslaved Christians that were a major theme of crusade excitatoria (exhortatory literature) and anti-Islamic and anti-Mongol polemics. William may also have considered how such descriptions would resonate with a king who himself had been a captive in Egypt and whose soldiers had been enslaved.

William addresses Louis’s concerns about Christianity in Asia with his observations about the religious practices of Mongol leaders and eastern clergy. The Mongol leaders he encountered were either eastern Christians who were, as he saw it, badly instructed and not loyal to Rome, or were not Christian and had no interest in conversion. The faith of the Mongol elites who venerated the cross was clearly suspect to the Franciscan. Although Mongke’s eldest son prostrates himself when William visits the son’s dwelling, and has the cross “set with great deference in an elevated position,” his mentor is a Nestorian and a “great drunkard.” William is disturbed by the Nestorian and Armenian rejection of the corpus on the cross and by the heterodox practices of eastern clergy.¹⁶⁶ His portrait of the false monk Sergius, who belonged to the circle of holy men who attended on Mongke, may be read as further condemnation of the state of Christianity among the Mongol elite.¹⁶⁷

In fact, to William’s mind, the Mongols were a threat to Latin Christendom and to the church’s ambitions for global conversion. In comments that echo the Relationes de Davide and other stories of Christian Asia from the Fifth Crusade, William writes that it was the Naiman, who were Nestorians, who had created “big rumours out of nothing” by claiming that Guyuk, Mongke, and Sartach were Christian when “the fact is that they are not.” William returns to this point in recounting his time at each of the courts he visits. Of Sartach he writes: “Whether Sartach believes in Christ or not, I do not know. What I do know is that he does not wish to be called a Christian: in fact, my impression is rather that he makes sport of Christians.”¹⁶⁸ William reports that the Mongols at Batu’s court clapped in derision when he declared that without baptism Batu would be damned.¹⁶⁹ William quotes Mongke as saying “God has given you the Scriptures, and you do not observe them; whereas to us he has given soothsayers, and we do as they tell us and live in peace.” The Mongols of William’s account are at best misinformed Christians, and otherwise indifferent or even hostile to Christianity. At no point does he suggest that they would or could be spiritual allies of Latin Christendom. Quite the opposite: given the Mongols’ “arrogance” and thirst for domination, William would “preach war against them, to the best of my ability, throughout the world.”¹⁷⁰

William saw himself as standing in for Louis IX and wrote accordingly. The remarkable first-person narration of his account stems from his desire to give a faithful rendering of his perceptions.¹⁷¹ As he writes, “Indeed I should have drawn everything for you had I known how to draw.”¹⁷² Like Mongke, whose letter to Louis stressed the interconnected Eurasia the Mongols had created, William described the implications of the Mongols’ global system for the king and his kingdom. It is unfortunate that we do not know more about Louis’s reaction to, and the broader reception of, William’s account, although enough evidence survives to allow informed speculation. Aside from excerpts in the Opus Maius of Roger Bacon, who met William in Paris around 1257, William’s report does not appear to have been copied or cited in medieval France.¹⁷³ It is not listed in any royal inventory. It survives in five medieval manuscripts that appear to be of English origin, which suggests the text was taken to England by Bacon.¹⁷⁴ This dearth of copies could be ascribed to several factors: the report’s status as a state secret; the fact that it was an unofficial, personal correspondence; diminished concern in France about the Mongol threat in the 1250s; or perhaps it did not satisfy readers’ expectations. Simon of Saint-Quentin’s account only survives, and partially at that, because Vincent of Beauvais integrated it with Plano Carpini’s account into his encyclopedia. Had William been a papal envoy, had his account made it to Paris earlier, or had it been written and organized in a more rigorously categorized fashion (like the accounts of Plano Carpini and Simon), it might have had a different reception.¹⁷⁵

Nor does it seem that William succeeded in getting Louis IX to take a greater interest in Mongol affairs. Louis returned to Paris on September 7, 1254, after a six-year absence. Until his death in 1270, he received a steady stream of communications about and from the Mongols, but these appear to have had little influence on his actions. For most of his last sixteen years, Louis was preoccupied with asserting his power at home and reforming his government. Ignored or deflected, the Mongols seem to have figured little in his decision-making. William’s mission appears to have been Louis’s last attempt to communicate with them. Louis received Mongol embassies, but his replies to them are unknown. Two of them he may have sent on to the pope without any reply.¹⁷⁶ Despite Louis’s concerns about the deteriorating state of the Latin principalities in Palestine, he refused Mongol invitations for an alliance against the Mamluks. Between the warnings of Plano Carpini, Simon of Saint-Quentin, Longjumeau, and William of Rubruck, and the Mongol demands of submission, Louis did not trust that the Mongols would be faithful allies.¹⁷⁷ To the end, Louis remained committed to his vision of global, militant, and sacral kingship. But whereas in the 1240s and 1250s he had included the Mongols in that vision, in his last decade he decided they were a matter for the church. Shortly after Louis’s death in 1270 on his second crusade, his son and successor King Philip III, while still in Tunisia, received an embassy intended for his father from the ilkhan Abaqa and the king of Armenia. The ambassadors also met with Louis’s brother Charles of Anjou.¹⁷⁸ However, nothing came of these meetings as the French were forced to withdraw. So ended Louis’s relations with the Mongols.

The Mongol archive in late medieval France grew exponentially during the reign of Louis IX, which witnessed the composition of some of the most important records we have on the Mongols. This growth owed much to the French themselves: Alberic of Trois-Fontaines received reports from eastern Europe; numerous letters were sent to France during the Mongol invasions; Moses ben Abraham produced his Livre; Andrew of Longjumeau, John of Plano Carpini, Simon of Saint-Quentin, and William of Rubruck composed accounts of their journeys; Louis IX sent an embassy and encouraged William’s mission; and Vincent of Beauvais ensured the preservation of Plano Carpini’s and Simon’s accounts by excerpting them in his Speculum historiale. It is likely that much more documentation on the Mongols, particularly that produced by the Council of Lyon, circulated in France during Louis IX’s reign but has not survived. What remains is nonetheless of the greatest historical importance and reflects the sophistication and international networks that made thirteenth-century France an intellectual capital of Latin Christendom.

Within this considerable archive, I have chosen to emphasize diplomacy and courts because the court was a privileged contact zone that allowed for meaningful communication between Latin Christians and Mongols. Yet for all of their anthropological similarities, the courts of Louis IX and his Mongol contemporaries offered stark contrasts. As numerous studies have highlighted, the friars were repulsed by Mongol gastronomical, sexual, sartorial, religious, and other habits and customs, but those are not what I see as the most important cultural divides. To my mind, the greatest difference is between the tradition and insularity of Louis’s court as opposed to the improvisation, flexibility, and openness of Mongol courts. These contrasting paradigms explain much about these actors’ historical trajectories.

Louis IX was an extraordinary monarch who mastered the performance of royalty in his era. He had a profound understanding of how to convey charisma and piety to his subjects and to all in Latin Christendom, and thereby enhance his authority. However, this success also explains why Louis failed in his attempts to project power beyond Europe. He lived according to traditions: those of the Bible, the church, and his royal forebears. Although he had global ambitions, they were rooted in a fundamentally monocultural perspective that largely sought to erase cultural difference through conversion, whether by preaching or the sword. There is a certain irony to Louis’s foreign failures: he implemented wide-ranging administrative reforms in France, but he could not innovate when it came to foreign policy and foreign relations.¹⁷⁹ His first crusade was, quite literally, a reprise of the disastrous Fifth Crusade. He reinforced existing castles in Palestine but failed to establish lasting political and economic structures to keep them viable.¹⁸⁰ Louis acted within the parameters already established by his culture—he did not look beyond them for other ideas, nor did he feel the need to.

In contrast, the Mongols of Louis’s era succeeded because of their multicultural competencies. Initially the Mongols were contemptuous of and destructive toward the foreigners they subjugated. Very quickly, however, they realized the need to co-opt artisanal, spiritual, intellectual, and political elites, who frequently became their advisors and residents of their courts.¹⁸¹ The Mongols came to refrain from violence as long as they received tribute, and initially they did not impose their or any other religion. They continued to disdain other cultures, but they recognized the need to absorb them to maintain order, acquire wealth, and facilitate communication and trade across the empire. As they expanded the empire, they developed a porous and flexible court culture that for many years remained a work in progress.¹⁸² By the end of the thirteenth century the courts of the four khanates had settled into stable forms, and they continued to be major centers of international exchange thereafter.

The point is not that one court culture was “better” than the other but that, as a matter of realpolitik, the Mongols’ approach was much more effective in projecting power across cultural and geographical borders. Might Louis IX’s crusade, conversion, and colonial efforts have been more successful had he devoted his energies to enlisting—whether by coercion or enticement—the collaboration of non-Christians? Had Louis emulated Mongol courts or, closer to home, the international courts of Christian lords in Iberia, Sicily, Byzantium, and Palestine? Of course these questions are moot, but they highlight the essential limitations of Louis’s worldview and methods as they applied to geopolitics. The Mongols raised the tantalizing possibility of global conquest for Louis IX and other Latin potentates, but at the same time they exemplified why such conquest by the Latins was impossible.

1. For a comprehensive account of the Mongol invasions of Europe, see Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 58–134.

2. For a history of this council, see Wolter and Holstein, Lyon I, 11–131. The pope brought with him letters from King Béla IV of Hungary describing Mongol attacks; eyewitness testimony was given by Archbishop Peter of Russia (Bird et al., Crusade and Christendom, 327–330; Dörrie, “Drei Texte,” 182–193; Jackson, “Testimony”; Wolter and Holstein, Lyon I, 49); and Roger of Torre Maggiore may also have spoken (Göckenjan and Sweeney, Der Mongolensturm, 129–130).

3. Plano Carpini’s account is also mentioned by Alberic of Trois-Fontaines, Chronica, 946.

4. Paris, Chronica majora, 6:163–165.

5. See appendix A.

6. Anderson, Alexander’s Gate; Bezzola, Die Mongolen, 105–109, 201–209; Bigalli, I Tartari e l’Apocalisse, 23–24, 160–190; Blurton, Cannibalism, 81–103; Burnett and Dalché, “Attitudes towards the Mongols”; Connell, “Western Views”; Fried, “Auf der Suche nach der Wirklichkeit”; Guzman, “Reports of Mongol Cannibalism”; Heng, Invention of Race, 287–416; Jackson, “Christians, Barbarians, and Monsters”; Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 138–150; Jackson, “Testimony”; Kappler, “L’image des Mongols”; Klopprogge, Ursprung, 153–236; Menache, “Tartars”; Schmieder, Europa und die Fremden, 258–285; Schmieder, “Gogs und Magogs”; Sinor, “Le Mongol vu par l’Occident”; Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews, 192–209, passim; Tanase, “Jusqu’aux limites du monde,” 199–205; Tattersall, “Anthropophagi,” 244–245, 250; von den Brincken, “Die Mongolen.” This is not to say that all of these studies focus only on Mongol alterity—several also discuss ways in which the Mongols were, or came to be, familiar to European observers.

7. al Hijjāwī al-Qaddūmī, Book of Gifts and Rarities; Allsen, Commodity and Exchange; Allsen, Culture and Conquest; Cannadine and Price, Rituals of Royalty; Elias, Court Society; Helms, Craft and the Kingly Ideal; Pohl, “The Regia and the Hring”; Vale, Princely Court; Wortman, Scenarios of Power.

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

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

10. Alberic of Trois-Fontaines, Chronica, 942. “Old Hungary” was “an area in the southern Urals from which the ancestors of the Hungarians were believed to have come” (Buell, Historical Dictionary, 157). Alberic appears to have had news of the reports of Friar Richard and Friar Julian. See Dörrie, “Drei Texte,” 147–181, and annotated German translations in Göckenjan and Sweeney, Der Mongolensturm, 67–125.

11. Kont, Étude, 8.

12. Little, “Saint Louis’ Involvement.”

13. Reed, Matthew Paris; Saunders, “Matthew Paris and the Mongols.”

14. Jackson is skeptical about the veracity of Paris’s account (The Mongols and the West, 60), while Jean Richard is not (Au-delà de la Perse, 62). On dubious statements about the Mongols in Matthew Paris, see Jackson, “Crusade against the Mongols.”

15. Paris, Matthew Paris’s English History, 1:341–347.

16. Paris, Chronica majora, 4:270–277, 6:75–76.

17. Holder-Egger, Ex Historiae, 604–605. The chronicle was dedicated to Alphonse of Poitiers (603).

18. Maier, Crusade Propaganda and Ideology, 76; Maier, Preaching the Crusades, 59–60. On Odo, see Charansonnet, “L’université”; Iozzelli, Odo da Châteauroux; Ruotsala, Europeans and Mongols, 60–67. Odo was a bridge to Jacques de Vitry’s generation. He “had been a student at Paris when James of Vitry directed his letters on the Fifth Crusade to the students and masters there, and he may have personally encountered James while preaching the Albigensian Crusade circa 1226 with Philip the Chancellor, the addressee of several of James’s crusade newsletters” (Bird, “Crusade and Conversion,” 32). Odo also succeeded Jacques de Vitry as cardinal of Tusculanum.

19. Charansonnet, “L’université,” 92.

20. Rachetta, “Paris 1244.”

21. Menache, “Tartars.”

22. “lessa l’en en France mout de marcheandises a faire pour la paour des Tartarins” (Holder-Egger, Ex Historiae, 604). This reference to disrupted trade in France echoes the famous remark by Matthew Paris about how the merchants of Gothland and Friesland did not go to Yarmouth out of fear that the Mongols would attack, which led to a glut of herring and a crash in price (Paris, Matthew Paris’s English History, 1:131).

23. “ne trouveront qui lor puis contrester jusqu’a vostre terre” (Holder-Egger, Ex Historiae, 604).

24. Paris, Matthew Paris’s English History, 1:346, 341.

25. Paris, Matthew Paris’s English History, 1:348, 341.

26. Matthew Paris writes that while the “Tartars” do not speak Hebrew or know the “Mosaic law,” it is nonetheless likely that they descend from the Ten Lost Tribes. Matthew Paris’s English History, 1:313–314.

27. Paris, Matthew Paris’s English History, 1:348.

28. Dörrie, “Drei Texte,” 162–182.

29. Herodotus’s descriptions of Scythian guile, mobility, archery, and cannibalism (Landmark Herodotus, 301, 308, 326) are strikingly similar to European accounts of the Mongols, as are Caesar’s descriptions of the valor and ferocity of German warriors (Caesar, Battle for Gaul, 33–34); see also W. R. Jones, “Image of the Barbarian.” As Schmieder observes, late medieval and early modern humanists identified the Mongols as Scythians (Europa und die Fremden, 301–302).

30. Lerner observes that the Cedar of Lebanon prophecy speaks of an invading people who are “headless wanderers,” which he relates to the fact that Mongol armies “appeared to terrified Westerners to be without a leader” (Powers of Prophecy, 22). As Heng notes in The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, the Mongols can also be likened to a “sentient swarm or herd” (296) with a “hive-mind” (387n27).

31. The same was true of Frederick II, who was presumably much better informed about the Mongols than Louis (Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 62). Both rulers were more focused on the Holy Land and on challenges closer to home.

32. Louis and Baldwin II were distant cousins: Louis was the great-great-grandson of King Louis VI of France, Baldwin II was Louis VI’s great-grandson.

33. On Baldwin II’s relations with the Mongols, see Richard, “À propos de la mission.”

34. W. Jordan, Louis IX; J. Le Goff, Saint Louis, 128–180; Richard, Saint Louis, 159–204.

35. On the Speculum Maius, see Franklin-Brown, Reading the World, esp. 95–128, 221–261; Paulmier-Foucart and Duchenne, Vincent de Beauvais.

36. On Vincent’s life and works, see Paulmier-Foucart and Duchenne, Vincent de Beauvais, 15–21.

37. Paulmier-Foucart and Duchenne, Vincent de Beauvais, 16.

38. Guzman, “Encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais”; Kappler, “L’image des Mongols”; Simon de Saint-Quentin, Histoire des Tartares, 7–20; von den Brincken, “Die Mongolen.” Vincent may have met Simon of Saint-Quentin (Histoire des Tartares, 22n1).

39. Paulmier-Foucart and Duchenne, Vincent de Beauvais, 81–82.

40. Simon de Saint-Quentin, Histoire des Tartares, 95.

41. Pelliot, “Les Mongols,” 74; Simon de Saint-Quentin, Histoire, 21–22n1; Tanase, “Jusqu’aux limites du monde,” 213–228. Plano Carpini left Lyon on April 16.

42. See Pelliot, “Les Mongols,” 58, 60–61, for Andrew’s return. Pelliot places Ascelin’s return in September 1248 (74). Ascelin returned with two Mongol emissaries, who received from the pope a letter for Baiju dated November 22, 1248 (Richard, Au-delà de la Perse, 79).

43. The papal letters brought by Plano Carpini, Andrew, and Ascelin, the long version of Plano Carpini’s account, the texts of Benedict and C. de Bridia, and excerpts from Salimbene of Adam’s chronicle relative to Plano Carpini are compiled and translated into French by Tanase in Plancarpin, Dans l’Empire mongol.

44. Guzman, “Encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais.”

45. Paris, Chronica majora, 6:113–115.

46. See Claverie, “Deux lettres”; Rachewiltz, Papal Envoys, 113–114; Richard, Au-delà de la Perse, 67–72. On the archiving of Mongol correspondence with the papacy, see Tanase, “Les Mongols.”

47. Bezzola, Die Mongolen, 174; Fried, “Auf der Suche,” 305 (“Wir sind also berechtigt, den Mongoleneinfall mit Grundzügen der scholastischen Methode zu konfrontieren [We are thus justified in bringing the Mongol invasions face to face with the essentials of scholastic method]”); Kappler, “Premières missions en Mongolie”; Klopprogge, Ursprung, 187–222; Tanase, “Jusqu’aux limites du monde,” 226. Tanase writes, “Les frères mendiants qui se rendirent en Asie ne furent pas de rares individus qui eurent le courage exeptionnel de se projeter dans un ailleurs abyssal avec lequel il était impossible de communiquer, mais bien la pointe avancée de tout un mouvement de dilatation intellectuelle de l’Occident latin [The mendicant friars who went to Asia were not rare individuals who had the exceptional courage to leap into an unfathomable elsewhere where it was impossible to communicate, but rather the avant-garde of an entire movement of intellectual expansion in the Latin West].” The papal ambassadors surely had either a mental or actual “survey form” with specific topics they had to address (the Mongols’ origins, history, homeland, religion, diet, housing, clothing, way of war, etc.), which explains the accounts’ overlap. As official envoys, they expected their reports to be archived by the papacy, which also motivated their thick description.

48. Hyde, Literacy and Its Uses, 85; Pian di Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 49–67; Tanase, “Jusqu’aux limites du monde,” 214–215.

49. Pian di Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 50–53, 302–303; Plancarpin, Dans l’Empire mongol, 25–26, 132–134. See also the biography in van den Wyngaert, Sinica Franciscana I, 3–6; on the eastern Europeans’ contacts with the Mongols, see Sinor, “John of Plano Carpini’s Return,” 205–206. Plano Carpini stopped at the courts of King Béla IV and Prince Daniel of Galicia on his way back to Lyon in 1247 and reported on his embassy. Pian di Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 117n19, 330; Sinor, “John of Plano Carpini’s Return.”

50. Ascelin may be the Dominican subprior of Avignon who attached his seal to a document of 1214 (Simon de Saint-Quentin, Histoire, 94–95n4). On Simon, see Guzman, “Simon of Saint-Quentin and the Dominican Mission”; Guzman, “Simon of Saint-Quentin as Historian”; Simon de Saint-Quentin, Histoire des Tartares, 12–14.

51. Simon de Saint-Quentin, Histoire des Tartares, 13–14.

52. Guerry, “Path Prepared.”

53. Paris, Chronica majora, 6:115; Pelliot, “Les Mongols,” 58.

54. Schmitt, La raison des gestes, 299–303.

55. Geertz, “Centers,” 15. As Geertz observes, “political authority … requires a cultural frame in which to define itself and advance its claims” (30).

56. As Durand-Guédy notes, “so-called ‘nomadic features’ are not exclusive to nomadic societies. A long-noted example is itinerancy” (“Introduction,” 14).

57. Vale, Princely Court, 140.

58. On European accounts of Mongol tents and camps, see the magisterial study by Andrews, Felt Tents and Pavilions, esp. 1:461–534.

59. For example, chapter 5: “De principio imperii Tartarorum” (Pian di Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 252).

60. Later in the text, Simon of Saint-Quentin notes that “khan” can also mean “magnificent or exalted” (“magnificus vel magnificatus”; Histoire des Tartares, 91).

61. Paris, Chronica majora, 6:113–114.

62. The term “nomadic feudalism” was used by earlier generations of Mongolists but is now out of fashion; see Kradin, “Ernest Gellner.”

63. Pian di Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 230. Syra means “yellow” or “golden” and evokes the imperial color.

64. Pian di Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 267. Corenza, the first Mongol lord whom Plano Carpini encounters, is said to have not a “curia” but an “orda,” “tentorium,” and “statio.” Although elsewhere Plano Carpini says that “orda” means “curia” (Pian di Carpine, Storia, 315), he apparently did not consider Corenza important enough to confer on his camp the term curia.

65. Salimbene de Adam, Cronica, 1:296–297.

66. Baiju’s officer in charge of receiving diplomats tells Baiju that if he kills the friars, the officer will go to the khan and denounce Baiju “in plenaria curia” (Simon de Saint-Quentin, Histoire des Tartares, 102).

67. On these sites see Boyle, “Seasonal Residences.” Plano Carpini did not visit and does not mention Karakorum, which was a half day’s journey from the region of these encampments (147).

68. Rachewiltz, Secret History of the Mongols, 1:157–162; 2:828–831.

69. Pian di Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 237.

70. The “golden orda” was “presumably Mongol Altan Orda” (Boyle, “Seasonal Residences,” 147), distinct from the syra orda.

71. On the sanctity of central Mongolia for the Mongols and their predecessors, see Biran, “Mongol Transformation,” 340–341, 347.

72. Plano Carpini writes that Batu was the most powerful Mongol lord after the khan (Pian di Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 309).

73. Implicit or explicit comparison to known entities is essential to Plano Carpini’s and, later, William of Rubruck’s descriptions. Thus Plano Carpini is unable to clearly (intelligibiliter) describe Mongol womens’ headgear because it is “alia quam alie nationes [different from that of other nations]” (Pian di Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 234).

74. Simon de Saint-Quentin, Histoire des Tartares, 98.

75. Pian di Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 237–238.

76. “Simon, dessen diplomatische Unfähigkeit [Simon, whose diplomatic incompetence]” (Bezzola, Die Mongolen, 148); “A vrai dire, Ascelin ne paraît pas avoir usé de beaucoup de diplomatie [In truth, Simon does not appear to have been very diplomatic]” (Richard, Au-delà de la Perse, 79); “Ascelin was a singularly undiplomatic diplomat” (Sinor, “Diplomatic Practices,” 345).

77. As when a police officer says “You are under arrest.” The classic study of performatives is that of Austin, How to Do Things with Words.

78. As Schmitt observes, gestures “permettent la transmission des pouvoirs politiques ou religieux qui sont le fondement de la cohésion sociale, ils en manifestent publiquement la force, ils en façonnent l’image vivante [enable the transmission of political or religious powers that are the foundation of social cohesion, publicly show these powers’ force, and fashion their living image]” (La raison des gestes, 16).

79. Pian di Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 320.

80. As Simon of Saint-Quentin explains, the friars wished to preserve the church’s honor, to prevent the church’s enemies from rejoicing, to prevent the “Tartars” from imposing more tribute on Christians, to preserve the hope of oppressed and enslaved Christians that the church would liberate them, and to avoid any accusation that the friars lacked constancy or feared death (Histoire des Tartares, 99).

81. Biran, “Mongol Transformation,” 347.

82. Aigle, “De la ‘non-négociation,’ ” 396.

83. I prefer “sumptuosity” to “luxury” in light of the discussions by Elias (Court Society, 37–38), who finds an overemphasis on luxury in studies of court culture, and Allsen (Commodity and Exchange, 103–104), who questions whether the Mongols had a concept of luxury but instead understood objects in terms of power relationships.

84. “alba purpura” (Pian di Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 317).

85. “de baldachino” (Pian di Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 320). Baldachin was “an oriental cloth woven of silk, shot through with gold (or silver) thread, or possibly one that was brocaded” (Owen-Crocker et al., Encyclopedia of Medieval Dress, 56, 375).

86. Pian di Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 321.

87. Simon de Saint-Quentin, Histoire des Tartares, 95.

88. See Allsen, Commodity and Exchange; Rosati, “Panni tartarici.”

89. Simon de Saint-Quentin, Histoire des Tartares, 85.

90. Plano Carpini observed that Mongol lords seized the best artisans of conquered lands (Pian di Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 291). Genghis Khan and his son Ogodei “established at least three settlements of textile workers in East and Central Asia” (Watt et al., When Silk Was Gold, 14); see also Komaroff and Carboni, Legacy of Genghis Khan, 63–66; Pelliot, “Une ville musulmane.” On the agencies overseeing textiles under the Yuan, see Farquhar, Government of China; Komaroff and Carboni, Legacy of Genghis Khan, 29–30.

91. On textiles in the Mongol Empire, see also Allsen, Commodity and Exchange; Allsen, “Robing”; the many entries in Komaroff and Carboni, Legacy of Genghis Khan; Rosati, “Panni tartarici”; Wardwell, “Panni Tartarici”; Watt et al., When Silk Was Gold, esp. 107–163.

92. Allsen, Commodity and Exchange, 15.

93. Of the gems and pearls, Plano Carpini writes “if we remember correctly” (Pian di Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 322), as if the splendid objects ran together in his memory.

94. Pian di Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 235.

95. Allsen, Commodity and Exchange, 60–63. The imperial association with gold is apparent, for example, in the expression “golden halter,” which “undoubtedly refers to the bond uniting the Mongol ruler—hence the term ‘golden’—to other rulers who owed him allegiance” (Rachewiltz, Secret History of the Mongols, 2:924).

96. “Insuper aurum et argentum et alia que volunt, et quando libet, et quantum placet, absque ulla contradictione petunt et accipiunt” (Pian di Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 287).

97. Simon de Saint-Quentin, Histoire des Tartares, 78–80.

98. Pian di Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 286.

99. As noted above, Louis met with Plano Carpini before leaving on crusade and was accompanied overseas by Longjumeau. It is not known if he was informed of Ascelin’s embassy.

100. Henry I was a great-great-grandson of King Louis VII of France, who was Louis IX’s great-grandfather.

101. A discussion and French translation of the letter are in Richard, Au-delà de la Perse, 166–170. See also Aigle, “Letters”; Osipian, “Armenian Involvement”; Richard, “La lettre.”

102. Longjumeau knew Eljigidei’s envoys from his previous embassy for the pope. Beer, “Letter of Jean Sarrasin,” 136–137.

103. On Guillaume, who may have been Andrew of Longjumeau’s brother, see Pelliot, “Les Mongols,” 179–181, and on Jean, 181–189.

104. Odo had been named papal legate to France in 1245 and directed the preaching of and fundraising for Louis’s crusade (Iozzelli, Odo da Châteauroux, 28). As Odo wrote to the pope, his letters to the Mongols declared that “Sacrosancta Romana Ecclesia conversionem eorumdem ad fidem Catholicam gratulanda audiet [the Holy Roman Church would gladly hear of their conversion to the Catholic faith]” (Charansonnet, “L’université,” 701).

105. Vincent of Beauvais refers to “servientes regis,” which Guillaume de Nangis translates as “serjans d’armes” (Pelliot, “Les Mongols,” 177).

106. However, Jackson argues that “the West did not see the Mongols as potential allies against Muslims until the 1260s” (“Crusade against the Mongols,” 2).

107. Charansonnet, “L’université,” 700–701.

108. Joinville, Vie de Saint Louis, 224, 424.

109. Viard, Les grandes chroniques, 7:132.

110. Viard, Les grandes chroniques, 7:132.

111. See Eskénazi, “Tref, pavellon, tante,” 550–555, 560; Owen-Crocker et al., Encyclopedia of Medieval Dress, 583–584.

112. Owen-Crocker et al., Encyclopedia of Medieval Dress, 301–302; see also Phipps, Cochineal Red. On the etymology and use of “scarlet,” see Munro, “Medieval Scarlet”; Munro, “Medieval Woollens: Textiles,” 212–215; Owen-Crocker et al., Encyclopedia of Medieval Dress, 477–481.

113. Like the words for scarlet in European vernaculars, Latin coccus could refer to either the dye or the cloth.

114. Owen-Crocker et al., Encyclopedia of Medieval Dress, 477.

115. Munro, “Medieval Woollens: Western European,” 231.

116. Joinville refers to the sails of eighteen hundred ships covering the sea (Vie de Saint Louis, 232–234).

117. Joinville, Vie de Saint Louis, 226.

118. Farmer, “Biffes,” 75–76.

119. “Li trez est merveilleux et granz / et entailliez a fleurs par panz. / … / a compas i fu mappamonde / bien entailliee [The tent is marvelous and large, / and some sections are decorated with flowers. / … / in a circle was a mappemonde beautifully fashioned (embroidered?)]” (A. Petit, “Les premières,” 312).

120. Bacci, “Tra Pisa e Cipro,” 372.

121. “bordaturae, in quibus ea quae Dominus Iesus Christus gessit pro nobis in corpore suo, sunt honestissime exarata [images on the hems, in which that which the lord Jesus Christ endured for us in his body is most worthily depicted]” (Charansonnet, “L’université,” 700–701).

122. Viard, Les grandes chroniques, 7:132.

123. The sources on textile production in Cyprus before the late thirteenth century are scant, but Jacoby observes that embroidery had probably been practiced there since the twelfth century (“Cypriot Gold Thread,” 106). On the history of textile production in Cyprus, see also Bacci, “Tra Pisa e Cipro,” 368–381; Durand et al., Chypre, 267–272; Jacoby, “Camlet Manufacture”; Owen-Crocker et al., Encyclopedia of Medieval Dress and Textiles, 166.

124. The Coccidae insects used to make kermes were cultivated from Provence to Crete. Munro, “Medieval Scarlet,” 16.

125. Suggs et al., Oxford Study Bible, 88–89.

126. The meanings of color terms are notoriously inexact, but vermeil was associated with both red and purple in Old French. See examples in Godefroy, Dictionnaire, 8:195. The Tabernacle of Moses is depicted on 36r of the Saint Louis Psalter (BnF, lat. 10525; 1258–1280). The tent is white with abstract blue and red decoration, so it does not appear to be visually related to Louis’s tent-chapel.

127. Louis’s tent may also have called to mind Hebrews 8:2, according to which Christ is “a minister in the real sanctuary, the tent set up by the Lord, not by man” (Suggs et al., Oxford Study Bible, 1526). The tent fused supersessionism with conversion: it replaced not only the tents of Moses but the pagan ones of the Mongols as well. On the Sainte-Chapelle, see Cohen, Sainte-Chapelle; Gaposchkin, Vexilla Regis Glorie; A. Jordan, Visualizing Kingship; Leniaud and Perrot, La Sainte-Chapelle; S. Murray, “Architectural Envelope”; Weiss, Art and Crusade, 81–195.

128. Among the relics Louis acquired from Baldwin was Moses’s rod (Noel and Weiss, Book of Kings, 76).

129. The representation of the Magi on the tent may also have expressed Louis’s desire to portray Latin Christianity’s claim on the territory now ruled by the Mongols. It is worth noting that the Grandes chroniques refer to the Magi as the “three kings of ‘Tharse’ ” and to the Mongols as coming from “Tharse.” “Tharse” as pertains to the Magi was probably intended to signify either the “Tarshish” of Psalm 72, which was understood to prophesy the coming of the Magi, or “Tarsus” in Asia Minor. The Mongol “Tharse,” on the other hand, seems to be a deformation of “Tartary.” It is not clear if the authors of the Grandes chroniques knew they were referring to two different places—Tarsus/Tarshish and Tartary—or if they conflated them into a single referent. If the latter, the implication could be that just as the Magi, who were previous kings of “Tharse,” had recognized Christ’s divinity, so should the current ruler—that is, the khan.

130. On the use of images as didactic aids in the thirteenth century, see S. Murray, Gothic Sermon.

131. See Branner, Manuscript Painting; Noel and Weiss, Book of Kings; Stahl, Picturing Kingship.

132. It is possible that the tent-chapel also resonated with Louis’s knowledge of the decorated tents of the Old French literary tradition (Roman de Thèbes, Perceval, Roman d’Enéas, Roman d’Alexandre, etc.). Both Louis’s chapel and the tents in literary works were sites of intercultural contact and narrative compilation. On tents in Old French literature, see Baumgartner, “Peinture et écriture”; Eskénazi, “Tref, pavellon, tante”; A. Petit, “Le pavillon d’Alexandre”; A. Petit, “Les premières descriptions.”

133. Joinville, Vie de Saint Louis, 436. The reference to Prester John is of course significant because he was a Christian like Louis.

134. Joinville, Vie de Saint Louis, 436.

135. Eljigidei also died in the conflict. On Oghul Qaimish, see Broadbridge, Women, 195–224.

136. Joinville, Vie de Saint Louis, 434–436. Throughout his account of the embassy, Joinville refers not to Oghul Qaimish but to the “king of the Tartars.”

137. Allsen, Commodity and Exchange, 52. On tents in medieval Mongol culture, see Andrews, Felt Tents and Pavilions, 1:270–665.

138. Pian di Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 311.

139. Andrews, Felt Tents and Pavilions, 1:512.

140. I assume that these objects came from Paris, which was a major center of goldsmithery and manuscript production during Louis IX’s reign.

141. The letter is reproduced in Meyvaert, “An Unknown Letter”; see also Aigle, “The Letters.” It is not known who translated this letter nor if this letter made it to Louis.

142. Meyvaert, “Unknown Letter,” 257; Richard, Au-delà de la Perse, 180.

143. Hulegu was born in 1218.

144. Bacci, “Tra Pisa e Cipro,” 372–373; Olschki, Guillaume Boucher, 17–23. William of Rubruck’s description is in Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 189.

145. Published in Duchesne, Historiae Francorum Scriptores, 5:428–432.

146. It is likely that Joinville met the ambassadors there and heard the account he included in his text. Paviot, “Joinville et les Mongols,” 207.

147. Iozzelli, Odo da Châteauroux, 38. Louis’s letter to the pope does not survive. According to Jackson, “nothing came of this” (The Mongols and the West, 103).

148. Sartach was Batu’s son and Genghis Khan’s great-grandson. See Richard, “Sur les pas de Plancarpin.”

149. On William of Rubruck’s biography, see Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 39–41, and for his encounter with the individual he had met on Cyprus, 115–116.

150. William makes no mention of the army’s defeat or of having been in captivity in Egypt. On the psalter, see Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 116.

151. Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 59.

152. “Le roi et la reine Marguerite avaient été très attentifs à munir Rubrouck de tout ce qui pouvait être nécessaire à un missionnaire [The king and Queen Margaret had been very attentive in furnishing [William of] Rubruck with everything that could be necessary for a missionary]” (Richard, Saint Louis, 251).

153. See Campbell, Witness; Jackson, “William of Rubruck”; Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William; Khanmohamadi, In Light of Another’s Word; Legassie, Medieval Invention of Travel; Olschki, Marco Polo’s Precursors; K. Phillips, Before Orientalism; Guillaume de Rubrouck, Voyage; Tanase, “Jusqu’aux limites du monde,” 250–259, passim; Watson, “Early Franciscan Missions.”

154. Khanmohamadi, In Light of Another’s Word, 59.

155. As Campbell observes, the relationship between East and West “is both controlled and expressed in the literary ‘relations’ of European travelers” (Witness, 91).

156. On William and the Mongols’ different understandings of his presence, see Legassie, Medieval Invention of Travel, 22–38.

157. Account taken from Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 42–43, 115 (quotation), 133, 172, 175.

158. Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 186; Richard, “À propos de la mission,” 120.

159. Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 180, 185–186, 248, 250.

160. “The Turco-Mongol word il/el meant not simply ‘at peace’ but also ‘submissive’ [which] reflected the Mongols’ conception of their world empire, of which all peoples were already members, whether they recognized it or not, with the result that anyone who opposed the qaghan was ipso facto a rebel” (Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 172–173n3).

161. Guzman, “European Captives.”

162. Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 244–245; on Buchier, see also Olschki, Guillaume Boucher. William writes that Buchier “believes he still has a brother on the Grand Pont called Roger Buchier” (Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 183).

163. Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 226, 252–253.

164. William describes in detail the remarkable fountain of different potables that Buchier designed for the great palace in Karakorum (Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 209–210), on which see Olschki, Guillaume Boucher, 45–106; Ruotsala, Europeans and Mongols, 123–130.

165. Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 214–215.

166. Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 194, 195–196.

167. Sergius “had not been ordained and was quite illiterate: he was a cloth weaver, as I discovered in his native country” (Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 198). On William’s depiction of Nestorians, see Heng, Invention of Race, 316–323.

168. Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 122, 126.

169. Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 133. See also 133n2 and 282 on Friar Giacomo d’Iseo’s account of his encounter in Tripoli with the king of Armenia, who recounted that he had heard from the Mongol “king” himself, by whom he may have meant Batu, how displeased the Mongol king had been with William’s threat that infidels would be punished with everlasting fire.

170. Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 237, 173.

171. For Campbell, “Friar William’s letter … is … the high water mark of literary excellence among the travel accounts of the Middle Ages” (Witness, 113).

172. Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 58.

173. Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 47. On Bacon’s use of William, see Bezzola, Die Mongolen, 201–209; Bigalli, I Tartari.

174. Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 52.

175. Euler, “Die Begegnung Europas,” compares Plano Carpini’s and William’s different approaches; see also Heng, Invention of Race, 292–323 passim.

176. The uncertainty about these two embassies stems from faulty and incomplete records that are open to different interpretations. Jackson argues for an embassy from Berke in 1260 or 1261, Jean Richard for one from Hulegu in 1262 (see the letter quoted earlier). See Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 123, 166; Meyvaert, “Unknown Letter”; Richard, “Une ambassade mongole.”

177. See Voegelin, “Mongol Orders of Submission.”

178. Monti, Da Carlo I, 21.

179. See Dejoux, Les enquêtes de Saint Louis.

180. Richard, Saint Louis, 501–530.

181. See Allsen, Commodity and Exchange; Allsen, Culture and Conquest; Allsen, “Ever Closer Encounters”; Allsen, “Guard and Government”; Komaroff and Carboni, Legacy of Genghis Khan; Rachewiltz et al., In the Service of the Khan; Wright and Twitchett, Confucian Personalities.

182. “In the biography of the Academician Want Pán (1202–1291) it is stated that at the beginning of the Chih-yüan period (1264) there were as yet neither audience halls nor a fixed court ceremonial, and that ‘whenever they were to greet [the emperor], the court officials and the commoners, without distinction of rank, all gathered in front of the imperial pavilion’ ” (Rachewiltz, “Yeh-lü Ch’u-ts’ai,” 200).