Appendix B
Objects and the Mongol Archive in Late Medieval France
As I note in the introduction to this book, the Mongol archive offers only traces of the Mongols’ place in the popular imagination in medieval France. From the texts that survive, we are left to imagine the news and rumors that circulated about the Mongols and the ways in which the Mongols shaped people’s perceptions of their world. Equally tantalizing are the few objects that may attest to the connections between late medieval France and the Mongols. There have survived to the present relatively few material vestiges of the immense traffic of people, animals, and objects that moved along the overland and maritime Silk Roads. Here I briefly describe objects that suggest some of the interactions, relationships, and networks that connected France to the Mongols in the late Middle Ages.1
The first object is the Cup of Saint Sigismond, which is housed at the Abbey of Saint-Maurice in Agaune, Switzerland. It is made of partially gilt and engraved silver, and at first glance its form resembles that of double-cup ciboria such as the Balfour Ciborium (England, 1150–1175; Victoria and Albert Museum), the Sainte Coupe (England, ca. 1160; Sens Cathedral), the ciborium of Master Alpais (Limoges, ca. 1200; Louvre), and the cup of Charlemagne (Germany, ca. 1210–1220; also housed at Saint-Maurice). More generally, the bottom portion—a bowl with a wide, tall foot—resembles both Christian chalices and the copies of them made in Islamic realms in glass and metal.2 As Antoine-König observes, the Cup of Saint Sigismond is a thoroughly syncretic object: its shape could derive from Christian, Islamic, or Persian tradition; the incised medallions recall Ayyubid and Chinese design; its dark color is typical of Chinese metalwork; and the metal ball in the sphere that rattles when the lid is moved could be tied to shamanistic rituals.3 I would add that the three serpents on the sphere crowning the lid could derive from Mongol veneration of serpents.4 Antoine-König’s conclusion is that the cup was made not in Europe but in the Golden Horde during the third quarter of the thirteenth century, around the time that the Mongols there converted to Islam, though the cup does not appear to be related to Islam.5
The cup is first mentioned in an inventory of Saint-Maurice of 1550–1572. It is not known how or when it arrived at Saint-Maurice, but it is tempting to imagine that King Louis IX was involved in the cup’s acquisition. Louis wished to spread the cult of Saint Maurice in his kingdom and received relics of the saint from the abbey. In gratitude, in 1262 he gave the monks a reliquary of the crown of thorns (which survives to the present).6 As noted in chapter 2, William of Rubruck appears to have visited Paris around 1257 and may have met Louis. The Mongol cup of Saint-Maurice could have been a gift for the king that William brought back from his mission. However, the problems with this supposition are that William does not mention the cup, it does not appear in medieval inventories, and it was not tied to Louis in the abbey’s records. The cup therefore probably has no connection to William or the king. And while it could be a vestige of international trade in the thirteenth century, the cup could also have made its way to Europe at a later date.
Unlike the Cup of Saint Sigismond, the second object to consider is a sure testament to global interaction in the thirteenth century. Visitors to the Met Cloisters, the medieval branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, have long admired the thirteenth-century tomb effigy of a knight believed to come from the monastery of La Clarté-Dieu (about twenty-five miles northwest of Tours) and to represent a member of the d’Aluye family (fig. 2).7 Clad in chain armor, hands joined in prayer, gaze fixed heavenward, the figure is the very image of pious chivalry. It also poses a surprising riddle. As the Met curator of arms and armor Helmut Nickel discovered in the early 1990s, although the effigy was carved in France and clearly depicts a Christian knight, the knight’s sword hilt resembles one of Chinese, not European, design (fig. 3). It would therefore seem that the sculptor portrayed an actual object that had been in this knight’s possession.
Just how a French knight of the thirteenth century acquired such a sword remains an unsolved and likely unsolvable mystery, particularly since it is not clear whom this effigy represents. It may be Jean d’Aluye, who left for the Holy Land in 1240, returned in 1244 with a relic of the true cross, and appears to have died in 1247 or 1248. A charter states that Jean received the relic from Thomas, bishop of Gera, Petra, and Arcadia in Crete, who had himself received it from Gervais, the Latin Patriarch of Constantinople, and that Emperor Manuel I Komnenos had carried the relic into battle.8 Thus we know that Jean brought the relic back; perhaps the sword was in his baggage as well. The Cloisters effigy could also represent Jean’s son Hugues VI, who journeyed outre-mer in 1248—probably on the Seventh Crusade with Louis IX. While overseas, either Jean or Hugues would have had the opportunity to obtain the sword as a purchase, a gift, or booty. Alternatively, the sword might have been acquired closer to home from a merchant or acquaintance. Whatever the sword’s origins, today this sculpture offers a tantalizing trace of the vast networks that connected one end of Eurasia to the other eight centuries ago.
Although this tomb effigy raises a host of questions, it does tell us about how people in thirteenth-century France reacted to a foreign object in their midst. Knightly accoutrements on tomb sculptures tended to be stylized and follow a well-established formula. In this case, however, the sword was perceived as so exceptional and significant that whoever commissioned the effigy felt it merited commemoration in stone. The sculpture was intended to preserve the image of the sword and its relationship to this knight. In other words, the tomb is not only a declaration of knightly status but also a record of possession—the tomb’s patron wished to declare that this knight owned this sword. The effigy exhibits the careful observation of the sculptor, whose work was so detailed that nearly eight centuries later the sword type is still identifiable. This artist rendered not only an image but a portrait of the sword; while the knight’s face is generic, carved as it was a few decades before the return of portraiture in European art, his sword is not. For the patron and those who knew the knight, the sword may well have been the reminder of stories the knight told about his travels, in which case it was also a mnemonic device evoking distant places and events. It is clear in any event that the sword possessed a particular meaning for the effigy’s patron.
Another object testifies to the commercial and personal relationships that linked the French to their captive compatriots in the Mongol Empire. The Met Cloisters has in its collection a saltcellar produced in Paris in the mid-thirteenth century (fig. 26).9 The boat-shaped container is made of rock crystal and is mounted in a gold frame supported by a tall stem on a large foot, also of gold. The boat’s gunwale is decorated with balas rubies, emeralds, and pearls. The saltcellar’s components attest to the global trade networks that brought raw materials to Parisian artisans. As Marco Polo observes, balas rubies (or spinels) were mined in Afghanistan (“balas” derives from Badakshan).10 The small handle on the saltcellar’s lid is in the shape of a serpent and refers to the fact that salt was believed to heal the bites of poisonous animals such as scorpions and snakes.11 The echo with the snakes on the Cup of Saint Sigismond is thus coincidental.
This saltcellar is related to the Mongol archive not only because of what it is made of but because of where and by whom it was made. As I discuss in chapter 2, while visiting the Great Khan Mongke in Mongolia, William of Rubruck met the goldsmith William Buchier, who said he was from France and believed that his brother Roger was still working as a goldsmith on the Grand Pont in Paris. It is impossible to know by whom the Cloisters saltcellar was made, but it was certainly by an elite goldsmith—someone at the pinnacle of the profession. It seems reasonable to assume that this person would have known the Buchier family, especially if the Buchiers were established enough to have an atelier on the Grand Pont. Moreover, given the saltcellar’s sumptuous facture, it is also reasonable to assume that it was made for an elite table service, and possibly for Louis IX himself. Thus the saltcellar may be doubly connected to William Buchier: through the maker’s relationship to the Buchier family, and through Louis IX, for whom Buchier made the “strap decorated with a precious stone that [the Mongols] wear to counteract thunder and lightning,” as William of Rubruck writes.12 Nor is the saltcellar the only such example. The two surviving reliquaries of the crown of thorns made in Paris during the reign of Louis IX, one of which Louis gave to the aforementioned monastery of Saint-Maurice in Agaune, were made at the same time as the saltcellar—probably by the same atelier—and evoke the same global connections.13
There are other objects and images that potentially or definitely belong in the Mongol archive. One of the most intriguing is the Fonthill vase (China, ca. 1300; National Museum of Ireland), a porcelain vessel decorated with flowers in high relief placed in four quadrilobe compartments around the circumference.14 The vase was in the dauphin’s collection in 1689, but how and when it came to France is unknown, and it may not have been a medieval acquisition.15 The vase nonetheless reminds us of references to porcelain in medieval French inventories, such as among the possessions of Jeanne d’Evreux (d. 1371) and Duke John of Berry.16
Similarly, one may point to the references to cloth of gold such as that in the inventory of Charles V’s library cited in chapter 4. There, the cloth in question covered a copy of Marco Polo’s Description of the World. Such cloth was often some form of pannus tartaricus, which originated in central Asia but whose production and use eventually spread from China to North Africa and Europe. Among surviving examples of gold cloth that ended up in France in the late Middle Ages, one of the most remarkable is the pourpoint said to have belonged to Charles of Blois (d. 1364).17 Housed today at the Musée des Tissus et des Arts décoratifs in Lyon, this incredibly well-preserved padded and quilted doublet is made of weft-patterned lampas with silk and gold threads that portray animals in octagonal compartments. Its origin is uncertain, and it may not have been produced in a Mongol realm, but it nonetheless reflects the influence and value of Asian cloths of gold in this period. The pourpoint leaves us to imagine the many other garments and hangings of panni tartarici and their imitations that must have been in the possession of French elites in the late Middle Ages.
The Mongol archive also includes the images of Mongols and other Asian peoples in late medieval French art, such as in The Book of Marvels.18 Kubiski examines the accurate representation of Asian dress in early fifteenth-century Parisian illumination, which she attributes to direct observation of Emperor Manuel II’s entourage during his stay in the capital between 1400 and 1402. It is possible that John of Sultaniyeh’s embassy in 1403 also influenced such images. As with manuscripts, I did not include individual miniatures in appendix A, but a full list of images would show the extent to which French artists were aware of and had access to Asian clothing, people, and objects—whether through personal experience, artworks (likely Italian), or pattern books.19
Finally, there is the matter of European objects and images that went east in the Mongol era. I discuss in chapter 2 the tent and liturgical objects that Louis IX sent to Guyuk. William of Rubruck brought books on his journey: a Bible given him by Louis IX, an illuminated psalter he received from the queen, a breviary, and a missal. These he showed to Sartach and Mongke, who both examined the books closely, with Mongke asking what the pictures meant.20 It may also be thanks to William that motifs from moralized Bibles made their way into thirteenth-century Armenian illumination.21 One of the most intriguing examples of the circulation of European books in Eurasia is the so-called Bible of Marco Polo.22 It is a small Bible produced in northern France (probably Paris) ca. 1240 that was brought back to Europe from China in the 1680s by the Jesuit Philippe Couplet and is today in the Laurentian Library in Florence (shelfmark Plut. 3). It is impossible to know at what point and with whom this Bible made its way east, but it seems likely that it was taken there before the fall of the Yuan Empire in 1368, and thus it resided in China for hundreds of years. King Philip IV gave Rabban Sauma “gifts and fine garments” for the ilkhan Arghun.23 No doubt there were other occasions of royal gift-giving to Mongol ambassadors. As I note in chapter 5, John of Sultaniyeh ends his biography of Tamerlane by mentioning the conqueror’s desire for luxury goods produced in France. Whether Tamerlane himself knew of such objects we cannot say, but John’s text suggests they were part of international commercial networks.
1. On material exchange between late medieval Europe and Asia and its cultural influence, see Allsen, Commodity and Exchange; Arnold, Princely Gifts; Chiappori, “Riflessi figurativi”; Luyster, Bringing the Holy Land Home; Mack, Bazaar to Piazza; Rosati, “Panni tartarici”; Wardwell, “Panni Tartarici”; Watt et al., When Silk Was Gold.
2. For example, the footed bowl with eagle emblem made of enameled glass (probably Syria, mid-thirteenth century) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
3. Antoine-König, Le trésor, 100–101.
4. Birtalan, “Oirat Ethnogenetic Myth,” 73; Pegg, “Ritual,” 94; Pop, “Mongols and Nature,” 270.
5. The text reads “durant le premier quart du XIIIe siècle [during the first quarter of the thirteenth century]” (101), but this is clearly an error, as the Golden Horde did not yet exist in this period. Moreover, the first ruler of the Golden Horde to convert to Islam was Berke (r. 1257–1267) (Morgan, The Mongols, 127).
6. Antoine-König, Le trésor, 26–27, 108–109.
7. Boehm and Holcomb, Jerusalem, 211; Nickel, “Crusader’s Sword.”
8. de Morry, “Le château de Vaujours,” 557.
9. Wixom, Mirror of the Medieval World, 103–104.
10. Polo, Le Devisement du monde, 2:4–5.
11. In his entry on the saltcellar, Wixom writes, “The gems and pearls in combination with the serpent probably had an apotropaic meaning, as serpents’ tongues were thought to warn against poison by breaking out into a sweat” (Mirror of the Medieval World, 103). The “serpents’ tongues” to which he refers were fossilized shark teeth, but their use as poison detectors becomes prominent in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Europe. A more direct relationship between salt and snakes is described in Bartholomeus Anglicus’s De Proprietatibus rerum, book 16, chapter 94, on salt: it “heals the bites of venomous beasts, of scorpions and of serpents, when it is mixed with honey and large nuts, as Avicenna says” (my translation from the Middle French translation produced by Corbechon for King Charles V, BnF, fr. 134, 279v).
12. Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 252.
13. Antoine-König, Le trésor, 108–109. The other reliquary is in the treasury of the Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi.
14. Arnold, Princely Gifts, 129–133; Lane, “Gaignières-Fonthill Vase.”
15. It was, however, in Hungary by 1381. See the discussion in Lane, “Gaignières-Fonthill Vase,” 124–126.
16. Lane, “Gaignières-Fonthill Vase,” 126–129.
17. Donzet and Siret, Les fastes du Gothique, 399–400; Rosati, “Panni tartarici,” 83–85.
18. See Bousquet-Labouérie, “Les voyageurs et l’Orient.”
19. See Arnold, Princely Gifts; Chiappori, “Riflessi figurativi”; Mack, Bazaar to Piazza. On Italian influence on late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Parisian illumination, see Meiss, French Painting.
20. Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 116–117, 190.
21. Evans, Armenia, 148–149.
22. See Melloni, In Via in Saecula.
23. Montgomery, History of Yaballaha III, 65.