Conclusion
The Afterlives of the Mongol Archive
Over two centuries, under the pens of many writers, in hundreds of manuscripts—not to mention through embassies, images, imported objects, legends, pilgrimages, and rumors—the Mongols became an essential part of intellectual and popular culture in France. They were the chief representatives of a world unknown to classical antiquity and, as many came to recognize, to the Bible as well. In thinking and writing about the Mongols, late medieval authors confronted the limits of not only their knowledge but also the systems they had inherited for learning about and interpreting the world. Like experimental science, the Mongols demonstrated the importance of experience and observation to understanding God’s plan. At the same time, because they were new to the Latin intellectual tradition, the Mongols were a tabula rasa to which any number of hopes, fears, and fantasies could be assigned: hopes of alliance against the Muslim powers, fears of invasion, fantasies of global Catholic dominance. The Mongol archive is the record of the many forms of imaginative engagement—and transformation—that the Mongols inspired in French writers, manuscript makers, readers, and audiences in the late Middle Ages.
The history of the Mongol archive after the death of King Charles VI in 1422 is a vast topic in itself. Accounts of the production and reception of Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale, Polo’s Description of the World, Hayton, The Book of John Mandeville, and texts about Prester John, Kublai Khan, and Tamerlane—to take but a few of the archive’s most famous works and subjects—have been (and will continue to be) the subject of much scholarly inquiry. The broader importance of the development of the Mongol archive, traced in this book, and its lasting influence are underscored by four key moments in its later trajectory: the end of the archive as a repository of current information, the role of the Burgundians in perpetuating the archive in the fifteenth century, the archive in print, and the archive’s relationship to exploration and colonization.
The decision to equate the end of the reign of Charles VI with the end of the Mongol archive in late medieval France is in many ways arbitrary. Since 1221, the French have never stopped producing and archiving works that mention the Mongols—a point highlighted by Matthieu Chochoy’s De Tamerlan à Gengis Khan, which focuses on French historiography on the Mongols from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Indeed, the Mongol archive exemplifies the problem with periodization, since many of the works discussed in this book were widely diffused in the early modern period throughout Europe and beyond. Some, such as the Speculum historiale and Polo’s Description of the World, made the transition from manuscript to print very early and have never been out of print. As noted in the previous chapter, John of Sultaniyeh’s biography of Tamerlane was copied into a manuscript as late as the eighteenth century. Medieval works on the Mongols have retained an authority and a fascination for readers down to the present, as the many editions and translations of them attest. In a sense, the Mongol archive of medieval France is to this day a living entity to which many other works have subsequently been added, but which remains medieval at its core. After all, even among postmedieval publications, those focused on the medieval Mongol imperium—which of necessity draw on the Mongol archive—far outnumber those that treat later Mongolian history.1
There were nonetheless fundamental changes in the nature of the Mongol archive in the fifteenth century that justify this chronology. One of these changes was discussed in the previous chapter: the archive for the most part stopped being a repository of current—that is, fifteenth-century—information. There are several reasons for this. Chief among them is the rise of the Ottomans, who after their defeat at Ankara in 1402 needed relatively little time to regroup and continue their expansion. They were aided in this by the deaths of Tamerlane in 1405 and his son Miran Shah in 1408, after which the Timurid zone of influence receded to India and central Asia, and Tamerlane’s successors did not maintain contact with France. We may also point to the plague, resistance within Islamic societies against Catholic missionaries, and a decline in overland trans-Asiatic trade as other factors that limited the transmission of news about the Mongols to France. There is also the fact that the Mongol khanates largely ceased to exist, and as a result there were no longer great “Tartar” lords with whom to communicate.
The Mongol archive’s stasis was also the result of the political situation in France, which became preoccupied by internal division and war with England. Philip the Bold’s dream of uniting the lords of France behind a crusade, already far-fetched during his lifetime, became impossible after his son John the Fearless assassinated Louis of Orleans (brother of King Charles VI) in 1407. The kingdom descended into civil war in the last years of Charles VI’s reign. The successful invasion of France by King Henry V of England, who decimated the French nobility in 1415 at Agincourt and captured Paris in 1420, further weakened the kingdom. Moreover, in 1416 Duke John of Berry died, then in 1419 John the Fearless was assassinated. Until the end of the Hundred Years’ War in 1453 and for decades thereafter, the French monarchy and nobility were too absorbed in warfare and reconstruction to maintain serious diplomacy with Asia. Even the fall of Constantinople in 1453, as shocking as it was, did not elicit a notable reaction in France. The French Crown’s contributions to the Mongol archive ended with Charles VI’s letter to Tamerlane, which, as we saw, likely never reached Asia.
What was added to the Mongol archive in France in the fifteenth century was largely owed to the Burgundians’ continued interest in crusading. Philip the Good became duke of Burgundy upon the death of his father in 1419. Like his father and grandfather, Philip made crusade a central feature of his rule by supporting land and naval attacks against the Ottomans, pursuing diplomatic initiatives to organize crusades, and sponsoring crusade-themed pageantry at home.2 The fall of Constantinople in 1453 inspired Philip’s famous “Vows of the Pheasant [Voeux du faisan]” banquet the next year, at which he and members of the Burgundian elite promised to launch a crusade against the Ottomans—a promise left unfulfilled.3 However, persistent fear of and planning against the Ottomans led to continuing interest in the Mongols, insofar as they were part of the crusade literature that Philip inherited and collected. Philip’s library of over eight hundred volumes was itself a contribution to the Mongol archive’s late medieval history, as it contained the Grandes chroniques (in multiple copies), two copies of Sydrac, Polo’s Description of the World, Joinville (in a copy that had come from the library of Charles V), Hayton (perhaps in two copies, one of which was fr. 12201), two copies of Torsello’s Liber secretorum, the Directorium (in Latin and in a French translation commissioned by Philip from Jean Miélot in 1455), Mandeville, Mézières’s Epistre and Songe, and John of Sultaniyeh’s life of Tamerlane (fr. 12201).4 With his library, Philip manifested his dynastic and political ties to earlier eras of crusading and international diplomacy—eras in which the Mongols figured prominently.
At the same time, Philip the Good was eager for new information about the state of Christianity in the world and about the power of the Ottomans. As a result, the “Tartars” continued to appear in works produced for or acquired by the duke. The second-to-last contribution listed in appendix A is the report of Philip’s ambassador Ghillebert de Lannoy about his travels in 1421–1422. Ghillebert encountered “Tartars” during his visit to Lithuania; met a “Saracen duke from Tartary” at the court of Duke Witholt in Kamienic (in modern-day Poland); and had a guide-interpreter named Gzoolyoos who was a “Tartar” and a “very loyal man.” He also noted that Damascus was burned in the time of Tamerlane but was being rebuilt when he visited.5 Ghillebert’s account shows that at least some in France were aware that the “Tartars” were still an important demographic and political presence in northeastern Europe. Philip sent Bertrandon de la Broquière on a reconnaissance mission in Egypt and Syria in 1432–1433. Broquière’s account, which was only copied for the duke in 1457, mentions Tamerlane’s attacks on Syria, the fact that the “Tartars” are one among many Islamic peoples (including Turks, “Barbares,” and Persians), and that Tamerlane’s son rules Persia, and it also describes the “Great Turk” as somewhat resembling a “Tartar.”6 Philip owned a copy of Emmanuel Piloti’s crusade treatise, which was composed in 1420 and translated into French in 1441. To illustrate why Cairo cannot be attacked from Syria, Piloti gives the example of Tamerlane, who despite his forces and strategic brilliance realized that he could not cross the desert and maintain his army. He also recounts Tamerlane’s pillaging and burning of Damascus, his victory over Bayezid, and seeing Tamerlane’s ambassadors in Cairo, where they offered an alliance in exchange for homage from the Mamluk sultan. Piloti explains that “Tartars” are the most highly prized slaves in Egypt and notes that the Genoese port of Caffa (Theodosia) in Crimea is surrounded by pagan lands, including that of the “Tartres.”7 Jean de Wavrin’s account of a naval expedition of 1444–1447 sponsored by Philip states that in the Sea of Azov, at the mouth of the Kuban River, the galleys captured around four hundred “Tartars.”8 Finally, mention must be made of Jean Germain’s Mappemonde spirituelle of 1449.9 Germain was an advisor to Duke Philip and a vocal proponent of crusade. His Mappemonde devotes an entire section to “Tartarie,” which Germain describes as having been Christianized by Saint Malachias of India in 1252. He appears to have derived this from the Grandes chroniques.10 He also writes that Pope Clement V sent the Franciscan “Jehan de Mont Colum” (John of Montecorvino?) and five archbishops to instruct the people in the faith.11 It is not clear on what sources Germain drew for his brief account, but it is nonetheless telling that he considered “Tartarie” part of Christianity’s global history.12 His Mappemonde recalls the argument for crusade and global proselytization in BL, Royal 19 D 1, made for King Philip VI more than a century earlier.
The printing press arrived in Paris in 1470, three years after the death of Philip the Good. A brief survey shows that the Mongol archive in the early age of print was in some ways not very different from the archive in manuscript. That is, works that were widely copied in manuscript—the Speculum historiale, Polo, Hayton, Mandeville—appeared in print as well. Antoine Vérard published the Myroir historial, Jean de Vignay’s translation of the Speculum historiale, in 1495–1496 in Paris; the fifth volume contains the Mongol passages. The only sixteenth-century edition of Polo’s Description of the World in French was printed in Paris in 1556.13 Hayton was first printed in France in the early sixteenth century.14 The first printed edition of Mandeville, in French, appeared in Lyon in 1480; twelve other editions appeared until 1550.15 Such examples are useful, but they do not tell the whole story of the Mongol archive’s reception in print in France. One of the great challenges in examining this reception concerns the international circulation of printed works. The fact that a given text does not appear to have been printed in France does not mean that that text did not circulate in France and was not read there. Any discussion of the Mongol archive’s print history in France must therefore consider the likelihood that certain texts, such as Polo or the Latin original of the Speculum historiale, were present even though they were not printed in France until the mid-sixteenth century or, in the case of the Speculum, the seventeenth century. One must also consider that certain texts were never printed because they remained unknown, and that still others—notably The Book of John Mandeville—fell out of favor.16
Printed volumes also demonstrate how earlier texts were adapted to new circumstances. In 1507, Vérard printed Sebastien Mamerot’s crusade history Les passages faiz oultremer par les roys de France et autres princes et seigneurs françois contre les Turcqs et autres Sarrazins et Mores oultre marins (The journeys made overseas by the kings of France and other French princes and lords against the Turks and other overseas Saracens and Moors), or Les passages d’outremer for short. Originally composed in 1472–1474, Les passages d’outremer copies the chapters in the Grandes chroniques on Louis IX’s meeting with Eljigidei’s envoys in Cyprus and also includes a passage about Tamerlane.17 A few years later, King Francis I (r. 1515–1547) commissioned Nicole Le Huen to translate Bernhard von Breydenbach’s Journey to Jerusalem and add a brief history of the crusade vows and crusades of the kings of France.18 Le Huen’s text, first printed in 1517, also contains excerpts on Saint Louis and the Mongols from the Speculum historiale.19 As these and other editions demonstrate, a major factor motivating the printing of these texts was persistent concern about the Ottomans, which in turn inspired interest in medieval crusade history and thus in the Mongol archive.
In addition to crusade, another phenomenon that drove the printing of works on the Mongols in France, as in the rest of Europe, was exploration and attendant colonization.20 The relationship between the Mongol archive in late medieval France and the Age of Discovery is both textual and dynastic. Medieval texts on the Mongols were assimilated into the print corpus on exploration, colonization, and cosmography very early. A salient example is the Novus Orbis, a collection of seventeen travel accounts first printed in Basel and Paris in 1532 and subsequently augmented with material on later voyages. The only pre–fifteenth-century accounts it includes are Burchard of Mount Sion’s description of the Holy Land, Polo’s Description of the World, and Hayton; all other texts relate fifteenth- and sixteenth-century journeys, including those of Columbus and Vespucci. As Lisa Pochmalicki observes, the Latin edition of the Description in the Novus Orbis “appears to have been the most read and the source for most of the quotations from the [Description] that later appeared in cosmographies, maps, and nongeographical texts.”21 The Novus Orbis was thus crucial to the early assimilation of the Mongols into humanistic geography and history.
The Mongol archive continued to appeal to readers because of not only curiosity but also a desire to “discover,” colonize, convert, and control far-off lands and peoples. This impulse had been present in the archive since the Relatio de Davide, but now, with advances in navigation, it had a substantially greater field of action. Giovanni da Verrazzano, in his report to King Francis I about his first expedition to North America, in 1524, writes that his goal was to reach Cathay and the eastern edge of Asia, that he has discovered a new continent, and that the world is much larger than the ancients thought. He also notes that the natives of this new land resemble “Orientals and the inhabitants of the most remote regions of China.”22 Verrazzano, like Columbus before him, thus presents his exploration as a continuation of earlier journeys to the Far East, notably that of Polo. In the report on his second voyage to Canada (1535–1536), Jacques Cartier writes in the preface that Francis I should imitate the king of Spain and create an empire in North America because the innumerable people and riches there offer “sure hope of the future aggrandizement of our most holy faith, and of your dominions and most Christian name [certaine esperance de l’augmentation future de nostredicte tres-saincte foys, et de voz seigneuries et nom tres-chrestien].”23 As Cartier’s text shows, the ambitions that had animated the Europeans’ crusade, conversion, and commercial activities in the Middle East and Asia had been transferred to the Americas. The journeys of these explorers were in many ways the continuation of the beliefs and enterprises that created the Mongol archive, which was therefore a prologue to and foundation of the Age of Discovery. The continuity of interest in and imagination about the Mongols makes clear how artificial such periodization is.
The connection between the Mongol archive in late medieval France and early modern European expansion was also a matter of inheritance.24 Summing up a common observation, Adshead writes that there is “a straight line from Marco Polo to Christopher Columbus.”25 However, from the perspective of the Mongol archive, the most meaningful line runs from Philip Augustus, during whose reign the first reports of the Mongols reached France, to his royal descendants. The kings of France played a crucial role in the “Europeanization” of the world. Their actions were enabled and rationalized by a long tradition of crusading, conversion, and colonization whose ideological and religious justifications had been established by their medieval forebears—a fact of which they and others were well aware, as the aforementioned works of Le Huen, Verrazzano, and Cartier demonstrate. The Mongol archive may be understood as a precursor to the many informational and institutional practices that were established by the French as their colonial empire spread around the globe between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, for in the Mongol archive we see the seeds of exploration and settlement, colonial bureaucracy, language schools, anthropology and ethnography, museums, and the mission civilisatrice. Colonialism was inextricably tied to knowledge and required archiving on a vast scale. The Mongol archive represents an early step toward the instrumentalization of information in the service of France’s global ambitions.
A fuller account of the ways in which the Mongol archive anticipated and shaped the modern era should discuss the larger context of the archive’s reception. Accounts from the Mongol archive were essential to the worldview of not only French monarchs but also other European potentates such as Henry the Navigator, Isabella I of Castile, and Emperor Charles V, all of whom were descendants of the Capetians. Their imperial and colonial projects altered the course of world history and were shaped in no small part by medieval encounters with and imaginings of the Mongols and Mongol-era Asia. This account should address the archive’s portrayal of religious beliefs and practices, animals and plants, marvels, monsters, and “barbaric” rites and how these prefigured colonial, anthropological, scientific, and racial discourses. It should show that these portrayals influenced not only post-Columbian representations of non-Europeans but also behaviors—that the archive records beliefs on which conquistadors, explorers, kings, merchants, and missionaries acted as they subjugated and colonized distant lands. And this account should also emphasize that the archive’s legacy includes the birth of Sinology in the West, the scholarly and popular interest in East-West relations since the Middle Ages, and the appreciation of the connectedness and hybridity of premodern cultures. In short, such an account should show that the Mongol archive’s rich and complex legacy lives on in ways both negative and positive.
1. One example of the enduring popularity of the Mongols’ medieval history is Weatherford’s bestseller Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World; one could cite many other examples in other media (e.g., exhibitions, films, video games).
2. See Moodey, Illuminated Crusader Histories; Paviot, Les ducs de Bourgogne; Paviot, La Politique navale.
3. On the “Voeux du faisan,” see Caron, Les voeux du faisan.
4. On the Grandes chroniques, see Bousmanne et al., La librairie, 4:87–111; on Sydrac: 2:226–232; on Polo: 5:176–180. On Joinville, see Moodey, Illuminated Crusader Histories, 92–93. On Torsello, see Bousmanne et al., La librairie, 5:181–195; on Directorium: 5:113–118 (French translation), 5:128–130 (Latin); on Mandeville: 4:207–212; on Epistre: 5:257–260. On Mézières, see Songe, 1:xxxi–xxxiii. On John’s biography of Tamerlane, see Moodey, Illuminated Crusader Histories, 92–94, 100; Paviot, Les ducs de Bourgogne, 205–206; Schmieder, Europa und die Fremden, 195–196. On Philip’s library, see Bousmanne and Savini, The Library.
5. Ghillebert de Lannoy, Oeuvres, 40–41, 55–57, 62, 159.
6. La Broquière, Le voyage d’outremer, 35–36, 56, 118, 181.
7. Piloti, Traité, 25, 239–240, 53, 143.
8. R. Desjardins, “Writing and Imagining,” 48; Paviot, Les ducs de Bourgogne, 303.
9. Bousmanne et al., La librairie, 5:272–275.
10. Viard, Les grandes chroniques de France, 7:130.
11. BnF, fr. 13235, 19v–20v.
12. Wrisley, “Jean Germain’s Debat”; Wrisley, “Situating Islamdom.”
13. Polo, La description géographique …, translated by François Gruget.
14. Burger, “Cilician Armenian métissage,” 67.
15. Deluz, “Le Livre Jehan de Mandeville,” 214.
16. Deluz, “Le Livre Jehan de Mandeville.”
17. I consulted BnF, fr. 5594 for these passages, which are on folios 226v–230v and 276r, respectively.
18. Beaune, “La légende de Jean Tristan,” 150.
19. The running title in this section reads “De Vincent hystorial.”
20. There is a large and growing bibliography on the continuity between the Middle Ages and the Age of Discovery. See, for example, Feldbauer et al., Vom Mittelmeer zum Atlantik; Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus; Goodman, Chivalry and Exploration; Lara, Christian Texts for Aztecs; Mollat, Les explorateurs; J. R. S. Phillips, Medieval Expansion of Europe; Reichert, Asien und Europa; Wolfzettel, Le discours du voyageur. Mention should also be made of Charles Verlinden’s extensive research on medieval slavery.
21. Pochmalicki, “Marco Polo,” 333.
22. Wolfzettel, Le discours du voyageur, 78–79.
23. Wolfzettel, Le discours du voyageur, 88–89.
24. Stahuljak, “Bridge Essay.”
25. Adshead, Central Asia, 77.