Preface: Artifacts of Our Global Past

The richness of the global past was revealed to me when as a graduate student I became a lecturer at the Met Cloisters, the branch of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted to the Middle Ages. There I encountered objects whose syncretism showed that this museum “devoted to the art and architecture of medieval Europe” (a description that has since been discontinued) was about much more than Europe. There were lions of Central Asian or Chinese inspiration carved onto capitals produced ca. 1130–1140 in Catalonia for the monastery of Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa (fig. 1).¹ There was elephant ivory from Africa carved into exquisitely delicate statues and high-relief plaques by artists in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Paris. A tomb effigy of ca. 1260 from the monastery of La Clarté-Dieu (about twenty-five miles northwest of Tours, France) portrayed a knight whose sword hilt is of Chinese origin (figs. 2, 3).² Many of the materials that European artists used came from far afield: garnets from Sri Lanka, lapis lazuli and balas rubies from Afghanistan, rock crystal from North Africa, and the list goes on. Everywhere I looked, the art spoke to Europe’s place in global trade and travel networks that were as important to understanding these objects as were their iconography and ritual functions.

As I learned more about the collection and as ever more scholars emphasized the global dimensions of the Middle Ages, I realized that this art was the record of a rich and complicated history that encompassed vast territories and many people beyond the artists and audiences who were usually studied. Medieval “European” art was often not, or only partially, European. Much of it was made possible by people who transferred from one realm or continent to another animals, artworks, books, gems, metal, minerals, pearls, plants, shells, spices, textiles, and weapons, not to mention other people whom they captured, enslaved, or hired. This global history predates the Western Middle Ages and is evident in a plethora of objects: Roman glass beads found in ancient tombs in Japan; Roman bronzes, coins, intaglios, and lamps found in ancient settlements in Vietnam; a small bronze statue of the Buddha probably made in Kashmir in the sixth century and found in a Viking-era burial site on the island of Helgö in Sweden; a seventh-century ceramic container made in China shaped like a Greco-Roman amphora whose dragon-headed handles evoke Persian and Central Asian metalwork (fig. 4).³ There are too the physical remains of artists, such as the woman buried at the Dalheim women’s monastery in Germany between 997 and 1162 whose teeth contain particles of lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, which indicates she may have been a scribe or painter who licked her brushes, or helped with the preparation of pigments.⁴ These and numerous other examples provide tangible and frequently surprising evidence of the history of long-distance trade and contact in Eurasia.

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries there is a noticeable increase in such globally inflected objects and in references to or records of them. This development was largely the result of the world order that arose in the wake of the Mongol conquests. Trade along the overland and maritime Silk Roads and elsewhere in Eurasia and Africa was given a tremendous boost by the Pax Mongolica. Over the past thirty years, the results of this commercial explosion have been on vivid display in numerous exhibitions, several of which—including When Silk Was Gold: Central Asian and Chinese Textiles; The Legacy of Genghis Khan: Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia, 1256–1353; Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797; and Jerusalem (1000–1400): Every People under Heaven—were co-organized by and mounted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Mongols were crucial in all of these exhibitions, whether as conquerors, facilitators of trade, or patrons. They shrank the world and left an extensive material record of their empire’s vast reach and influence.

Art was my introduction to the global Middle Ages and to the Mongols’ central role in medieval history, and art’s lessons stayed with me as I focused my studies on medieval French literature. In this book, I focus on French contact with the Mongols to illuminate France’s place in the medieval world system from an interdisciplinary perspective. For in addition to the remarkable artworks the Mongol era produced are the many texts composed, copied, or archived in France that record or arose from long-distance encounters. I examine texts, objects, and actors whose connections have often been overlooked but who exemplify the varieties of cultural production and exchange in the global or, more accurately, the Mongol Middle Ages. In essence, this book is the endpoint of an investigation sparked by a Chinese sword hilt on a thirteenth-century French tomb effigy. I hope to have shown why that effigy and the many other examples of Franco-Mongol contact documented in this book are important to understanding our medieval past and our present.

1. Dale, “Monsters.”

2. See appendix B.

3. On the Roman beads, see Tamura and Oga, “Archaeometrical Investigation”; on ancient Vietnam, see Malleret, L’Archéologie, 379–395.

4. Radini et al., “Medieval Women’s Early Involvement.”