The Mongols in the Works of Philippe de Mézières

Among the contributions to the Mongol archive during the reign of Charles VI, the works of Philippe de Mézières stand out for their multifaceted portrayal of the Mongols. This portrayal combines historical and travel accounts, legends, eyewitness testimony, and allegory to create the image of a timeless Mongol empire. For Philippe, the Mongols exist in an eternal present—they simultaneously influence history and are unaffected by its vicissitudes. These quasi-allegorical Mongols provide static examples to whom Philippe assigns different meanings and roles depending on his didactic or hortatory objectives. Philippe’s vision of the Mongols is thus important not for its historiographical or ethnographic value but because it demonstrates how the Mongol archive continued to be used and to evolve in the decades after the fall of the Yuan Empire.

Judging by Philippe’s comments about his peripatetic career as a soldier, royal councilor, and diplomat, he heard frequently about the Mongols. They are mentioned in the Songe du Vieil Pelerin of 1389, an elaborate allegorical mirror for the prince and argument for religious and political reform; in the treatises for his Order of the Passion of Jesus Christ; and in the Epistre lamentable et consolatoire of 1396, addressed to Duke Philip the Bold of Burgundy, which both criticizes and proposes reforms for Christian knighthood in the wake of the defeat at Nicopolis.⁷ In the Songe, Philippe writes that when he served “un grant roy d’orient [a great king of the East]”—by whom he means either Hugh IV or Peter I of Cyprus—he met a Genoese merchant who had lived fifty years in “Inde la Majour” (China).⁸ This merchant recounted much about the great marvels of “India,” among which must have been many stories about the Mongols. However, Philippe does not go into detail because, as he writes, these stories are not relevant to the Songe and would make it too long.⁹ In the Epistre, Philippe writes that while serving Hugh IV and Peter I he met merchants, old soldiers, and Muslim converts to Christianity, whom he “demandoit continuelment et enquerroit ardanment [asked continually and interrogated fervently]” for information about the lords of Egypt, Syria, Turkey, and Tartary. In the Songe and Epistre, he also mentions his “special friend” Jean Bargadin of Metz, who had served the Great Khan eight years in Khanbaliq, “savoit les langages de par dela [knew the languages of those parts],” and knew “choses … sans nombre [innumerable things]” about the Mongols.¹⁰ Once in Paris, Philippe would certainly have heard about the Mongols from Levon V, the exiled king of Cilicia.¹¹ Out of religious devotion, crusading zeal, professional necessity, and innate curiosity, Philippe made it his business to learn firsthand about the world beyond Latin Christendom and inevitably learned much about the Mongols.

The Mongols thus figured prominently in the mental world map that Philippe developed from his encounters with this wide variety of informants. It is clear that he also read about the Mongols. He mentions Genghis Khan’s victory over Prester John and the Great Khan’s cities and magnificence; he describes Mongol encampments, discipline, mobility, customs, and money; and he speaks of the Mongols with a mixture of respect, fear, and disdain. His information and attitudes suggest familiarity with a range of sources, and there are good reasons to assume that he knew the Mongol archive in France. After Philippe’s career in Cyprus ended in 1369, he went to France and was a councilor to King Charles V until Charles’s death in 1380. Philippe remained in service to the Crown as a diplomat or councilor until at least 1396, and he died in Paris in 1405. This means that for decades he had access to the royal library (not to mention other libraries in Paris and throughout the kingdom). Moreover, Philippe was for a time a tutor to the dauphin (the future Charles VI).¹² The chapter in the Songe in which the Old Pilgrim—Philippe’s stand-in—lists works that the future king should and should not read can be understood as a princely user’s guide to the royal library. The list of condemned books includes romances and works on magic, prophecy, and astrology. Recommended books include Nicole Oresme’s translations of the Ethics and Politics, while an earlier chapter praises Oresme’s treatise on astrology.¹³ Judging by the breadth of titles and genres he mentions in the Songe and in other works, it seems certain that Philippe knew intimately the royal library and those who helped expand it.

Given his career, commitment to crusade and evangelization, and interest in international affairs, it is safe to assume that Philippe was familiar with works in the library related to the Mongols. At the very least, he would have known the excerpts of Plano Carpini’s and Simon of Saint-Quentin’s reports in Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale, Polo’s Description of the World, and Hayton’s Flower of the Histories.¹⁴ These were authoritative sources on the Mongols that existed in multiple copies in the library; they were also, as we have seen, well known among the French nobility. Moreover, Philippe would have identified with all of these authors.¹⁵ Like the friars, he wished to spread the Gospel; he learned much from Italian merchants and traveled frequently to Italy; and like the Armenian prince Hayton, he led an active military and political life before retiring to a monastery.¹⁶ It is also easy to imagine that Philippe knew the Catalan Atlas. His constant references to places beyond France, not to mention the Songe’s account of the world tour of Truth and her entourage, suggest a keen interest in and deep knowledge of geography.

In Philippe’s conception of the world, the Mongols are still a great power in Asia. In the Songe, although the journey of Truth and her followers, who include the Old Pilgrim who narrates, is recounted in the past tense, the narrator describes the Mongols in the present tense. Thus the virtues “entrerent en Tartarie et … vindrent à Caubalech [entered Tartary and … came to Khanbaliq].” However, the cities of Saray and Khanbaliq are described in the present: they “sont plus grandes. iiii. fois chascune que n’est le Caire en Babilone [are each four times larger than Cairo in Babylon].” The account of the khan’s mobile encampment (“cité portative,” or portable city) is in the present and the future: “Et demeure le Grant Can en ladicte cité portative trois mois ou environ … Et tantost que le Grant Caan vendra la ou il doit arester, il trouvera celle mesme cité portative [And the Great Khan stays in the aforesaid portable city three months or thereabouts … and as soon as the Great Khan arrives at the place where he should stop, he will find this same portable city].” Later Hardiesse (Boldness) speaks of the Mongols’ obedience and of the Great Khan’s justice in the present: “Il sont obediens au Grant Caan … Et toutefois il sont ydolatres [They are obedient to the Great Khan … and yet they are idolaters].”¹⁷ Truth too speaks in the present when describing the game in which the khan’s archers keep a ball in the air for hours by shooting arrows at it.¹⁸ More generally, in the Songe, the Epistre, and the three redactions of the treatise on the Order of the Passion, the lists of peoples to be targeted for crusade and conversion include the “Tartars.”¹⁹ The second redaction of the chivalric treatise also mentions that the order’s members should learn the languages of the infidels and schismatics, including “linguam tartaricam.”²⁰ Thus the Mongols belonged very much to the present in Philippe’s mind and were an essential part of his worldview.

Yet like his contemporaries, Philippe retained an outdated idea of the Mongols. He believed that the Yuan Empire, or something like it, still existed. One reason for this misconception is the fossilization of the European image of the Mongols discussed in the previous chapter. Philippe, like many authors, readers, and manuscript makers of his time and later, read accounts of the Mongols in the Speculum historiale, Polo, Hayton, and other works as if they were current.²¹ Another reason for this timeless image of the Mongols seems to be the informants on whom Philippe drew. In the Songe and the Epistre, Philippe speaks of the khan’s two great cities and the portable city in the present because he was told of them by Jean Bargadin. Oral, eyewitness testimony seems to have given Philippe the impression that the Mongol world others described and that he read about still existed. A third reason for this atemporal view of the Mongols is that, despite the need Philippe felt to fight or convert them, they no longer figured as an immediate threat to Latin Christendom. By Philippe’s time, the Latins perceived their greatest threat to be the Ottomans, who had succeeded the Mongols as the latest “infidel horde” menacing Europe. In the Songe, Philippe writes that he has no doubt that if the lords of Christendom do not defend and reform the faith, they will within ten years see the Amorath (the Ottoman sultan) or another Ottoman leader in Puglia and Germany, and the Ottomans will do to Hungary what previous enemies of the faith had done.²² Thus the Ottomans now pose the same threat that the Mongols once did. Later in the Songe, Truth says that the Turks are “les plus hardis [the boldest]” of the infidels who threaten Christendom.²³

The Ottomans established a geographical and imaginative distance between Latin Christendom and the Mongols that allowed an outdated and often fantastical vision of the Mongols to flourish. In Philippe’s case, this vision was rife with moral and spiritual meaning. As he sees it, the Mongols’ success is part of God’s plan to punish Christian sin. In the Songe, when Truth and her entourage arrive in India they discover that more than two hundred years earlier, Prester John and his Christian subjects had been defeated by the Great Khan of Tartary because they had stopped being virtuous.²⁴ Divine Providence explains that she raised Genghis Khan to his imperial throne and used him to punish Prester John and all the Christians of India, Persia, Media, and Chaldea.²⁵ These passages echo earlier commentary on the Mongols, but crucially, Philippe does not demonize them or resort to apocalyptic imagery to characterize them.²⁶ He makes no mention of Gog and Magog, for example. The prophecies of a Mongol-led apocalypse had lost their currency by Philippe’s time, and a new infidel threat had arisen in Anatolia. Instead of announcing end-times, the Mongols’ rise was understood by Philippe as a sign that eastern Christians needed to repent, reform, and above all recognize papal authority. The Mongols’ rise meant too that the Latin Church needed to augment its missionary efforts.²⁷ To be sure, the Mongols were ruled by superstition, and Latin Christendom would eventually have to confront them.²⁸ But for Philippe, Mongol power was the result not of demonic influence but of Christian failings and the Mongols’ own virtues.

In Philippe’s view, these virtues were considerable. Another reason that he does not demonize the Mongols is that he considers them to be worthy models for Christians, and particularly for Christian lords and knights. Like earlier commentators, Philippe presents Mongol government as exemplary. In the Songe, when Truth and her entourage arrive in the empire of Tartary, they find that justice, peace, and mercy rule there more than any other kingdom they have visited except for the land of the Brahmans. When the group goes to visit the Great Khan at his summer residence on the plains, they are “grandement receues et noblement hounourees [received grandly and honored nobly].”²⁹ In the section of the Songe devoted to social and governmental reform, the khan’s portable city is held up as a model of both administration and justice. Unlike the king of France, whose parliament contains many “superfluous people” who undermine the king and the commonweal, the khan has only twelve councilors even though he travels with a million mounted men.³⁰ In the khan’s portable city, there are no fights, murders, or thefts, and thus little need for lawyers and judges. Although the Mongols are idolaters, they are ruled with such justice and behave so obediently that “leur biau gouvernement condampne la policie et l’orgueil des princes des crestiens [their fine government shames the administration and pride of the Christians’ princes].” In concluding her description of the portable city, Boldness asks what more she can say “après si bel example pour les François [after such a fine example for the French].”³¹

Philippe returns to the image of the portable city in the Epistre, where it becomes a crucial model for the crusade Order of the Passion that he had been proposing for decades. As in the Songe, Philippe writes that the khan travels with a million soldiers and cavalrymen. In the middle of this vast encampment, the khan resides in the immense “cité portative,” which is composed of tents arranged along streets, with artisans, boutiques, and all the other necessities that one would find in the largest city in the world. No city could be better organized.³² Once the resources (“biens”) of the surrounding area have been consumed (“consommés”), the khan moves to another site where the exact same portable city has been erected, such that one cannot tell the new one from the previous city. Philippe’s concern in the Epistre is not so much the portable city’s good government as its mobility. The city represents the Mongols’ extraordinary capacity to move vast numbers of people and goods over great distances. It is this mastery of space and place, of movement and material arrangement, that so impresses Philippe. The Epistre is in effect a complement and addendum to the earlier treatises on the Order of the Passion. One of Philippe’s chief concerns in these texts, in addition to spiritual and social reform, is the ability of Latin Christendom to project power beyond Europe. As he sees it, the Mongols offer the perfect example of military organization and efficiency: their good government, combined with their logistical genius, has made them the greatest power in Asia and a model for Christians to emulate.

Furthermore, in the Epistre, the Mongol “cité portative” provides the basis for one of the most remarkable allegories in medieval French literature. Philippe explains that the Order of the Passion is itself a “cité de Dieu portative [portable city of God]” that combats the city of Babylon and its king the devil—that is, the crusaders fight vices, sins, and the enemies of the faith. Like the Mongols, those in Philippe’s portable city of God will camp outside of cities and will consume all the pasture and food in the surrounding area. That is, “parlant moralment [morally speaking],” the knights will deplete “la force et la vertu des ennemis de la foy [the strength and power of the enemies of the faith].” The portable city of God will then move to another site in infidel lands that will be exactly like the previous one, which is to say that not a single knight will be missing and that this “cité portative” thus represents the “multiplicacion de noble chevalerie crestienne [the increase of noble Christian knighthood].” The portable city of God also figures the great good (“grant bien”) that the order’s crusaders will do in infidel lands, and the marvelous works (“euvres merveilleuses”) that will free the Christians captured at Nicopolis if they cannot be freed through negotiation. This crusader “cité portative” resembles too the portable altar of a traveling lord. Just as every day the Eucharist commemorating Christ’s sacrifice is celebrated on the altar, so do the knights in the “city” prepare themselves daily to give their lives for God. Philippe’s explication of the allegory ends with the observation that we are better served by the “choses … portatives [portable things]” of this world than by those that cannot be carried.³³

As this summary shows, Philippe constructs an elaborate symbolic structure around the core image of the portable city. His allegorical exegeses are creative, as when he transforms the Mongols’ environmental destruction into the crusaders’ sapping of enemy strength, or when at the end of this passage he equates the vast mobile city with a miniaturized portable altar. Applying traditional mnemonic techniques, Philippe uses the Mongol encampment as the framework or icon to which other associations and meanings are attached. It is this assimilation of elements that I find most interesting because of its multilayered and multifaceted syncretism. Philippe invites and incites readers to see, as he does, the spiritual forces at work in the world. The Mongols are a manifestation of these forces, having been elevated by God to global power. An exotic, quasi-magical entity, the Mongols inhabit a moral and imaginative sphere that is both within and outside of history. And it is precisely the Mongols’ ability to transcend time, space, and corporeality that Philippe wishes to cultivate in his Order of the Passion. As Tarnowski observes, the ultimate goal of the order was to create knights who deny the self, think only of eternity, and overcome “the mutability inherent in humanity.”³⁴ This is what the Mongols as imagined by Philippe have managed to do. Their portable city is an appropriate model for crusaders because it embodies many of the qualities—among them hierarchy, justice, obedience, order, self-abnegation, and sobriety—that will be required if Latin Christendom is to conquer and convert the world.

Despite his respect for the Mongols, within the longue durée of the Mongol archive Philippe is more akin to early, critical authors such as Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck than he is to later, pro-Mongol authors such as Polo, Hayton, or others who argued for a Christian-Mongol alliance. Like Plano Carpini, Philippe was impressed by Mongol obedience; like William, he believed that if Christian soldiers emulated Mongol practices they would be unstoppable.³⁵ Yet like the friars, he also anticipated that Latin Christendom would eventually have to fight the “Tartars.” Moreover, this conflict could only be won by the knights of his Order of the Passion who, adhering to the beliefs and practices set down by Philippe, would be so empowered by God that “un de noz chevaliers m. Turs et Tartres en chassant poursuivra et ii. x^m. Sarrasins [one of our knights will put to flight a thousand Turks and Tartars, and two, ten thousand Saracens].”³⁶ Philippe’s comments reflect the fact that by his time the Mongols of central and western Asia had been Islamized. The earlier dream of allying with the Mongols against Islamic powers was alien to Philippe. Hence the paradox at the heart of his portrayal of the Mongols: his crusaders had to imitate the very force that they would eventually have to defeat—a force that was superior in every way save its religion. We do not know if Philippe’s outlook changed after Tamerlane defeated Bayezid at the battle of Ankara in 1402. However, as the next section discusses, we do know that Philippe’s combative perspective was challenged by another experienced diplomat when he visited the court of King Charles VI.

John of Sultaniyeh’s Little Book on Tamerlane

Philippe de Mézières’s portrayal of the Mongols was indicative of the extent to which they had become an ahistorical and allegorical subject among French writers by the late fourteenth century. As is evident in appendix A, little new information about the Mongols arrived in France after the 1330s—or in any event, little was recorded and has survived. The great exceptions are the Catalan Atlas and the documents provided by John, archbishop of Sultaniyeh, during his visit to Paris in 1403.³⁷ John brought letters in Persian from Tamerlane and his son Miran Shah, and Latin translations of these letters. He also composed a short biography of Tamerlane, one surviving copy of which was probably produced while John was still in Paris. John’s visit is also recounted in the Chronographia regum Francorum and in the chronicle of Michel Pintoin, the Religieux de Saint-Denis.³⁸ John’s embassy is thus of great significance because it is well documented and represents the last major updating of the Mongol archive in late medieval France.

Timur the Lame, or Tamerlane, was born in the Chaghatai khanate (see map 1) in central Asia in 1335 or 1336. He was from an elite family of Turkized Mongols, and by 1370 he ruled the western part of the khanate. He formed an army out of his nomadic people and led them on a series of campaigns against foreign territories that had formerly been part of the Mongol Empire. His career echoed that of Genghis Khan in that he was a formidable war leader, maintained his army through territorial expansion and the acquisition of booty, and used violence to terrorize his enemies. However, he never claimed to be khan, preferring instead to rule through puppets of Genghis Khan’s line. Contrary to what later biographers and historians would assert, Tamerlane was not related by blood to Genghis Khan, but he did marry into the Chinggisid line to strengthen his position. His campaigns brought him into conflict with the Mamluks and the Ottomans, both of whom he defeated in a series of battles in Syria and Anatolia between 1400 and 1402. Unlike his Mongol forebears, he did not invade Europe and apparently had no desire to. His capital was Samarkand and his focus always on Asia (see map 2). At his death in 1405, he was planning an invasion of China, the last part of the former Mongol Empire that he had not yet attacked. Whether he wished to reconstitute Genghis Khan’s empire, or a semblance of it, remains a matter of debate.³⁹

Tamerlane was an extraordinarily powerful if, from the French perspective, distant figure, and John of Sultaniyeh’s embassy to Paris therefore had the potential to be of major geopolitical importance given the right circumstances. John was a Dominican who apparently came from Padua and was named archbishop of Sultaniyeh (in northwestern Iran) on July 20, 1398, by Pope Boniface IX.⁴⁰ In 1398–1399 he acted as an envoy to Genoa and Venice on behalf of Tamerlane’s son Miran Shah, and he also visited England.⁴¹ John’s journey to Europe in 1403 was inspired by Tamerlane’s victory over Bayezid at the battle of Ankara on July 28, 1402. John arrived in Paris in May 1403 with a letter from Tamerlane addressed to King Charles VI; the Persian original and Latin translation of this letter survive to the present in the national archives of France. He also bore a letter from Miran Shah addressed to all Latin Christians, the Latin translation of which also survives in the national archives.⁴² The letter from Tamerlane states that the conqueror had already received letters from Charles VI, which had been delivered by a Dominican named Francis whose embassy had been more or less simultaneous with those of John in 1398–1399.⁴³ Even before John’s visit in 1403, the French knew who Tamerlane was and had had direct contact with him.⁴⁴

While the letters brought by John and their embellished Latin translations are important pieces of the Mongol archive, much more significant is the biography of Tamerlane that John produced for the royal court. Unlike most documents in the Mongol archive, John’s text relates current information and comes directly from the source. As the Chronographia regum Francorum states, John “Parisius pluribus personis particulariter multa narravit, que eciam quibusdam litteraliter in modum libelli in gallico scripti tradidit [recounted much in detail to many people in Paris, which someone then set down faithfully in French in a little book].”⁴⁵ The French text survives in four medieval manuscripts, and a rearranged, slightly abridged version in Latin was included in the Chronographia.⁴⁶ The earliest copy survives in BnF, fr. 12201, which was produced for Duke Philip the Bold of Burgundy and purchased on May 24, 1403. It is likely that the text was copied into this manuscript while John of Sultaniyeh was still in Paris.⁴⁷ Interest in John’s account did not wane after Timur’s death in 1405—the Berkeley and Ghent copies of the biography date to the mid-fifteenth century.⁴⁸ Nor was the text restricted to Paris. The Berkeley manuscript was made in Avignon, which is noteworthy because Benedict XIII appears to have had a copy of John’s account in the early 1400s.⁴⁹ These copies likely mean that John visited Avignon after leaving Paris and continued to share his little book.

John’s account is also notable because he knew Tamerlane personally, having spent more than twelve years with him.⁵⁰ His text ranks with other eyewitness accounts in the Mongol archive—those of Plano Carpini, Simon of Saint-Quentin, William of Rubruck, Polo, Hayton, and Odoric of Pordenone—in its detailed evaluation of people, battles, and customs. However, John found himself in a considerably more complicated position than his predecessors. On the one hand, he wished to gain support for expanded missionary efforts in Asia. It is for this reason that he styled himself “archiepiscopus totius Orientis [archbishop of the entire Orient]” in his translation of Tamerlane’s letter to Charles VI, a title that does not occur in the Persian original.⁵¹ On the other hand, John knew the extraordinary challenges that missionaries to Asia faced, beginning with the fact that Islam was firmly implanted in the realms that Tamerlane had conquered. John was therefore faced with the need to portray Tamerlane as a powerful enemy of the Ottomans with whom the French could and should negotiate, but without inflaming his Christian audience against Muslims.

John’s “little book” on Tamerlane is thus much more than a dry recitation of facts. Rather, it is a carefully composed portrait whose every detail has been strategically chosen to make Tamerlane comprehensible and familiar, and to distinguish him and his people from the Turks. To this end, John situates Tamerlane in the world of the “Tartars.” As he states, Tamerlane is “Tartre de la partie d’Orient [a Tartar from the eastern region]” and has a “visaige de Tartre [a Tartar face].” The women of his court too have “Tartaresque” faces.⁵² Although he has conquered a vast empire with many different peoples in it, Tamerlane lives among his own “Tartar” people in nomadic style. If John was aware of the cultural and demographic fusion that made Tamerlane, in modern terms, a Turko-Mongol, he does not say so. He explains that “Timur” means “iron” but does not say that the word is Turkish. It is hard to imagine that he did not know this; we seem to have here a purposeful omission to hide Tamerlane’s cultural connection to the Turks. However, John cannot omit the fact that Tamerlane and his people are Muslims. His emphasis on Tamerlane’s “Tartar” identity seems intended to frame him as belonging more to Mongol history than to that of Islam or the Turks. Such a portrayal was in part true to Tamerlane’s own political self-fashioning: he did see himself as the heir to the Chingissids, but he also saw himself as a truer Muslim than his Muslim enemies.⁵³

To integrate Tamerlane into Mongol history, John also draws on the form and content of earlier works about or related to the Mongols. It is certain that he knew Hayton’s Flower of the Histories, which he cites in another work.⁵⁴ As I discuss below, we may assume that he also knew the Mongol passages in the Speculum historiale and Polo’s Description of the World.⁵⁵ John may have structured his account like these earlier works because they were important references for him, or because he thought it would appeal to his French audience, or both. It is reasonable to assume that John visited the French royal library and knew that it housed works on the Mongols with which he was familiar. Indeed, John may have composed his life of Tamerlane as a complement to the extensive collection of Mongol-related works already in the king’s possession. Another reason for the resemblance between John’s and previous accounts of the Mongols is that Tamerlane consciously imitated the tactics, strategy, customs, and nomadic lifestyle of earlier Mongol lords. John’s biography of Tamerlane may thus be understood as both a reprise and an updating of the Mongol archive.

The text that John of Sultaniyeh’s account most resembles is Polo’s Description of the World. This is not surprising: as a Dominican he would have known of Polo’s book, and as an Italian who lived and traveled in Asia, John may have identified with Polo.⁵⁶ While there are no direct citations of Polo in John’s text, and it is a much smaller work, its structure and the topics it addresses are very similar to Polo’s account of Kublai Khan.⁵⁷ In what seems conscious imitation of the Venetian, John devotes entire chapters to Tamerlane’s rise to power, the challenges he initially faced and how he overcame them, his sons, his wives and concubines, the cities and territories that he conquered, his wealth, his great host, his government, and his appearance. John’s declaration that “no one has ever found or seen a greater [lord], nor his equal, in the Orient” seems a direct response to Polo’s statement that Kublai is “the most powerful man in people, land, and treasure who has ever lived from the time of Adam to today.”⁵⁸ John may also follow Polo’s model when describing Tamerlane’s eating customs, his physical separation from others, how he rewards his soldiers, key battles he has fought, and his people’s clothing. Just as Polo recounts how Kublai, to suppress Naian’s rebellion, traversed in twenty days a distance that normally took more than thirty days of travel, so does John tell of how Tamerlane, on his way to invade Syria, built a fleet in five days and then had 1.5 million men cross the Euphrates in only two and a half days.⁵⁹ Although John, unlike Polo, does not go into any detail concerning travel infrastructure in Tamerlane’s realm, he does note that merchants are protected, makes repeated references to Tamerlane’s vast wealth, and ends his account by listing the goods that Tamerlane prizes. This emphasis on trade and treasure echoes both the letters that John delivered to Paris and Polo’s repeated references to commercial activities and riches in the Yuan Empire, its tributaries, and beyond.

Despite the clear influence of Polo on John’s biography of Tamerlane, there is one significant difference between the two accounts. Whereas Polo wrote as a servant and admirer of Kublai, John writes from a much more detached perspective. He evaluates Tamerlane not as a subject and servant but as a missionary and guardian of Christianity in Asia. In this way John’s account resembles those of Plano Carpini, Simon of Saint-Quentin, and William of Rubruck (whose text he probably did not know) more than it does Polo’s. His brief ethnographic observations—Tamerlane and most of his people live in tents, they eat no bread and drink no wine, the women ride like men and wear pants—echo the observations of Plano Carpini and Simon of Saint-Quentin. Like the friars, John comments on the unclean eating habits of the “Tartars.” John’s mention of Tamerlane’s warriors’ fortitude—they are raised to fight, live always on the plains, and are indifferent to hot and cold—also recalls earlier reports.⁶⁰ Such details respected the genre in which John was writing and met his audience’s expectations while providing useful information.

Like his mendicant predecessors, John was also attentive to political hierarchies and displays. He explains that Tamerlane is not from the nobility but of “petite condicion [low status]” and from the “commune generacion [common people].”⁶¹ After killing the emperor of Tartary, Tamerlane executed all of the emperor’s sons save one, whom he kept on the throne. To strengthen his position, Tamerlane married one of the emperor’s wives who was also a member of the imperial family (i.e., of the Chingissid line), while he married his sons to the emperor’s daughters. Tamerlane does not call himself king or emperor but rules in the name of the puppet emperor, and he even performs a ceremony of homage to the emperor once a year. Tamerlane has his own seal, inscribed with the word “truth,” and acts as a supreme judge.⁶² John also devotes a chapter to listing the kings and princes whom Tamerlane has subjugated. While John gives a minimal account of court life, he nonetheless is attentive to the signs and uses of power, like his mendicant forebears.

Perhaps most striking, however, are John’s descriptions of Tamerlane’s violence and cruelty. Here the difference from Polo and the similarity to his mendicant predecessors are most obvious. John writes that after promising the inhabitants of Sivas that he would not harm them if they surrendered, Tamerlane proceeded to bury thirty-six thousand of them alive, but he spared the “Greeks.”⁶³ After taking Aleppo, Tamerlane “pillaged and robbed and killed the majority of those who had remained.” In Damascus, Tamerlane ordered all Muslim religious and political leaders into the great mosque, then he set it ablaze and killed eight or nine thousand people.⁶⁴ Similarly, after defeating Bayezid and taking the sultan’s capital city of Bursa, Tamerlane had the city’s Jews gather in their synagogue, which he then burned.⁶⁵ Perhaps the most gruesome exploit recounted by John concerns the capture of Baghdad. Tamerlane, angered that the inhabitants broke a treaty with him, captured the city and killed all within it. He then had his troops stack the victims’ heads with the faces turned outward to make a “tower.” In John’s estimation, this “fut une des grans cruaultez dont oncques hommes oist parler [was one of the greatest atrocities that anyone ever heard of].” More generally, John tells of how Tamerlane tortures subjugated people to gain ransom money, enslaves them and their children, and tortures and kills those who go against his will, whether Muslim or Christian. According to John, it is said that Tamerlane has killed a quarter of the Muslim population.⁶⁶

Despite this unflinching account of Tamerlane’s brutality, John does not draw the conclusions we might expect. For one, he does not demonize Tamerlane. Like many other texts in the Mongol archive, John refers to the “Porte ferrée [iron gate]” where Alexander closed off the Caucasus.⁶⁷ He states that Tamerlane has taken some of the people from these mountains, but that “on dit [it is said]” that peoples called Gog and Magog remain enclosed. However, John makes no mention of the enclosure of the “Tartars” or of Antichrist. Moreover, he never in any way connects Tamerlane or his people to the apocalypse, and in fact he seems to studiously avoid such an interpretation—as demonstrated by the complete lack of biblical citations in his account. And this leads to another important point: John never says that Tamerlane is a threat to Latin Christendom or to Europe. On the contrary, John writes that he and his fellow Dominican Francis have succeeded in softening Tamerlane’s attitude toward Christians. Moreover, John writes that Tamerlane’s eldest son, Miran Shah, who will succeed him, is generous and good like any Christian, thoroughly loves eastern and Latin Christians and allows them freedom of worship, and is “another Alexander.”⁶⁸ John ends his account of Tamerlane in much the same way that Tamerlane and Miran Shah end their letters to Charles VI—with an appeal for trade or, in the case of the biography, with a “wish list” of Tamerlane’s preferred luxury objects.

Another reason that John of Sultaniyeh does not demonize Tamerlane or present him as a potential invader is that to do so would have undermined John’s standing both within Latin Christendom and with Tamerlane. John’s personal ambitions are not fully evident in the French sources, but they become much clearer in the Libellus de Notitia Orbis. This is a brief but comprehensive overview of the state of Christianity in eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa that John seems to have composed in central Europe in 1404, not long after he had left France.⁶⁹ In it, John refers to an Armenian prophecy according to which an Asian conqueror named “Iron” would send an envoy to Christian princes, after which the envoy would return to the East and convert many people. Then a Christian ruler would come from the West to lead a final crusade to capture the Holy Land and destroy Islam.⁷⁰ As John explains, the prophecy’s fulfillment has already begun: Tamerlane is clearly the Asian conqueror (again, “timur” meant “iron” in Turkish), and John is the envoy.⁷¹ The “princeps christianissimus [most Christian prince]” who will lead the crusade is left unspecified, likely so that John could tell his many royal and patrician interlocutors in Europe that any one of them might be the prince. John thus presents Tamerlane and himself as momentous actors in salvation history. Such a narrative, and the self-promotion that it served, did not allow the demonization of Tamerlane. It did, however, leave open the possibility of future conflict with the conqueror, which may be why John does not minimize Tamerlane’s violence in his account.

How would Charles VI and his court have understood John of Sultaniyeh’s account? Certainly the account was an opportunity for John to demonstrate his exceptional knowledge of and access to Tamerlane and his realm. It enhanced John’s standing and was further proof, along with the letters from Tamerlane and Miran Shah, that he deserved the title of “archbishop of the entire Orient.”⁷² John’s emphasis on Tamerlane’s victory over Bayezid was clearly intended to present Tamerlane as the enemy of France’s enemy, and thus to inspire a favorable French response to Tamerlane’s overtures. John’s repeated references to Tamerlane’s generous treatment of foreign merchants and ambassadors was also meant to make the conqueror seem accessible and rational, while his portrait of Miran Shah calmed concerns about enmity toward Christians. Although John could not offer a military alliance with Tamerlane, he could offer enrichment. It is notable that the final chapter of the biography makes multiple references to goods produced in France: “item teles deliées comme elles sont à Reims; … item vaisseaulx d’argent adournez d’esmeraudes polies et ordonnées comme elles sont en France; … item de banquiers comme en France; item de nobles tapisseries comme elles sont en France [also fine linens like those of Reims; also silver vessels adorned with polished and arranged emeralds like those in France; also bench covers as in France; also noble tapestries like those in France].”⁷³ John apparently understood the importance the French placed on their manufacturing and luxury industries, and he accordingly appealed to their pride and desire for profit.

More evidence for how John’s biography of Tamerlane was received by the French court comes from BnF, fr. 12201. This was one of three manuscripts commissioned by Duke Philip the Bold of Burgundy in late 1402 or early 1403, each of which contained Hayton’s Flower of the Histories and a text listing ecclesiastical provinces around the world.⁷⁴ Philip kept fr. 12201 for himself and gave the other two manuscripts (which do not survive) to his brother Duke John of Berry and to his nephew Louis of Orleans (brother of King Charles VI). The gift copies did not contain John’s text on Tamerlane, which was therefore added after the initial conception and execution of these books. However, the biography was not a hastily produced afterthought. In fr. 12201, John’s text opens with a miniature depicting the siege of a city (84r [fig. 18]). Tamerlane is shown sitting in a cart—as the text says he sometimes did on account of his disability—and preparing to throw a spear toward the city’s defenders. Its illumination, mise-en-page, and scribal hand show that as much care was taken to copy John’s account as had been devoted to the other texts in the volume.

Viewed in the longue durée of the Mongol archive, fr. 12201 is significant because it records the moment and the manner in which a major source was absorbed into the archive. As Paviot has amply illustrated, Philip the Bold established crusade as an essential component of Burgundian political and spiritual identity.⁷⁵ Fr. 12201 is a testament to the duke’s enduring interest in the Middle East and Asia both past and present. Plotard argues that the commissioning of fr. 12201 and its twins was also part of Philip’s call for union among the greatest princes in France so that they might organize a new crusade in the wake of Tamerlane’s victory over Bayezid.⁷⁶ For my purposes, fr. 12201 is important because it materializes John’s life of Tamerlane and thereby makes the text archivable, repeatedly readable, and copyable. The manuscript’s fine facture also endows John’s work with authority and valorizes it as both an object and a source of knowledge. By having John of Sultaniyeh’s little book copied in the way he did, Philip commemorated both Tamerlane’s victory and John’s embassy to Paris.

We must also see John of Sultaniyeh’s account of Tamerlane as one element in a larger communicative enterprise or performance. We know from other sources that John said many things that were not included in the biography. The Libellus gives us an idea of the other subjects, such as the Armenian prophecy, that John likely discussed with Charles VI and his councilors, and of the grandiose role that he likely assigned himself. According to the Chronographia, John informed the court that Tamerlane had freed all Christians held captive by Bayezid. With this attempt to cast the conqueror in a favorable light, John must have known that he was repeating an established—and effective—trope.⁷⁷ It seems likely that even if John did not promise an alliance with Tamerlane, he nonetheless argued for renewed crusade efforts. Perhaps he even told the French court that Tamerlane’s son Miran Shah was susceptible to conversion. Judging by his account of his and Francis’s influence over Tamerlane, he had a high opinion of his own powers of persuasion.

Viewed as a contribution to the Mongol archive, John of Sultaniyeh’s embassy was of great significance and certainly enriched French knowledge about a crucial phase in Mongol history, and about the Mongol legacy in central Asia. However, whether we view the embassy from the European or the Asian perspective, it led to no historically significant action. The letter that Charles VI gave to John of Sultaniyeh presumably never reached Tamerlane. John was still in Europe in 1412, while Tamerlane died in 1405 and Miran Shah in 1408.⁷⁸ Thereafter there was no contact between the French Crown and the Timurids, which may not have troubled the French. As the author of the Livre des fais du bon messire Jehan le Maingre, dit Bouciquaut (1409) wrote, through Tamerlane, the suffering Bayezid had inflicted on Christendom had been avenged, “mais n’eust pas fait meilleur compaignie cellui Tamburlan aux crestiens que avoit fait le Basat se longuement eust vescu; car ja n’eust esté saoul de conquerir terre [but this Tamerlane, if he had lived longer, would not have been a better neighbor to Christians than Bayezid, because he would never have conquered enough land to be satisfied].”⁷⁹

Even more striking is how John’s embassy appears viewed from the Timurid perspective. Modern biographies of Tamerlane mention the embassy only in passing, while major studies that focus on Tamerlane’s reign and legacy do not mention it at all.⁸⁰ For example, the embassy does not figure in Lentz and Lowry’s extensive catalogue on Timurid art; nor in Broadbridge’s Kingship and Ideology in the Islamic and Mongol Worlds, which discusses diplomacy at length; nor in Manz’s The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane, widely considered the definitive account. There are several reasons for this absence, but one stands out: Europe was of marginal concern to Tamerlane. He was from the Chaghatai khanate, in the heart of Asia, and his focus was on conquest in Asia. As John of Sultaniyeh observes in his account, Tamerlane’s capital was Samarkand, to which mountains of booty and treasure were conveyed in the course of Tamerlane’s career. He died while preparing a campaign against China. To the extent that Tamerlane had expansionist designs after defeating Bayezid, they were aimed eastward, not westward. As far as Tamerlane was concerned, Europe was a source for goods, but its rulers and people were of little interest or consequence. Silvestre de Sacy recognized this in his study of the letters brought to Paris by John of Sultaniyeh: “Tamerlan mettoit très-peu d’importance à cette mission, et ne considéroit, sans doute, le roi de France que comme une puissance d’un ordre très-inférieur [Tamerlane assigned very little importance to this mission, and no doubt considered the king of France only as a ruler of greatly inferior status].”⁸¹ Indeed, Silvestre de Sacy believed that the embassy to France was the brainchild of John, not of Tamerlane. There is no reason to think that Tamerlane was aware of the long history of Franco-Mongol contact, but if he was, he surely found it of no interest.

John the Fearless and The Book of Marvels

Although John of Sultaniyeh’s little book on Tamerlane apparently sparked limited interest among the French elite, at least judging by contemporary manuscripts, and although French contact with the Mongols effectively ended with John’s departure from Paris in 1403, the Mongol archive’s expansion was not yet over. There were still spectacular contributions to come—not from the Crown, however, but from the dukes of Burgundy. We have already seen one of these contributions: BnF, fr. 12201, which represents the last major addition of contemporary information to the archive. Fr. 12201 was followed by a book far more remarkable in conception and scale: BnF, fr. 2810, The Book of Marvels, which was made for Philip’s son John the Fearless ca. 1410. In this section, I will discuss how and why The Book of Marvels was the last major celebration of Franco-Mongol history and a fitting conclusion to the Mongol archive in late medieval France.

The Book of Marvels is likely the largest textual and visual compendium in the vernacular devoted to the Middle East and Asia produced in medieval Europe. It compiles (as titled in the manuscript): The Book of Marco Polo (1r–96v); The Book of Brother Odoric of the Order of Friars Minor (97r–115v); The Book of Talleyrand of Perigord (William of Boldensele’s Itinerarius; 116r–132v); a letter dated 1338 (the correct date is 1336) from the last Yuan emperor of China, Toghan Temur, to Pope Benedict XII (133r); a letter from the Alans of Khanbaliq to Benedict XII (133r–133v); a note on the dating of these two letters (134r); Benedict XII’s reply to the Alans from 1338 (134r–136r); On the Estate and Government of the Great Khan of Cathay (136v–140v); The Book of Sir William [sic] of Mandeville (The Book of John Mandeville; 141r–225v); The Book of Brother Hayton (Hayton’s Flower of the Histories; 226r–267r); and The Book of Brother Bicul of the Order of Friars Preachers (Riccoldo da Montecroce’s Book of the Sojourn Abroad; 268r–299v), all of which are in French.⁸² In addition, the manuscript preserves 265 miniatures produced by some of the most prominent Parisian workshops of the time, although art historians do not agree on which ones.⁸³

As this list of works suggests, The Book of Marvels is in many ways a summa of the Mongol archive. Not only does it contain three of the most popular and influential works in the archive—Polo, Hayton, and Mandeville—but every work in it mentions the Mongols, and it includes papal correspondence with the Yuan emperor. The Mongols are thus one of the compilation’s principal and unifying subjects. The Book of Marvels is one of six manuscripts to compile translations into French, produced in 1351 by Jean Le Long, of Odoric of Pordenone, William of Boldensele, the three papal letters and the note on their dating, On the Estate and Government of the Great Khan of Cathay, and Riccoldo da Montecroce. Jean Le Long also translated Hayton’s Flower of the Histories, but the version in The Book of Marvels is the original. For whom these translations were intended is unknown; there is no evidence of any connection between Jean Le Long and the French Crown or the Burgundians.⁸⁴ The Mongols also figure prominently in the manuscript’s illuminations. At least seventy-nine miniatures depict or relate directly to the Mongols (such as those showing the pope receiving a letter from the Great Khan); this number is higher if one counts images of places that owe tribute to or that trade with the Mongols. Thus nearly a third of the 265 miniatures illustrate or concern the Mongols. Aside from its binding, some overpainting, and a repainted miniature, the manuscript appears to be in its original form.⁸⁵

I see The Book of Marvels as emerging from three facets of John the Fearless’s identity: member of the Valois dynasty, crusader and captive, and traveler. Scholars have long assumed that The Book of Marvels was inspired by John’s crusade experiences, with Gousset arguing that John himself was involved in the manuscript’s textual and visual design.⁸⁶ I agree with both observations, but I think that The Book of Marvels also reflects a larger awareness of the Mongol archive and of the history of Franco-Mongol contact.⁸⁷ Its compilation may be understood as a distillation of the Mongol archive, while the manuscript’s miniatures represent a major addition to the portrayal of the Mongols in France. A pluralistic and multimedia image of the East, The Book of Marvels is as much a monument to information gathering in France and to French history as it is to events beyond the kingdom’s borders.

One indication that The Book of Marvels was a personal project lies in its texts, which evoke John the Fearless’s dynastic identity in two principal ways. The first concerns his status as a crusader. A great-grandson of the first Valois king, Philip VI, John was a member of the Valois dynasty and thus a descendant of the Capetians. The French royal house had participated in the Crusades since the First Crusade in 1095, when Hugh the Great, brother of King Louis VI, took the cross with a host of northern French knights.⁸⁸ Louis VII, Philip II, and Louis IX had all gone on crusade, and later French monarchs, Capetian and Valois alike, had all taken the cross or publicly pledged their support to crusade efforts.⁸⁹ The Book of Marvels celebrates this history. Anti-Muslim rhetoric and references to Christian-Muslim enmity and to holy war appear throughout the manuscript, particularly in Mandeville and in Hayton’s Flower of the Histories, both of which call for a crusade to retake the Holy Land.⁹⁰ A Judeo-Christian geography threatened or occupied by Islam is evoked by repeated references to events in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, to Christian pilgrims, relics, and shrines in the Middle East, to eastern Christians, and to Muslim violence and depredation. While there are no texts devoted entirely to crusade history, there are references to crusaders past such as Godfrey of Bouillon and Louis IX. There are also crusade-related images, such as that depicting Hayton explaining his crusade project to the pope (fig. 19) or that of crusaders sailing to the Holy Land (fig. 20). Many images in The Book of Marvels reinforce these crusade references through orientalizing and denigrating depictions of eastern dress or lack thereof (fig. 21), cannibalism (fig. 21), appearance, architecture, posture, animals, and idolatry (fig. 22).⁹¹ The history of the Crusades and the French ambition to reclaim the Holy Land are thus implicit, and at times explicit, subjects in The Book of Marvels.

The other way in which The Book of Marvels’ compilation signifies John the Fearless’s dynastic identity is through textual history. The manuscript opens with Polo’s Description of the World, which as I discuss in chapter 3 was a particularly meaningful text for the Valois dynasty. Hayton, an Armenian prince, also evoked John’s royal lineage.⁹² The inclusion of his Flower of the Histories recalls the French kingdom’s long association with the Cilician royal family, which was partly French because of multiple marriages with the Lusignan dynasty of Cyprus. Louis IX had extensive contact with and support from the Armenians on his first crusade, and Hayton wrote his geography-cum-crusade treatise in 1307 for Pope Clement V while in Poitiers.⁹³ The French link to Cilician Armenia would have been evident to John the Fearless because he surely met the deposed king of Cilicia, the aforementioned Levon V, who died in Paris when John was twenty-two. We have already seen that Odoric of Pordenone’s travel account and Mandeville were in the possession of the French Crown early on. The Book of Marvels was thus a lieu de mémoire for the Valois dynasty in which the texts evoked the history of French entanglement with the Middle East and Asia.

In addition to John the Fearless’s Valois identity, The Book of Marvels also emerged from his personal experiences as a crusader against and captive of the Ottomans. John earned his sobriquet after participating in the crusade of 1396, which ended with the crushing defeat of the Christian forces at Nicopolis. As one of the Christian army’s leaders and highest-ranking prisoners, John was spared, but he was forced to watch the execution of Christian soldiers.⁹⁴ Before his release, which was secured for a hefty ransom, John spent several months in the Ottoman Empire (Edirne, Bursa, Karacabey in modern-day Turkey). Among those who helped negotiate his release were the Italians Francesco Gattilusio (the Genoese lord of Mitylene), Duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti of Milan, and the banker Dino Rapondi. After a first ransom payment, John and others were released in June 1397 on the condition that they remain in Venice until the balance of the ransom was paid. John returned to Dijon in February 1398.⁹⁵

This experience marked John for the rest of his life, as evidenced by the memorial mass he had said annually, the gifts he gave to crusaders’ survivors and to returning captives, and the objects he brought with him on his return from Turkey. A group of campaign veterans served him, as did a group of “Saracens and Turks” who returned to Burgundy with him.⁹⁶ Particularly poignant is the image of Saint Leonard, the patron saint of captives, who is painted holding fetters in a book of hours produced for John the Fearless.⁹⁷ As Leroquais argues, there can be little doubt that this miniature refers to the duke’s captivity and liberation; it is also a reminder of the enslaved comrades he left behind.⁹⁸ Perhaps the image in The Book of Marvels depicting the capture of the elder son and killing of another son of King Hayton I of Armenia by the sultan of Egypt (fig. 23) is an indirect recollection of John’s own experience.

That John’s crusade experiences underlay the creation of The Book of Marvels is apparent in the manuscript’s relationship to John of Sultaniyeh’s embassy to Paris in 1403. Tamerlane’s victory over Bayezid in 1402 briefly awakened the same hopes among Christians for aid against inimical Islamic powers as had the Mongols in earlier eras. After the battle of Ankara, it was rumored in France and elsewhere in Europe that Tamerlane had freed the enslaved captives of Nicopolis, which would no doubt have attracted the notice of John the Fearless.⁹⁹ As we have seen, John of Sultaniyeh confirmed these rumors on his visit to Paris. In fact, it is very likely that John the Fearless met Tamerlane’s envoy in 1403 when the archbishop spoke to King Charles VI and his court. The Chronographia states that aside from the Dukes of Berry, Burgundy (John’s father Philip the Bold), Orleans, Bourbon, and Brittany, there were also present “multis aliis de sanguine et consilio regali [many others of royal blood and of the royal council].”¹⁰⁰ John the Fearless doubtless had other opportunities to speak with Archbishop John as well.

The importance of John of Sultaniyeh’s embassy for the Burgundians is apparent in BnF, fr. 12201, as noted above, but this manuscript’s meaning becomes clearer when we consider it in light of John the Fearless’s crusade experience. Of all the French lords who met Archbishop John, it is not surprising that Philip the Bold, John the Fearless’s father, was the one who had the archbishop’s biography of Tamerlane copied. Indeed, we may wonder if he did not do so at his son’s behest.¹⁰¹ With his defeat of Bayezid, Tamerlane—a “Tartar”—had succeeded where the army led by John the Fearless and other Christian lords had failed. And Tamerlane had done so in spectacular fashion. As Michel Pintoin (the “Religieux de Saint-Denis”) writes, after conquering and pillaging Bursa, Bayezid’s capital and a city in which John the Fearless had been captive, Tamerlane freed all of the Christian prisoners “to insult Bayezid.” As Bayezid watched, Tamerlane had all of the Ottoman lords whom he had captured decapitated, then he placed an iron ring in Bayezid’s nose and led him around as he continued his campaign in Turkey.¹⁰² It is reasonable to interpret the mise en livre of the biography of Tamerlane in fr. 12201 as an expression of respect for Bayezid’s conqueror, a form of vengeance against a fallen enemy, and an act of healing for a father and son whom the Ottoman sultan had caused to suffer.

I see The Book of Marvels as a companion volume and prequel to the life of Tamerlane in fr. 12201 that recounted “Tartar” history before Tamerlane and affirmed the Mongols’ place in world history. The image of the Mongols in The Book of Marvels is almost entirely positive. The one exception is the assessment of them by Riccoldo da Montecroce, but even Riccoldo admits that they are formidable fighters, that many love Christians, and that they would become Christians if the Christians gave them gifts like the Muslims do.¹⁰³ As a celebration of the Mongols, The Book of Marvels belongs to the “exemplary Mongol” tradition. More specifically, it echoes the views of contemporary writers such as Philippe de Mézières who, as we saw above, held the Mongols up as examples for Christian knights. Philippe’s view was vindicated by Tamerlane’s defeat of Bayezid—that is, a “Tartar” and his “portable city” had done what the mightiest powers in Christendom had been unable to do. The Book of Marvels suggests that John the Fearless found Tamerlane’s victory personally meaningful and may even indicate that he felt an affinity with the Mongols—the victorious enemies of his enemy who had avenged his defeat and suffering.

Although there are no overt references to Nicopolis in The Book of Marvels, there is one image that is undoubtedly meant to commemorate John the Fearless’s crusade experience. Of the many signs that identify The Book of Marvels as John’s possession, the most striking is the portrait of him on 226r (fig. 24).¹⁰⁴ It opens Hayton’s Flower of the Histories and depicts the duke receiving a book from a kneeling cleric.¹⁰⁵ Given that this is an official likeness of the duke, the artist may have received an order from John himself to execute this portrait.¹⁰⁶ The identity of the cleric is not immediately apparent. As Buettner observes, he is a “rather generic-looking author,” but she assumes that he is meant to represent Hayton, as do Avril and Legassie.¹⁰⁷ Aside from the image’s placement, the clearest indication that the cleric is indeed Hayton is that he is dressed like a Premonstratensian, the order to which Hayton belonged, as the rubric below the image states.¹⁰⁸ Of course, this scene is historically impossible since it portrays Hayton, who died ca. 1308 (sixty-three years before John the Fearless’s birth), presenting his work to The Book of Marvels’ patron as if they were contemporaries.

Why portray John the Fearless in this manner? If the goal was to demonstrate his patronage of the manuscript, why not place him in an equally fanciful scene with Marco Polo at the book’s opening? The answer, I think, is that Hayton’s text was perceived as particularly relevant to the duke’s personal history. Of all the authors compiled in The Book of Marvels, Hayton provides the longest discussion of the Turks’ rise to power and their conflicts with the Mongols. The third kingdom described by Hayton is Turkestan; the rubric opening this brief description appears on 226v, overleaf from the portrait of John the Fearless. On 227r Hayton explains that the inhabitants of Turkestan are called Turks, that “almost all believe in the false teachings of Mohammed’s law,” and that there are others who “have neither law nor faith”—his enmity for the Turks is thus established from the outset.¹⁰⁹ On 230v the description of Turkey opens with the rubric “Of the kingdom of Turkey and of its might and size.”¹¹⁰ According to Kohler’s edition, The Book of Marvels is the only copy of the text to include the last phrase, all other copies reading simply “Of the kingdom of Turkey.”¹¹¹ This rubric would seem to indicate an emphasis on, if not a preoccupation with, Turkish power. If this rubric was not in the exemplar but was instead added by the scribe, it raises the possibility that the scribe associated Turkey with power because he knew the story of Nicopolis, if not of the duke’s own involvement in the battle. The addition may even be a way of excusing or explaining away the loss at Nicopolis. Hayton ends the chapter on Turkey by noting that the Turks are “good warriors on foot and on horseback” (231r).¹¹² Later Hayton describes how the Turkmen converted to Islam, grew in wealth and population, took lordship in Asia, and first came into Turkey, where they fought Godfrey of Bouillon during the First Crusade (233v–234v). He relates other battles involving Turks, including their defeat at the hands of the Mongols at the battle of Köse Dağ in 1243, which ended the Seljuq dynasty (240r). Turks thus figure prominently in Hayton’s account as antagonists of Latin Christendom and the Mongols.

Based on these references to Turks, it would appear that John and Hayton “meet” in the portrait on 226r because they were understood to be protagonists in different chapters of the same history. Hayton’s account corresponds at various points with John’s experience. Hayton claims to have participated in campaigns with the Mongols against Islamic forces, and he is thus a knight like John. Hayton’s warnings about Turkish military skill and might echo those that preceded Nicopolis and that were, in the eyes of contemporary French chroniclers and reformers such as Philippe de Mézières, foolishly disregarded. John himself, of course, experienced this skill and might firsthand. Hayton’s proposal that Latin Christendom ally with the Mongols against Islamic forces appeared prescient when The Book of Marvels was produced, since a “Tartar” force had in fact defeated the Turks in John’s time. Hayton’s text could thus be viewed as the prologue to John the Fearless’s own crusade ambitions and experiences. The book that Hayton hands to John in the miniature on 226r can be understood as not only an object or text but also a bequest of duty, history, and memory from one enemy of the Turks to another.¹¹³

The miniature on 226r is also noteworthy because it suggests a direct link between The Book of Marvels and fr. 12201. Hayton’s text is the first in fr. 12201 and opens with a presentation image that shows Hayton kneeling before a seated pope (Clement V) and handing him a book (fig. 25). This image seems to have provided the inspiration for that in The Book of Marvels, where the pope has been replaced by the duke of Burgundy. Granted, these miniatures are by two different artists and have very different compositions, but it is nonetheless striking that the image in which John the Fearless was inserted in The Book of Marvels corresponds to a similar scene in fr. 12201. It is as if the miniature on 226r in The Book of Marvels were intended as a visual bridge between the two manuscripts.¹¹⁴ Perhaps this replacing of the pope with the crusader duke was also an implicit condemnation of what John perceived as papal failure and inactivity vis-à-vis the Islamic threat.

The connection between these manuscripts is also apparent in the text of Hayton’s Flower of the Histories. It is almost certain that the text in fr. 12201 provided the exemplar for that in The Book of Marvels. Like that in The Book of Marvels, the text in fr. 12201 is not the translation by Jean Le Long but the original French version composed by Hayton in 1307. The text in The Book of Marvels closely follows the punctuation and use of capitals in fr. 12201. The differences between them are mainly examples of litteral substitution, where the later scribe changed the spelling but kept the original wording; or of punctuation, as The Book of Marvels drops the paraphs in fr. 12201. The slight changes in wording here and there seem to arise from poor scanning or ad hoc editing. Of particular note is that the scribe in The Book of Marvels has added “et de ses merveilles [and of its marvels]” or other qualifiers (such as that for the aforementioned rubric on Turkey) after the toponyms in the rubrics, whereas the rubrics in fr. 12201 are neutral (e.g., “Du royaume de Turquesten”). Such interventions suggest a scribe who was directed, or who took it upon himself, to embellish the original text and make it more fitting for a “book of marvels.”

Thus far I have addressed The Book of Marvels as arising from John the Fearless’s dynastic identity and crusade experience. I conclude with John’s relationship to the authors compiled in this manuscript, who like the duke were all travelers who had seen the world beyond Latin Christendom. A plurality of these writers—Marco Polo, Odoric of Pordenone, and Riccoldo da Montecroce—were from Italy.¹¹⁵ Their inclusion in this manuscript is appropriate given their fame and authority, but also given John’s firsthand knowledge of, and reliance on, the international financial and diplomatic networks of Italians. As noted above, John spent months in Polo’s hometown of Venice on his return from captivity in Turkey. Moreover, all of the texts in The Book of Marvels, save On the Estate and Government of the Great Khan of Cathay, are autoptic accounts, and every first-person author but the Alans is, like John, portrayed at least once in an illumination.¹¹⁶ Like these writers, John himself was a “long-distance specialist” who had acquired the prestige of not only the crusader (and prisoner) but also the voyager who has endured and learned much away from home.¹¹⁷ The Book of Marvels may therefore be understood as a virtual council that offers a variety of perspectives on the East, and which also echoes the diverse actors with whom John the Fearless came into contact and on whom he relied as a crusader and, later, ruler. With The Book of Marvels, John commissioned a polyvocal and thorough account of foreign lands—a kind of “intelligence dossier”—as had his royal forebears with BnF, lat. 7470, and BL, Royal 19 D 1.¹¹⁸

None of this is to say that John the Fearless wished to undertake another crusade or believed that an alliance with the Mongols was possible or desirable. Schnerb relates the visit that John received from an Ottoman ambassador in 1410, to whom the duke gave two houppelandes, one in “French style” and the other in “Turkish style,” and a thousand gold francs. He concludes: “Pour Jean sans Peur, si le souvenir du ‘voyage en Hongrie’ restait vivant, la page de la croisade était définitivement tournée [For John the Fearless, if the memory of the “trip to Hungary” remained vivid, the crusade page was definitively turned].”¹¹⁹ The Book of Marvels seems to confirm this assessment. In it, John had himself portrayed as a lord at home who receives a visit from a stranger come from afar. In The Book of Marvels, the duke is in the company of other travelers, but nothing in the manuscript suggests a desire to travel on the patron’s part. Like his uncle King Charles V, who traveled in the comfort of his library, John the Fearless had the world in his Book of Marvels.

Yet he did not have it for long. Despite The Book of Marvels’s deeply personal design, John the Fearless gave it to his uncle John, Duke of Berry, as a New Year’s gift in 1413. The reasons for this gift are yet to be elucidated, but I assume that they concern the political situation of the time. John the Fearless had ordered the assassination of Louis of Orleans, brother of King Charles VI (and John the Fearless’s first cousin), in 1407. Thereafter Louis’s sons sought to avenge their father. Despite a truce between the parties in 1409, hostilities broke out again in 1411, with the duke of Berry supporting Louis’s sons. In September 1412 another truce was signed.¹²⁰ I find it likely that John the Fearless gave The Book of Marvels to John of Berry to help cement the peace, or at least to make Berry view John of Burgundy more favorably. We may assume that as a means of influence, the manuscript was very well chosen. John of Berry was one of the greatest collectors and patrons of his age, and The Book of Marvels appealed to his love of fine books and the foreign. Berry owned six tapestries devoted to the “history of the Great Khan,” world maps, and copies of Polo, Mandeville, and other works in the Mongol archive.¹²¹ He sought to cultivate not just a princely but a specifically oriental, or exotic, image of royal power. The Book of Marvels was a perfect and indeed crowning addition to Berry’s collection, as John the Fearless certainly knew it would be.¹²²

The works I have focused on in this chapter—those of Philippe de Mézières and John of Sultaniyeh, fr. 12201, The Book of Marvels—reflect both the vibrant intellectual and artistic life of the time and the variety of ways in which the Mongols were thought of and represented in France during Charles VI’s reign. Depending on the context and the author’s (or patron’s) motives, the Mongols could be allegories, historical figures, or contemporaries; allies, enemies, or both at once; a presence embodied by an ambassador, or a mirage conjuring an infinitely large, rich, and powerful Asia. It is true that French writers in this period continued to refer to the “Tartars” as if they were a single community, and to the Mongol imperium as if it still existed in China. They seem to have been largely unaware of the mixed and varied demographic composition of the lands the Mongols had once ruled, and of Turko-Mongol societies. Nonetheless, the examples discussed above, and others cited in appendix A, show that the fossilization of the Mongols in the medieval French mind was not absolute, and that for a brief moment the Mongol archive received an infusion of new information and works after the fall of the Yuan Empire.

Nor is the vitality of the Mongol archive in this period surprising. The French remained open to and eager for new information about the world, continued to project power abroad, and maintained a diplomatic network that stretched across Europe and the Mediterranean.¹²³ The Mongols necessarily figured in French reflections on Islam and crusade, missionary efforts, global trade, and other international issues. Even the fantastical Mongols of Philippe de Mézières were based on living testimony and presented as relevant to contemporary concerns. Even The Book of Marvels, though it preserves texts that were all over fifty years old, was nonetheless innovative in its textual compilation and, above all, in its visual representations of Asia.¹²⁴ One might even say that the cultural flourishing of this troubled time was in part made possible by the Mongols, who inspired France’s exceptional patrons and artists to produce some of the era’s most remarkable works.

1. See Kiel, “Incorporation of the Balkans”; Kunt, “Rise of the Ottomans”; Luttrell, “Latin Responses.”

2. On Nicopolis, see Atiya, Crusade of Nicopolis; Delaville le Roulx, La France en Orient, 1:209–334; Kaçar and Dumolyn, “Battle of Nicopolis”; Philippe de Mézières, Une Epistre lamentable, 47–64. On John the Fearless’s crusade and captivity, see Paviot, Les ducs de Bourgogne, 17–57; Richard, “Les prisonniers de Nicopolis”; Schnerb, Jean sans Peur, 61–110.

3. On the date of Philippe’s birth, see Philippe de Mézières, Une Epistre lamentable, 13–14.

4. As Jackson notes, “There is no indication that anyone in Europe—with the possible exception of John of Sultaniyya—ever learned that the Mongol rulers had been expelled from China and replaced by the native Ming dynasty in 1368” (The Mongols and the West, 345).

5. It is possible that earlier envoys had also written documents while at court, for example, the Italians who brought letters in 1289 and 1305 (see chapter 3).

6. See Taburet-Delahaye, Paris.

7. The first treatise was composed in Latin in two redactions in 1367–1368 and 1384; the second in French in 1389–1394; and the third in French in 1396 (Tarnowski, “Material Examples,” 165). On these treatises, see Jorga, Philippe de Mézières; Tarnowski, “Material Examples.”

8. Philippe de Mézières, Songe, 1:187.

9. Philippe does not say when or where he met this merchant, but based on what we know of his biography it would have been in the years 1347–1369. This merchant would thus have known the Yuan Empire before its fall, and he could even have experienced the final years of the reign of Kublai Khan, who died in 1294. For a summary biography of Philippe, see Philippe de Mézières, Une Epistre lamentable, 11–45.

10. Philippe de Mézières, Une Epistre, 212, 196–197; see also Philippe de Mézières, Songe, 1:195, 546–547. Jackson wonders if Bargadin existed (The Mongols and the West, 314), but given Philippe’s curiosity and career, I see no reason to doubt him.

11. Luttrell, “Latin Responses,” 133; Philippe de Mézières, Une Epistre lamentable, 35–36.

12. Philippe de Mézières, Une Epistre lamentable, 29–33, 40–41, 31.

13. Philippe de Mézières, Songe, 2:947–952. Oresme’s treatise on astrology is mentioned at 1:755.

14. The Songe du Vieil Pelerin refers to the “livre” of Vincent (2:1282), the Epistre to Vincent and “son livre du Mirouer ystorial [Jean de Vignay’s translation of the Speculum historiale]” (208). It should be noted that in the Songe, Droiture (Rectitude) says “Les Megoulles, ce sont les Tartres [The Mongols, these are the Tartars]” (1:200). Philippe could have found the name “Mongol,” which had many variants in French manuscripts, in Polo or Hayton, or heard it from an informant. That Philippe read Hayton is strongly suggested, if not confirmed, by the fact that Divine Providence refers to Genghis Khan as “un viel et povre fevre [an old and poor blacksmith]” (2:1386), while in the Flower of the Histories he is “un veillart, povre home fevre” (Hayton, La Flor des estoires, 148).

15. I do not see any influence of Mandeville in Philippe’s descriptions of the Mongols. For example, Mandeville says that Prester John and his realm still exist, and the number of knights who he says accompany the Great Khan when he travels is much smaller than the million claimed by Philippe.

16. Philippe lived in the monastery of the Celestines in Paris from 1379 until his death; see Philippe de Mézières, Une Epistre lamentable, 34–41.

17. Philippe de Mézières, Songe, 1:194, 195, 196, 546.

18. Philippe de Mézières, Songe, 2:938–939.

19. See, for example, Brown, “Philippe de Mézières’ Order,” 66; Hamdy, “Philippe de Mézières,” 55, 57; Philippe de Mézières, Une Epistre lamentable, 212; Philippe de Mézières, Songe, 2:1062–1063.

20. Jorga, Philippe de Mézières, 459n4.

21. For example, in Tommaso III de Saluzzo’s Livre du Chevalier Errant (1394–1405), the Knight visits the house of Fortune, where he sees Fortune’s wheel and all of the lords who are thrown from it. He then observes that many men who bear the title “Great Khan” and “Prester John” sit comfortably in the house and are not cast down. When he asks why this is, he is told: “Pource qu’ilz sont moult amés des leurs subgiz, et leur portent bonne foy; pour tel la Dame n’a mie souvent complainte d’eulz, et tart a eulz se courouce [Because they are much loved by their subjects, and have great faith in them; for this reason the Lady [i.e., Fortune] rarely has reason to complain of them, and is slow to be angry with them]” (Ward, “Critical Edition,” 885). Tommaso’s Mongols too exist outside terrestrial mutability.

22. Philippe de Mézières, Songe, 1:234. Similarly, Froissart writes that Murad I had boasted to Levon V of prophecies about his ruling the world, and had said he would like to be crowned in Rome (Oeuvres, 11:245); that Bayezid intended to conquer Rome and have his horse eat off of the altar of Saint Peter’s (16:67); and that the count of Nevers (the future John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy) reported after his return from captivity in Turkey that “supposoient les plusieurs en sarrazine terre que le roy Basaach, de la Turquie roy, estoit né a ce qu’il seroit sires de tout le monde [many in Saracen lands believed that King Bayezid, king of Turkey, was born to be lord of the whole world]” (16:67). On the title “Amorath” or “Amorath Baquin,” see Badel, “Quand le Grand Turc.”

23. Hamdy, “Philippe de Mézières,” 55, 57; Philippe de Mézières, Songe, 1:243.

24. Philippe de Mézières, Songe, 1:187–188. As the narrator says, the Christians of India “avoient habandoné de forgier les bons besans [had stopped forging good coins]” (1:188) which, in the text’s allegorical code (1:38), means they had stopped performing good works.

25. Philippe de Mézières, Songe, 2:1385–1386.

26. There are, however, echoes of earlier fears about the immensity of the Mongol population, as when Lust includes the “Tartars” among those whom she influences (Philippe de Mézières, Songe, 1:377, 388), or when Divine Providence claims that there are more Mongols than Christians, “Saracens,” and Jews combined (2:1386).

27. In the allegorical terms of the Songe, alchemists would have to be sent from Rome (Philippe de Mézières, Songe, 1:188). Philippe hoped to convert not only through force but also through preaching; see Brown, “Philippe de Mézières’ Order,” 119; Philippe de Mézières, Songe, 2:1063.

28. Philippe de Mézières, Songe, 1:723.

29. Philippe de Mézières, Songe, 1:195, 196 (quotation).

30. Philippe de Mézières, Songe, 1:575–576. Philippe appears to have learned of the khan’s twelve councilors from Polo (Le Devisement du monde, 3:98–99).

31. Philippe de Mézières, Songe, 1:546, 547. The comparison of a deficient Christendom to exemplary infidels was of course traditional, but it acquired new life in the late fourteenth century. See Honorat Bovet’s use of a Muslim interlocutor in his Apparicion Maistre Jehan de Meun of 1398 (Hanly, Medieval Muslims).

32. Philippe de Mézières, Une Epistre lamentable, 196.

33. The “cité portative” passage is in Philippe de Mézières, Une Epistre lamentable, 195–198.

34. Tarnowski, “Material Examples,” 169.

35. “I tell you with confidence that if our peasants—to say nothing of kings and knights—were willing to travel in the way the Tartar princes move and to be content with a similar diet, they could conquer the whole world” (Jackson and Morgan, Mission of Friar William, 278).

36. Brown, “Philippe de Mézières’ Order,” 115.

37. It is likely that Levon V, the last king of Cilician Armenia, who lived in Paris from 1384 until his death in 1393, also brought a wealth of information about the Mongols. However, the only record of his conversations with the French court is the garbled account in Froissart; see Medeiros, Hommes, 233–240. See also the Chronique d’Arménie by Levon V’s confessor Jean Dardel.

38. Bellaguet, Chronique, 3:135–137; Moranvillé, Chronographia, 3:199–223.

39. On Tamerlane’s life and reign, see Adshead, Central Asia, 103–126; Blin, Tamerlan; Broadbridge, Kingship and Ideology; Hodgson, Venture of Islam, 2:428–435; Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 235–248; Knobler, “Rise of Timur”; Lentz and Lowry, Timur; Manz, Rise and Rule; Nagel, Timur der Eroberer; Roux, Tamerlan.

40. On John’s origins, see Luttrell, “Timur’s Dominican Envoy,” 211–212.

41. Jackson, The Mongols, 242; Knobler, “The Rise,” 342–345; Luttrell, “Timur’s Dominican Envoy,” 212–213; Paviot, Les ducs de Bourgogne, 257–258; Richard, La papauté, 181–182, 257; Silvestre de Sacy, “Mémoire,” 515; Tanase, “Jusqu’aux limites du monde,” 664. Jackson and Tanase state that John visited Paris in 1398, but the letter that refers to this embassy mentions only Francis. The Chronographia and the chronicle of Michel Pintoin do not mention that John had visited Paris before. His visit in 1403 was apparently his first.

42. The foundational study of these letters is by Silvestre de Sacy, “Mémoire.” French and Latin texts of the letters sent to Charles and his reply are included in Clavijo, La route, 293–298.

43. Luttrell, “Timur’s Dominican Envoy,” 216.

44. Knobler observes that “no surviving notices of Timur exist in Western sources before 1394” (“Rise of Timur,” 342).

45. Moranvillé, Chronographia, 3:206. The characterization of John’s text as a libellus may indicate that the author of the Chronographia had access to fr. 12201, in which the rubric opening the text reads “Cy commence un petit livre fait d’un Tartar qui se nomme Themirbey [Here begins a little book written about a Tartar named Tamerlane]” (83r).

46. These manuscripts are (1) Ghent, Universiteitsbibliotheek 418, 1r–16v; (2) Paris, BnF, fr. 5624, 63v–72r; (3) Paris, BnF, fr. 12201, 83r–97v; (4) University of California Berkeley, Bancroft Library, UCB 173, 95r–105v. The original French text is in Moranvillé, “Mémoire sur Tamerlan”; a modern French version is in Soltanieh, La vie. Mention should also be made of BnF, lat. 15175, an eighteenth-century manuscript that preserves a Latin translation of the account. I did not consult this manuscript as it is beyond the scope of this book. See also Moranvillé, Chronographia, 3:206–223; the account of the battle of Ankara is included in the text preceding the biography (200–202).

47. See Plotard, “Les ducs.”

48. The Ghent manuscript is catalogued in Derolez et al., Medieval Manuscripts, 156, and viewable on the Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent website (https://lib.ugent.be/viewer/archive.ugent.be%3A7878112A-C7E8-11E0-BE6C-3BA837D8FA8C#?cv=&c=&m=&s=&xywh=-589%2C-1%2C6587%2C4096). BnF, fr. 5624, likely dates to the early fifteenth century based on its texts, all of which relate to events that occurred between 1400 and 1403.

49. Luttrell, “Timur’s Dominican Envoy,” 229.

50. Luttrell, “Timur’s Dominican Envoy,” 212.

51. See Kern, who notes that John based his claim to this title on a papal bull that placed “Tartaria orientalis,” or the former Yuan Empire, under the authority of the archbishopric of Sultaniyeh (“Der ‘Libellus,’ ” 116n39), and Luttrell, “Timur’s Dominican Envoy,” 220.

52. Moranvillé, “Mémoire,” 445, 463, 452.

53. Hodgson, Venture of Islam, 2:430–432.

54. Kern, “Der ‘Libellus,’ ” 117–118. For other works that John cites in the Libellus, see p. 91 and Kern’s useful notes.

55. John may have been influenced by Jacques de Vitry’s Historia orientalis and seventh letter, which contains the Relatio de Davide. In his Libellus de Notitia Orbis, John writes that there are more Christians than Muslims in the world (Kern, “Der ‘Libellus,’ ” 121–122), which echoes Jacques de Vitry’s assertion that more Christians live in Islamic lands than do Muslims (Histoire orientale, 312–313). In his biography of Tamerlane, John writes that Tamerlane held Bayezid in golden chains (Moranvillé, “Mémoire,” 461), which echoes the Relatio de Davide’s account of how King David bound the king of the Persians in gold shackles (Brewer, Prester John, 109). It is of course possible that these and other similarities between Jacques’s and John’s works were simply commonplaces by John’s time.

56. On Polo and the Dominicans, see the discussion and references in chapter 3.

57. Polo, Le Devisement du monde, vol. 3.

58. Moranvillé, “Mémoire,” 447; “le plus puissant homme de gent et de terre et de tresor qui onques fust au monde ne qui orendroit soit du temps d’Adam … jusques au jour d’ui” (Polo, Le Devisement du monde, 3:57).

59. Polo, Le Devisement du monde, 3:61; Moranvillé, “Mémoire,” 454.

60. Moranvillé, “Mémoire,” 453.

61. Moranvillé, “Mémoire,” 441, 447.

62. Moranvillé, “Mémoire,” 445, 451.

63. Moranvillé, “Mémoire,” 454. Moranvillé notes that Sharafuddin Ali Yazdi, who wrote an official history of Tamerlane in the 1420s, states that Tamerlane spared the Muslim inhabitants (454n2).

64. Moranvillé, “Mémoire,” 455.

65. Moranvillé, “Mémoire,” 456. Luttrell observes that this story was “probably an invention” (“Timur’s Dominican Envoy,” 215).

66. Moranvillé, “Mémoire,” 456 (quotation), 451.

67. Moranvillé, “Mémoire,” 448–449. John’s text reads “la cité où Alixandre mina la mer jusques à la montaigne qui est appellée Caucasi [the city where Alexander led the sea all the way to the mountain that is called Caucasus]”—I interpret “mina” as a variant of mena. Thus John seems to say that Alexander dug a canal, which does not at all correspond to the legend about him building a wall. The translator of the Latin text of John’s account in the Chronographia opted for another interpretation of the phrase “mina la mer”: “ubi condam Alexander … mare mensuravit usque ad montem Caucasi [where once Alexander measured from the sea to the Caucasus mountain]” (Moranvillé, Chronographia, 3:215). It is possible, as Kosta-Théfaine observes (Soltanieh, La vie, 29), that very early in the text’s transmission a scribe made a mistake, and “la mer” should be “le mur [the wall].”

68. Moranvillé, “Mémoire,” 449, 462.

69. Luttrell, “Timur’s Dominican Envoy,” 221. For the text of the Libellus, see Kern, “Der ‘Libellus.’ ”

70. Luttrell, “Timur’s Dominican Envoy,” 219.

71. Kern, “Der ‘Libellus,’ ” 19–20.

72. That the French court took this title to be official is further suggested by the entry from Philip the Bold’s accounts, according to which Philip ordered his receiver general to pay 100 ecus to the “reverent pere en Dieu l’arcevesque de tout l’Oriant, ambassadeur du Tamburlant [the reverend father in God, the archbishop of the entire Orient, ambassador of Tamerlane]” (Paviot, Les ducs de Bourgogne, 258n11).

73. Reims was a leading center of linen cloth production in the fourteenth century (Farmer, “Biffes,” 79–81). For this list, see Moranvillé, “Mémoire,” 463–464.

74. On these manuscripts, see Delisle, Recherches, 2:264; M. Hughes, “The Library,” 185–186; Luttrell, “Timur’s Dominican Envoy,” 227; Paviot, Les ducs de Bourgogne, 202–203; Plotard, “Les ducs”; Tanase, “Jusqu’aux limites du monde,” 670; Willard, “The Duke.” On Philip the Bold’s library, see Bousmanne et al., La librairie; Bousmanne and Savini, The Library; de Winter, La Bibliothèque; M. Hughes, “The Library.”

75. Paviot, “Burgundy and the Crusade”; Paviot, Les ducs de Bourgogne.

76. Plotard, “Les ducs,” 6–7. See also Moodey, Illuminated Crusader Histories, 93–94.

77. As Jackson observes, “We have encountered these themes—especial favour towards Christians, the release of Christian slaves found in the army of a defeated Muslim enemy—before” (The Mongols and the West, 245). In fact, these themes are present from the very beginning of the Mongol archive, in the Relatio de Davide.

78. Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 243; Luttrell, “Timur’s Dominican Envoy,” 224.

79. Lalande, Le livre des fais, 159. This comment echoes Froissart, who wrote (incorrectly) that Tamerlane had sent troops to fight on the side of Bayezid’s army at Nicopolis (Oeuvres, 15:320). However, it should be noted that in Sharafuddin Ali Yazdi’s Zafarname (1420s), after Bayezid has been captured and brought to Tamerlane’s tent, Tamerlane says that if Bayezid had kept peace with him, Tamerlane would have given him money and soldiers to continue his holy war and exterminate the enemies of Mohammed (Pétis de La Croix, Histoire de Timur-Bec, 4:17). See also Le Ninan, “L’idée de croisade,” on Christine de Pizan’s ambivalent attitude toward Tamerlane (esp. 9n17).

80. See Blin (who devotes the longest discussion to it), Tamerlan, 215–220; Nagel, Timur der Eroberer, 356, who does not name John; and Roux, Tamerlan, 146.

81. Silvestre de Sacy, “Mémoire,” 519.

82. On the papal letters, see Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 259. An edition and French translation of The Book of John Mandeville in fr. 2810 was recently published by Guéret-Laferté and Harf-Lancner.

83. Meiss perceives two stylistic groups, that of the Boucicaut Master and that of the Bedford Master (French Painting, 116). Avril argues for the work of five stylistic groups, the principal one that of the Boucicaut and Mazarine Masters, the second most prominent that of the Egerton and Bedford Masters (“Le Livre des Merveilles,” 307–324; see also Avril et al., Marco Polo, 487–490). König sees the Mazarine Master as the principal artist, assisted by the Egerton and Bedford Masters (Bedford Hours, 50).

84. See Andreose and Ménard, Le voyage en Asie, cxxviii; Dörper, Die Geschichte, 28–31.

85. Avril, “Le Livre des Merveilles,” 302–303. The later miniature on 42v was painted ca. 1470 by Evrard d’Espinques (Avril and Reynaud, Les manuscrits, 164–167). The note written in 1413 by Jean Flamel, John of Berry’s secretary, on the flyleaf of The Book of Marvels gives the current order of the texts. It omits the letters and the note on their dating, perhaps because this section does not open with a miniature like the others but only with a rubric. The 1413 inventory of the Duke of Berry’s library gives the text opening 2r, which is from the Description of the World and has not changed to the present (Guiffrey, Inventaires, 1:270).

86. See Gousset, “Un programme iconographique,” 353–364.

87. Gousset notes “une certaine analogie” between BL, Royal 19 D 1 and The Book of Marvels (“Un programme iconographique,” 356). Royal 19 D 1 was already in England when The Book of Marvels was produced, so there is no direct connection.

88. Riley-Smith, First Crusaders, 88–90.

89. Louis IX, who died in Tunisia in 1270 on his second crusade, was the fourth great-grandfather of John the Fearless.

90. See Espada, “Marco Polo.” William of Boldensele’s text opens with a discussion of how the Holy Land belongs to Christians, without overtly calling for a crusade.

91. Cruse, “Pleasure in Foreign Things,” 221–222.

92. For Hayton’s biography, see Hayton, La Flor des estoires, xxiii–cxlii.

93. Evans, Armenia, 130, 131.

94. Froissart, Oeuvres, 15:326.

95. Not in 1402 after Tamerlane’s victory over Bayezid as is sometimes claimed; see Schnerb, Jean sans Peur, 100–102.

96. Schnerb, Jean sans Peur, 105. Schnerb estimates that these companions from Turkey numbered half a dozen. They were later baptized and one became a Carthusian. On John’s crusade and captivity, see Paviot, Les ducs de Bourgogne, 17–57; Richard, “Les prisonniers de Nicopolis”; Schnerb, Jean sans Peur, 61–110.

97. BnF, nouv. acq. lat. 3055, 164v.

98. See Leroquais, Un livre d’heures, 18, 43–44, 56, 64–67. Leroquais (67) notes that a similar image appears in the Boucicaut Hours (Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, ms. 2, 9v) and depicts Saint Leonard holding a chain to which are attached a kneeling Jean Le Maingre (marshal of Boucicaut) and Guy de la Trémoille, both of whom were also taken captive at Nicopolis.

99. Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 244–245; Moranvillé, Chronographia, 3:205.

100. Moranvillé, Chronographia, 3:205.

101. It should also be noted that Philip purchased fr. 12201 from Jacques Raponde (Jacopo Rapondi), the brother of Dino, who as noted above had helped arrange John the Fearless’s ransom. See Buettner, “Jacques Raponde”; M. Hughes, “The Library,” 169; Maddocks, “The Rapondi.”

102. Bellaguet, Chronique, 3:49. The story about the nose ring is certainly apocryphal, and an example of vengeful wishful thinking on the part of Christians. Sharafuddin Ali Yazdi’s Zafarname states that Bayezid was unbound and treated with respect when brought before Tamerlane (Pétis de la Croix, Histoire de Timur-Bec, 4:18); Manz notes that Bayezid was “well treated” (Rise and Rule, 73).

103. De Backer, L’Extrême Orient, 297.

104. On the emblems of John that appear throughout the book, some of which have been overpainted, see Avril, “Le Livre des Merveilles,” 294–300.

105. König’s assertion that the portrait was the “volume’s original frontispiece, now bound as f. 226” (Bedford Hours, 50) is not tenable; as noted above, fr. 2810 is today bound in its original order.

106. On this portrait see Avril, “Le Livre des Merveilles,” 293; Legassie, Medieval Invention of Travel, 53–55.

107. Buettner, “Past Presents,” 602.

108. Avril, “Le Livre des Merveilles,” 293.

109. “pres que tous sont creans aux faux enseignemens de la loy mahommet. Et aucuns en y a qui ne tiennent loy ne foy” (227r).

110. “Du royaume de Turquye et de la puissance et grandeur d’icelui.”

111. Hayton, La Flor des estoires, 132.

112. “Et sont bonnes gens d’armes a pie et a cheval.”

113. Badel, “Quand le Grand Turc,” discusses late medieval and early modern French depictions of and attitudes toward the Turks.

114. I leave aside discussion of the artists who worked on these two manuscripts. Gousset, following Meiss, attributes the presentation miniature in fr. 12201 to the Master of the Coronation of the Virgin (Taburet-Delahaye, Paris, 139). This artist is not associated directly with The Book of Marvels, but there can be little doubt that he knew at least some of its illuminators given the tight circle of elite artists in early fifteenth-century Paris, on which see Avril et al., Marco Polo; Meiss, French Painting; Taburet-Delahaye, Paris.

115. Marco Polo and Odoric are both tied to Venice—as the rubric on 97r opening Odoric’s account states, the author was “né de une terre que on appelle port de Venisse [born in a land called port (or pass) of Venice].” Riccoldo was from Florence.

116. The texts in The Book of Marvels combine first-person references with what Higgins refers to as “impersonal itineraries” (Higgins, Book of John Mandeville, 7n4). As noted in chapter 3, Polo’s Description alternates between the first person of Polo, and of his amanuensis Rustichello da Pisa, and a first-person plural that may join the two. It should be noted that Polo’s authorship is firmly established in The Book of Marvels with the running title “Le Livre de Marc Paul.”

117. On travel in premodern culture, see Helms, Ulysses’ Sail; Legassie, Medieval Invention of Travel.

118. See chapter 3.

119. Schnerb, Jean sans Peur, 110.

120. Taburet-Delahaye, Paris, 137.

121. The tapestries are mentioned in Guiffrey, Inventaires, 2:207–208. No date of accession is given for these tapestries, and one wonders if their design or acquisition was related to The Book of Marvels. On Mongol-related works in Berry’s collection, see Delisle, Recherches, 2:248 (Livre de Sidrac), 254 (Book of Marvels, another copy of Polo, Mirouer historial), 256 (Croniques martiniennes), 261 (Les grandes chroniques), 264 (Croniques de Burgues), etc.; and Guiffrey, Inventaires.

122. On John of Berry and The Book of Marvels, see Cruse, “Pleasure in Foreign Things,” 228–233.

123. As at Nicopolis, in Genoa, and in the eastern Mediterranean; see J. Barker, Manuel II Palaeologus; Delaville le Roulx, La France en Orient, 1:159–518; Lalande, Jean II le Meingre.

124. See Cruse, “Novelty and Diversity”; Kubiski, “Orientalizing Costume.”