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A Medieval Religious Orientalism: the Perspectives and Environments of Mendicant Travel Writers In A Medieval Religious Orientalism: The Perspectives and Environments of Mendicant Travel Writers in the Far East (1245-1368) Alec Muklewicz Advisor: Dr. Nina Caputo 4/10/2019 1 Table of Contents Introduction 2 Travelers to the East: The Writings of Mendicants, Merchants, Monks, and More… 6 The Other in Imagination: A Brief History… 11 I. Orientalist Analysis of the Mendicant Texts 16 The Oneiric Horizon and Oriental Despotism: The Mendicants’ Varying Perception of Power and Wealth… 17 Christianity and the non-Christian World… 25 Alterity between East and West: The Barbarous Mongols and the Monsters Beyond… 34 II. The Prerequisites for Orientalism 42 Mendicants, Merchants, and Power in and Beyond Europe… 42 Broader Perspectives and the Role of Christian Europeans in the Far East… 44 III. Conclusion: Medieval Religious Orientalism 55 Further Research… 58 Bibliography 60 Appendices 64 2 Introduction It is well known today that Marco Polo made his journey to the Mongol realm in the late thirteenth century, a world that had only been previously touched on in fantastical legends of antiquity. The Far East thus represented a blank canvas on which European travel writers could paint as they saw fit. However, many had made this journey to the East, including the mendicant travelers of the Franciscan and Dominican Orders during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Where European merchants merely took advantage of lucrative opportunities in the trade centers of the Far East, the mendicants instead sought to penetrate the cultural, religious, and governmental institutions of the Mongol Empire and the Yuan Dynasty.1 The mendicants’ stories are remarkable in their careful approach and in their wide breadth of observations; however, their imaginative, subconscious visions of Eastern wealth, cultures, and peoples stand out in stark contrast to their otherwise objective reporting of their observations.2 The contrasts between the Christian and non-Christian worlds were at the center of the mendicants’ accounts of their journeys. This contrast possibly can be construed as a medieval form of Orientalism based in primarily religious terminology. These travel writers’ imaginative recounts, juxtaposed onto the reality of the relations between the East and the West, are perhaps Orientalist images of the Far East. They existed prior to a time where it was supposed to have existed in Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said’s Orientalism provides the lens through which I will view the mendicants’ works. Orientalism is a 1 I purposefully use the terms ‘Mongol Empire’ and “Yuan dynasty’ somewhat interchangeably in this paper. Though the Yuan dynasty did not represent the full extent of the number of Mongol Empires following its fragmentation in the late thirteenth century, this distinction is not important for this paper’s purposes – the perspectives of the mendicants in their journeys were shaped by what they saw, and not inherently by the polity that were dealing within. Differences between the early Mongol Empire and the height of the Yuan are marked and will be relayed to the reader according to its relevance. 2 The usage of foreign names from European languages other than English will be rendered in English unless the name is significantly more often rendered in English using the word from the original language. Words from Chinese will be rendered using standard Hanyu pinyin. Words from Mongolic languages will be rendered using the Mongolian Latin alphabet. 3 Western style “for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”3 That is, where a colonial or imperial force exists, a kind of cultural refraction results from the imbalanced interaction in their representation of the Other. The prerequisites for an Orientalist perspective are satisfied in an environment where an imbalance of power exists between two broad regions, namely the West over the East. He suggests that the long-term historical relationship between East and West was “a relationship of power, of domination, [and] of varying degrees a complex hegemony.”4 In the imagination of Western writers, “[t]he Orient was almost a European invention, and had [arguably] been since antiquity,” attaching to this imagined place impressions of inferiority, exoticism, and barbarity.5 Specifically, exaggerated portrayals of “Oriental despotism, Oriental splendor, cruelty, sensuality, many Eastern sects, philosophies, and wisdoms” are prevalent in Orientalist writings.6 The Western perception of the East, Said argues, is a representation based in our exporting of our ancestors’ basest, fears, desires, and imagination onto the canvas of the mysterious Other. There are at least two major issues in applying this Orientalist to a medieval perspective of the Far East. Saidian Orientalism only concerns the Near East during the modern era, not the Far East of the medieval era. Said believes that the Near Orient represents Europe’s “deepest and most recurring images of the Other.”7 Nevertheless, the Far Orient remains an important place for the shape of Orientalism, as it did indeed help define a European identity in a medieval setting, even if it is secondary in this respect to the Near Orient. However, there is a bigger question as to whether Orientalism can be applied to a medieval context. Critics have pointed out that Said was too broad in his claim that this Orientalism has been applicable to Western 3 Said, Edward W. Orientalism. 1st ed. New York City, NY: Pantheon Books, 1978, 3. 4 Ibid., 5. 5 Ibid., 1. 6 Ibid., 4. 7 Ibid., 1. 4 interpretations of the East for millennia – there has not always been a hegemonic dominance of the West over the East, particularly before the colonial era. The requirements for the relationship characterized by Orientalism necessitate an imbalance of power that exhibits some kind of colonialist relationship or intent by the West over the East. In the Mongol period, the imbalance of power perhaps favored the East rather than the West. The Mongols and Chinese held parity and were even in some respects seen as superior when compared to European Christian civilization. In the mendicants’ perspectives, the Far East and “China [in particular] exhibited qualities that were equal to the best of Europe,” namely with respect to the Far East’s wealth and perceived civilization.8 However, while Europeans did not hold sovereign power over the Mongol Empire to any significant extent, the perceptions of both the Mongols and the Europeans towards the other indicate otherwise. Kim M. Phillips briefly alludes to a kind of medieval religious Orientalism in Before Orientalism: Asian Peoples and Cultures in European Travel Writing, 1245-1510. Though she also denies any broader sense of a medieval Orientalism, Phillips admits in her analysis that medieval peoples of the Far Orient were to some degree “regarded with fear, disdain, wonder, and awe, and were the focus of wariness, curiosity, and pleasure” by medieval European observers.9 I primarily aim to explore in this paper the potential religious Orientalism that was brought up in her work but not really explored. In analyzing of the mendicants’ texts, I have found explicit and implicit indications of a religious, medieval Orientalism in their descriptions of the Far East. The West’s dreams and efforts to dominate over the East in an explicitly religious manner were plentiful. The mendicants’ evangelism and missionary work in the Far East, alongside their observations and reflections thereof, comprise the strongest evidence for such a religious Orientalism. Again, 8 Phillips, Kim M. Before Orientalism: Asian Peoples and Cultures in European Travel Writing, 1245-1510. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014, 170. 9 Ibid., 27. 5 unlike the simple economic motivations of European merchants who traveled to the Mongol realms, the motivations of these mendicants were expressly concerned with the cultural and religious conversion of peoples in the Far East. An Orientalism in this religious context was thus possible. Powerful groups and peoples in both East and West significantly aided the mendicants, and the mendicants’ perspectives were shaped by their close relationship with commerce and power in Europe, as well as in the Far East later on. Their positive relationships with these peoples and institutions were necessary for the success and the existence of their travels in the first place. Their vision of the East is accordingly characterized by a fount of this wealth and power in their particular experiences of the Mongol realms, culminating in a fantastical, oneiric vision10 of the East that deliberately is contrasted with the relative poverty of Europe and the ascetic mendicants. Despite the mendicant orders’ original ascetic values, this oneiric vision was born of the mendicants’ personal desire for a connection to some of the strongest manifestations of power and wealth in the world at that time in East Asia. In contrast, some of the mendicants described stark images of barbarities and monstrosities that coincided with their polarizing depictions of the religions of Far Eastern peoples. The mendicants drew alterity between East and West in explicitly religious terminology such that this religious thinking generated many kinds of Orientalist imagery in their texts, several of which I will discuss in this thesis. Mendicants such as John of Pian de Carpine, Benedict the Pole, William of Rubruck, John of Montecorvino, Andrew of Perugia, Peregrine of Castello, Odoric of Pordenone, and John of Marignolli wrote the most
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