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 relevant of the recovered mendicant accounts of the Far East.11 I
10 This idea is appropriated from Jacques Le Goff’s analysis of the medieval European perception of India and the surrounding region. I think the idea can be applied to the Mongols in the same way. This application is further discussed and explored in chapter one. 11 Why are some of the mendicants who travelled to the Orient and thereafter wrote about their journeys not included here? Simon of Saint Quentin’s partially extant account only concerns the region of the world leading up to the Mongol camp at Baiju in modern day Armenia; this region of the world is not of interest for this paper because it is out of the scope of this thesis which concerns the geographical realm of the Far East. In short, most travelers who did not explicitly travel to the regions occupied by 6 briefly present Marco Polo and John Mandeville in relevant discussions to juxtapose the mendicant traveler against other travel writers, particularly those with far more fantastical and popularized perspectives of the Far East, grounding the analysis of the mendicants against these other travel writers.12 Moreover, I will utilize other, relevant primary sources to frame certain discussions in their context. For example, sources of the khans demonstrate their perspectives of the mendicants and Einhard’s commentary on Charlemagne serves as a point of contrast between the ways Europeans about the leaders of East and West.
Regarding the structure of this thesis, the first chapter concerns a textual analysis of the mendicants’ texts, namely through wealth, power, religion, and race. The second chapter of this thesis is a discussion that explores the context that would allow an Orientalist analysis to be possible for the mendicant accounts, as much of chapter one is devoted to exploring the mendicants’ Orientalist perspectives. In the third chapter, I explore broader conclusions about the notion of a medieval Orientalism in the wake of these discussions. I now submit a short analysis of medieval travel writing to shed some more light on why the mendicants stand out from other medieval travel writers.
Travelers to the East: The Writings of Mendicants, Merchants, Monks, and More
In general, travel writings are not explicitly cultural commentaries on foreign cultures; rather, they are recounts of the travel writers’ experiences into the strange unknown. Sometimes they were written for the annals of history and their sovereigns, sometimes for entertainment through exaggerated spectacles based on their adventures. The mendicant travelers’ innate
Yuan China at some point are to be left out of this thesis. Moreover, alongside John of Pian de Carpine’s mission, two other contemporaneous missions existed, led by Friar Ascelinus and Andrew of Longjumeau; however, they were considered peripheral to the main mission, their successes were indeed planned to be comparatively limited, and their accounts were lost in the end. Ibn Battuta’s account of the Mongol Empire is of interest to the question of Western perceptions of the East, but is out of the scope of this paper considering his non-Christian, non-mendicant background. 12 Regarding evidence for these other travelers who did not write their accounts of their travels, much of it exists in these accounts and in the textual sources and artifacts of East Asia; there was indeed a sizeable Christian, European merchant community in various trade cities in China. Their opinions and actions are thus somewhat shrouded from historical analysis but the role of merchants and other travelers in this paper cannot be understated. 7 attitudes towards the world and their context for writing must be understood prior to any explicit notion of outward European imperialism, and it must be understood that they were sometimes agents of ulterior interests, such as for spying, diplomacy, evangelism, or trade.
However, travel writing is a deliberate creation with many limitations. Firstly, these writers did not write down all they observed and experienced – even Marco Polo allegedly had only told a fraction of what he had seen.13 Moreover, the accounts are told in a way that caters to being read by particular audiences rather than a full account of their observations – people, in general, do not observe the world in pieces and instead construct them within a larger personal narrative that was then later written as a more succinct and directed narrative with said audiences in mind. Some of their narratives can be characterized as non-linear, confusing ramblings as they were often written many years after their journeys. Even the authors’ mastery of language can be unclear, perhaps due to their lack of language usage during these long journeys or due to their old age. For example, John of Marignolli, one of these mendicant travelers, wrote his account many years after his journey; accordingly, “[t]he Latin of Marignolli is bad because it is the hazy expression of confused thoughts.”14 It is for these reasons that each piece of writing here must be treated as its own entity in its own context in light of these limitations. For example, the artificially constructed, mission driven reality of the mendicant accounts diverges from the diplomatic reality depending largely on their individual purposes for writing and the experiences abroad. Unmistakably, the mendicants stand out with respect to the context and the way they wrote about their journeys. The mendicants were the most learned in Europe and demonstrably
13 Polo, Marco. The Travels. Edited and Translated by Nigel Cliff. London: Penguin Classics, 2016, 4. 14 Yule, Henry. “John de’ Marignolli and his Recollections of Eastern Travel: Biographical and Introductory Notes” in Cathay and the Way Thither: Being a Collection of Medieval Notices of China. Vol. 3. 4 vols. 2nd. Trans. and Ed, Yule, Henry. Taipei: Ch'eng-wen Publishing Company, 1966, 203. 8 showed an attention to accuracy in their representation of their observations due to the nature of their travels.15
My thesis primarily examines the mendicant writers, but it should be noted that travel accounts written by authors from secular and monastic backgrounds stand in stark contrast with the mendicants’ works, primarily with respect to intent, concerns of objectivity, the popular- literary and writing backgrounds of these authors, and the consequential relative popularity and cultural impact of these accounts. Representative of the secular account is Marco Polo, whose account was first orated by Polo and then penned by Rustichello da Pisa. Rustichello was an
Arthurian romance writer for the court of Prince Edward of England whom Marco Polo met in the Genoan prison where this account was written down.16 In contrast, John Mandeville was a nominally fictitious character whose account was penned by a Benedictine monk cleped Jean le
Long.17 Jean le Long was a prolific writer who collected and studied numerous other travel accounts, particularly those by the mendicants, in the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Bertin in Saint-
Omer near Ypres.
Importantly, both Polo’s and Mandeville’s accounts are devoid of a sense of a reality that the mendicant accounts’ seem to convey a relatively keen awareness thereof. In most cases, the mendicants’ intents in drafting these accounts involved writing a report to a king or a memoir to be read for simple posterity’s sake. That is not to say that the mendicant writers represent the reality of the time with perfect accuracy and objectivity; rather, the mendicant writers wrote for
15 We shall see later that there was an observable religious ignorance due to their perceived superiority. However, compared to their observations on the diversity of religion, their observations of race, culture, and other subject were generally much more poignant, researched, and serious. 16 Petech, Luciano. "Italian Merchants in the Mongol Empire." In The Spiritual Expansion of Medieval Latin Christendom : The Asian Missions (The Expansion of Latin Europe, 1000-1500), edited by James D. Ryan. Vol. 2. New York City, NY: Routledge, 2016, 165-88. According to Luciano “[i]n this period it was a universal truth… that merchants who undertook a voyage did not write an account of it.” Perhaps the only reason that Polo did write an account was due to Rustichello’s insistence that it would be viable as a piece of literature – it is certain that Rustichello was an important influence on this work in this regard. 17 Jean Le Long is hereby referred to as John Mandeville; this fictional author is indeed seen as the real author by his contemporaries and I believed it more academically accessible to refer to him by his more prominent name. 9 practical ends as opposed to purely literary ends. However, both kinds of reports were altered to fit their respective ends, often resulting in an artificial narrative appropriate to the end. Again, nearly all the travelers, save those who had sent letters during their stay in the Far East, wrote years or even decades after many of these observations had been made. The main difference between the literary authors and the mendicant authors lies in how Polo and Mandeville treat fantastic speculations when filling in the imagination’s empty corners of the world for the sake of fulfilling a wider audience’s expectations about the far reaches of the world. Polo, deliberately claiming to share only the truth, wrote to create a wondrous, fascinating narrative to be read by a wider audience, whereas Mandeville wrote to inspire political-religious action by an audience that had an ability to influence or carry out actions of that character. 18 It is likely that Polo’s account was only written because of Rustichello da Pisa and that its fantastical elements were added in because of Rustichello’s literary background. These intentions are correlatively reflected in the relative popularity and availability of the texts’ manuscripts in Europe seen in
Figure 1 in the appendix.
It is important to highlight that most of the mendicants’ works have comparatively few extant manuscripts, indicating that they were rather obscure while the other, more numerous manuscripts from Polo and John Mandeville, to some degree, entered a medieval public consciousness. One exception to this generalization is Odoric of Pordenone’s account that had a relatively modest success. Odoric seemed to be distinctly disinterested in the religious affairs of his journey and was instead more interested in the fantastic things he saw and heard. His account reads more like a secular itinerary, similar to Polo, than a typical mendicant account. Another
18 One may worry about the way I single out Polo and Mandeville as the representatives of the secular and monastic travel writers particularly given the fact that many thousands of other, similar Europeans were alleged to have traveled to the East in this time; however, other similar, extant texts of this character are unavailable. Marco was the only European merchant to have left an extant account of the East at this time. As stated previously, other travelogues speak to other parts of this world or are out of the scope of this paper. With that said, I think the texts from Polo and Mandeville serve as the most obvious and most well-known contrasts to the mendicants texts that need not be analyzed with great depth due to their peripheral relevance to this paper. 10 exception was John of Marignolli. He was a professional writer who had written such a degree of fantastical elements in his otherwise authentic account that it appears more akin to Mandeville’s fictions of magical, heavenly, and hellish isles in the Indian Ocean. However, John of
Marignolli’s narrative was not wholly based on a fictitious account of the Orient like
Mandeville’s narrative. Indeed, account was originally written not as a stand-alone account, but rather in the annals of a Bohemian history at the request of the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia, Charles IV, whom John of Marignolli had befriended. Therefore, unlike the works by Mandeville, Polo, and Odoric, it was not inherently suited to, nor written for, a widespread readership because this narrative could not have been intended for a very wide audience in a history book of some otherwise irrelevant kingdom.19 John of Pian de Carpine’s minor, popular success can be attributed to his attention to the Mongol military prowess in a setting where
Europeans believed another Mongol invasion could have been imminent. While this general correlation between the popularity of these travelers’ accounts and their inclusion of fantastical elements is thus somewhat blurred, it is still a plausible explanation for many of the differences between the mendicants and other travel writers.
Overall, the significance of the mendicants, with respect to the influence of their accounts, would thus appear limited in light of these more famous narratives, for it is Marco Polo and, secondarily, John Mandeville that live on in the modern-day, popular imagination of the medieval European traveler in the Mongol world. However, the historical significance of the mendicant accounts lies in the authors’ unique perspectives for informing us of their evangelism and the observations made in that context. In comparison to both secular and other kinds of religious writers, these mendicant authors wrote with more seriousness and attention to reality
19 I suspect this account was written to aggrandize the Bohemian history, and to add to some kind of special history only bestowed to an important, kingly figure such as Charles IV. 11 because of their practical intents for writing; that is, the mendicants wanted to expose certain religious and economic truths and to speak of their mission’s progress to others. There is no doubt that the mendicant writers believed that their accounts had the potential to inform the basis for future missions to the Far East, especially as they reference this kind of prospect frequently in their writings. While it should not be gleaned that the mendicant accounts represented anything close to the truth of their observations of their journeys, especially in their Orientalist depictions of the East, these accounts are still the most careful and informed of all medieval travel writers.20
The Other in Imagination: A Brief History
Prior to the mendicant journeys, European contact with the East was limited to isolated ventures, and no long-term links had ever been developed; however, it is necessary to understand the previous relationships with and perspectives of Europeans towards the Far East in order to clearly examine the role mendicants could have played in context.
Since antiquity, rumors of great, enormous, and powerful civilizations (primarily the
Romans, the Franks, and the Chinese dynasties), which produced exotic and extremely valuable goods among other things, had existed in both the Orient and the Occident. This mutual, dream- like bewilderment hazily occupied people’s imaginations of the world for millennia. In the West,
Biblical tales and ancient myths further defined this imagination. The most significant of these myths was the medieval legend of Prester John, a powerful Christian ruler of a great Christian kingdom somewhere in the reaches of the world. This legend developed and was caught in the
European imagination in an important time – the crusades. The crusaders “were so eager to find natural allies in the east that the very first western envoy sent out by the Pope in 1177 was
20 Some studies of these attitudes have shown that these observations sometimes stray away from the reality of their time. The question of the authenticity of these fantastical claims is not very fruitful; rather, exploring the reasons for and the consequences of these representations that were imparted by the mendicants is important for my analysis. 12 ordered to search for Prester John.”21 This Prester John figure is present in several of the mendicant accounts in various forms and will be discussed later on.
However, the primary links between East and West prior to the Mongol era were the
Islamic traders who have long been the primary intermediaries between the Far East and the
West. Even Said acknowledged that a study of Orientalism between the West and the Far East must be understood alongside the Orientalist relationship concerning the West and the Near
East.22 Many Westerners’ perceptions of the Far East were in several respects founded on the perspectives of the Islamic traders and their alleged, pre-existing Orientalist relationship with the
Near East. The ways in which second-hand knowledge of the Far East passed from Muslim traders to people in the West are not entirely clear nor are they the focus of this study. Briefly, I will say that the mendicants tend to qualify their fantastical claims with either an assertion or a disavowal of its actual reliability, particularly where second-hand information is involved.23 It is then likely that some of the mendicants’ more exaggerated and fantastical claims surrounding certain details of the Far East came from the Muslims’ observations and misinterpretations.
Additionally, I suggest that basic attitudes towards the Mongols, such as those born of the brutalities against the Muslims in the Mongol conquests, were somehow translated to a European context in their own subsequent encounters with the Mongols. Most fundamentally, however, the
Muslims represented the primary Other who typified the rest of the non-Christian world for
21 Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350. New York City, NY: Oxford University Press, 1989, 160. India was rumored to have sizeable Christian community by a number of accounts and later, especially following the Mongol decline, was considered the most likely location of Prester John’s kingdom. 22 Said, Orientalism, 17. 23 There has been a large degree of material on the subject of medieval rhetoric in this kind of writing. Many medieval travel writers had made very explicit claims about the truth of their claims or had distanced themselves from certain claims that seemed too fantastical; Marco Polo, Odoric of Pordenone, and others made frequent use of this reassurance when they used phrases like ‘I can assure you that…’ or explicitly insist in the prefaces of these narratives that their stories are wholly and completely true. This rhetoric made these writers an exceptional authority, beyond that of a simple eyewitness, in their observations of the East The significance of this kind of rhetoric can explored further in Mary B. Campbell’s The Witness and the Other World: European Travel Writing 400-1600, 87-161. She particularly emphasizes the works of Marco Polo, William of Rubruck, and John Mandeville in these pages. 13
European Christians. Particularly in the context of the crusades, I suggest that this Near Eastern
Orientalism intensified the dynamics between Christians and other peoples based on their treatment of Far Eastern peoples.24
The environment in which the mendicants wrote about their respective journeys is directly related to the expansion, development, and decline of the Mongol polities. The rapid expansion of the Mongols began under Chinggis Khan once he consolidated the Mongol tribes into an empire in 1206. Over the next two decades, the Mongols came to rule an empire that stretched from the Pacific Ocean to the Caspian Sea. His successors invaded surrounding regions, including those in the Middle East, East Asia, China, and Eastern Europe. The culmination of this expansion from a European perspective was the devastating invasions that saw Mongol forces as far West as Austria in 1236-41. This expansion would not last indefinitely as all future expansion into Europe was halted with Ögedei Khan’s premature death in 1241.
Moreover, after the death of Möngke Khan in 1259,25 the Mongol Empire underwent a series of internal conflicts that eventually led to the fragmentation of the Mongol Empire into four distinct polities until the end of the thirteenth century. The Yuan Dynasty was among the most important of the Mongol polities for this paper as it was the largest and its territories corresponded to East
Asia, including Mongolia, China, and Korea. After a long decline period that arguably began in the 1320s, the Yuan dynasty lost control of most of Chinese territory by 1368, permanently ending the Mongol dominance in East Asia. The mendicants and others who took advantage of the Pax Mongolica, a phenomenon which was said to have allowed Western travelers to have
24 This is a limited analysis of the interactions between the West’s distinguishable relationships with the Near East and the Far East. There is not much written on this subjective because of the enormity of the task of comparative historical analysis. More research here needs to be made for a fuller analysis of an Orientalism of the Far East. 25 The internal conflicts that occurred following 1259 would account for the marked gap in travelogue sources for this period. Where William of Rubruck left the Mongol Empire in 1254, no extant accounts were seen until Marco Polo and John of Montecorvino in c.1300 and 1305, respectively. Although Marco Polo had been in the Mongol realms from 1269 onward, the relations between the Occident and the Orient certainly were interrupted by internal conflicts. 14 strong, sustained contact with the Far East, were also subject to the ebb and flow of the stability and attitudes of the Mongol rulers towards the outside world. Where the mendicants were concerned, this was “a special set of circumstances which briefly encouraged,” in Central Asia and China, “dreams of new Christian communities aligned with the Roman Church.”26
Regarding the initial European perspective of the Mongols and other Far Eastern peoples, the closest point of comparison for the European were the Hunnic and Tartaric groups that moved from Central Asia to Eastern Europe before the thirteenth century. These peoples were seen as barbarians and not worthy of attention in most instances, particularly for Western
Europeans. When the Mongols arrived during the 1236-1242 invasions, the resulting panic momentarily engulfed Europe in a firestorm of fear that Europe would be totally conquered by these nearly unstoppable foes. A European distrust and a barbarization of the Mongols coincided with this fear, as a future invasion seemed imminent. For example, the Mongol emperor had once suggested sending ambassadors with John of Pian de Carpine, the first European to journey to see the Great Khan, on his return trip to Europe, but John declined saying they ought to instead deliver letters themselves. This was done primarily to prevent the Mongols from spying on the
West, only to then make war with them. Secondly, they did this out of a fear that Europeans who hated the Mongols so much that they would kill the Mongols. John of Pian de Carpine cited an instance where simple servants in Tartar attire were almost stoned to death in the Dutch provinces, a region a thousand kilometers removed from the recent Mongol conquests. Carpine then worried that the Mongols might take revenge if their ambassador was killed and that no good would come of Mongol contact with Europe.27
26 Ryan, James D, "Christian Wives of Mongol Khans: Tartar Queens and Missionary Expectations in China in the Fourteenth Century." In The Spiritual Expansion of Medieval Latin Christendom : The Asian Missions (The Expansion of Latin Europe, 1000-1500), edited by James D. Ryan. Vol. 2. New York City, NY: Routledge, 2016, 285. 27 Johannes De Plano Carpini, “The Voyage of Johannes De Plano Carpini,” in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, by John Mandeville. London: Macmillan and, Limited, 1923, 258. 15
However, this existential fear faded into obscurity since the Mongols did not plan any future invasions and even became quite receptive to the European. The European perspective of the Mongols grew into a respect. Some even called for an alliance between Christendom and the
Mongol Empire against the Muslim states of the Near East during the crusades. Contemporary
Europeans believed that forging such an alliance would effectively surround Islamic civilization, thus leading to the triumph of Christendom over non-Christians. Some contemporary academic commentators have suggested that this was the sole impetus for contact with the Mongols.28
However, this claim is disputable since letters carried by figures such as William of Rubruck and
John of Pian de Carpine contain very little on this notion of an alliance. William of Rubruck wrote that the khan would “seize the territory from the Saracens as far as” King Louis IX’s holdings in the Levant, but only if the Christians bowed to the khan.29 Indeed, while great conflicts had already then occurred between the Mongol Empire and the Islamic states, the
Mongols had largely ceased their advance into the Near East by the 1250s. For the Mongols, especially following the Mongol Empire’s fragmentation in the latter half of the thirteenth century, and specifically with the Golden Horde and the Chagatai Khanate, Islam even became widely adopted. Moreover, it is still true that the Europeans considered the Mongols untrustworthy and barbaric in the period that the hope for an alliance would have been most widely held. Ultimately, the Mongol’s relationship with Islam was never antagonistic enough that Christendom would neither seriously consider an alliance with nor servitude to the Mongols.
28 See Abu-Lughod, Before European, 145. Also see Igor De Rachewiltz. Papal Envoys to the Great Khans. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1971, 143. 29 William of Rubruck, “The Journey of William of Rubruck” in The Mongol Mission: Narratives and Letters of the Franciscan Missionaries in Mongolia and China in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries by Dawson, Christopher, ed. Translated by A Nun of Stanbrook Abbey. New York City, NY: Sheed and Ward, 1955, 159. 16
I. Orientalist Analysis of the Mendicant Texts
As the mendicants do not directly divulge their part in the connections to broader forces of power, trade, and religion to the reader, a close reading of their accounts is necessary to reconcile their perspectives with Orientalism. This chapter is concerned with the ways in which the mendicants themselves alluded to these connections in their accounts of their travels and how they characterized this relationship in a specifically East Asian context. I am interested in the attitudes and observations that perhaps exhibited Orientalist thought. Broadly speaking, the mendicant’s observations regarding people, culture, and other aspects of these societies do not seem to confer consistently domineering or Orientalizing attitude towards Far Eastern peoples.
However, in analyzing the most poignant examples of Orientalist thought in these texts, I suggest that a religious Orientalism for the Far East can be authenticated in virtue of the European characterization of the Far East as essentially non-Christian. Specifically, this authentication can be shown through the mendicants’ perceptions of wealth and power, religion, and racial characterization.
The first section concerns the Mongols’ wealth and power, including their capacity for, and varieties of, economic productions, large and dense populations, architecture, art, luxuries, gardens, leaders, palaces, and court ritual. Tropes of this nature seem to coincide with a vision of the East that Jacques Le Goff, a modern French medievalist calls, an ‘oneiric horizon.’ The mendicants equate the Far East with a wealth that, relative to the West, seemed exceedingly superior. The second section concerns topics of religion in the accounts, including Christian heretics (such as the Nestorians, Orthodox Christians, and others), the other Abrahamic religions, and idolaters and pagans. Here, I am particularly interested in how the mendicant travelers, as agents of proselytization, shaped their views of these foreign, estranged religions based on their 17 formative beliefs about the world. The perceived divisions between Christian and non-Christian are the foundations of their views. The third section examines the racial characterization of the
Mongols as a product of the division between Christian and non-Christian. The mendicants’
Orientalist perspective on the races of the East coincided with the ideal values of European
Christianity and civilization. While the mendicant’s descriptions are careful and varied, the
Mongol race, in particular, is subject to a depiction of barbarization. While these insights exhibit certain patterns, I also consider the diversity found in the unique mendicant accounts and incorporate them as necessary.
The Oneiric Horizon and Oriental Despotism: The Mendicants’ Varying Perception of
Power and Wealth
The East Asian region was measurably superior to other places in the world as it was
“most extensive, populous, and technologically advanced region of the medieval world.”30 The mendicants implicitly contrasted this apparent fact with the European economic state of affairs.
Although most contemporary academics consider the notion of a European Dark Age problematic, the mendicants still believed that the West’s accomplishments paled in comparison to those of the East, particularly with respect to wealth and power. This Western dream was a projected image of a world of fabulous riches that contrasted with the relative poverty of
Western Europe.31 In this context, Jacques Le Goff argues that Europeans saw India, for instance, as representative of an ‘oneiric horizon.’ While this term was applied to observations of the wealth of India, and not the Far East, I think this narrative is quite applicable to their observations of the Far East as well. However, this oneiric vision perhaps takes on a new
30 Abu-Lughod, Before European, 316. This question of an actual superiority will be further explored in the next chapter. 31 Le Goff, Jacques. “The Medieval West and the Indian Ocean: an Oneiric Horizon” in The Mongol and the West 1221-1410, by Peter Jackson, 338. The Medieval World. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2005.
18 meaning with the mendicants’ asceticism towards material possessions and roles as agents of intercontinental wealth and power. That is, the mendicants accentuate the basic oneiric vision in such a way that they only implicitly invite further exploration for mercantile and missionary ventures into the East in their depictions of the Far East, despite their outwardly prohibited pursuit for wealth and power. Although these laudatory and admiring depictions of the East are abundant, aspects of the barbarism of autocracy and cruelty peek through the gaps of this imagery of wealth and power, particularly in William of Rubruck’s account. Regardless, both the images of riches and despotism ultimately support Orientalism in this period.
Certainly, the mendicants’ perspectives largely embody this oneiric vision of wealth and power. All of these travelers speak on some level to the immense wealth found within the
Mongol Empire’s realm. Most of the travel writers point out the exceeding wealth of the empire in general, those goods produced there, the major cities, population sizes, and so on. The dense and numerous population centers of Cathay and Manzi impressed many of the mendicants. For example, Hangzhou during the Song dynasty was the world’s most populous city with an estimated 1.5 million; in contrast, Europe’s largest cities did not even exceed 200 thousand people.32 In this context, Odoric of Pordenone, and Marco Polo as well, place imagined great cities of pure gold in their imaginations of Japan or the Indies that spoke to the perceived wealth found within the Far East in general. William of Rubruck also reported that the Mongols all regularly wore gold and silk clothing.33 These commentators also often noted the kinds of economic production of the different regions of the East. The way Marco Polo’s account organizes each section according to production for each region he visits is unsurprising considering his merchant background. Odoric of Pordenone, though he was not a merchant, was
32 Russell, J.C., The Control of Late Ancient & Medieval Population in Before Orientalism, Kim M. Phillips. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1985, 8. 33 William of Rubruck, “The Journey,” 101. 19 also interested in the unique economic versatility of individual cities and regions in a similar way.34 Odoric, in particular, expressed how much things cost and how rare goods in the west are worth comparatively little in China.35
Indeed, some iteration on a line that spoke to the absolute greatness of the Mongol
Empire in general is endemic to most of the accounts – regarding the Mongol Empire, John of
Montecorvino stated that “there is [no empire] greater in the world.”36 Brother Peregrine wrote that the Latins in the Orient had then often compared greatness of the Mongols to all the other kingdoms of the world.37 A specific aspect of the mendicants’ praise towards the Mongols’ successful bureaucracy concern the highway inn system, a service that mendicants and traders would have greatly relied upon in their endeavors.38 Overall, the Mongol Empire’s vast territories, conquered through their military might in a matter of decades, must have struck awe and fear into the Europeans and thus the mendicants.
Moreover, this oneiric, laudatory rhetoric also appears in the travelers’ descriptions of the palaces, courts of the khans, and the Mongol Empire’s general wealth. Friar Odoric spoke at great length regarding the many amenities of the khan’s palace. This included four miles of walls in circuit, a large garden of diverse fauna, a great lake, all kinds of birds and wild beasts for hunting and entertainment, expensive gems and processed goods, and golden statues of peacocks
34 Odoric of Pordenone, “The Journal of Friar Odoric” in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, by John Mandeville, A.W. Pollard, ed. London: Macmillan and, Limited, 1923, 346. There are other examples found in Pordenone’s account; however, this particular set of passages on the cities of ‘Chilenso’ and ‘Janzu’ is demonstrative of the kinds of ways he wrote about these subjects. The other mendicants make similar remarks on more important cities such as Khanbalik, Karakorum, Hangzhou, Yangzhou, Quanzhou, and others in their accounts. 35 Ibid., 346-7. 36 John of Montecorvino, “The Third Letter of John of Montecorvino” in The Mongol Mission: Narratives and Letters of the Franciscan Missionaries in Mongolia and China in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries by Dawson, Christopher, ed. Tr. A Nun of Stanbrook Abbey. New York City, NY: Sheed and Ward, 1955, 230. 37 Peregrine of Castello. “The Letter of Brother Peregrine, Bishop of Zaytun” in The Mongol Mission: Narratives and Letters of the Franciscan Missionaries in Mongolia and China in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries by Dawson, Christopher, ed. Tr. A Nun of Stanbrook Abbey. New York City, NY: Sheed and Ward, 1955, 234. 38 Odoric of Pordenone, “The Journal,” 351. 20 that can spread their wings by “art magic or by some secret engine underground.”39 Odoric moves on to describe the palace court, the seating arrangements for royalty and commoners, the great feasts, the 14,000 barons, each wearing a garment of gold and precious stones, who attend to those feasts, and more.40 Odoric of Pordenone and others point out the spatial hierarchies and the complex rituals between the khan, his wife, his concubines, his noble kin, the divisions of women and men, his secretaries, his entertainers, and so forth in succession within the throne room.41 Odoric also speaks to the excessive splendor of the Mongol court, “including such marvels as the Great Khan’s palaces [as having] golden pillars and gates, obviously inspired by the [pre-existing] European literary image of the Orient with which the learned Dominican [or
Franciscan] was [likely] familiar.”42
Furthermore, another factor in this prosperous depiction of the Mongol Empire is the khan himself: the writers often describe the khan’s complexion and personality in detail, and assign to him all responsibility for the greatness of the Mongol Empire. As a starting point of comparison, take for example Einhard’s famous, ninth century commentary on the life of
Charlemagne as an emblematic account of a Western characterization of a great king. This comparison is apt due to the way their respective commentators similarly figure each as the most powerful and greatest leaders on Earth. Einhard wrote great praise of Charlemagne, “the greatest of all the princes of his day,” particularly emphasizing his humanity, his merriness, his manliness, and his virtuousness – all positive qualities to assign to a king.43 Andrew of Perugia
39 Odoric, “The Journal,” 347-8. 40 Ibid., 349. 41 Ibid., 349. 42 Igor De Rachewiltz, Papal Envoys, 42. Descriptions of luxury and grandeur for palaces and courts were not limited to European travelers in East Asia as this was a common trope to be found among similar observations in this period in Europe. Writers in this period in general were closely tied in to places of power and wealth because of the connection between being educated and having connection to the aristocracy in medieval Europe; accordingly, it is natural for these writers to write about this subject more so than others – most people never experienced the splendor of the interior areas of great palaces. 43 Einhard: The Life of Charlemagne, Tr. Turner, Samuel Epes. NY: Harper & Brothers, 1880. Accessed April 7, 2019. https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/einhard.asp. section 1. 21 emphasized the khan’s generosity when he wrote of how his grants to the mendicants and others exceeded “the income and expenditure of many Western kings.”44 Einhard similarly emphasizes
Charlemagne’s generosity in his helping of Christians in need. Marco Polo’s commentary on
Kublai Khan was remarkably favorable; he wrote that the Great Kham was “the most powerful man, whether measured in subjects, lands or treasure, who exists in the world or ever did exist.”45 John of Montecorvino connected the greatness of the khan to the greatness of the
Mongol empire as he wrote that “there [was] no king or prince in the world who can equal the
[khan] in the extent of his land, and the greatness of the population and wealth.”46 These mendicants universally and explicitly describe the unrivaled quality of the palaces and the courts, particularly in comparison to their preexisting observations of these manifestations of wealth and power they would have seen in Europe. Comparing depictions of Charlemagne and the khans, we can see many similarities, namely in their greatness and virtuousness. This particular conclusion is particularly pertinent to the mendicants’ oneiric visions – the mendicants seriously believed that the wealth of the East seriously rivaled that of Europe’s greatest kingdoms and leaders.
However, some differences lie in these depictions, namely with respect to the khans’ demeanor. Where the khans were largely depicted as quite serious, albeit barbaric and often drunk, Charlemagne was a temperate, albeit jovial, man of the people.47 According to John of
Pian de Carpine, Güyük Khan was around forty or forty-five years old, “of a mean stature, very wise and politic, and passing serious and grave in all his demeanour; [a] rare thing it was, for a
44 Andrew of Perugia, “The Letter of Andrew of Perugia,” in The Mongol Mission: Narratives and Letters of the Franciscan Missionaries in Mongolia and China in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries by Dawson, Christopher, ed. Tr. A Nun of Stanbrook Abbey. New York City, NY: Sheed and Ward, 1955, 235. 45 Polo, The Travels, 87. 46 John of Montecorvino, “The Second Letter of John of Montecorvino” in The Mongol Mission: Narratives and Letters of the Franciscan Missionaries in Mongolia and China in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries by Dawson, Christopher, ed. Tr. A Nun of Stanbrook Abbey. New York City, NY: Sheed and Ward, 1955, 227. 47 Einhard, section 24. 22 man to see him laugh or behave himself lightly.”48 However, Igor de Rachewiltz points out that
Güyük Khan at this time “was actually quite sick and was a prematurely old man, used up by alcohol and women.49 He was only forty at the time of Carpine’s arrival and was doomed to die less than two years later, likely from some complications of alcoholism – it seems unlikely that
Güyük Khan actually was a serious man in this respect. For other mendicant commentators, some of the khans’ more personal characteristics were still more exaggerated towards a positive portrayal.
More starkly, William of Rubruck quite readily diverges from the more splendorous, oneiric visions given by the other mendicants and explicitly points out less-than-desirable features of the khan’s demeanor and rulership. William cites Möngke Khan as “a flat-nosed man of medium height, about forty-five years old” who sat on a couch in his sumptuous gold-lined tent accompanied by “ugly” women and “the dung of oxen,” wearing “a speckled and shiny fur like seal-skin.”50 William’s characterization of the khan here depicts him as somewhat barbarous, but still not inherently lacking in wealth and power. When speaking to the khan, both the khan and his interpreter appeared to be intoxicated, much to William’s frustration, and the khan moreover was deeply offended that William had offered no gifts for him.51 At one point, William makes a snide remark where he suggests that the khan’s city and palace pale in comparison to the worth of the village and the monastery of Saint Denis, respectively.52 In a similarly, mocking way, William wrote that the khan portended to have sat “up there [on his throne] like a god.”53
Similarly, John of Marginolli’s implicit view of the Yuan dynasty’s last khan, Toghon Temür,
48 Johannes De Plano Carpini, “The Voyage,” 252. 49 Igor de Rachewiltz, Papal Envoys, 101. 50 William of Rubruck, “The Journey,” 153-4 51 Ibid.,155 52 Ibid., 183-4. The Benedictine monastery of Saint Denis was a splendorous piece of Gothic architecture that housed the burial sites of nearly all French kings from the tenth to the eighteenth centuries, as well as several from previous centuries. 53 Ibid., 176. William of Rubruck probably wrote this with some degree of subterfuge; to have merely been like a god suggests that the khan was not as worthy of respect as one might believe. The khan’s arrogance that he should sit like one is plainly obvious to William of Rubruck. 23 was probably characterized by degeneracy and selfishness – that of an emperor by who fell prey to the decadence of wealth and power. Accounting for Marignolli’s premature departure from
China, Marignolli must have seen him and the Yuan Dynasty’s decline and subsequently left.54
In relation to broader context, William of Rubrucks’ differences in this regard are attributable to his particular circumstances in the Mongol Empire. It is well known that William of Rubruck’s account was an account of his failure.55 In this context, his barbarization and unfavorable impressions of the Mongols’ prosperity were perhaps partly caused by frustrations over his failures. The relationship between the Church, power, and wealth was seen as integral to the success of future Christian missions into the Mongol World by the mendicants; those that had obtained those connections succeeded, and the few that didn’t actually failed in several regards and accordingly wrote about the Mongols in a more negative light (William being a prime example).56 The recent invasions of the Mongols in Europe would have also contributed to his barbaric depiction of the khans. Moreover, considering William of Rubruck’s unique position as an early Franciscan mendicant who was more likely to adhere to the original Franciscan teachings of asceticism rather than the other mendicants’ close connections to power and wealth,57 it is likely that this failure coincides with his position which was completely unsuitable for a mendicant envoy. As a result, his Orientalist vision was not characterized by a wealth- oriented oneiric vision of the East; rather, he harbored a barbarization of and condescension towards the Mongols. This negative portrayal of the khans seems to be more connected with
54 Igor De Rachewiltz, Papal Envoys, 196-7. John of Marignolli’s commentary on East Asia is quite short; it is difficult to glean a holistic opinion of the Mongol realms from his work. 55 William of Rubruck, “The Journey,” 89. William reminisces on how he should have acted like “a wise man and not as a fool” on his journey in the very first lines of his account. 56 This finding is also explored in the mendicants’ discussions of race later in this chapter, as well as in chapter two. Both William of Rubruck and John of Pian de Carpine stand out in their accordingly negative representations of the Mongol race. 57 William of Rubruck was quite the ascetic when compared to the other mendicants covered in this thesis. Rubruck, at one point, accepted gifts of simple tunics from the khan out of politeness where he had previously repeatedly refused their prospective gifts of gold and silver. See page 205 of his account. Moreover, he reiterates throughout his account that he was indeed not an official representative of the pope or the French king. His final remarks emphasize how future envoys ought to be sent with diplomatic and economic backing. See page 220 of his account. 24
Orientalist depictions of despotism and cruelty in the East than Orientalist depictions of wealth.
Though, both variants are indeed variants of Orientalism.
Interestingly, a tangential philosophical problem becomes clear in mendicants’ oneiric visions. The mendicants were on the one hand ascetics who should have renounced this personification and mass-acquisition of wealth. On the other hand, many of the mendicants openly embraced the gifts of the khan. While some mendicants, namely William of Rubruck, occasionally refused and openly disdained the acquisition of material wealth, their awe of the wealth and power of the Mongol Empire seems to have superseded their ascetic principles as it had with many mendicants in their close associations with power and commerce across the world. The resulting effect on the mendicants’ Orientalist perspective was that the East was epitomized as the peak of wealth and power in the world in the sense stipulated by Le Goff with his conception of the oneiric horizon. Again, the mendicants believed that the denizens of the
East were worthy of admiration as a result of their experiences with the Mongols’ perceived magnanimity, particularly in contrast with European kingdoms and lords. However, the notion that the mendicants were betraying their orders’ ascetic doctrines in participating in these connections with and admiration of this kind causes their vision of Eastern affluence to take on a deeper meaning. I suggest that the Orient, in its facilitation of personal wealth for the mendicant envoys and in its excess riches, was the romanticized embodiment of the mendicants’ task and desire to serve as agents and beneficiaries of power and wealth.58 For the mendicants, the East represented an obvious and desired opportunity to exploit the riches of the East.
58 The role of personal greed within the mendicant orders’ activities can be used further to reinforce this claim. See for, example, Spencer E. Young’s “Avarice, Emotions, and the Family in Thirteenth-Century Moral Discourse” in Susan Broomhall’s Ordering Emotions in Europe, 1110-1800. Avarice was perceived to be a major problem that detracted from the mendicants’ allegiance to St. Francis’ original principles of asceticism. It would not be a stretch to say that this carnal desire could be applied to these mendicants’ oneiric visions of the East; though, confirming this would require more research that I did not intend to cover in this paper. Chapter two of this thesis also provides further discussion on the role the mendicants played in the confluence of wealth and power. 25
Christianity and the non-Christian World
It is clear that mendicants were very prominent figures of religious authority, missionary work, and theological thought in the East, in addition to their roles as agents of wealth and power. Their allegiance to a Christian-centric worldview shaped their views of others and certainly dominated their religious Orientalism. The mendicants’ perceptions of other religions superficially show that Latin Christianity would not achieve success with their missionary activities. In this context, the travelers’ perceptions of East Asian religions are indicative of their opinions about whether future and greater missions would work in the East. The observed religions in the Orient included other sects of Christianity, Nestorianism, Judaism, Islam,
Tengriism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism, as well as many minor cults, idolatries, and so on. With respect to their evangelism, the mendicants had the most success in the East’s heretical Christian communities, comprising the Nestorians and those Western Christians that had been displaced or otherwise moved into the Mongol realms. The mendicants’ missionary failure would have a marked impact on how they wrote of their activities and successes in the
Far East. I argue that the mendicants drew an Orientalist alterity with these other religions that developed in the Orient in the context of their failures. Accordingly, the Nestorians were depicted among the Other despite Nestorian Christianity’s common ancestry with Latin
Christianity. The related phenomenon of ‘Christianization’ in the mendicants’ depictions of Far
Eastern leaders and kingdoms was common to several mendicant accounts. That is, the mendicants sometimes depicted powerful Christian leaders in the East where there were actually none. Within the suddenly transformed view of Christianity’s global context when they met the
Mongols, this Christianization was ultimately an exaggeration that served to elevate the fundamental polarization between Christian and non-Christian for the zealous mendicants. 26
Regarding other Christians in the Far East, the Catholic mendicants saw the most success in their evangelizing mission and together shared the most similarities; however, the mendicant saw these Christians, especially the Nestorians, as alien and antagonistic to their mission. The heritage of the foremost Christian sect found in East Asia, Nestorianism, became schismatic with
Western Christianity when Nestorius’ views were condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431
C.E. The development of Nestorianism in the East, separated from most other forms of
Christianity and in an environment where syncretic religions flourished, was wildly divergent from that of Catholicism. According to Friar William, at least one Nestorian monk, who was clearly influenced by Buddhism, even believed in the transmigration of souls for animals.59 The
Nestorians overshadowed the influence of the mendicants’ Catholic Christianity in the Yuan dynasty due to the Nestorian’s superior numbers and their entrenchment within local belief structures, cultures, and indigenous governments. Conflicts between Nestorianism and
Catholicism were common, mainly concerning William of Rubruck and John of Montecorvino.
The Nestorians, William wrote, “call them-selves Christians, but behave in a very unchristian manner, [and] have grown so strong in these parts that they did not allow any Christian of another rite to have any place of worship.”60 William strongly condemned the powerful influence that Nestorians had here and blamed them for his overall failure in converting a mere seven individuals. He wrote of their abject ignorance and the fact that they lacked morals regarding corruption, bigamy, simony, usury, and drunkenness. These qualities resembled his more general characterization of the Mongols.61 Moreover, John of Montecorvino was accused by the
Nestorians of having killed the true emissary of Christendom, replacing that emissary, and even
59 William of Rubruck, “The Journey,” 192. To state this plainly, Catholic Christians would have thought this belief to be exceptionally heretical. 60 John of Montecorvino, “The Second Letter,” 224. 61 William of Rubruck, “The Journey,” 165. Compare the description of the Nestorians to the Mongols in the rest of the account; drunkenness is a topic that William discussed often, in a derogatory way. 27 almost landed in jail.62 Nevertheless, both John of Montecorvino and Brother Peregrine cite how, in spite of the troublesome, schismatic, and erroneous Nestorians, Catholicism was able to make some headway against them in the Far East.63 The number of Nestorians baptized by the mendicants numbered in the tens of thousands, according to the mendicants themselves.
Beyond the Nestorians, Orthodox Christianity was another heretical Christian sect that had a somewhat notable presence in the Far East. The Mongol invasions of Russia, the Caucasus, and the rest of Eastern Europe led to the kidnapping of many artisans and workers from these regions to the Central Asian steppe. The mendicants did not write about these people at great lengths. A notable exception concerns the Russian goldsmith, Cosmas, who assisted John of Pian de Carpine during his stay in Karakorum, despite the religious differences between them.
Without Cosmas, Carpine wrote, thanking God, he would have almost certainly have starved to death.64 In contrast, there is an instance where John of Montecorvino spoke of a heretical
Lombard physician who “infected [Khanbalik and the surrounding Cathay region] with incredible blasphemes about the Roman Curia, about [their] order, and about the situation in the
West.”65 The mendicant accounts of these religious heretics, those closely related to Latin
Christianity in particular, are sparse and varied; however, considering the mendicant mission to convert Christian heretics in general, they were often depicted with sharp disdain.
Regarding these findings and the dichotomy of Christian and non-Christian in an
Orientalist discussion, the fact that the mendicants so starkly disavowed these heretics of the East firstly indicates that the original mission of the mendicant orders to convert heretics was still a
62 John of Montecorvino, “The Second Letter,” 224. They likely distrusted John of Montecorvino because of his relative effectiveness in baptizing thousands of Nestorians into Catholicism and in having successfully garnered the Mongols’ support. 63 Peregrine of Castello, “The Letter of Brother,” 232. 64 Johannes De Plano Carpini, “The Voyage,” 256. 65 John of Montecorvino, “The Second Letter,” 226. The ‘blasphemes’ here likely referred to the controversy between Pope Boniface VIII and Phillip the Fair of France. The debated surrounded the pope’s belief that “every human creature [and kingdom] is subject to the Roman pontiff.” John of Montecorvino obviously stood on the side of the pope. 28 major focus of the mendicants, even in a non-European setting. However, the fact that the
Orthodox Christians are treated with much more respect and appear to share more commonalities compared to the Nestorians and other blasphemous heretics seems to be related to the relative
‘legitimacy’ of a given sect of Christianity. While Orthodox and Catholic Christianity were historically divided, they had shared a relatively close historical heritage in Europe. Where
Cosmas the Orthodox Russian was considered a friend, a victim of Far Eastern barbarism, and even a gift from God, the Nestorians were broadly illustrated as barbaric, combative, and essentially unchristianly. The mendicants had to confront the idea of these Oriental Christianities in their accounts. In seeing their immense cultural, racial, and religious dissimilarities, the mendicants thus grouped the Nestorians with the Far Eastern Other, and, somewhat paradoxically, the non-Christian Other. Being Christian was not enough – one had to be Latin
Christian or at least of some European origin to have been considered familiar to the mendicants.
In addition, a notable number of Muslims were observed in the Orient. Despite the oppositions drawn between Christianity and Islam, particularly in the context of the crusades, the mendicants’ observations of Muslims in the Far East were mostly quite neutral – these comments are relatively unremarkable and are typically simple statements of information. However, there are a few examples derogatory characterizations of Muslims. For example, William of Rubruck wrote of a certain man who, after he was fully educated about the Catholic faith, had wished to become Christian. However, after speaking with his wife, he refused because he would be unable to drink kumis66 – something he claimed he needed to survive in the barren environment of the
Central Asian Steppe – once he became a Christian.67 The juxtaposition of refusing the Catholic faith simply because of one’s wife and the contemptible desire for alcohol would paint this man
66 A fermented beverage made from mare’s milk commonplace in the Mongol realms. 67 William of Rubruck, “The Journey,” 111. 29 in a rather negative light. To characterize a man subdued by these two ‘vices’ is to characterize him as pitiable and weak in the context of the mendicants’ probable patriarchal and Christian value systems.68
In contrast, Buddhism was a powerful religion in the region and was indicated by the mendicants to be a major barrier to the success their evangelistic mission. The religion had a mounting institutional influence within the Yuan government itself.69 By Kublai Khan’s reign in the middle of the thirteenth century, Buddhism had been adopted as the primary state religion, even though other religions had been allowed to flourish. Buddhism was thus an obvious barrier to Christian expansion. According to the mendicants, the authority of its ‘Buddhist pope’ is such that the khan ‘[honored] him above all other men, and when the emperor rides in his company he makes him ride close by his side.”70 Regarding Buddhism’s successful dominance in the Mongol realms, Peter Jackson rightfully argues “Buddhist teaching was inherently more capable of coexisting with, and even absorbing, Mongol folk religion” than Christianity and even more than
China’s relatively syncretic belief systems of Confucianism and Daoism.71 While Christianity and Buddhism are both universalist religions, Buddhism was still far more pluralistic. The Latin
Christian insistence that one need follow the articles of their faith or be damned to hellfire was a major problem in spreading Christianity in the region. Batu Khan rebuked William of Rubruck’s religious hostility towards the khan when he purportedly replied by saying
[t]he nurse at first lets some drops of milk into the infant’s mouth, so that by tasting its sweetness he may be enticed to suck; only then does she offer him her breast. In the same way you should persuade Us, who
68 Seeing as the Muslim population in this region of Asia was comparatively little and was more informed by Orientalist attitudes of the Near East, I will not dwell on Islam here, or Judaism for similar, but stronger, reasons. 69 Jackson, Peter, The Mongols and the West 1221-1410. The Medieval World. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2005, 45. 70 Igor De Rachewiltz, Papal Envoys, 177. 71 Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 274. Confucian and Daoism were, more strictly than Buddhism, tied into a Han Chinese context; Both Confucianism and Daoism polarize Chinese and non-Chinese identities; the Mongols would have fallen on the ‘other’ side of this dichotomy. However, while Quanzhen Daoism had thrived under and had close associations with Mongol rule, it did not exist on the same caliber of universalism that Christianity and Buddhism did, regardless of environment; Quanzhen Daoism was particularly focused on the unique, individualistic, and inward development of its adherents. 30
seem to be totally unacquainted with this doctrine, in a simple and rational manner. Instead you immediately threaten Us with eternal punishments.72 Accordingly, while the Mongols were known for their religious tolerance, openness, and syncretism, Christianity was simply not equipped to account for opposing beliefs within its theological systemization, and so Christianity never gained traction in this environment. The mendicants’ greatest successes were among other Christians. However, among the other
Abrahamic religious adherents there was no success whatsoever. Unsurprisingly, with the syncretic idolaters, “exceedingly many [were] baptized but… they [did] not adhere strictly to
Christian ways.”73 It is true that the mendicants made certain syncretic accommodations in their conversions in order to achieve success, such as prioritizing baptism over catechism and engaging in local cultural traditions that would otherwise be erroneous for their faith (including drinking kumis against the mendicants’ religious law and accepting the Mongols’ gifts out for politeness in order to further their mission). However, it is clear they did not make enough accommodations in order to enrapture populations as Buddhism did. The mendicants’ broader failure in this regard is epitomized in the 1254 debate between the many religions of the Mongol
Empire, hosted by Möngke Khan and attended and written about in detail by William of
Rubruck. While he ostensibly proved Catholicism superior to Nestorianism and Buddhism, he admitted nobody wanted to become a Christian afterwards. Clearly, the mendicants’ treatment of
Eastern religions was largely dismissive in favor of the true Christian faith.
Indeed, the mendicants’ evangelistic failure is further displayed in the way the mendicants dismissed Eastern religions as unremarkable, inferior pagan religions. John of
Montecorvino, William of Rubruck, and others certainly attempted to convert the great Khan, but
72 Igor de Rachewiltz, Papal Envoys, 137. The khan’s alleged response here may have been more indicative of other peoples’ perceptions of the mendicants and of William of Rubruck in particular. More specifically, King Hethum I of Lesser Cilician Armenia relayed this quote of the khan about Rubruck’s ineffectual tactics to us in his own account. Though in general, this portrayal of William of Rubruck was probably applicable to the mendicants in general due to the perceived and actual alterities that existed between Christians and non-Christians. 73 Andrew of Perugia, “The Letter,” 237. 31 they all had been “too far gone in idolatry.”74 The mendicants frequently noted their plain inferiority and wrote little of them beyond this basic characterization, often lumping together
Buddhism and many other East Asian faiths. One exception, however, was William of Rubruck.
He had attempted to accurately articulate the thought of some other religions in his report, especially Buddhism and those creeds discussed in the religious debate he attended. He purportedly even admired “certain hermits [who live in Cathay’s]… woods and mountains” and how they were “of wondrous life and austerity.”75 However, given William of Rubruck’s predominant, combative stance against the inferiority of these other faiths, this dedication to understanding these pagan religions’ theology and practice is diminished.
However, the alleged large-scale presence of powerful Christian leaders, institutions, and kingdoms in the Far East where there was none in reality is quite confusing given this dismissive posturing towards the Orient’s idolatrous religions. That is. Eastern religions were sometimes mischaracterized based on their ostensible similarities to the Christian faith and were frequently juxtaposed with descriptions of wealth and power. Mischaracterizations of this degree were proliferated in the mendicant texts in their depictions of other religions alone; where the mendicants’ discussion of secular topics sometimes tended towards fantastic embellishment, their erroneous remarks on religion were unrivaled. These observations were seemingly based on an ignorance of those religions, perhaps as a result of their perceived position of religious superiority. After discussions on the wealth of the khan, another mendicant discusses the institutions of Buddhism, namely regarding Buddhism’s “sovereign bishop” with a power “such as [that] the Pope” held over Christians.76 The explicit and implicit comparisons to Christianity
74 John of Montecorvino, “The Second Letter,” 224. Based on what we know about the khan, the state, and religion in the late Yuan Dynasty, this idolatry that John dismissively wrote of was almost certainly Buddhism. 75 William of Rubruck, “The Journey,” 144. These hermits he spoke of were probably Daoists. 76 Igor De Rachewiltz, Papal Envoys, 177. 32 are difficult to ignore. Furthermore, John of Marignolli wrote of a great temple housing thousands of monks77 who worshipped the Buddhist ‘Goddess of Mercy,’ Kuan-yin. He insinuated that this same goddess was really the Virgin Mary – these numerous followers would then have to be followers of the Christian faith.78 John of Pian de Carpine muddies Buddhist and
Christian traditions when he wrote that the Buddhists were pagans, but also worshipped one God and had many diverse saints. He supposed them to have “[adored] Christ Jesus our Lord,” believed in “the article of eternal life,” esteemed the Christian scriptures” – the one, simple issue for John was that they were not baptized.79 John of Pian de Carpine later wrote that they were “a very courteous and gentle people” and that “[t]heir country [was] exceedingly rich, in corn, wine, gold, silk, and other commodities.”80 The juxtaposition of the exceeding wealth of an oneiric vision with a kind of Christian rule is also quite suspect. In yet another instance, John of
Montecorvino exaggerates the character of ‘King George,’ an influential Ongut prince who was
‘converted’ from Nestorianism to Catholicism, as a direct relative of Prester John.81 The most demonstrative and poignant instance of this Christianizing phenomenon is in John Mandeville’s account. Mandeville wrote that Prester John and the khan were the “greatest lords under the firmament,” a firmament he believes ought to be ruled by Christians because of God’s role in creating the world.82 He even insinuated that the great khan was a descendant of Noah and that he thus deserves to rule over the world too.83 In his view, it was Prester John and the Great Khan, not the Christian rulers of Europe, who had come to rule over the greatest lands and cities of the
77 This number was clearly exaggerated. Igor de Rachewiltz suggests that most of these monks “were actually laymen who crowded the temples to evade taxes and compulsory labor” on page 197. 78 Igor De Rachewiltz, Papal Envoys, 197. 79 Johannes De Plano Carpini, “The Voyage,” 225. 80 Ibid., 225. 81 Ryan, James D. “Conversion vs. Baptism? European missionaries in Asia in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” in Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages. Muldoon, James, ed. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida, 1997. “Chinese sources show George also a devotee of Chinese culture and Confucian values, so his commitment to Christianity may have been quite superficial” (note 32, 153). 82 Mandeville, John, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. London: Macmillan and, Limited, 1923, 179. 83 Ibid., 145-6. 33 world. Mandeville intended the alleged existence of thriving communities of Christianity in the
East to serve as a rallying cry for European lords. He wrote that European lords should emulate these idealized rulers of the East, namely in conquering the non-Christian world in the name of
God.84
Overall, the oneiric vision of wealth seems to have been refigured in terms of religion, creating a kind of oneiric vision of religion, despite the absence of a Christian heritage in the
East. In dialogue with the dialectic between the Christian and the non-Christian, the oneiric vision of religion becomes a poignant foundation about a kind of religiously-based Orientalism.
This religious oneiric vision establishes a similar kind of envy observed in the original sense with wealth except that this religious envy was now being utilized by writers like John
Mandeville to justify and spur further Christian imperialism into the non-Christian world.
Though the mendicants did not explicitly write to this particularly end, except to the extent that missionary work would entail it, the fact that John Mandeville exaggerated their accounts in this way is not very far-fetched, theoretically speaking. Mandeville’s relative literary popularity in
Europe shows that the validity of this oneiric interpretation that was used for a religious imperialism in the mind of the European reader was, in some sense, a natural extension.
Again, it is clear that this religious Orientalism is closely intertwined with the European
Christian’s conceptions of the world’s people as fundamentally being either Christian or non-
Christian. This perceived polarity was certainly cemented during the mendicants’ journeys as they began to realize that the world was not at all dominated by the true faith of Latin
Christianity.85 Moreover, these mendicants extended the boundaries of the imagined world for
Europe in their writings. The mendicants accordingly extended the boundaries of who they
84 Mandeville, The Travels, 3-6. John Mandeville explicitly dedicated his entire prologue’s mission statement to this call for a worldwide crusade. 85 Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 346. 34 considered non-Christian, thereby perhaps extending a religious superiority and fervor that existed with the crusades in the Near East into the Far East. In this context, the mendicants’ characterization of Oriental races yields to this polarized view of the world.
Alterity between East and West: The Barbarous Mongols and the Monsters Beyond
To this end, the mendicants’ conception of religion and race are closely related, particularly in light of the mendicants’ perceived correlations between Christian and Western peoples, as well as non-Christian and Eastern peoples. For the mendicants, the Christian religion was the primary identifier of whether one was a European or not. Whether or not a mendicant’s systemic understanding of this Christian and non-Christian dialectic was common among the mendicants or Europeans prior to their journeys and their narratives is beyond the scope of this paper; however, in the mendicants’ accounts and related sources seem to show that the European identity was to some degree constructed in this way during this time. This Christian-European identity was supposedly based on a sense of Christendom that was specifically centered in Latin
Christianity, but also perhaps peripherally included in it the lands and peoples of the Greek
Orthodox Church. In contrast, the Mongols identified themselves as Mongols before any particular religious identity, excluding them from being good Christians in the eyes of the mendicants. Moreover, discussions about wealth and power at the beginning of this chapter show that the mendicants either barbarized the Mongols or depicted them ambiguously in contrast to the mendicants’ descriptions of their glorious empire. These depictions developed as a result of this religiously-based characterization of the non-Christian peoples of the East. While the mendicants’ discussions of race were varied and yet also carefully acknowledged distinctions between the various races, classic Orientalist ideas of monsters distort these otherwise attentive observations. 35
Generally speaking, the Mongols were not cognizant of Europe’s historically diverse environments;86 rather, they perceived the Catholic European travelers as members of a singular, united entity – a powerful kingdom of Christendom led by the pope. The Mongols appear to have subscribed to a belief that characterized the West as essentially Christian. In Europe too, “[m]en who thought of themselves as living in Christendom were conscious that the rest of the world was not Christendom,” again assigning a kind of real territoriality to the abstract concept of
Christendom.87 This use of the word ‘we’ in John of Pian de Carpine’s commentary alongside the usage of the word ‘Christians’ to linguistically unite Europe against the Mongols and other non-Christian foes is an explicit indication of this characterization.88 However, this sense of
Christendom was associated with Latin Christendom more than Byzantium or other sects and their respective geographical regions of belief as, during the crusades, Europeans even broadly labeled themselves as Franks – a power that once united most of Latin Western Europe.
Likewise, in several East Asian languages, the word for the Latin European people was some variant on the word ‘Franks.’ For example, the Chinese term used by the Mongols to apply to the mendicant travelers was rendered as Folangji. Within this conflation of the Frank and the Latin
European, there is a connotation of a great, unified empire – perhaps even some polity that descended from the ancient, great Roman Empire.89 Supposedly then, their ‘descendants’ were then leading crusades and sending mendicants and merchants across the known world and beyond. This particular distinction of Europe from the rest of the world had a remarkable impact on how the Mongols perceived these travelers. Supposing that Europe was indeed united under
86 Take, for example, the diverse confluence of peoples in the Medieval Mediterranean that were brought together by trade in a heterogeneous manner but were divided by kingdom, religion, and otherwise. 87 Bartlett, Robert, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950-1350. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, 253. 88 Johannes De Plano Carpini, “The Voyage,” 236-7. 89 This can perhaps be attributed to the way that East Asians probably perceived China; that is, it was a long-standing civilization that has continuously held power as a civilization in the region since antiquity in one form or another. This was discussed briefly in the last section of the introduction. 36
Christendom, the Mongols thought that this great, unified kingdom was something in itself to be respected, as “they feared the Franks more than any other race in the world.”90 The Mongol
Empire perhaps thought of Christendom to be on some sort of parity with their empire based on this characterization.
Moreover, I suggest that these characterization set up a mutual polarization between East and West, and more specifically between the Mongol realms and Christendom. East and West differ with respect to the ways they characterize one another – the East perceives the West racially, and the West perceives the East religiously. To the Mongols, “the word Christianity appears to them to be the name of a race,” and they were themselves “unwilling to be called
Christians” when converted, instead wanted “their own name, that is, Mongol, to be exalted above every other name.”91 The Mongols saw religious identifications to be secondary to their primary identity - their racial identity. At the same time, the mendicants thus thought the
Mongols were not primarily and thus not wholly Christians – they could not have not good
Christians if they didn’t wholly subscribe to the Christian belief system. Consequently, John of
Pian de Carpine plainly indicated that the Mongols “and other nations of the east” were “the enemies of God” in his accounts’ opening lines, further showing the peoples of the East lacked the West’s right interpretation of good Christian qualities.92 One was simply either Christian or non-Christian in the Western perception, and Mongol or non-Mongol in the Eastern perception.
Regarding the Mongol peoples specifically, the mendicants speak volumes regarding their nature and appearance in this context. Some accounts of the Mongols regard them as barbaric, completely otherworldly savages. Odoric of Pordenone, though not entirely critical of
90 Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 92. 91 William of Rubruck, “The Journal,” 121. 92 John of Plano Carpini, “History of the Mongols” in The Mongol Mission: Narratives and Letters of the Franciscan Missionaries in Mongolia and China in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries by Dawson, Christopher, ed. Tr. A Nun of Stanbrook Abbey, 3-76. New York City, NY: Sheed and Ward, 1955, 3. 37 the Mongols, does express disgust for their “vile and abominable” behaviors, particularly regarding a religious practice that involved eating from and drinking out of the skull of a deceased father.93 Carpine characterized them as a cruel, devilish, mischievous, and cunning people.94 Similarly, Carpine believed that they could not be trusted as any appearance of amiability was merely pretense – they “spoke smooth words, but later they would sting like a scorpion.”95 When William of Rubruck “arrived among those barbarians,” he twice iterated that he was “stepping into some other world.”96 The Mongols primarily relied on hunting and pastoralism as the mendicants noted this across several of the accounts. The mendicants’ commentaries on this issue are largely neutral and even quite comprehensive; however, William of Rubruck made an effort to note how they ate “all kinds of mice,” perhaps signaling that these
Mongols were not at all civilized.97 Rubruck insisted that he “must tell” the reader that the
Mongols “eat all dead animals indiscriminately” and that they eat their food in “a really disgusting and gluttonous manner.”98 Historically, the connections between hunter-pastoralism societies and the barbarian are not coincidental. ‘Civilized,’ urban peoples around the world have always equated this pastoral nomadism with barbarians. The Europeans could not have recognized the Mongols’ foods and habits.99 Their habitual drunkenness, their drinking of horses’ blood, and even the consumption of human flesh when necessary must have been quite jarring for the mendicants.100 Most interestingly, William of Rubruck wrote that the Mongols had
93 Odoric of Pordenone, “The Journal,” 355. 94 Johannes De Plano Carpini, “The Voyage,” 238 95 Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 91. 96 William of Rubruck, “The Journal,” 93. 97 Ibid., 100. 98 Ibid., 97. 99 Phillips’ chapter on the foodways of Far Eastern peoples is particularly of interest here. She goes into much further depth on this subject than I do here. I only summarize some of her content and stress the mendicant observations of these foodways here as needed for my argument. See pages 73-100 of Before Orientalism. 100 Phillips, Before Orientalism, 78. 38
“no abiding city nor [did] they know of the one that is to come.”101 Rubruck’s apparent adjoining of an obvious sign of civilization and a belief in Christianity is particularly telling of the
European perspective of the Mongols. Mongolic barbarism was conceivably somehow related to their race’s lacking religious belief in God and heaven.
Similarly, the mendicants extended this characterization of barbarity to the Mongol’s war capabilities and their rule. The perceived, merciless Mongol invasion of Eastern Europe surely had been widely known in Europe, adding a poignant basis in this barbaric characterization of the Mongols. Carpine remarked on “the intolerable and unheard-of servitude that they imposed on subject peoples” that made “no peace possible.”102 Deserters and those that abandoned fellow soldiers were put to death by the Mongols.103 Carpine then expands at length the tactical, behavioral, and material advantages the Mongols might have had over the European in order to discuss how they might be resisted.104 However, the Mongols’ strength was allegedly only based on fear and intimidation in battle. Carpine thought that these Mongols were able to be overcome, but deemed “not any one kingdom or province able to resist them” and subsequently argued that, in order to fight the unified forces of the Mongol Empire and its subject peoples, Christendom must be united against them.105 Therefore, this attitude implies a sense of European superiority – these Mongols were essentially simple barbarians, and John of Pian de Carpine thought that a united European civilization could defeat them, no matter how perceptibly destructive and cunning they were.
101 William of Rubruck, “The Journal,” 93. The translation here is somewhat ambiguous as to whether that “the one that is to come” refers to a literal “celestial city” found in others translations or that William of Rubruck simply wanted express concern that the Mongols never knew where their next place of dwelling was to be. In context of his discussion of the lives of the Tartars, the quote ought to be more like this latter sense. However, I could not obtain access to the original manuscript or its Latin translation and so this unfortunately remains somewhat of a question. 102 Johannes De Plano Carpini, “The Voyage,” 235. 103 Ibid., 235-6. 104 Ibid., 234-8. 105 Ibid., 236. 39
Other mendicant writers noted, for example, the military prowess of the Mongols and their incredible numbers of ships, men, horses, and otherwise, but they are comparatively muted next to Carpine’s profound commentary on war, and, secondarily, William of Rubruck’s observations on their behaviors. Characterizations of the Mongols in the texts that appeared a few decades later were comparatively more neutral. For instance, John of Montecorvino is rather keen to focus on the heretical, perverse Nestorians, having only extolled the Mongols for their aid for the mendicants and for the ‘true faith.’106 However, their condemnations of the East’s religions and the Mongols’ and other people groups’ concurrent acceptance of those same erroneous faiths lead to a barbarization that was then defined by religious undertones more so than anything else, religious undertones that had existed even in those early accounts, as we have seen.
In a vacuum, the mendicants’ observations on race were notably lucid. The Europeans acknowledged diversity in the peoples they saw and generally used distinct designations to describe them as such. The mendicants previously traveled to proselytize the many diverse peoples in European and Mediterranean settings; however, clearly the Mongol Empire offered an unrivaled diversity in its peoples. William of Rubruck “was astonished to find French jewelers,
Armenian priests and Chinese merchants among the Khan’s entourage” while in Karakorum, centered in the otherwise isolated and unforgiving Asian steppe.107 Having conquered much of the Old World, the Mongols facilitated, forcefully and otherwise, dynamic migrations of many different people groups and cultures across the massive empire in all directions. Informative commentaries on the cultures, lifestyles, behaviors, appearances, crafts, religious institutions, governments, economies, specific oddities and more of these assorted people-groups are written
106 John of Montecorvino, “The Second Letter,” 226. 107 Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 41. 40 about in most of these accounts. Several of the mendicants distinguish between the Mongols, the
Cathayans, the people of Manzi, and as well as beyond and within these broadest categories.
These commentaries do not exist without certain Orientalist slants or fantastical exaggerations, but they generally do not stray far from a conceivable social reality for these East Asian cultures.
However, the mendicants sometimes included exceptionally strange and fantastic representations of the peoples they saw or heard of in these regions. The most poignant examples of this can be found in John of Pian de Carpine’s account. He spoke of “certain monsters who in all things resembled the shape of men, saving that their feet were like the feet of an ox, and they had indeed men’s heads but dogs’ faces,” and when the spoke they spoke “two words like men, but at the third they barked like dogs.”108 Benedict the Pole similarly reports of ‘the dog-headed
Cynocephali’ and the Parossites as well, who were described by Benedict as having mouths so narrow that they couldn’t eat using them, and instead breathed in the steam and smoke of cooking meat and fruit.109 There are numerous other examples of magical and fantastical exaggeration involving man and nature alike. Igor de Rachewiltz writes that these far-fetched examples of monsters are entrenched in Western-geographical lore of the East. These monsters were engrossed in the cultural tradition of the Bible and Alexander Romance, mingling fact and fable and projecting their fear of the unknown that occupied the still empty corners of the world.110 The dog-like monsters found in Carpine’s account seem to exaggerate the difference of the barbarian speaker, whose language was likely so alien that it perhaps seemed beastlike in light of their observations of their culture, eating habits, et cetera. Benedict’s narrowed-mouth creatures seem to brandish a more primal fear in hunger and starvation; the European’s relatively
108 Johannes De Plano Carpini, “The Voyage,” 233. 109 Benedict the Pole, “The Narrative of Brother Benedict the Pole” in The Mongol Mission: Narratives and Letters of the Franciscan Missionaries in Mongolia and China in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries by Dawson, Christopher, ed. Tr. A Nun of Stanbrook Abbey, 79-84. New York City, NY: Sheed and Ward, 1955, 80-81. 110 Igor de Rachewiltz, Papal Envoys, 97-8. 41 poorer status compared to the East perhaps somehow played a part in this nightmarish vision.
However, not all the mendicants indulge in these fantasies of monsters, as several of the mendicants explicitly refute rumors of such monsters.
In conclusion, the mendicants’ conception of race is a varied picture that most prominently espouses attitudes of fear and disgust towards the Mongols’ practices, characterizing them as barbaric and sometimes even monstrous. This conception sits in contrast to the common conception of prosperity that the mendicants had towards the Mongolian and Chinese civilizations they witnessed in their journeys. The Mongols’ invasions and the mendicant accounts that immediately followed this event deeply shaped the foundation of their perceptions
– the Mongols were depicted as barbarous, alien, and, most fundamentally, non-Christian. The inhabitants of the East are characterized in this way, in spite of their mendicants’ perceived prosperity of them, due to their stance towards and characterization of their religion. The juxtaposition of the Christian mendicant and the non-Christian races of the world in this light lend credence to a medieval religious Orientalism.
42
II. The Prerequisites for Orientalism
In analyzing the texts in this way, there rises a question of whether these texts originated from an Orientalist context. That is, establishing the presence of Orientalist thought necessitates the occurrence of a wide-scale colonial enterprise and an imbalance of power in favor of the
West. Initial assumptions show that the balance of power nominally favored the Mongol Empire, especially in its early expansionary period, and that this broader, necessary colonial enterprise was quite muted. However, there are more discrete manifestations of these imbalances of power that are more complex and more nuanced than these broad generalizations about the wider balance of power. The Mongols uniquely allowed, and even sought ought, Western missionaries in the Mongol Empire because of the commercial and political benefits for the empire that arose from this relationship. There are discrete ways in which the Christianity perhaps challenged this aforementioned imbalance of power and exhibited a specifically religious Orientalism in this context. I argue that the mendicants, rather than European merchants or otherwise, were the leading agents of this religious colonial power and that this religious power manifested in such a way that the Orientalism discussed in the previous chapter is justified.
Mendicants, Merchants, and Power in and Beyond Europe
With respect to the mendicants, their origins awash in a religious history centered at the juncture between intercontinental wealth and power. The Franciscan and Dominican orders were the two most prominent examples of the extension of European influence into Asia, and they characterize the main context for the travel writers discussed in this paper. Founded in 1209 and
1215 respectively, these orders were established on the idea of roving evangelization in order to spread the word of the Gospel as the apostles did. Franciscans and Dominicans “settled in cities across Europe and took on the task of ministering to the growing urban populations, including 43 merchants” locating their convent complexes near city walls, adjacent to trade routes, cathedrals, and markets. 111 This was done “specifically so that the friars could see and be seen and have easy access to both the religious and secular centers of cities.”112 The original mendicants were ascetic travelers – they were precluded from ownership of property and were even expected to beg for food while preaching. The mendicant orders were characterized by their opposition to heresy and their pledge to service those Christians who could not be part of a normalized
Christian community otherwise. Moreover, they were far more engaging and accessible to their congregation by virtue of their position within the community and the fact that they preached in the local vernacular.113
Moreover, the mendicant orders became successful at the same time as the rapid economic growth of European urban centers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The establishment of the mendicant orders coincided with urban expansion in the Mediterranean region whilst merchants gained power and shaped the development of these trade centers.114
Over time, a mutually beneficial relationship formed between the mendicant orders and the merchants. Due to their presence across different urban centers, the mendicant orders were well equipped to religiously support and advise the merchants anywhere they traveled. They fulfilled a societal need during the rise of an inter-European trade network, led by the Mediterranean trade cities. In turn, the merchants gave the mendicants massive donations as kinds of indulgences to absolve themselves of sin, “providing funding for the friars’ work, the maintenance of the monastic complex, and the commissioning of works of art and architecture.”115 The ties between
111 Chubb, Taryn E. L., and Emily Kelley. “Mendicants and Merchants in the Medieval Mediterranean: An Introduction.” Medieval Encounters 18, no. 2/3, 2012, 161. 112 Alexander Murray, “Piety and Impiety in Thirteenth-Century Italy,” in Popular Belief and Practice, Studies in Church History 8, eds. G. J. Cumming and Derek Baker. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1972, 86. 113 Chubb and Kelley, “Mendicants and Merchants,” 164. 114 Ibid., 152. 115 Ibid., 152. 44 merchant and mendicant are further blurred when considering that some mendicants, including
John of Marignolli and even Francis of Assisi,116 came from merchant families. In many instances the mendicants became diplomatic mediators between church and state. The friars were
“inveterate news-gatherers, and as such invaluable spies and dispatch carriers” in times of war and otherwise.117 Friars, especially Dominicans, were expressly directed by the Pope to expound theology and expel heresy in Europe and abroad. In 1288, Nicholas IV became the first
Franciscan pope, presenting clear evidence for the ascendancy of the Franciscan order in late medieval Europe. His election legitimized the Franciscan order’s activities in Europe and abroad as he was the first pope to undertake a serious missionary effort to the Mongol realm.118 As a result of this growth in power, the Franciscans, alongside Catholic Western European merchants, traveled to the Far East and became the first Europeans to go there in such large numbers.119 The
Mongol perspective of them in particular is thus important to consider.
Broader Perspectives and the Role of Christian Europeans in the Far East
Again, the early Mongol treatment of Europeans was largely dismissive and ambiguous, particularly around the time of the Mongol Invasion of Eastern Europe. The Mongols held that the conquest of the world was their right and that all should bow to their superiority, a superiority that held equity with the heavens and with the support of God. In reply to a letter sent by Pope
116 Francis of Assisi was the founder of the Franciscan Order, and so his connections with wealth are even more surprising and complicated when we know that he was the one who espoused the order’s original ascetic principals. 117 Rowling, Marjorie, Everyday Life of Medieval Travelers. London: B. T. Batsford Ltd, 1971, 168. 118 Ryan, “Christian Wives,” 288. 119 The Franciscans largely overshadowed the Dominicans in these papal missions to the East. The two Dominicans, Andrew of Longjumeau and Friar Ascelinus, selected to go East at the same time as John of Pian de Carpine were explicitly instructed not to journey to the Mongol court and were expected instead to deliver their papal letters to the first Mongols chiefs they encountered to then be delivered by their hand to the Great Khan. The Dominican missions were relatively unsuccessful and uneventful in comparison to John of Pian de Carpine’s and the other Franciscan’s successes. The Franciscans were perhaps favored over the Dominicans in these missions because of the differences that lie in their motivations and activities. Dominicans were historically more associated with the Near East than the Far East and were far more concerned with intellectual and theological concerns in comparison to the Franciscans. 45
Innocent IV in 1247 that attempted to establish a friendship with the Mongols and requested freedom from future invasion, Güyug Khan wrote that
… From the rising of the sun to its setting, all the lands have been made subject to me. Who could do this contrary to the command of God? Now you should say with a sincere heart: “I will submit and serve you.” Thou thyself, at the head of all the Princes, come at once to serve and wait upon us! At that time I shall recognize your submission. If you do not observe God’s command, and if you ignore my command, I shall know you as my enemy…120 The rhetoric of the Mongol Empire was exceptionally threatening during their expansionary period in the early thirteenth century. In this context, the khan was determined to “set up a flag of defiance against all the countries of the west.”121 Regarding the notion of a far-away kingdom of
Christendom, the Mongols knew of their potentially united power and their Crusades into
Muslim lands but did not know much of them beyond that. Their views of Europeans were sometimes rather ambiguous due to their peripheral position in Mongol interests (aside from the short-lived invasion of Europe and prior to 1250 C.E. or so). In contrast, the Mongols’ treatment of Europeans in the era following the Mongol Invasions of Eastern Europe in the 1230s and
1240s was nominally positive. The Mongols gradually claimed less and less their absolute superiority over the rest of the world as the connections, commercial and otherwise, between
East and West solidified. Moreover, the middle of the thirteenth century saw the split of the
Mongol Empire into several distinct polities, none of which had the individual capability to reclaim Chinggis Khan’s undertaking of global domination.
Regarding foreign relations in a Chinese context, the historical relationship between
Chinese states, including the Yuan dynasty, and the outside world was mediated through the tributary system. This system originated within China’s central role as cultural and economic superpower in the region. This system primarily involved a ceremonial exchange of luxurious
120 “Guyuk Khan’s Letter to Pope Innocent IV (1246)” in The Mongol Mission: Narratives and Letters of the Franciscan Missionaries in Mongolia and China in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries by Dawson, Christopher, ed. Translated by A Nun of Stanbrook Abbey. New York City, NY: Sheed and Ward, 1955, 86. There is a problem with the veracity of the language of this letter as it was translated from Mongolian to Persian and then to Latin. Later, it was of course translated into English as seen above; therefore, there must be some scrutiny placed on the severity of language found in this letter. 121 Johannes De Plano Carpini, “The Voyage,” 254-6. 46 gifts between other rulers and the Chinese emperor. Those nations that operated under this system subjugated themselves to a Chinese superiority, thereby granting the emperor legitimacy as ruler of the ‘Middle-Kingdom,’122 and, in return, the emperor gave these nations the right to trade with China, as well as various protections. This system generally continued in its previous form under the Yuan, a dynasty led by culturally and ethnically non-Chinese ‘barbarians.’
However, the Yuan dynasty was unusually open to foreign trade. Commerce between
Chinese dynasties and foreign polities largely depended on the Mongol state policy regarding private business.123 Historically, the Chinese stance on trade and commerce had been disdainful.
Dominant Confucian attitudes towards commerce were largely negative as merchants were considered to be at the bottom in most East Asian society’s hierarchies, and ‘barbarian’ merchants were assessed to be even lower. Trade in and of itself was seen as unnecessary as
China was largely self-sufficient, and so trading with the outside world was never perceived as culturally important. The Yuan government had no close association with Confucian doctrine and thus did not completely abhor these barbarian merchants on the basis of those principles.
There is even evidence that the relationship between Mongol leadership and foreign merchants was intimate throughout its existence. As early as c.1203, Muslim traders were found among the close adherents of the future Chinggis Khan. Both tributary trade and private, unofficial trade had existed between foreigners and Mongol officials across the empire’s lifespan. The Mongols granted merchants special passes, called Paizas, which gave travelers engaged in imperial business a great degree of authority, safety, the unrestricted use of postal relay system, as well as many other privileges that were not afforded to most.124 Indeed, the Mongols’ ‘open-door’ policy
122 In Chinese thought, China was seen to be the center of the world geographically, culturally, economically, and otherwise; in Chinese, the name for China has historically rendered as Zhongguo, or literally, the middle-kingdom. 123 Abu-Lughod, Before European, 318. 124 Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 291. 47 paved the way for European prosperity from business in this region.125 Moreover, the character of China’s economic production during this time was inherently suited for export, especially those goods that Europeans found rare and valuable, such as silks, other fabrics, porcelain, spices, etc. China, in particular, was known for its silks, not because they were of high quality but rather due to their quantity and cheapness that made trade with China preferable to trade with the nearer Central Asia for silk.126 Therefore, unlike other Chinese dynasties, the Yuan government facilitated a degree of preferentialism and incentive for foreign merchants.127
In juxtaposition with the Mongol’s past rhetoric of global domination, the structure of their particular relationship with European Christendom appears to be uncharacteristic of the
Mongols’ foreign policy in general and the general patterns of Chinese dynastic history in these aforementioned respects. While gifts were certainly expected by the Mongols at various points during the mendicants’ journeys, there was never a tributary relationship. Describing the election ceremony for a new Mongol khan just a few years after the invasion of Europe, John of Pian de
Carpine testified that diverse nations from all over the world had sent emissaries to this election to bring gifts and submit to their rulership. During the new khan’s coronation, everyone attending bowed to him except the Papal envoys, for they were not his tributaries even after the
125 Rouleau, Francis A., “The Yangchow Latin Tombstone as a Landmark of Medieval Christianity in China” in The Spiritual Expansion of Medieval Latin Christendom : The Asian Missions (The Expansion of Latin Europe, 1000-1500), edited by James D. Ryan, 217-40. Vol. 2. New York City, NY: Routledge, 2016, 218. 126 Petech, "Italian Merchants,” 167 127 Ikle, Frank W., “The Conversion of the Alani by the Franciscan Missionaries in China in the Fourteenth Century” in The Spiritual Expansion of Medieval Latin Christendom : The Asian Missions (The Expansion of Latin Europe, 1000-1500), edited by James D. Ryan, 241-50. Vol. 2. New York City, NY: Routledge, 2016, 245. Ikle says that “[a]lthough they had requested and facilitated the travel of the Franciscans to China, they had done so to learn something from them about the European world, and not because they desired to become converts. Christianity could not furnish them with the cultural and political strength which Islam gave to the Ilkhanate or Buddhism to the Yuan rulers.” While the claim that the Mongols facilitated European travel to China, the notion that their reason for doing so was merely out of curiosity seems gravely insufficient and uncorroborated by the evidence. My argument is that the travelers were instead furnished by more practical reasons; the Mongols would not support these Franciscans and amicably communicate with the pope unless there was a practical reason to do so – the most obvious reason concerns wealth. Moreover, the notion that Christianity did not provide the material, political, or cultural strength that Islam and Buddhism did seems naïve; one ought to attribute Christianity’s lack of success to contextual factors outside of the inherent features of Christianity as a religious thought. 48 devastating invasions of Europe.128 It seems neither the European mendicants nor the Mongols considered the European inferior to the Mongols except during the years following the Mongol invasion of Europe.
Several other phenomena exist which exemplify how the Mongols further facilitated a uniquely positive link between East and West. The Mongols thought of the mendicants as diplomatic emissaries of the pope and all of Christendom who were to be treated with the highest of honors. John of Pian de Carpine’s first experience with “the armed Tartars” was indicative of this treatment: the Mongols at first “came rushing upon [them] in uncivil and horrible manner, being very inquisitive of” them and asking “what manner of persons, or of what condition [they] were.”129 However, upon learning that they were envoys of the Pope, the Mongols left them in peace. It should be noted that the Mongols’ experience with the West prior to this initial contact was primarily limited to their invasion of Europe; that the Mongols should respect the envoys of the pope says something about the respect or fear they had for Christendom and the pope. In general, the mendicant travelers were treated generously with lavish provisions and the Mongols financially supported a large number of the mendicant travelers in their endeavors with few exceptions. The Yuan dynasty even directly supported the construction of Catholic churches in their capital and several other important cities. Direct contact, in the form of letters and emissaries, existed between the pope and the Mongol khan from the 1240s onward until the fall of the Yuan over a century later. An example of this is the Mongol mission to Avignon in 1338.
The Mongol envoys had brought gifts to the Pope and requested that the former Archbishop of
Khanbalik, John of Montecorvino, be replaced following his death several years prior (his original replacement from Europe had never arrived). Moreover, they expressed a desire to have
128 Johannes De Plano Carpini, “The Voyage,” 252. 129 Ibid., 240. 49 a similar European mission be sent to the Mongols. This shows that the Mongols actively sought continued diplomatic ties with Europeans.
A tangential point of consideration concerns the Alans, a non-Latin Christian peoples from the North Caucasus displaced by the Mongols. As a part of the same 1338 Mongol mission mentioned above, the chief of the Alans, had also sent a letter requesting the replacement of the archbishop in Khanbalik. This fact is surprising as the Alans were not historically or geographically associated with Latin Christendom. However, the reason for their contact then was perhaps religious in nature. Some Alans had then converted to Catholicism, especially through the efforts of John of Montecorvino during his time in China, and the Christian Alans would probably welcome any kind of Christianity in a region of the world where Christianity existed as a minority and as a part of the confluence of many other religions in the region. Peter
Jackson suggests “the Mongols [more broadly] recognized how useful religious leaders could be in securing the submission of the local population.”130 For example, Latin Christendom’s effects on the Alan population were perceptibly quite positive. In particular, the pope was seen to be a
“holy man who prays unceasingly to God for all peoples, … the vice-regent on earth of [Jesus
Christ], and the head of all who believe in and pray to Christ,” and so the Alan population would be thus subdued with a renewed connection with Christianity.131 Additionally, the Alans’ importance to the Mongols should not be understated. These Alans had “filled the most important offices of [the Mongol] state,” numbering at a figure of around 30,000 in China within the Yuan court in Dadu, serving in important administrative and military roles.132 Accordingly, the mendicants probably fulfilled a spiritual need of the Alans peoples that would have greatly benefitted the Mongols due the Alans’ relative importance.
130 Peter Jackson, “The Mongols and Faith,” 315. 131 Ibid., 315. 132 Yule, “John De’ Marignolli,” 184. Dadu is another name for Khanbalik. 50
Furthermore, the role of European merchants also must not be understated. Marco Polo wrote that he served as governor of a Chinese city, a tax inspector in the city of Yanzhou, an envoy on behalf of the Mongols, and as an official of the khan himself. There was also said to be large-scale European communities in China as well. The gravestone of Katarina Vilioni, a female member of an important Genoan trading family, who died in Yangzhou in 1342, was found to be major evidence for such communities as women were very rarely included in long-distance trade missions. Reason suggests that she was found in Asia because these communities were somewhat more permanent than would be expected. Another great European merchant, Andaló de Savignone133 was sent by the Mongols “to the land of the Franks beyond the seven seas where the sun sets, to open the way for ambassadors who will be sent frequently by us to the pope and by the pope to us” in the 1338 mission to Avignon.134 Alongside the several Christian churches that were established across several Chinese cities and the mendicants’ observations and roles in the development of these communities, there came to be a sizable European community which had entrenched itself in the furthest reaches of Asia under Mongol rule.
It must be noted that the relative successes of the travelers in the Mongol Empire were entirely dependent on their connection to the institutions of Mongol power. Some travelers, namely William of Rubruck and John of Pian de Carpine, stand out because the Mongol leadership did not support them. Their time in the Orient was accordingly difficult compared to later travelers, as they were not treated well and were even partially starved because they failed to bring gifts to the khan upon their arrival.135 William of Rubruck had also commented that without the support of the Mongol leadership, all future attempts to venture in this land would
133 This man was also known as Andrew the Frank. At this point, the Frankish Kingdom had been absent for centuries. This man’s status as a Frank is something that Easterners applied to all Europeans. 134 Petech, "Italian Merchants,” 169-70. 135 William of Rubruck and John of Pian de Carpine had given away most of their gifts to minor Mongol lords in order to earn passage on their way to the capital to see the khan. 51 fail. He recommends that any future envoys be sent with credentials, abundant supplies, traveling funds, and a figure capable of fully representing the interests of the church and the kingdoms of
Europe, to ensure his efforts would not be wasted.136 Later mendicant travelers who had friendlier, long-term arrangements with the Mongols, such as John of Montecorvino, Odoric of
Pordenone, Andrew of Perugia,137 and Peregrine of Castello, operated with help not only from the Catholic Church and merchants (European merchants especially), but also from the religiously tolerant Mongol administration. The most notably endowed of all the mendicants was
John of Montecorvino. He was able to construct two churches in Khanbalik with the help of
King George, a Mongol lord described as a generous, Prester-John figure,138 and Master Peter of
Lucalongo, “a faithful Christian and a great merchant.”139 This support was not meager as the compound included “a surrounding wall and buildings and simple offices and a chapel which
[could] hold two hundred people.”140 One church was built in a central location within
Khanbalik, and one church was even built directly opposite of the imperial palace of the khan.
This indicated that the mendicants had the privilege to position the Franciscan Order in this otherwise impenetrable land and that they possessed the intent to spread the values of the
Christianity in virtue of their centrality to the centers of trade, culture, and state of a given city, just as they did in Europe. John of Marignolli, for example, received elegant treatment, luxurious housing, durable, costly clothing, and princes that attend to his party’s needs for all things they needed for nearly four years.141 In addition, Peregrine of Castello claims that the Mongols extended other kinds of support beyond financial benefits that were advantageous to their religious mission when he wrote that “… among the infidel we can preach freely and in the
136 William of Rubruck, “The Journey,” 220. 137 Andrew of Perugia, “The Letter,” 236. 138 John of Montecorvino, “The Second Letter,” 225-6. 139 John of Montecorvino, “The Third Letter,” 229. 140 Ibid., 229. 141 John de’ Marignolli, “Recollections of Travel,” 214-5. 52 mosque [moscheta] of the Saracens we have preached often that they might be converted, and to idolaters likewise.”142 Again, despite the trivial numbers of Latin Christians in the Mongol
Empire and despite the meager support for his mission, the khan chose William of Rubruck to represent the Catholic Church in one of his great religious debates. Although the Buddhist and
Nestorian representatives overshadowed Rubruck, his presence there indicated that the Catholic
Church was seen as a great power and was, for some reason, worth being supported in their evangelizing mission.
Seemingly, all of these privileges conferred upon European religious specialists and merchants in the Mongol Empire must have served a particular purpose. In order to know this purpose, we must understand the Mongol perspective. It would seem that the Mongols’ famed tolerance of other cultures and religions was based in a certain political practicality. Peter
Jackson wrote that
[t]he ‘tolerance’ of the Mongol rulers has been overstated [in contemporary literature,] and such even- handedness as they displayed in religious matters was not the product merely of a natural inclination towards syncretism. It sprang from the same roots, namely Realpolitik, as their habit of exploiting the religious susceptibilities of independent powers for diplomatic and strategic purposes.143 Therefore, the Mongols’ ostensible tolerance towards other religions “had much less to do with
[the Mongol] rulers’ religious sympathies than an eclecticism that made use of whatever talents were available.”144 However, “although the Mongols supported all religions for political reasons, support was not given in the same degree. The Mongols drew the line at importing priests, or being interested in maintaining religious connections” unless politically and practically necessary.145 This imperialist strategy would have clearly extended to their relationship with
Christian merchants and mendicants.
142 Peregrine of Castello, “The Letter of Brother Peregrine, Bishop of Zaytun.” In The Mongol Mission: Narratives and Letters of the Franciscan Missionaries in Mongolia and China in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries by Dawson, Christopher, ed. Translated by A Nun of Stanbrook Abbey. New York City, NY: Sheed and Ward, 1955, 233. 143 Jackson, “The Mongols and Faith,” 329. 144 Ibid., 300. 145 Ikle, “The Conversion,” 245. 53
Cognizant of all these aforementioned pieces of evidence, a simple narrative can be generated to tie them together. The mendicants originally operated in Europe at the intersections between commerce, religion, and state power – why should their role in Mongol realms be any different? I suggest that wealth that came from East-West commerce was a fundamental driving force for the Mongols’ intentions in supporting the mendicants. For
[i]t was European merchants and soldiers of fortune who first… took advantage of [the Mongol’s] relative openness to outsiders. When the papacy finally began to sponsor missionaries in Mongol lands [after William of Rubruck and John of Pian de Carpine and the generation of Mongol invasion]… it was largely in response to contact from the various Mongol courts, by then finally eager to open friendly relations with the West.146 It seems that Mongols’ practical openness was first initiated in response to the presence of
European merchants. The Mongols sought further connections with the West, particularly through the mendicant envoys, in order to accommodate these merchants. The mendicants sought to support the Christian merchants in the Mongol realm alongside their missionary work. In turn, merchants’ monetary support of the mendicants, the power of the pope in Europe, and the
Mongols’ desire for this trade amply supplied these mendicants with the ability to enact their evangelistic goals for a time.
Most importantly, there is strong evidence that the mendicants deeply sought to evangelize the people of the Orient despite their failure to do so. Despite the pretense that he was a simple missionary, William of Rubruck explicitly wrote of how his primary objective was to baptize and convert Möngke Khan, despite his failure to do so as a result of his perceived personal failings.147 John of Montecorvino wrote forcefully about how he “summoned the
Emperor himself to receive the Catholic faith,” despite his failure to do so due the influence of
Buddhism.148 Even John of Montecorvino’s success in ‘converting’ Prince George was lauded as
146 Ryan, “Christian Wives,” 287. 147 William of Rubruck, “The Journey,” 195. Here Rubruck laments that his opportunity to further “put the Catholic Faith before” the khan was thereby ended – there are other instances where Rubruck speaks of conversion of the khan and men in powers, but this particular instance is demonstrative of his mission’s failure to do so. 148 John of Montecorvino, “The Second Letter,” 224. 54 an extraordinary feat. The mendicants had even made translations of Bible into the Mongol language and had furthermore fervently preached to the locals. All of these were clear attempts to exert a Christian-European influence over Far-Eastern peoples which was largely characterized by their “long-range missionary goals… to create a foundation of belief” in the Far
East, foregoing for now their actual success in this matter.149
Overall, while Christian Europe did not embody a broader colonial relationship through these mendicants over the Mongols in this period, it can be seen that the question of a religious imperialism and the application of a religious Orientalism therein was probably true. The mendicants were able to evangelize under the powerful control of the Mongol khans because of their desire for their services. The Mongols were actively compliant with and supportive of the religious influence their powerful rival that lie in European Christendom. Ultimately, the active and nearly uninhibited purveyance of a Western cultural-religious institution in the East justifies the religious Orientalism seen in the mendicant texts, regardless of their mission’s perceived success.
149 Ryan, “Conversion,” 161. 55
III. Conclusion: Medieval Religious Orientalism
In light of previous discussions, the question of a religious orientalism would seem to have a great degree of credibility behind it. While a kind of colonialism did not describe the relationship between East and West before the sixteenth century, and the desire of Western powers to possess the East was largely absent,150 there is evidence for a discourse of power characterized by evangelism, uninhibited and even encouraged by the Mongol rule. The resulting religious Orientalism found in the mendicant texts was fundamentally defined by religious terminology, extending even to the mendicants’ depictions of the Orient in a non-religious context as well. The broader Orientalist tropes that stand out in this context of the mendicants’ perspectives of the Far East include the oneiric vision of wealth and power, Oriental despotism, the mendicants’ portrayal powerful Christian lords and kingdoms in the East, their inferior non-
Christian ways, and the barbarians and monsters that were alleged to reside there.
However, there is now a question as to how a medieval religious Orientalism fits in with the Saidian conception of Orientalism. While the West can be equated with Christendom and the
East with the Mongols in this setting, the dynamics of power in the Saidian conception do not correspond well with the character and relationship of Eastern and Western cultures in the medieval era. Saidian Orientalism encompasses a wide range of characterizations that exist under a broadly imbalanced relationship in favor of the West. Medieval religious Orientalism, on the other hand, can only be confirmed in a religious respect under a complex set of relationships that do not rely on a broad imbalance of power. Rather, medieval religious Orientalism was only able to manifest because of the mendicants’ distinctive role as powerful intermediaries between the
Orient and the Occident. The mendicants were able to exact a particular kind of power in an environment that heavily encouraged their advance and use of power over Oriental populaces.
150 Phillips, Before Orientalism, 24-27. 56
Where Kim M. Phillips is concerned, I have to disagree with some aspects of her
Orientalist analysis of the medieval era. Phillips denies “that later medieval writer‐travelers drew clear lines of selfhood and alterity between secular Europeans and their global counterparts,” and argues instead medieval travelers and the mendicant travelers to the Far East have demonstrably
“display[ed] a willingness to attempt some understanding of those diverse peoples and their alien cultures.”151 Phillips also argues that “[t]he notion of a ‘European’ (as opposed to Christian) superiority was not yet widespread when Western travelers first encountered the complex and sophisticated cultures of China.”152 I am in nominal agreement with these characterizations with respect to secular Europeans. However, with respect to Christian Europeans and their religious appraisals of their global, non-Christian counterparts, Europeans did draw clear lines of selfhood and alterity and exhibited Orientalist attitudes. I have argued that this religious Orientalism became embedded in the mendicants’ racial projection unto Oriental peoples. The way Phillips distinguishes European and Christian in her original analysis does not readily seem to be born out in the evidence. The mendicants pervasively evaluated themselves and the Other under the framework of being Christian or non-Christian, lending credence to a medieval religious
Orientalism that necessarily operates on this polarized thinking. While the mendicants still thoughtfully illustrated aspects of the lifestyles and cultures of the East, their perspectives are dominated by their subconscious Orientalist perspectives.
Although wealth and power were the basis for the establishment of the mendicant missions, the mendicants disconnected themselves from their orders’ values of asceticism in order to do so. Their duty as agents of wealth and power were paramount to religious concerns in most cases. In contrast, with respect to their views on the races and peoples of the Far East, the
151 Phillips, Kim M. "Travel, Writing, and the Global Middle Ages." History Compass 14, no. 3, March 4, 2016: 81-92. Accessed August 28, 2018. 152 Phillips, Before Orientalism, 171. 57 mendicants were informed by their baser religious views that heathens and heretics were enemies of their God-given mission for a kind of global crusade into the non-Christian world. A practical reading of this would initially convey that the mendicants were agents of European power that broadly used Christianity to justify their missions and visions. The mendicants’ representation of the world as being primarily inhabited by Christians, including Prester John figures and the
Christianized Mongol khans, is in direct conflict with the diplomatic reality of their situation.
The mendicants had not held a great power over the Orient; yet, they had still supported this narrative in their accounts. Ultimately, Peter Jackson writes that “the picture they draw of
Mongol ideas on the religious matters may well be skewed on occasion by their monotheistic vision” and their proselytizing mission.153 It was both their belief in their mission and the power they were granted by the Mongols that led them to make these fantastic claims. This is true despite their mission’s failure.
Again, despite the mendicants’ intentions to spread Christianity and their beliefs about their religious superiority over others in the region, their efforts were ultimately unsuccessful.
Future attempts for conversion were generally not recommended by any of the travelers in their accounts, especially with respect to the Catholicism’s observed interactions with Oriental religions and cultures. The religions native to the region dominated and Catholicism had only achieved superficial success therein. In the end, the Franciscan Order simply “had not driven its roots deeply enough into Chinese soil,” perhaps due to the vast differences between the requirements diplomatic reality and the actions that were conditioned by their particular
Orientalist perspective.154 The mendicants were theologically ill-equipped to meet the religious needs of the syncretic peoples of Central and Eastern Asia in their evangelizing mission. Had the
153 Jackson, “The Mongols and Faith,” 298. 154 Rouleau, “Hangchow Latin Tombstone,” 219. 58 mendicants focused more on catechism, as James Muldoon suggests, and had been more sympathetic towards a syncretic outlook, there may have been more of a lasting impact “had political realities not intervened to nullify their efforts.”155 The polarized divisions between
Christian and non-Christian, East and West, were too strong to rival the influence that
Nestorianism, Buddhism, and other faiths had in the Mongol realms. During and after the decline of the Yuan, European contact with the Far East over land totally deteriorated. Although Pope
Urban V sent forth the French Minorite William Depres in 1370, it appears he never arrived in
China.156 The new Ming dynasty had ejected all foreign influences in 1368 due to backlash towards the wake of the rule by a non-Han Chinese government. The end of sustained European contact with the Far East ended the possibility for any colonialism and any resulting Orientalist thought until the travels of later Europeans some centuries later. Overall, the mendicant travels were largely forgotten in history, overshadowed by the later colonial ventures from Spain,
Portugal, and the rest of Western Europe in the next few centuries. The stories of the mendicants nonetheless comprise an important footnote in this history of Eastern and Western contact. Their stories certainly formed the basis for future European contact with East Asia, particularly in their literary legacy that was passed through Mandeville’s narrative, which was far more popularized, and to those that happened to read and have been thusly inspired by the mendicant accounts.157
Further Research
I admit that this paper is not an exhaustive characterization of a medieval religious
Orientalism. It concerns a specific group of Europeans’ perspectives, primarily the mendicants’
155 Ryan, “Conversion,” 162. 156 Igor De Rachewiltz, Papal Envoys, 202. 157 Many later figures are known to have read and have been inspired by the mendicant accounts. For example, Roger Bacon was known to have read William of Rubruck’s account and were even friends. Supposedly, Roger Bacon was the first European to have learned how to create gunpowder as a result of William of Rubruck’s and others’ accounts’ discussions thereof and a demonstration of the use of Chinese firecrackers brought from the Far East. This was recorded in Bacon’s Opus Majus and in his Opus Tertium. 59 accounts, with respect to a few of the clearest manifestations of orientalist portrayals found within their texts. Ideally, I would have spent more time on each subject area covered in order to obtain a deeper, more confident analysis.
An Orientalism of a sensual nature was notably prevalent in Said’s original analysis of the Near East; however, this was not observable in the mendicant texts. Considering that they were religious scholars who were reporting to kings, writing letters of limited size, and scribing kingdom’s official histories all in order to inform others of their most important observations and concerns, this was not a major issue. Other topics worth exploring would include a closer analysis of non-mendicant perspectives and their relation to a religiously-based Orientalism,
Europeans who wrote about the Far East but who did not travel there, the interactions between the perspectives of Near and Far Orientalism, and so on. 60
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Appendices
Name of Traveler(s) Number of extant Manuscripts for each traveler respectively John Mandeville ~300 Marco Polo ~150 Odoric of Pordenone 73 John of Pian de Carpine 7-13 (At least 5 short versions, 2 long versions, also copied in Vincent of Beauvais’ medieval encyclopedia, Speculum Historiale which has 5 extant manuscripts) William of Rubruck, 3 John of Montecorvino (here, the manuscripts of both of his relevant, extant letters included as one sum) John of Marignolli 1 (2 including a partial) Benedict the Pole, 1 Peregrine of Castello, Andrew of Perugia Figure 1: Listed here are the travelers their accounts’ number of extant manuscripts.
65
Notable events Genghis Khan’s Reign (1206-1227) Seventh Crusade (1248-1254) Mongols conquer the Jin (1234) Mongol invasion of Europe (1236-1242) Mongol Empire fragments (1260-1294) Mongols conquer the Song (1276) Founding of the Yuan (1271) Start of the Yuan Decline (c. 1320s) Toghon Temür’s Reign (1333-1370) Collapse of the Yuan (1368)
Travelers’ journeys John of Pian de Carpine and Benedict the Pole (1245-1247) William of Rubruck (1253-1255) Marco Polo (1271-1295) John of Montecorvino (1286-1328) Andrew of Perugia (1307-1332) Peregrine of Castello (c. 1313) Odoric of Pordenone (1318-1329/30) John Mandeville* (c. 1322) John of Marignolli (1338-1353)
*John Mandeville’s account, and likely even Mandeville himself, are fictitious.
Figure 2: Timeline