WILLIAM OF RUBRUCK IN THE MONGOL EMPIRE: PERCEPTION AND PREJUDICES

PETER JACKSON*

The Franciscan Friar William of Rubruck has often been described as an envoy of King Louis IX of France, but in fact he made his journey from Palestine to the Mongols (or Tartars, as they were commonly known in the West) early in 1253 in a missionary capacity and, as he told his Mongol interlocutors more than once, in accordance with the Rule of his Order. News had reached Louis' crusading army that the Mongol prince Sartaq was a Christian, and so the friar's first goal was Sartaq's encampment on the western banks of the Volga. He also intended to make contact with some Germans who had been enslaved by the Mongols during the invasion of Hungary in 1241-42 and to bring them spiritual comfort. The letter he and his colleague carried from the king to Sartaq was simply one of recommen• dation, in which Louis in addition sent felicitations to the Mongol prince on his conversion: ironically, it was this which was misinterpreted by the Mongols as a request for an alliance against the Islamic world and so prolonged the friars' journey.1 Sartaq despatched Rubruck and his colleague to his father Batu, the ruler of the so-called Golden Horde, who in turn forwarded them to the court of his cousin, the great khan (qaghan) Möngke (1251-59). There they arrived in December 1253 and stayed until July 1254, when Möngke sent Rubruck back with a letter ordering King Louis to accept his place in the Mongol world-empire and to submit. On his arrival in Syria in 1255, Rubruck found that Louis had left the country well over a year previously. As the Franciscan provincial minister would not allow him to travel to France, he was obliged to send his report to the king, with the request that Louis ask the minister to release him. Since the English Franciscan Roger Bacon, who was in Paris a few years later, records having met Rubruck, we can assume that Louis's intercession was successful. After this, Rubruck disappears from view.2 Because Rubruck's Itinerarium was in the nature of a private letter and not the account of an official embassy, it seems to have barely circulated, and we may have Bacon to thank that it was preserved at all, for the four principal surviving

* Department of History, University of Keele, England. 1 Jean Richard, 'Sur les pas de Plancarpin et de Rubrouck: la lettre de saint Louis à Sartaq', Journal des Savants, (1977), 49-61, reprinted in his Croisés, missionnaires et voyageurs: les perspectives orientales du monde latin médiéval (London, 1983). 2 For what is known of Rubruck, see the translation of the Itinerarium by Peter Jackson, introduction, notes and appendices by Peter Jackson with David Morgan, The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck: His Journey to the Court of the Great Khan Möngke, Works issued by the Hakluyt Society, Sec. Ser., clxxiii (Cambridge, 1990), 39-47. WILLIAM OF RUBRUCK IN THE MONGOL EMPIRE 55 manuscripts are all English. Indeed, it looks very much as if, until Rubruck was rediscovered by Richard Hakluyt, in the late sixteenth century, the material in the Itinerarium was available only in abridged form through the medium of Bacon's Opus maius? The comparison with the report of Rubruck's fellow Franciscan John of Piano Carpini, who had visited the Mongols as the ambassador of Pope Innocent IV in 1246-47, is instructive. The surviving manuscripts of Piano Carpini's Ystoria Mongalorum are numerous: there are variant recensions, of which one at least, the so called Tartar Relation', was composed in eastern Europe even before Carpini had rejoined the pope.4 In terms of its contents, moreover, the Itinerarium, which reads for the most part like Rubruck's memoirs and is accordingly rambling and laced with digressions, has been compared unfavourably with Carpini's Ystoria—admittedly a systematic dossier composed by an experienced diplomat and administrator whose task was to assess the extent of the Mongol danger and to propose a means of countering it.5 But the comparison can be misleading. Rubruck's report is undeniably a more human document than is Piano Carpini's. In the first place, it has a certain quality of intimacy, since a remark in the epilogue suggests that the friar numbered Louis among the 'spiritual friends' whom he was anxious to see once more.6 And secondly, the king had told Rubruck to write down for him everything he had seen among the Tartars'.7 Rubruck seems to have interpreted this commission fairly broadly, and one wonders what Louis made of a report which contained material not only on the Mongols—the way they constructed their tents, the way they made qumis ('comos', fermented mare's milk), the rituals that surrounded sickness and death, their various taboos—but also on languages, geography, Korean costume, Chinese medicine, and Inner Asian fauna (Rubruck is the first European writer to mention the ovis Poli, or arghali, the great horned sheep which of course takes its name from a Venetian adventurer who sighted it twenty years or so later). Unsystematic Rubruck's report may be for the most part (at least after chapters II-VIII, which are devoted to specific aspects of Mongol life), and lacking in any overall practical purpose. But it is full of personal reactions to the trying and alarming situations in which Rubruck and his colleague found themselves. It is for

3 Jarl Charpentier, 'William of Rubruck and Roger Bacon', in: Hyllningsskrift tillägnad Sven Hedin pà hans 70-àrsdag den 19. Febr. 1935 (Stockholm, 1935), 255-67. 4 See pp. 91-2 of Peter Jackson, 'William of Rubruck: a Review Article', Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, (1987), 91-7. 5 For a slightly unfair comparison of the two reports, see vol. Π, pp. 375-81 of C. R. Beazley, The Dawn of Modern Geography. A History of Exploration and Geographical Science from the Conversion of the Roman Empire to AD 900 (c. AD 900-1260 - AD 1264-1420) ... With Reproduction of the Principal Maps of the Time, 3 vols. (London, 1897-1906). 6 Rubruck, Itinerarium, Epilogue, 1, in Anastasius van den Wyngaert (ed.), Sinica Franciscana, i. Itinera et relationes fratrum minorum saeculi XIII et XIV (Quaracchi-Florence, 1929), 330; tr. Jackson & Morgan (op. cit. η. 2), p. 276. For Louis's friendship towards the Mendicants, see Lester K. Little, 'Saint Louis's involvement with the friars', Church History, xxxiii (1964), 125—48; William Chester Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: a Study in Rulership (Princeton, 1979), 129-30. 7 Rubruck (op. cit. η. 6), Preface, 2, p. 164; tr. Jackson & Morgan (op. cit. η. 2), p. 59.