For these reasons, the book is envisaged as a contribution to an emergent “precolonial studies” rather than the better-established work on medieval “postcolonialism” that has emerged over the past decade and a half.9 Said’s theory of Orientalism was instrumental in the formation of postcolonial theory more broadly, although earlier works by Frantz Fanon and critics of the British Raj were also among its foundational texts. The theory takes awareness of the inequality and injustice inherent in relations in any given colonial context as its starting point.10 Medieval postcolonialism, far from being a “mind-bending” concept,11 is a valid and important field that still offers scope for more detailed studies. For example, early medieval societies, as some recent scholars have helped us see, possessed languages, buildings, law codes, and mental outlooks marked by their then recent status as Roman colonies.12 Many studies offer subtle engagements that problematize any rigid concept of what counts as “postcolonial” and critique the work of Said, Bhabha, and others. Yet chronologies may be synchronous; thus medieval society was at once “colonial,” with various colonialist enterprises under way in different times and places, and “postcolonial,” having gone through numerous such processes already, but also “precolonial,” in that not all of Latin Christendom’s encounters with other peoples were driven by a colonialist impulse.
Perhaps the closest medieval powers came to pursuing informal colonial enterprises in the distant East was in missionary endeavors and the expansionist ambitions of the popes directing them. From the mid-thirteenth to late fifteenth centuries, the papacy sent Franciscan and Dominican missionaries to convert Asian populations to the Catholic faith. We might argue for a culturally colonialist motive in these efforts at evangelization; however, we would also need to acknowledge that nothing close to actual dominance of the Christian faith was ever achieved. The missionary efforts were tiny and scattered among vast and mainly unreceptive Asian populations. The latters’ overwhelmingly indifferent response is notorious among Asian historians who point to the lack of oriental records of the western visitors. The notable exception was John of Marignolli (in China in the 1330s and 1340s), who made an impression on Chinese annalists not for the Christian message he sought to deliver but for the huge horse he brought as a present for the emperor.13 Moreover, although missionary work has often gone hand in hand with modern colonialism, we should recognize certain specific agendas and contexts among medieval missionaries.14 One of the chief concerns of Franciscans was a belief in an imminent apocalypse. Thus Franciscan missionaries to China, India, and other distant civilizations aimed to achieve the conversion of humankind to Catholic Christianity, even if it meant their own martyrdom, before the end of the world. Dominican friars, particularly active in central and west Asia and in India, regularly attempted to draw eastern branches of Christianity (such as Nestorian and Armenian Christians) into the Latin fold or to convert Mongols to Christianity to gain allies in crusades against Islam. The efforts of both groups might be read as ideological colonialism, but only with numerous provisos in place. The difference between medieval and more recent missionaries is well summarized by E. Randolph Daniel, who explains medieval Christians’ evangelizing efforts in light of concepts of societas christiana: When non-Christians “adopted Catholicism, they were accepted into the corpus christianorum. … This is not to be confused with the attitude of nineteenth-century missionaries who believed that they were civilizing as well as Christianizing Africans and Asians. Conversion to Christianity in the nineteenth century simply included the acceptance of the superiority of European civilization; it did not incorporate those converted into European civilization” in the way that medieval conversion assumed assimilation within the societas christiana.15 There are fundamental differences between medieval missions in Asia and more recent efforts accompanying economic, political, and settler expansion.
The absence of a true colonizing agenda among late medieval travelers to the distant East and their readers back home created a vision of Asia that admitted neutrality and often admiration as well as critique. This is hardly a new observation: there is a distinguished body of scholarship on different aspects of the topic.16 Its influence has begun to have some effect on medieval Europeanists beyond the fields of travel and encounter; for example, Georges Duby notes that in the wake of the testimony of emissaries to the Mongols, Marco Polo, and other travelers, “a few Europeans began to perceive that the extremities of the world were not all populated by cruel monsters and that order, wealth and happiness could prevail, under wise monarchs, in countries that were not Christian.”17 The goal here is to revisit the field with greater attention to some topics that have come into prominence with the rise of cultural anthropology. Alongside medieval travel writers’ efforts to paint eastern peoples and cultures as “Other,” we will find plenty of occasions when they noted sameness or at least similarities between East and West. Admiration and the willingness to learn are found, too, and where authors denigrated particular Asian cultures their attitude can be explained by the motives of authors and expectations of their audiences. For instance, much writing on Mongols up to the later thirteenth century was dominated by perceptions of ferocious enemies (actual or potential) and was additionally influenced by ancient prejudices against nomadic or non-urban “barbarians.” Some of the latter stereotypes also affected portrayals of rural southeast Asians down to the end of our period. In contrast, most medieval writing on China was full of admiration and appealed to audiences’ desire to revel in descriptions of natural bounty and civilized pleasures. Descriptions of India were varied, encompassing the full range of medieval responses to eastern contexts from enchantment to disgust.
Europeans had been traveling to ancient civilizations of the distant East long before they made journeys to the “new” worlds of the Americas and Oceania. Xenophon’s expedition to Persia c. 400 BCE and Alexander the Great’s advances across Persia and into India in the 330s–320s BCE endured in European memory. Alexander’s campaign was transformed into literature and mythology in Pseudo-Callisthenes’s Alexander Romance, composed in the third century CE and popular throughout the medieval period.18 Roman traders had sailed into the Indian Ocean from the first century CE and maintained trading posts as far as the Bay of Bengal. According to J. R. S. Phillips, “Roman products and occasionally even Roman subjects could be found as far afield as South-East Asia and China,” while Asian products including silk and spices were traded westward.19 Roman geographer Pomponius Mela wrote c. 43 CE, “The Seres [Chinese] are … a people full of justice and best known for the trade they conduct in absentia, by leaving their goods behind in a remote location.”20 Pliny the Elder stated he had heard from an Indian delegation that the Chinese “are of more than normal height, and have flaxen hair and blue eyes [rutilis comis, caeruleis oculis], and they speak in harsh tones and use no language in dealing with the travellers.”21 Mela commented on the peoples of India, emphasizing their diversity. He says their dress and customs vary a great deal, from linen or wool to the skins of birds or animals to complete nakedness or covering only of private parts. “Some are short and puny, others so tall and huge in body that routinely and with ease they use even elephants—the biggest ones there—in the same way we use horses.” Some think it wrong to eat any kind of meat, others eat only fish, and still others kill and eat their ailing parents. Some withdraw from society to die quietly, while others hasten death by hurling themselves on fires.22 Evidently, reliable information had to contend with rumor, exaggeration, and outright fiction from the earliest days of East-West contact.
European travel beyond the eastern Mediterranean slowed to a trickle after the decline of the western Roman Empire and Islam’s advances in the seventh and eighth centuries. Pilgrimages (and, from 1096, crusades) kept up eastward passage of Europeans to the Holy Land, but the way to the more distant Orient was ventured by few before the rise of the Mongol Empire from the early thirteenth century. Benjamin of Tudela, a Navarrese Jew, managed to travel to Basra in the second half of the twelfth century and in his narrative mentioned lands as far east as China without benefit of eyewitness experience. His section on China (“Zin”) amounts to only a legend of the