It was a heroic journey of several thousand kilometers into dangerous territory, strewn in places with “skulls and bones of dead men lying on the ground like dung.”3 They kept up a cracking pace with five or seven changes of horses every day in the later phases, traveling from dawn to nightfall with no stopping for meals and indeed often no chance to eat in the evenings as they made camp so late. Benedict the Pole tells how they bandaged their limbs to “bear the strain of continual riding.”4 Ruy Gonzáles de Clavijo, Castilian ambassador to Temür in the early fifteenth century, concurred that “it is scarcely to be believed, had we not ourselves seen it and thus we can vouch for the truth, what a distance these [Mongol] riders can encompass in a day. … By the roadside many were the dead horses we saw during our journey, which had been thus ridden to death and the carcass abandoned.”5 Carpini’s return journey took place through the winter of 1246–47, finally arriving at Lyon in November 1247. As he tells it, the friars slept on the freezing open ground, often waking to find themselves covered in snow. On reaching Europe, Carpini and his companions were greeted “as if we were risen from the dead.”6 Presumably Carpini no longer sported the corpulent figure for which he had previously been celebrated.
At the same time Lawrence of Portugal, also Franciscan, was to have approached the Mongols via the Levant but nothing is known of his journey; he may have died on the way or perhaps did not go at all.7 Two further missions via the eastern Mediterranean were headed by Dominicans, that of Ascelin and his companion, Simon of St. Quentin, who reached the camp of Baiju in the Armenian highlands in May 1247, and that of Andrew of Longjumeau, who traveled to a Mongolian encampment near Tabriz in Persia in 1245–47 and to the camp of the regent Oghul-Qaimish, widow of Güyük Khân, southwest of Lake Baikal at the request of King Louis IX in 1249–51.8 All these journeys required considerable courage, given the Mongolians’ reputation as ferocious warriors. As Peter Jackson and David Morgan comment drily, “The Mongol imperial government held a fairly uncomplicated view of international relations.” They believed Tenggeri (the “Eternal Heaven”) had granted the entire world to the Mongols, and it was the duty of all other rulers and peoples to submit to them or pay a terrible price.9
Carpini’s, Ascelin’s, and Andrew of Longjumeau’s missions resulted in written accounts of Mongol peoples and represent some of the earliest European ethnographic writing on Asia.10 However, descriptions of Mongols had already begun to circulate from the 1220s, when Europe was under threat of total conquest. Some of these were preserved in Matthew Paris’s Chronica majora.11 The papal emissaries offered less panicky descriptions that sought not to demonize but to warn and inform. Each of their accounts, however, has a complex textual and authorial history. Benedict the Pole, Carpini’s companion, left a short dictated account of their journey.12 Ascelin’s journey is represented by the record of his companion, Simon of St. Quentin, but this does not survive in any independent copy and is known only from extracts Vincent of Beauvais copied into his Speculum historiale (c. 1253) along with excerpts from Carpini.13 Likewise, Andrew of Longjumeau’s work has not survived independently, though copies of his translations of letters from eastern Christians and Mongols are in Papal registers. Parts of his record of the first journey and a little on the second are preserved in Matthew Paris’s Chronica majora, while Joinville’s Histoire de Saint Louis includes information from the latter.14 However, from the point of view of medieval as well as modern readers, Carpini’s book, titled Ystoria [Historia] Mongalorum in key manuscripts, is the most important. It was produced upon the friar’s return to Lyon in 1247 and survives in two main versions. The shorter is extant in twelve copies and contains the chief ethnographic and military chapters. The longer, which adds a lengthy final chapter narrating the friars’ itinerary, is in three manuscripts and is the version used here.15
Among variant versions of Carpini and Benedict’s itinerary, one, generally known as The Tartar Relation, was discovered in 1957. This became famous because of the manuscript’s inclusion of the so-called Vinland Map, reputed to be a fifteenth-century redrawing of a thirteenth-century original and depicting a large island labeled “Vinland” to the west of Greenland.16 This first excited the attention of book dealers and historians who believed it the earliest European cartographic depiction of North America, but it is now widely accepted as a twentieth-century forgery. However, the remainder of the manuscript, consisting of The Tartar Relation and a copy of Vincent’s Speculum historiale, is considered authentic.17 Coming from the pen of one C. de Bridia, The Tartar Relation was probably written down by someone who heard Benedict and/or Carpini speaking of their travels at some point on their homeward route.18 The text is close to Carpini’s but with plausible additions and variations: there is nothing to ring alarm bells over anachronism. Carpini himself says that versions were made on their journey home.
Many have suggested that one of Innocent IV’s motives in sending envoys to the Mongols was to investigate the possibilities of a joint Mongol-Christian campaign against the Saracens in the Holy Land, though Menestò, Carpini’s recent editor, finds no direct evidence for this. Rather, the missions were “diplomatic, but also exploratory.”19 With the Mongol threat to Latin Europe still very real and their bloody conquests ongoing, Innocent’s chief aim was to compile a dossier of useful information on their territories, way of life, and above all weapons and techniques of war to better prepare themselves for the defense.20 From the Historia Mongalorum itself one may gather that Carpini’s motivations in writing were to produce a work recognized as the true and full version of the journey and provide detailed practical information to aid in future dealings with Mongols. He lists European merchants and dignitaries whom the friars met while in Mongolian-controlled territory “to avoid any doubt arising in the minds of anyone as to our having been to the Tartars.”21 According to the chronicler Salimbene de Adam, who met with Carpini on two occasions after the latter’s return to Lyon, he saw him “carrying with him the book which he had written on the Tartars. And the friars read it in his presence; and he commented on and clarified to them those things which appeared obscure or difficult to believe.”22 In her comparison of the two main versions of Carpini’s text, Maria Cristiana Lungarotti shows how the second draft consistently expands upon the first for the purposes of clarification and to reemphasize its truthfulness.23 Around one-fifth of the second version is devoted to geographic and ethnographic material, another fifth to Mongol history and the rise of their empire, a quarter to military tactics and technologies, and the final third or so to the itinerary and experiences of the friars. The work is readable but was not designed for entertainment.
King Louis IX called upon another Franciscan, William of Rubruck from Flanders, to travel to the Mongols in 1253. Rubruck and his companions reached the camp of Möngke Khân at Karakorum on 27 December 1253.24 Like Carpini, Rubruck was a heavy man,25 and he, too, suffered physical hardship on his journey: “There is no counting the times we were famished, thirsty, frozen and exhausted.”26 His insistence on the Franciscan habit of going barefoot despite December snow near Karakorum suggests, however, that some of this suffering was self-inflicted.27 After almost six months at the Khân’s court Rubruck gained leave to depart, but his companion, Bartholomew of Cremona, could not face the journey home and elected to live out his days among the Mongols on the harsh steppes of the Khân’s empire.
The reasons for Rubruck’s mission are harder to determine than those of his predecessors. Rubruck’s own motivations seem to have been religious—to convert Mongols to Christianity and to console Christians under Mongol occupation—but Louis’s