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Encounters in the Ruins: Latin Captives, Franciscan Friars and the Dangers of Religious Plurality in the Early Mongol Empire*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
Among the richest, and strangest, sites for religious encounter during the medieval period was the network of Mongol encampments on the Eurasian steppe. In the middle decades of the thirteenth century, a vast empire was administered from these itinerant cities. In consequence, they were crammed with a transient population of people drawn, summoned or seized from diverse societies across the continent. Within these cities, physical space, approved gestures and permitted actions were heavily ritualized according to shamanistic practice, but as long as these customs were respected, the Mongols encouraged an atmosphere of relative egalitarianism among the various faiths represented in the camps.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2015
Footnotes
*
In writing this essay, I have benefited from discussions at the meetings of the AHRC-funded network, ‘Defining the Global Middle Ages', conversations with Miles Larmer, Caroline Dodds Pennock and Miriam Dobson, and the opportunity to present a version at the University of Sheffield’s Department of History research seminar.
References
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24 These were not necessarily asymmetrical categories for medieval observers. For Roger Bacon, the ‘Mongol’ religion (secta or ritus Tartarorum), was one of the six major sectae of the world: Rogeri Baconis: Moralis philosophia, ed. Eugenio Massa (Turin, 1953), e.g. 212—14. For ‘Mongol’ identity as communicated to Europeans by the qaghans, see Voegelin, Eric, ‘The Mongol Orders of Submission to European Powers, 1245—1255’, Byzantion 15 (1941), 378–413.Google Scholar
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28 On the devastation through which they passed, see John of Piano Carpini, Historia mongalonim 6.16 — 7.6; 7.9; 9.22—3 (Storia, ed. and transl. Menestò et al., 283—7, 289—90, 314); William of Rubruck, Itinerarium 19.2; 23.6; 12.6 respectively (Mission, transl. Jackson, 130, 147, 106).
29 The guidance for friars ‘going among infidels’ was at ‘Regula non bullata’ 16, in Opuscula Sancti Patris FmncisciAssisiensis, ed. Katejan Esser (Grottaferrata, 1978), 268-71.
30 Relatio Fr. Benedicti Poloni, in Anastasius van den Wyngaert, ed., Sinica Franciscana, I: Itinera et relationes fratrum minomm saeculi xiii et xiv (Florence, 1929), 133—43, at 139.
31 William of Rubruck, Itinerarium 19.5; 15.6-7 respectively (Mission, transl.Jackson, [32, 116—17).
32 Ibid. 12.1-2 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 104).
33 Ibid. 19.7; 33-5—6 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 133,228).
34 Ibid. 25.7 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 155).
35 Ibid. 27.4 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 166—7).34
36 On the history of the ‘Nestorian’ or East Syrian Church, see Baumer, Christoph, The Church of the East: An Illustrated History of Assyrian Christianity (London, 2006), especially 212—16 for Latin attitudes to Nestorians in this period.Google Scholar
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38 William of Rubruck, Itinerarium 30.8 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 212).
39 Ibid. 26.12—14 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 163—4).
40 E.g. John of Piano Carpini, Historia mongalorum 8.6, 10 (Storia, ed. and transl. Menestò et al., 296, 299).The connection between peace and reform had been widely emphasized from at least the late tenth century: see Head, T. and Landes, R., eds, The Peace of Cod: Social Violence and Religious Response in France around the Year 1000 (Ithaca, NY, 1992)Google Scholar; Mastnak, T., Crusading Peace: Christendom, the Muslim World, and Western Political Order (Berkeley, CA, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a later instance of the same argument, see, in this volume, Charlotte Methuen, ‘“And our Muhammad goes with the Archangel Gabriel to Choir”: Sixteenth-Century German Accounts of Life under the Turks’, 166—80, at 174, 177-80.
41 William of Rubruck, Itinerarium, Epilogue 5 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 278).
42 ‘[U]t asini verberantur’: John of Piano Carpini, Historia mongalorum 7.11—12 (Storia, ed. and transl. Menestò et al., 291—2); cf. ibid. 8.6 (Storia, ed. and transl. Menestò et al., 296); William of Rubruck, Itinerarium 8.2 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 93). Similar information was given by other envoys: Simon de Saint-Quentin, Histoire des Tartares 30.84 (ed. Jean Richard [Paris, 1965], 47-8).
43 ‘[Q]uasi intollerabilis nostre genti’; ‘et quia in nichilum redigitur cultus Dei, et anime pereunt, et corpora ultra quam credi possit multimode affliguntur’: John of Piano Carpini, Historia mongalorum 8.5, 3 respectively (Storia, ed. and transl. Menestò et al., 296, 294).
44 William of Rubruck, Itinerarium 29.17; 4.4; 5.1; 11.2 respectively (Mission, transl. Jackson, 188, 82, 84., 102).
45 Ibid. 36.18 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 252).
46 John of Piano Carpini, Historia mongalorum 9.11, 14 (Storia, ed. and transl. Menestò et al., 308, 310).
47 E.g. ibid. 3 (Storia, ed. and transl. Menesto et al., 235—44).
48 Ibid. 3.10 (Storia, ed. and transl. Menestò et al., 240); William of Rubruck, Itinerarium 35 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 240—5).
49 ‘[P]otius vellet mori, quam facere quod non licet’: John of Piano Carpini, Historia mongalonim 3.4—5 (Storia, ed. and transl. Menestò et al., 237—8 and note at 415). The Russians, too, chose to understand what had happened in ‘religious’ terms. Mikhail was canonized, and Russian authors took care to avoid discussing the realities of the situation: Dimnik, Martin, The Dynasty of Chernigov, 1146-1246 (Cambridge, 2003), 366—75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Halperin, Charles, Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History (London, 1985), 64—8.Google Scholar
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51 John of Piano Carpini, Historia mongalonim 3.1 (Storia, ed. and transl. Menestò et al., 235).
52 ‘[S]uam fidem vel legem’: ibid. 3.5 (Storia, ed. and transl. Menestò et al., 238 and note at 415).
53 The Alans were an Iranian people, living in the Caucasus region. Like the Georgians, they were Eastern Orthodox Christians, but they may have held some Catholic doctrines in preference to those of the Greek Church: Mission, transl. Jackson, 102 nn. 1-2.
54 William of Rubruck, Ilinerarium 30.10—14 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 213—16).
55 E.g. ibid. 29.3 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 183).
56 Ibid. 29.2 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 182). 120
57 Ibid. 32.4-5 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 223-4).
58 Ibid. 29.3 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 183).
59 Ibid. 32.1 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 221).
60 Ibid. 29.15 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 187).
61 Ibid. 22.2; 29.19-23 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 141—2, 189-91).
62 Ibid. 29.15 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 187); see Foltz, Richard, ‘Ecumenical Mischief under the Mongols’, Central Asiatic Journal 43 (1999), 42—69.Google Scholar
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64 Ibid. 33-3 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 227—8).
65 ‘[A]lia multa secreta que nobis erant necessaria ad sciendum’; ‘Et ipsi nobis voluntarie et aliquando sine interrogatione, quia sciebant nostram volontatem, omnia referebant’: John of Piano Carpini, Historia mongalorum 9.38-9 (Storia, ed. and transl. Menestò et al., 324).
66 Ibid. 5-8 (Storia, ed. and transl. Menestò et al., 252-302).
67 Hence the argument in Guzman,’European Captives’.
68 John of Piano Carpini, Historia mongalorum 9.48 (Storia, ed. and transl. Menesto et al., 330).
69 The Cumans were a nomadic tribal grouping of Turkic, Mongol and Iranian origins. They had dominated the Eurasian steppe for two centuries before the Mongol invasions, and had close relations with the sedentary societies around them, some settling in Hungary: Berend, At the Gate, 68—73.
70 William of Rubruck, Itinemrium 20.4 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 135-6; Viaggio, ed. Chiesa, 100, cf. 407).
71 ‘[R]eddidit eis rationem, narrans ei conditiones Ordinis nostri’: ibid. 28.4—5 (Viaggio, ed. Chiesa, 146—8 [my translation]; Mission, transl. Jackson, 173).
72 E.g. ibid. 23.7 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 148).
73 Ibid. 24 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 150—2).
74 Ibid. 30.10-14 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 213—16; Viaggio, ed. Chiesa, 218—24, quotation at 224).
75 Even so, the influence of Latin doctrines was curtailed by the Nestorians, as (for example) when they removed the figure of Christ from a crucifix made by Boucher for the Nestorian chief scribe Bolghai; William’s indignation had no effect: ibid. 29.62 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 208).
76 Ibid. 35.11-13 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 244-5).
77 Ibid.
78 ‘[I]mmo non reputant se christianos postquam biberint, et sacerdotes eorum reconciliant eos tamquam negassent fidem Christi’: ibid. 10.5 (Viaggio, ed. Chiesa, 54 [my translation]; Mission, transl. Jackson, roi).
79 Ibid. 12.2 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 104; Viaggio, ed. Chiesa, 58).
80 Ibid. 11.2 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 102—3).
81 Ibid. 20.3 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 135; Viaggio, ed. Chiesa, 100).
82 See note to ibid. 30.13 in Viaggio, ed. Chiesa, 462.
83 Ibid. 30.13 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 215; Viaggio, ed. Chiesa, 222). On Bouchers knowledge of Christian theology and tradition, see Tatár, Sarolta, ‘The Iconography of the Karakorum Fountain’, in Knüppel, Michael and Tongerloo, Aloïs van, eds, Life and Afterlife and Apocalyptic Concepts in the Altaic World (Wiesbaden, 2011), 77–105.Google Scholar
84 William of Rubruck, Itinemrium 29.25 (Mission, transl. Jackson, 192).
85 On the active discrediting of less educated clergy, see Denton, Jeffrey H., ‘The Competence of the Parish Clergy in Thirteenth-Century England’, in The Church and Learning in Later Medieval Society: Essays in Honour of R. B. Dobson, ed. Barron, Caroline and Stratford, Jenny, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 11 (Donington, 2002), 273-85.Google Scholar