Early in 1221 the army of the Fifth Crusade was encamped in the city of Damietta in northern Egypt. As it planned its next move, messengers began to arrive bearing wondrous news. An army was approaching the Middle East from Asia. At its head was a Christian king named David who was coming to aid the crusaders and liberate Jerusalem from Muslim control. Between January and April, the crusade leaders sent letters about King David to recipients across Europe. Emboldened by David’s approach, the crusaders set out from Damietta to attack Cairo. But David and his army never materialised. Within weeks the crusaders were vanquished, and Damietta back under Egyptian control. Writing a few years later, one chronicler assumed that David had returned to his Asian realm when he heard of the crusade’s defeat. No one in Europe investigated David further, and he was quickly forgotten.
The story of King David would be one more unexceptional example of the many rumours that circulated among anxious and exhausted crusaders were it not for one significant aspect: it represents the first time Europeans heard of the Mongols. King David did not exist. He was a composite of different Asian warlords, but most of his story was drawn from the conquests of Chinggis Khan. It seems that Christian communities in Islamic lands, having heard of Chinggis’ victories over Muslims, believed that the Mongols were their prophesied salvation. Reports about David spread between Christian communities in Baghdad and elsewhere until eventually they reached the crusaders in Damietta, whence they made their way to Europe. These are the earliest extant reports in Europe of near contemporary activity in the Far East, and thus signal a new era in global history. As Mongol domination reached further in all directions, the eastern and western ends of Eurasia would be connected as never before.
Among the Fifth Crusade’s leaders were several Frenchmen, one of whom – James of Vitry – made sure to send reports of King David to Paris. Thus was born one of the largest archives on the Mongols in all of Eurasia. In Europe, there were many ‘Mongol archives’ that grew as Europeans deepened their contact with the Mongols over the next 150 years. Yet French interaction with the Mongols is particularly important because France was one of the most powerful and influential kingdoms in Europe throughout the Middle Ages. Not only did the French project power beyond their borders through the crusades and other enterprises, they also wrote extensively about world affairs past and present. The Mongols, as another ambitious and powerful actor on the world stage, were of great interest to the French for commercial, diplomatic, intellectual, religious, and strategic reasons.
Feeling the thunder
The French next received news of the Mongols in 1237 as they surged across western Asia under Ögedei Khan. The chronicler Alberic of Trois-Fontaines wrote that in that year the Mongols had killed their own lord Prester John, attacked Armenia and murdered 42 bishops there, invaded territory east of Hungary, and prepared to invade Hungary itself. For the next four years information about the Mongols trickled into France, but in 1241 the dam burst. The Mongols invaded Hungary and Poland, after which letters for Louis IX (r.1226-70), William of Auvergne (the archbishop of Paris), and other lords and prelates flooded into the kingdom. These letters capture with great immediacy the fear and astonishment Europeans felt as they confronted these invaders of whom they had little knowledge. Matthew Paris, an English monk who copied letters and reports on the Mongols in his Chronica majora (c.1253-59), wrote: ‘Where have such people, who are so numerous, till now lain concealed?’ The Holy Roman emperor Frederick II, in a letter addressed to Christian potentates, wrote that if the German resistance to the Mongols faltered, ‘the rest of the world will then feel the thunder of the suddenly coming tempest’. It seemed to many that the Mongols heralded the apocalypse, or had been sent by God as punishment for Europe’s sins.
Who the Mongols were and what they wanted became burning questions for Europe’s leaders, especially Louis IX. Not only was Louis the ruler of one of Latin Christendom’s largest kingdoms, he also saw himself as a defender of the faith. France would therefore be deeply implicated in forging Europe’s response to the Mongols. In 1245 Pope Innocent IV sent three embassies to them, two to the Near East and one to Mongolia. One was led by a Frenchman, Andrew of Longjumeau; another included a Frenchman, Simon of Saint-Quentin, as its chronicler. Before the ambassadors returned, the pope also called a Church council in Lyon (28 June to 17 July 1245) to discuss, among other subjects, ‘a remedy against the Tartars’ (Tartar, a deformation of Tatar, was the term commonly used for the Mongols in medieval European sources). Over the next three years, as the papal ambassadors returned, their reports were copied and archived in France. The French Dominican Vincent of Beauvais included the embassy accounts of John of Plano Carpini and Simon of Saint-Quentin in his encyclopedia, the Speculum historiale (c.1235-64). Plano Carpini, a Franciscan monk, met with Louis in 1248, and Andrew of Longjumeau accompanied the king on crusade that year – no doubt because Louis anticipated contact with the Mongols while overseas.
The French were thus crucial to the earliest gathering and dissemination of intelligence on the Mongols. Vincent of Beauvais deserves special recognition for the great service he rendered to history. While John of Plano Carpini’s account of his embassy survives unabridged in several copies outside of Vincent’s encyclopedia, Simon of Saint-Quentin’s account survives only as excerpted in the Speculum historiale. John and Simon both comment extensively on the Mongols’ origins, customs, conquests, and ambitions. Both recognise the Mongols’ virtues and vices. As John writes:
They honour one another greatly, and bestow banquets very liberally, notwithstanding that good victuals are scarce among them. They are also very hardy, and when they have fasted a day or two, they sing and are merry as if they had eaten their bellies full. In riding, they endure much cold and extreme heat. There are, in a manner, no disputes among them, and although they often are drunk, yet they do not quarrel in their drunkenness. No one of them despises another but helps him as much as he conveniently can.
As for their vices, Simon writes: ‘Their impiety and arrogance are such that they call their lord, the Khan, “son of God” and worship and venerate him instead of God.’ John and Simon recognised that the Mongols possessed culture, reason, and a strict social hierarchy. They also understood that the Mongols sought global domination. As Simon writes, ‘they glorify themselves beyond measure and assume that they will quickly succeed in dominating the world.’ These texts shaped Western perceptions of the Mongols for centuries.
‘Good friends’
In late 1248 Louis stopped in Cyprus on his way to attack Egypt. He was met there by two ambassadors from Eljigidei, the Mongol governor of Persia. They claimed that the Mongols wished Louis success and wanted to ensure the well-being of Christians. In response, Louis sent Andrew of Longjumeau and two other Dominican friars as ambassadors to the Great Khan Guyuk (r.1246-48). They intended to reach Mongolia, but Guyuk died before they arrived and their journey ended in Kazakhstan. Two years later, having been released from captivity after a disastrous crusade in Egypt and now residing in the Holy Land, Louis received the Mongols’ reply to his embassy. The ambassadors had met Guyuk’s widow, Oghul Qaimish, who was the imperial regent. She demanded tribute from Louis – ‘We invite you to send every year enough of your gold and silver to keep us your friends; and if you do not, we will destroy you and your people’ – and reminded him that the Mongols had killed Prester John and many other kings. The chronicler John of Joinville wrote that Louis ‘greatly regretted’ that he had sent the embassy and refused to send tribute.
Despite his disappointment, Louis understood that the Mongols were a great power about whom he needed to know more. He therefore sent another monk in his entourage, the Franciscan William of Rubruck, to Mongolia in 1253 with the principal mission of gathering information on the Mongols. His resulting account is, in effect, a long letter to Louis in which William states: ‘You told me, when I left you, to put in writing for you everything I saw among the [Mongols], and further urged me not to be afraid of writing you at length.’ Acting as the king’s eyes and ears, William wrote a remarkably detailed description of his travels, which took him overland from Acre in the Holy Land to Karakorum in present-day Mongolia. His attention to everything from dress (‘from pelts they make breeches’) and customs (‘it is the woman’s task to drive the wagons and to load and unload the dwellings on them’), to weather (‘even in May it froze every morning’) and topography (‘the river [Don] was as wide at that point as the Seine at Paris’) brings to vivid life the ‘new world’ that he encountered as he crossed Asia. One of the more remarkable passages describes the Mongols’ shamans:
The soothsayers also disturb the atmosphere with their incantations, and when the cold is so severe, from natural causes, that they can find no means of relief, they hunt out people in the camp whom they accuse of bringing on the cold, and these are put to death without delay.
One of William’s main objectives was to convince Louis that France figured in the Mongols’ plans for conquest. Like John of Plano Carpini and Simon of Saint-Quentin before him, William’s assessment was that the Mongols were a threat and that Europe needed to be prepared for further invasions. Yet he greatly admired their mobility: ‘If our peasants – to say nothing of kings and knights – were willing to travel in the way the [Mongol] princes move and to be content with a similar diet, they could conquer the whole world.’
Model empire
After Louis’ death in 1270, the French had only intermittent contact with the Mongols. The last crusader stronghold in the Holy Land, Acre, fell in 1291. Louis’ grandson, Philip IV (r.1285-1314), was more concerned with centralising and expanding royal power than with crusade and foreign affairs. It is therefore somewhat ironic that the single most important document in France’s – or any European – Mongol archive appeared during Philip’s reign. This is The Description of the World by Marco Polo. The son of a Venetian merchant, Polo travelled with his father and uncle to the court of Kublai Khan in present-day Beijing, spent
17 years there, and returned to Europe in 1295. Polo wrote his renowned book, which is a textual atlas of Asia from a Mongol perspective, in a dialect of French, chosen because it was an international lingua franca and he hoped to reach a large audience, including those who could not read Latin. Polo was the first European to write about China and several other realms (including Japan and Madagascar), and the Description showed Europeans that their traditional understanding of Asia was completely incommensurate with the continent’s real size, wealth, and complexity.
In 1307 Philip’s brother Charles of Valois sent an envoy to Venice, where he received a copy of Polo’s book from Polo himself. For the next two centuries more manuscript copies of The Description of the World were produced in France for the kingdom’s most elite readers, including several monarchs and their families. Polo’s account fascinated the French for several reasons. The first is that Polo’s portrayal of the Yuan Empire – the Mongol realm in China – reflected the French elite’s ambitions for their own kingdom. Polo writes that Kublai Khan:
is the most powerful in men, land, and treasure that the world has ever seen or who ever will be. And in [this] book I will show you very clearly that this is the truth.
He then describes how Kublai expanded and centralised his empire, and how he ruled firmly but with charity. For example, Polo writes that Kublai fed 3,000 people a day at his court and ‘takes pity on his poor people, and the people hold him in such great regard that they pray to him like a god’. Polo’s Kublai offered a model for the French monarchy, which also sought to strengthen royal control over the realm.
Dropped connection
French contact with the Mongols seems to have ceased entirely after a French embassy to Mongol Persia in 1303. There are various reasons for this: the end of major crusade activity, political turmoil in Mongol lands (the Mongol khanate in Persia fell in 1335), the outbreak of plague in the 1330s and 1340s, and the Hundred Years War between France and England. The Yuan Empire fell in 1368, but it is doubtful whether anyone in France was aware of this for several decades.
Despite the lack of contact, the Mongols remained an important subject in France’s intellectual culture, as suggested by two remarkable works. The first is The Book of John Mandeville (c.1360), a ‘bestseller’ that survives in over 300 manuscripts – a number far surpassing Polo’s Description, which survives in 142 medieval copies. Mandeville is a fictional account of the eponymous knight’s travels around the world. Recycling earlier accounts of the Mongols, it was important in maintaining their memory. The other major work from this period in France’s Mongol archive is the Catalan Atlas. The Atlas was produced in Majorca around 1375 by the cartographer Elisha Cresques for Charles V of France (r.1364-80) and is exceptional for several reasons. It is a table map on parchment that measures about ten feet long by two feet high; very few maps of this size and antiquity survive. It is the oldest extant map to employ Marco Polo’s Chinese toponyms for Asian sites, including such important cities as ‘Quinsai’ (Hangzhou) and ‘Zaytun’ (Quenzhou), and to accommodate them the Atlas portrays an Asia that is much larger than on previous European maps. Not surprisingly, given its reliance on Polo, the largest realm on the Atlas is that of Kublai Khan, who is shown seated next to his capital of ‘Cambaluc’ (Beijing). In fact, all four Mongol khanates – the Ilkhanate, the Golden Horde, the Chaghatai Khanate, and the Yuan Empire – are shown on the Atlas. The map’s emphasis on the Mongols seems to reflect the cartographer’s awareness that Charles V had a particular interest in Asian geography, and especially in the Mongols.
But the next major event in the history of Franco-Mongol relations did not involve the Mongols at all. In 1396 the kingdoms of Latin Christendom assembled a crusade army such as had not been seen in more than 200 years. The aim of this force was to push the Ottomans out of southeastern Europe and, if possible, proceed to the Holy Land for the liberation of Jerusalem. On 25 September the crusaders were crushed by the Ottomans near the city of Nicopolis, in present-day Bulgaria. Among those captured was John of Nevers, the son of Duke Philip the Bold of Burgundy and first-cousin of the French king Charles VI (r.1380-1422). The defeat at Nicopolis was profoundly traumatic for Christian Europe and especially for France, which had contributed many nobles and soldiers. Moralists were scathing in their criticisms of the army’s leaders, while many saw the catastrophe as divine punishment.
The memory of Nicopolis was still fresh when in 1402 Tamerlane defeated and captured the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I at the Battle of Ankara. Tamerlane came from the Chaghatai Khanate and, although not a descendant of Chinggis Khan, was married to a member of the Chinggisid dynasty and ruled in the name of a puppet Chinggisid emperor, Soyurgatmish. He sought to reconstitute the Mongol empire, though died in 1405 as he prepared to invade China. In 1403 a Dominican named John of Sultaniyeh arrived in Paris and claimed to be an ambassador from Tamerlane. While it seems, based on the forged letter that he presented (which survives), that Tamerlane had not sent John in an official capacity, John had in fact spent many years at Tamerlane’s court in Samarkand. While in Paris, John composed a biography of Tamerlane in French, a luxury copy of which was commissioned by Philip the Bold. In it, John insists that Tamerlane is a Mongol: he writes that Tamerlane ‘is a Tartar from the eastern region’, has ‘a Tartar face’, ‘always resides in the middle of fields in tents’ and that, in common with all ‘Tartars’, he and his people eat ‘on the ground without tables and without cloths and are rather disgusting’. John also writes that although he is a Muslim, Tamerlane seeks to protect Christians in his realm, and that he wishes to acquire luxury goods from France. John was clearly familiar with other works on the Mongols – notably Polo’s Description of the World – and his references to Tamerlane’s avarice, cruelty, martial skill, vast army, and way of life were intended to make him resemble other Mongol leaders about whom the French had heard. John emphasises Tamerlane’s Mongol identity, downplaying his religion.
The enemy of my enemy
The Battle of Nicopolis, Tamerlane’s victory over the Ottomans, and John of Sultaniyeh’s Life of Tamerlane were the impetus for the last major piece in medieval France’s Mongol archive. This is The Book of Marvels, one of medieval Europe’s most famous manuscripts. The codex was produced c.1410 in Paris for John of Nevers, who was by then known as John the Fearless, and had succeeded his father as duke of Burgundy. The Book of Marvels preserves several travel and geographical texts, including Polo’s Description and The Book of John Mandeville, illustrated with 265 richly painted miniatures. It is probably the largest textual and visual compendium in the vernacular devoted to Asia produced in medieval Europe. Many different places (Europe, the Holy Land, Central Asia, China), peoples (Catholics, Eastern Christians, Muslims), and phenomena (marvellous creatures and miracles) are discussed in the book. However, there is a special focus on the Mongols, who figure in every text – almost always in a positive light.
John the Fearless appears to have commissioned The Book of Marvels to celebrate Mongol history. After the defeat at Nicopolis he had spent several months in captivity in Turkey before being ransomed and returning to France. The Book of Marvels is John’s homage to the Mongols, and especially to Tamerlane, following his defeat of Bayezid. The rumours in France were that Tamerlane had freed all the Christian prisoners from Nicopolis to insult Bayezid. It was also said that, as Bayezid watched, Tamerlane had all the Ottoman lords whom he had captured decapitated, and then placed an iron ring in Bayezid’s nose and led him around as he continued his campaign in Turkey. As Islamic chroniclers – notably Sharaf ad-Din Ali Yazdi, who completed a famous biography of Tamerlane in 1425 – inform us, Tamerlane treated Bayezid respectfully. But the rumours of Bayezid’s humiliation, recorded in French chronicles, indicate the intensity of French anger over Nicopolis and joy at the Ottomans’ defeat. In image and text, the Book of Marvels portrays the Mongols as possessing nobility, courage, wealth, and power on a par with the greatest powers in history, such as the Greeks under Alexander the Great and the Romans under Julius Caesar. As The Book of John Mandeville says (following Polo’s example):
Under the firmament there is no lord so great or so strong as is the Great Khan … for neither Prester John, who is emperor of high India, nor the Sultan of Babylon, nor the Emperor of Persia, compares to him in power, in nobility, or in wealth, for in all this he surpasses all the earthly princes.
The Book of Marvels was an expression of respect for Tamerlane and his people, who had avenged John’s defeat and capture.
Closed archive
There were few additions to France’s Mongol archive after the death of Tamerlane in 1405. The French remained preoccupied with the Hundred Years War, which dragged on until 1453, and with a few exceptions had neither the time nor the means to engage in sustained diplomacy with distant kingdoms. Contact between Europe and the Far East had in any event long since ended. The Ming dynasty that succeeded the Mongols in China in 1368 had effectively shut the country to Europeans, who would have minimal contact with China for the next 200 years. The Mongols continued to be major actors in Central Asia and Eastern Europe, notably in Russia, but this history barely registered in French chronicles and literature – though their presence was not forgotten. The Mongol archive endured long after the end of the Middle Ages.
Mark Cruse is the author of The Mongol Archive in Late Medieval France: Texts, Objects, Encounters, 1221-1422 (Cornell University Press, 2025).