The Monks of Kublai Khan: Emperor of China: Medieval Travels from China Through Central Asia to Persia and Beyond 9780755623938, 9781780764535

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Altar slab preserved in the Church of St Thomas on St Thomas’s Mount near Madras Impression of the seal of Arghôn Khân Chinese crosses found at Shih-tzǔ-ssǔ Chinese cross found at Fang-shan Chinese cross dug up on the Hsi-shan

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Facsimile of a page of the Syriac text of the History of Rabban Sâwmâ and Yahbh-Allâhâ III . The ancient Nestorian Monastery of Rabban Hormîzd The Nestorian Stele at Siganfu (Hsi-an-fu) Mongolian diagram of the constellation of the Bull The obverse and reverse of a silver Pâizâ, or Pâizah Temujine, or Chingiz Khân Ogdai Khân receiving Ambassadors The siege and capture of Baghdâd by Hûlâgû Khân The siege and capture of Baghdâd by Hûlâgû Khân The Cross sculptured on the Nestorian Stele at Hsi-an-fu Portion of the Chinese text on the Nestorian Stele at Hsi-an-fu Portrait of Kûblâi Khân . A silver Pâizah, with an inscription in the Uighûr character

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Mangu Khân in his palace Portrait of a captive Mongol prince Portrait of a Mongol warrior at the time of Tamerlane .

INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION David Morgan

The most celebrated traveller in the Mongol Empire of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is undoubtedly a European: Marco Polo, who travelled from Venice to the Great Khan Qubilai’s court in China, and who stayed in his dominions for many years before returning to Italy. He is the best known, but probably not the best informed or the most perceptive of such travellers. That accolade should in justice be awarded to the Franciscan friar, William of Rubruck, who journeyed to Mongolia and back in the 1250s. Both he and Marco Polo, of course, went eastwards from Europe. What we lack are accounts of travellers who headed in the opposite direction. The book reissued here – officially known as The History of Yahballaha III – is, in part, just that: an account of the wanderings of two Christian monks from China – members of what has often been termed the Nestorian Church, though its adherents greatly prefer it to be known as the Church of the East. This was – and is – a church which, during the early centuries of Christianity, took a different view of the nature or natures of Christ from that which was accepted as correct by the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. The two monks went first to the Mongol kingdom in Persia, known to historians as the Ilkhanate, and they ultimately settled there, having been frustrated by the political situation in the Middle East in their desire to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. That would be remarkable enough in itself. But what makes the book unique is that it also contains an account by one of the monks, Rabban Sawma, of his journey from Persia to Western Europe as an ambassador of the Mongol Ilkhan Arghun. We owe the only complete English translation of this invaluable document to Sir Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge; and it is his volume, first published by the Religious Tract Society in 1928, which is made once again available in this edition. Budge was himself a remarkable phenomenon. Born in Cornwall in

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1857, he left school at the age of 12 and went to work for W. H. Smith. In his spare time, he began to learn some of the astonishing range of ancient languages with which he eventually became conversant, notably Hebrew and Syriac. He got to know some of the relevant experts at the British Museum, and struck lucky when he was noticed by the organist and composer, John Stainer. Stainer persuaded the head of Budge’s firm, W. H. Smith himself (then a Member of Parliament) and W. E. Gladstone, the former and future Prime Minister, to help him raise funds to send Budge to study at Cambridge. There, between 1878 and 1883, Budge learned several eastern languages. In 1883 Budge obtained employment at the British Museum, where he remained until his retirement in 1924 (he died in 1934). Once at the Museum, his main interest switched to ancient Egyptian, and the majority of his numerous publications were to be in that field. The most famous of these is perhaps his translation of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, which has been constantly reprinted since its first publication in 1895. Here, however, we are concerned with a text in another of Budge’s languages: Syriac. That text was not Budge’s only such contribution: in 1932 he also published (again from the Mongol period) a manuscript facsimile and English translation of the Chronography of Bar Hebraeus, an important Syriac chronicle which was the work of a member of the Jacobite Christian community in Iraq – a Church that was significant, though smaller and less widespread than the Church of the East. Bar Hebraeus naturally wrote in Syriac (though he also produced a to some extent parallel Arabic version of his work); but the first half of the anonymous History of Yahballaha III – the section concerned with the travels of Rabban Sawma to Europe – was originally composed in Persian, then fast becoming the lingua franca of the Mongol Empire. The Persian original has not survived (or at any rate, if it did, it has not yet come to light), so we are fortunate that the Syriac translation at last surfaced in the late nineteenth century (and in any case, Budge would hardly have tackled his translation project had the text been in Persian, which was not one of his many languages). What we cannot know with any certainty is precisely what role was played by the translator from Persian to Syriac, but it is clear that he both edited and abridged the Persian text fairly radically as well as translating it, before going on to relate the life of Mark, by then Catholicus (i.e. head of the Church of the East, with the title of Mar Yahballaha III), from the time of Sawma’s death in 1294 until Mark’s own death in 1317 (which forms the second

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half of the book). Mark’s election to the supreme office in the Church of the East was undoubtedly a surprise to him, since on his own admission he was not an especially learned man; and he did not even have a good grasp of Syriac, the necessary liturgical language. But the notables of the church were clear that he was the man for the job. In their view, we are told, The kings wh­o held the steering poles of the government of the whole world were MÛGLÂYÊ (Mongols), and there was no man except MÂR YAHBH-ALLÂHÂ who was acquainted with their manners and customs, and their policy of government, and their language. (pp. 152–3)

The historical background to the lives and adventures of Sawma and Mark is the most striking phenomenon in the history of the world in the thirteenth century: the rise and establishment of the Mongol Empire, which at its most extensive, around the year 1280, stretched uninterruptedly from Korea to eastern Europe – the largest contiguous land empire known to history. It was founded by Chinggis (Genghis) Khan (?1162/1167–1227), a nomad chief from what is now the Mongolian Republic: by the time of his death he had conquered a vast territory, from Mongolia and north China to Central Asia and parts of what is now northern Iran. Unlike most nomad-ruled empires, it continued to expand for half a century after the death of its charismatic founder, eventually encompassing something like twice the territory it had covered in 1227. The internal politics of Chinggis’s family proved to be somewhat rumbustious, but expansion continued under his immediate successor, Ögedei (r. 1229–41), notably in China and, most spectacularly, in Russia and eastern Europe. A coup d’état in 1251 brought Chinggis’s grandson, Möngke, to the throne as Great Khan; and he resumed the process of conquest – by this time, if not indeed before, the Mongols had concluded that their empire and the whole world were, at least potentially, identical. The Great Khan commissioned two of his brothers, Qubilai and Hülegü, to head expeditions at the eastern and western ends of the empire, respectively. Qubilai was to complete the conquest of south China, the Song Empire, which took him until 1279, by which time he had long succeeded his brother as Great Khan. Hülegü was despatched to the west, where his particular targets were the Nizari Isma’ilis (the Shi’i Muslim sect known in the West as the ‘Assassins’) of northern Persia, and the ‘Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad. He was to

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eradicate the Assassins and bring the Caliph to submission by whatever means proved necessary. He achieved these aims between 1256 and 1258. Baghdad was taken in 1258, and the last ‘Abbasid Caliph was executed, probably by being wrapped in a carpet and trampled to death by horses (this being a kind of compliment, in that the Mongols believed that royal persons should be executed honourably, by some means that did not involve the shedding of their blood: there seems to be no evidence, however, that the Caliph was made aware of the honour that was being conferred upon him). Hülegü then marched on into Syria, much of which was then ruled by a member of the family of Saladin, the Ayyubids. He was successful, but his progress was interrupted by news of the death in 1259 of the Great Khan while on campaign in China. Hülegü withdrew most of his forces to Armenia, so as to watch the settling of the succession question (which did in fact result in a four-year civil war between Qubilai and a fourth brother, in which Qubilai was victorious in 1264). He left a small force in Syria, which had the misfortune to face, in battle, the army of the Mamluks of Egypt. The Mamluk (slave soldiers) of the Egyptian Ayyubid Sultans had overthrown that dynasty in 1250, and had taken power for themselves. A singularly unstable decade followed as a succession of members of the new regime attempted to establish themselves in power. In 1260 the Mamluk Sultan was Qutuz. Seeing that the Mongol menace had to be faced, he made an accommodation with the principal Mamluk faction that had opposed him, the Bahriyya, and marched north into Syria. He met and defeated Hülegü’s holding force at ‘Ayn Jalut (‘the Spring of Goliath’), in the Galilee area – a victory of enormous symbolical significance, in that, although he had by no means defeated the main Mongol army, he had at least demonstrated that it was possible to win a battle against the Mongols. But Qutuz was murdered on his way back to Cairo, to be succeeded by a leading Mamluk from the Bahriyya grouping, Baybars, who reigned until 1277 and became the effective founder of a Mamluk Sultanate which endured until Egypt and Syria were conquered by the Ottomans in the early sixteenth century. Hülegü withdrew to Iran, where he established himself as ruler of the Mongol kingdom which we call the Ilkhanate. He died in 1265, and his descendants continued to rule there until 1335. Whether he had in fact been commissioned, when he set off from Mongolia on his great expedition, to establish a kingdom for himself, is open to considerable

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doubt. Although most of our sources were written by Persian historians who worked for the Ilkhans, there remains sufficient ambiguity in what they say to suggest that in fact the Great Khan Möngke had intended his brother to return to Mongolia once he had accomplished his mission. But the circumstances following the Great Khan’s death, the uncertainty over the succession, and the civil war between 1260 and 1264, allowed Hülegü the opportunity to establish his own rule in Persia and Iraq. In addition, he backed Qubilai, the winner in the contest for the office of Great Khan; so Qubilai had every reason not to contest his brother’s seizure of power in a part of the Mongol Empire that was far from China and Mongolia. Indeed, the political situation in the Mongol Empire after 1260 made it highly desirable for Qubilai to remain on good terms with his relatives in the Ilkhanate. For the year 1260 saw the beginnings of what Peter Jackson has termed ‘the dissolution of the Mongol Empire’. The empire, of course, by no means vanished. But it did devolve into what, with some degree of oversimplification, we may call four more or less independent Khanates, ruled by different branches of the imperial family: the Great Khanate in Mongolia and China, the Chaghatai Khanate in Central Asia, the Golden Horde in southern Russia, and the Ilkhanate in Persia, Iraq and parts of Anatolia. The empire was so enormous that some degree of devolution was no doubt inevitable: in the circumstances of the thirteenth century, it was hardly possible to rule so vast an area as a centrally directed polity. But such devolution might, in other circumstances, have been organised peacefully and by the mutual consent of Chinggis Khan’s descendants. That, however, is not what happened. There were periods of peace; and trans-continental trade, which was in everyone’s interest, was not necessarily terminated by intra-Mongol warfare. But essentially, after 1260 the Great Khanate and the Ilkhanate were allied against their relatives in the Golden Horde and the Chaghatai Khanate (much of which was, in practice, ruled for several decades in the late thirteenth century by Qaidu, a descendant of Chinggis Khan’s first successor, Ögedei). The most savage and unrelenting enmity was between the Golden Horde and the Ilkhanate. The ruler of the Golden Horde who was contemporary with Hülegü, Berke, was the first major Mongol figure to be converted to Islam. It was not, therefore, to be expected that he would be enamoured by the execution of the ‘Abbasid Caliph in 1258. More enduringly, the Khans of the Golden Horde felt that the Ilkhans

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had usurped much valuable territory in the Caucasus, which rightly belonged to them. Hence there followed a series of wars between the Golden Horde and the Ilkhanate. That is no doubt one reason why the Mongols of the Ilkhanate were never able to reverse the decision of ‘Ayn Jalut. Another is that the Mamluks, shrewdly, allied themselves with the Golden Horde against their common Mongol enemy in Persia (there was also a commercial motive for the alliance: the lands of the Golden Horde were the chief recruiting grounds for new supplies of Mamluk slave soldiers to be exported to Egypt). The Ilkhanid Mongols continued to mount invasions of Syria until the early fourteenth century. It may be that they remained hopeful that Syria could be added permanently to their realms – certainly that is what they said they were doing. But it is perhaps more likely that Syria was a convenient sphere in which, from time to time, to exercise their soldiers’ instincts for fighting and loot: states established by nomad warriors not infrequently found themselves in difficulty on that score when frontiers were stabilised and there was no more prospect of foreign plunder. Sometimes the Ilkhanid armies were victorious in Syria, sometimes not. But either way, they always quickly returned to Persia. There is no doubt that the Ilkhans remained worried by the Mamluks and by their alliance with the Golden Horde, and that they regarded this as a serious threat. In these circumstances, from quite early on, they began to make approaches to European powers in the hope that some kind of an alliance might be made in which forces from the West could combine with the Ilkhanid army, to crush the Mamluks between them. Attitudes had got off to an unpromising start in 1260, when the authorities in what was left of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, in its capital at Acre, decided to allow Qutuz’s Mamluk army free passage through its territory while Qutuz was on his march to confront the Mongols. This was long regarded as a ‘missed opportunity’ – the Crusaders might, it was argued, have instead allied themselves with the Mongols, and thus have averted the total destruction of the Crusader states at Mamluk hands which followed during the thirty years after ‘Ayn Jalut. But, as Peter Jackson has persuasively suggested, we can only argue this with the benefit of hindsight. The West’s attitude towards the Mongols was inevitably still coloured by the experience of the horrors of the Mongol invasion of eastern Europe twenty years earlier; and there can have seemed no reason in 1260 to suppose that the Mamluk regime, which had been so unstable, would in fact prove to become as

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fixed and formidable as it in fact did. In 1260, the Mongols must have seemed much the greater menace. In the changed circumstances of later decades, however, the prospect of a Mongol-European alliance was more attractive, and it seems likely that negotiations were conducted with sincerity by both sides; though in practice, none of this ever came to very much on the ground. On the European side, there also long remained the hope, never fulfilled though sometimes encouraged, optimistically, by Christian envoys, that the Mongols might become converted to Christianity. Such was the situation which prompted Rabban Sawma’s visit to Europe, as an Ilkhanid ambassador, in 1287. The then-reigning Ilkhan, Arghun, was a distinct enthusiast for such an alliance against the Mamluks. During a reign that lasted only from 1284 to 1291, he sent four missions to Europe, of which Rabban Sawma’s was the second. His choice of an envoy who was a member of the clergy of the Church of the East is interesting and significant: the Mongols made a practice of sending ambassadors who, they hoped, might be acceptable to the foreign power concerned. Hence, a Christian envoy was sent to Christian monarchs. The Mongols may not have appreciated that, from the point of view of Rome, a ‘Nestorian’ ambassador might well have been regarded as a heretic, and therefore not necessarily as acceptable as they would have hoped – though Rabban Sawma did not experience any such difficulties, or so he says. His account contains no hint that the cardinals thought him a heretic, and he was even asked to celebrate mass before the Pope and his cardinals, as well as before King Edward I of England. According to Sawma, the Pope and cardinals ‘rejoiced, and said, “The language is different, but the use is the same”’ (p. 190). But perhaps the Roman authorities, if not King Edward, were merely being diplomatic when negotiating with a valued ambassador. It is fascinating to be able to see Europe in the late thirteenth century through the eyes of a Christian Turkish (probably Önggüt, not Uighur as Budge thought) monk who had originated from the area of modern Beijing. His view is unmistakably favourable – much more so than we can imagine coming from a Muslim traveller to the West, had there been any such. He was especially enraptured by Rome, and by its apparently endless store of Christian relics. He managed, before his return to Persia, to induce the newly elected Pope Nicholas IV to give him some. Grumbled the Pope:

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INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION If we had been in the habit of giving away these relics to the people (who come) in myriads, even though the relics were as large as mountains, they would have come to an end long ago. But since thou hast come from a far country, we will give thee a few. (p. 195)

In the first instance, Rabban Sawma had gone to Europe to negotiate with the Pope. But when he arrived in Rome, there was no Pope, as Honorius IV had died, and the election of his successor was in train. Hence, rather than await the result of the election in Rome, Sawma decided to travel: so he visited King Edward in Gascony and King Philip IV of France in Paris. He was most impressed with Paris as a university city, remarking that ‘there were in it thirty thousand scholars ... and they engaged constantly in writing (theses), and all these pupils received money for subsistence from the king’ (pp. 183–4). It is unlikely that this statistic is literally true, but it is interesting that the university made so powerful an impression upon Sawma. He was also impressed, when in Naples on his way to Rome, by watching a sea battle between the Angevin and Aragonese fleets: [Sawma] and his companions sat upon the roof of the mansion in which they lived, and they admired the way in which the Franks waged war, for they attacked none of the people except those who were actually combatants. (p. 171)

That was not the fashion in which warfare was conducted in Mongol dominated Asia. Sawma returned to Persia, and died there peacefully a few years later. His diplomatic mission may have produced little result but, as Morris Rossabi remarks in concluding his illuminating study of Sawma, ‘He had brought the very different worlds of Christian Europe and the Mongol Empire closer, if only for a moment.’ His much younger disciple, Mark, now the Catholicus Mar Yahballaha III, lived on for another twenty-three years, and had the misfortune to witness the decline in the standing of the Church of the East, as well as of other Christian groups, after the conversion of the Ilkhan Ghazan to Islam in 1295. Prior to that, most of the Ilkhans had professed adherence in some fashion to Buddhism, but they had retained the traditional Mongol attitude towards religions: that they were all equal (a view which could easily be, and often was, mistaken for an inclination to be converted to Christianity), and that priests and holy men of all of them should pray

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for the Khan and, when required, use their various skills for the benefit of the state. In the Ilkhanate, the Christians had certainly been favoured. But that all changed when the Mongol rulers adopted Islam, the religion of the overwhelming majority of their Persian subjects. The second half of the book translated here is for the most part a melancholy account of the trials and troubles of Yahballaha III and his Church in the years after 1295. The Church of the East had been an extraordinary phenomenon over many centuries, with bishops, priests and believers spread across the length and breadth of Asia. Mar Yahballaha III, as this book so vividly illustrates, witnessed both the height of his Church’s influence, and the beginnings of its inexorable decline. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE The standard edition of the text here translated is by P. Bedjan, Histoire de Mar Jab Alaha, Patriarch, et de Raban Sauma, second edition, Paris, 1895, from which Budge made his translation. There is a more recent edition, with a translation and extensive notes in Italian, by Pier Giorgio Borbone, Storia di Mar Yahballaha e di Rabban Sauma, Turin, 2000; new edition, 2009. Budge’s is the only complete English translation, though J. A. Montgomery’s History of Yaballaha III, New York, 1927, briefly preceded it. However, Montgomery translated only most of the first half of the book. The earliest translation into a modern Western language, which is highly regarded, was J.-B. Chabot’s French version: Histoire de Mar Jabalaha III et du moine Rabban Çauma, Paris, 1895. This was apparently made from Bedjan’s first edition of 1888. There is a Russian translation by N. V. Pigulevskaia, Istoriia Mar Iabalakhi i Rabban Saumy, Moscow, 1958. A vivid and reliable study of Sawma and Mark’s adventures up to Sawma’s return from Europe, placed firmly in their historical context, is Morris Rossabi’s Voyager from Xanadu: Rabban Sauma and the First Journey from China to the West, Tokyo, New York and London, 1992 (second edition, Berkeley, 2010). A very early study was N. McLean, ‘An eastern embassy to Europe in the years 1287–88’, English Historical Review 14, 1899, pp. 299–312. There are characteristically penetrating observations in Paul Pelliot, Recherches sur les chrétiens d’Asie centrale et d’Extrême Orient, ed. J. Dauvillier and L. Hambis, Paris, 1973. There is a good relevant chapter in J.-P. Charbonnier, Christians in China: A.D. 600 to 2000, trans. and ed. M. Couve de Murville, San Francisco, 2007, Ch. 4, ‘The Cross among the Mongols’. For the history of the Syriac churches in this period, see J. M. Fiey, Chrétiens syriaques sous les Mongols, Louvain, 1975. For the

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Church of the East, the ‘Nestorian’ Church, C. Baumer, The Church of the East: An Illustrated History of Assyrian Christianity, London and New York, 2006, is an excellent recent account. See especially Ch. 9, ‘The Period of the Mongols’. L. E. Browne, The Eclipse of Christianity in Asia, Cambridge, 1933, was a pioneering study of the history of eastern Christianity and its ultimate decline, now rather dated. Another valuable older book is A. C. Moule, Christians in China before the Year 1500, London, 1930. More recent studies include A. S. Atiya, A History of Eastern Christianity, Notre Dame, 1967; S. H. Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia, I: Beginnings to 1500, second edition, Maryknoll, 1998, II: 1500 to 1900, Maryknoll, 2005; and, a most readable and thought-provoking book, Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity. The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa and Asia – and How it Died, New York, 2008. There is a good introduction to the history of the eastern churches in Bernard Hamilton, The Christian World of the Middle Ages, Stroud, 2003, Ch. 5. For the Mongol background, the most recent surveys are Timothy May, The Mongol Conquests in World History, London, 2012, and Morris Rossabi, The Mongols: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, 2012. Two older surveys are David Morgan, The Mongols, second edition, Oxford, 2007, and J. J. Saunders, The History of the Mongol Conquests, London, 1971. Rossabi is also the author of the standard biography of Qubilai: Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times, Berkeley, 1988. From the point of view of trying to understand the Mongol Empire and how it worked, the most important book published in recent decades is T. T. Allsen, Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia, Cambridge, 2001. The outstanding study of relations between the Mongols and European powers is Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 1221–1410, Harlow, 2005. Ch. 7, ‘An ally against Islam: the Mongols in the Near East’, is particularly relevant.

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