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Part VI: The Mongol Crusades, 1241–1262
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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PART VI The Mongol Crusades, 1241–1262 The Mongol Empire and its expansion into China, eastern Europe, and the eastern Islamicate in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries turned the geopolitical world of Eurasia upside down. Assembled by a talented chieftain named Temujin (d. 1227), who overcame and absorbed neighboring peoples until in 1206 he was acclaimed Chinggis Khan, the empire expanded enormously under his sons and successors. His claim to world rule was based on earlier imperial nomadic steppe practices, but his highly selective adaptation of his various subjects’ linguistic and administrative practices made his empire far more complex than earlier nomadic empires. Military rivalry with a neighboring people brought Chinggis Khan’s generals across the Caucasus and into Georgia in 1223, crushed the Cumans and their Kievan allies, and brought the Mongols dramatically to the attention of both eastern Europeans and the Muslim world. Chinggis was succeeded by his son Ögödei (1229–1241), whose armies returned to the western steppes in 1235 and destroyed armies of Ukrainians, Poles, Hungarians, and others at Kiev in 1240 and at Liegnitz in 1241. Hungary, the Balkans, and Poland fell, and Gregory IX proclaimed a crusade against the Mongols in 1241 when again they withdrew eastward to the steppes. The growing intensity of the conflict between Frederick II and the popes prevented the formation of any organized resistance to Mongol expansion, and for much of the central decades of the thirteenth century the Mongols shaped Western discussions of the crusade movement. The letters and eyewitness accounts translated here represent but a fraction of the sources used by Matthew Paris and others for the fullest European chronicle accounts of the Mongols. Matthew’s and others’ impression of the Tartars was also heavily influenced by reports submitted by mendicant missionaries to the council of Lyons (1245), a letter purporting to be from the ‘‘king’’ of the Tartars, and correspondence from exiled prelates, monks, and friars forwarding news of the invaders and seeking spiritual and material assistance from Western ecclesiastics and secular magnates. Matthew Paris’s descriptions of the Tartars were even accompanied by his own drawings, which emphasized their bestial and savage behavior, and his at times near hysterical tone indicates the terror their advent inspired in many in Western Christendom and the Latin kingdoms in the East. His and many contemporaries’ conceptions and expectations of the Tartars were shaped by descriptions of the wondrous peoples and animals said to inhabit the Near and Far East (common in classical authors and medieval versions of the Alexander legend), including the monstrous races (identified with the biblical Gog and Magog) said to have been shut up by Alexander the Great behind the Caspian Gates. Their unleashing would initiate the harrowing of the earth in its final days prior to the advent of the Antichrist himself. Mongol Crusades 307 A competing and more optimistic legend was that of the Christian king Prester John, who, from the mid-twelfth century onward, was rumored to dwell to the east of Muslim-occupied territories and to desire to ally with Western Christendom in their annihilation.1 In fact, the first reports of the activities of the Mongols to reach the West came in the form of prophecies regarding the aid expected from a mysterious ‘‘King David,’’ which surfaced among the armies of the Fifth Crusade. They were publicized by James of Vitry and Oliver of Paderborn, among others present in the crusader camp, to Rome, England, France, and other regions in Western Christendom, and they influenced the army’s disastrous decision to proceed toward Cairo. These accounts actually mixed components of the legendary Prester John with a composite of the recent conquests of the Christian Naiman king Küchlüg and/or Chinggis Khan (who had successfully attacked the KaraKhitai and the Khwarizmian Empire as he assembled his own Mongol Empire), and ignited Western hopes for potential alliances with a Far Eastern power against the Muslims. However, as further news regarding the Mongols’ activities reached the West, doubts arose concerning their formerly assumed Christianity and their potential as allies against Islam. From the early thirteenth century onward, Hungary had attempted to come to terms with the Cumans on its borders by sending missions to evangelize them and by persuading some of their chiefs to swear fealty to the king of Hungary, to effectively serve as a buffer between Hungary and threats farther east. With the rise of Ögödei to power, the Mongols once...