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57 c h a p t e r 3 Writing Ethnography “In the Eyes of the Other” William of Rubruck’s Mission to Mongolia The thirteenth century witnessed a remarkable opening of the Asian landscape and peoples to Europe. The great thirteenth-century missions , many of them instigated by Pope Innocent IV in part as a defensive strategy of knowing the Mongol other on Europe’s eastern border , produced an impressive set of ethnographic treatments of Asia’s Mongolian peoples, including those of John of Plano Carpini, Benedict the Pole, and Andrew of Longjumeau, and perhaps most gripping of all, William of Rubruck’s own. William’s mission, and the thirteenth-century missions generally, may now be viewed as part of medieval Europe’s great dream of converting Asia, and its mythical eastern Christian king, Prester John, or else allying with it against the common enemy of the Muslims of the Middle East. The missions of John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck influenced later medieval missions to Asia by John of Montecorvino, Jordanus Catalini, Odoric of Pordenone, and John of Marignolli. This collective late medieval ethnographic interest in Asia would find no parallel until the coming of the Jesuits in Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If Gerald of Wales stands as the twelfth century’s most accomplished ethnographer, Wiliam of Rubruck may well represent the thirteenth century’s. The fineness of William of Rubruck’s Itinerarium or Journey, a report of his mission to Mongolia in 1253–55, notwithstanding , its contemporary reception was mixed at best. The Journey enjoyed scant contemporary attention and was unknown even to encyclopedists like Vincent of Beauvais, who recorded the earlier chapter 3 58 Mongolian mission of John of Plano Carpini; Vincent of Beauvais personally knew King Louis IX, at whose request William made the journey “ut omnia scriberem . . . quaecumque viderem inter Tartaros ” (to put in writing . . . everything I saw among the Tartars) (preface ).1 Were it not for the great admiration of Roger Bacon, who copied much of the Journey in his Opus Maius (c. 1264), William’s fascinating account of his two-year mission from the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem through the twin imperial courts of Baatu (1242–55) and the great khan, Mangu (1251–59),2 would probably not have come down to us. Its low circulation is suggested, further, by its mere five extant manuscripts, four located in England.3 Though published partially by Richard Hakluyt in 1600 and completely by Samuel Purchas in 1625, the Journey continued its path of relative obscurity, overlooked by historians of its own Franciscan order and other orders, even after the discovery and publication of all its manuscripts by the Société de Géographie of Paris in 1839. At the same time, the Journey’s reputation for distinction grew among travel collectors and publishers: Purchas called William’s account a “Jewell of Antiquitie,” while Sir Henry Yule, the great editor of Marco Polo, wrote of William’s book: “the generation immediately preceding his [Marco Polo’s] own has bequeathed to us . . . the narrative of one great journey which, in its rich detail, its vivid pictures, its acuteness of observation and strong good sense, seems to me to form a Book of Travels . . . which has never had justice done to it, for it has few superiors in the whole Library of Travel.”4 Like Yule in the early twentieth century, William’s modern commentators have been struck by the vividness of detail and acuteness of observation that inform William’s descriptions of Mongolian life, qualities that allow the Journey to stand today as a major ethnographic source for medieval Mongolian practices.5 Whether for this reason or on account of the relative reliability of its narrator,6 studies have tended to treat the Journey as a document of hard science rather than a complex narrative object—endowed, as Mary Campbell has put it, with “a plot and a character”7 —and a complex cultural object reflecting a particular mode of medieval ethnographic thinking and poetics. In what follows, I argue that William’s ethnographic choices in the Itinerarium are shaped by the exigencies of medieval “missionary ethnography”: a peculiar, ambivalent, and strategic acknowledgment of non-Christian humanity and difference deployed in order to incorporate the non-Christian other into the fold of Christian Writing Ethnography “In the Eyes of the Other” 59 promise. A number of the most distinctive qualities of this ethnographic work—namely, Rubruck’s intersubjectivity, or interlocking subjectivity...

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