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C h a p t e r 2 Travelers, Tales, Audiences Travelers’ tales are often the preserve of the young, vigorous, and egocentric, yet it fell to an aging, overweight Franciscan friar to be among the first to travel into the heartland of a far Asian empire and return to tell his story. John of Plano Carpini (Giovanni di Pian di Carpine, c. 1180–1252), born in Pian di Carpine, now Magione near Perugia, was an early stalwart of the Franciscan order and near contemporary of St. Francis.1 He had spent the 1220s and 1230s traveling Saxony and Spain to help establish the new order in those places, gaining a reputation for trustworthiness and sound judgment, kindness, and piety. His fellow Franciscan Giordano da Giano left a vivid image of him as, in de Rachewiltz’s paraphrase, “a kind, genial and heavily built man, so heavy in fact that he used to ride a donkey instead of the prescribed horse, thereby attracting notice and sympathy wherever he went.”2 By 1245 he had surely earned some quiet and comfortable twilight years but instead was called by the new pope, Innocent IV, to head one of four diplomatic missions into Mongol territory. He was not the first—there had been some earlier Hungarian expeditions into Mongol-held territories—but he is distinguished for the distance traveled and for his account of the journey. Carpini, accompanied first by Friar Stephen of Bohemia, who fell ill en route and was replaced by Benedict the Pole, departed from Lyon on 16 April 1245 and took the route via Bohemia, Poland, and southern Russia. He reached the camp of Güyük Khân under Mongol escort just west of the capital Karakorum on 22 July 1246. It was a heroic journey of several thousand kilometers into dangerous territory, strewn in places with “skulls and bones of dead men lying on the ground like dung.”3 They kept up a cracking pace with five or seven changes of horses every day in the later phases, traveling from dawn to nightfall with no stopping for meals and indeed often no chance to eat in the evenings as Travelers, Tales, Audiences 29 they made camp so late. Benedict the Pole tells how they bandaged their limbs to “bear the strain of continual riding.”4 Ruy Gonzáles de Clavijo, Castilian ambassador to Temür in the early fifteenth century, concurred that “it is scarcely to be believed, had we not ourselves seen it and thus we can vouch for the truth, what a distance these [Mongol] riders can encompass in a day. . . . By the roadside many were the dead horses we saw during our journey, which had been thus ridden to death and the carcass abandoned.”5 Carpini’s return journey took place through the winter of 1246–47, finally arriving at Lyon in November 1247. As he tells it, the friars slept on the freezing open ground, often waking to find themselves covered in snow. On reaching Europe, Carpini and his companions were greeted “as if we were risen from the dead.”6 Presumably Carpini no longer sported the corpulent figure for which he had previously been celebrated. At the same time Lawrence of Portugal, also Franciscan, was to have approached the Mongols via the Levant but nothing is known of his journey; he may have died on the way or perhaps did not go at all.7 Two further missions via the eastern Mediterranean were headed by Dominicans, that of Ascelin and his companion, Simon of St. Quentin, who reached the camp of Baiju in the Armenian highlands in May 1247, and that of Andrew of Longjumeau, who traveled to a Mongolian encampment near Tabriz in Persia in 1245–47 and to the camp of the regent Oghul-Qaimish, widow of Güyük Khân, southwest of Lake Baikal at the request of King Louis IX in 1249–51.8 All these journeys required considerable courage, given the Mongolians’ reputation as ferocious warriors. As Peter Jackson and David Morgan comment drily, “The Mongol imperial government held a fairly uncomplicated view of international relations .” They believed Tenggeri (the “Eternal Heaven”) had granted the entire world to the Mongols, and it was the duty of all other rulers and peoples to submit to them or pay a terrible price.9 Carpini’s, Ascelin’s, and Andrew of Longjumeau’s missions resulted in written accounts of Mongol peoples and represent some of the earliest European ethnographic...

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