During the three and a half months it took to get there, Rubruck made careful notes on the landscape and people he observed along the way. His extremely detailed account became one of the most important descriptions of Central Asia ever recorded by a European. Fascinated by the customs and beliefs of all the peoples he encountered, he was forever making enquiries of the whereabouts of the monsters and other strange creatures that were supposed to inhabit these lands. The friar was constantly astonished to find no evidence of such beings anywhere.

  By October, Rubruck and his party were south of Lake Balkhash where he recorded that large numbers of villages had been destroyed ‘so that the Tartars could feed their flocks there, for it is very fine pasturage’. Clearly old habits died hard. As with all journeys across the Asian steppe, the going was hard and gruelling. At times they were close to starvation, forced to eat raw mutton because of the lack of fuel. They kept on, driven by Rubruck’s obsession to penetrate deep into this heathen wasteland and transform it into the new Eden. However, this proved more difficult than he had ever imagined – especially as his guide and interpreter, Omodeo, was more of a liability than an asset, having virtually none of the local languages.

  Just before Christmas they arrived at Mongke’s camp, a few miles west of Qaraqorum, and almost immediately the friars were granted an audience with the Great Khan. Once again, the Mongols found it hard to swallow William’s declaration that he simply wanted to live at court and preach the gospel. It seems that Mongke was untroubled by the lack of precious tribute and accepted that they were not royal emissaries from Louis. However, given the Mongols’ own heavy reliance upon spies and informers, they were naturally suspicious of someone from Europe requesting permission to wander about the countryside. For the next two months William and his party were regularly interrogated by the Great Khan’s ministers, who were never entirely satisfied with their explanations. Mongke, on the other hand, treated his guests with great courtesy. He granted them many audiences and listened intently to William’s sermons.

  Some of the eastern Christians at court even maintained that it was simply a matter of time before the Great Khan was baptised; after all, his mother, Sorghaghtani Beki, a niece of the Kereyid King Ong Khan, had been a Christian all her life. Be that as it may, Sorghaghtani had nevertheless always practised the traditional Mongol policy of religious impartiality, and had instilled these virtues in her son. Although a Christian, she was also remembered for having founded a richly endowed Muslim college in Bukhara.

  Rubruck was sufficiently observant to notice that Mongke Khan paid equal attention to all the various foreign religions represented in his realm, making certain to attend all the important ceremonies. In a conversation with Rubruck, he was once reported to have explained his religious impartiality thus: ‘We Mongols believe there is but one God, by Whom we live and by Whom we die, and towards Him we have an upright heart… But just as God gave different fingers to the hand so has He given different ways to men.’ Despite Mongke’s highly sophisticated views on religion, the fact is that he remained fundamentally a shamanist, dependent upon fortune-tellers who burned the shoulder-blade of a sheep to divine the future.

  At the beginning of April, the Great Khan moved his court to Qaraqorum and Rubruck and his party followed, thus becoming the first Europeans ever to visit the capital of the largest empire that the world had ever seen. He was not impressed. After spending time in Batu’s capital, he wrote: ‘I was overcome with fear, for his own houses seemed like a great city stretching out a long way and crowded around on every side by peoples to a distance of three or four leagues.’ Qaraqorum, on the other hand, had not flourished to quite the same degree, and Rubruck declared that he found it no bigger than the village of Saint Denis to the north of Paris. Nevertheless, he was impressed by the uniquely international population; there was not another city like it anywhere. According to Rubruck it was divided up into various quarters: one for artisans, one for clerics, another for builders and engineers, and so on. There was a ‘European colony’, which apparently comprised craftsmen, merchants and scribes from Germany, Poland, France and Hungary, and even an Englishman called Basil, all of whom mingled with artisans, scientists and builders from Persia and China. Within its confines there were no fewer than twelve Buddhist temples, two mosques and a church. Along the many highways that linked the far reaches of the empire with Qaraqorum there flowed an unlikely traffic of priests, ambassadors, mystics and charlatans, come to beg indulgences or to take advantage of the Mongols’ legendary superstitious nature. In the midst of this cosmopolitan society, Rubruck and his entourage set about preaching the gospel.

  Even by his own account, Rubruck found his mission something of a struggle. Part of his problem was his own over-zealous approach. His teaching was shackled with academic dogma, and his arguments often reduced to threats of hellfire. Eventually even the local Christian community began to tire of him, especially after he threatened the Great Khan himself with eternal damnation. It is reported that Mongke responded to Rubruck’s haranguing with the wisdom of a sage:

  The nurse at first lets some drops of milk into the infant’s mouth, so that by tasting its sweetness he may be enticed to suck; only then does she offer him her breast. In the same way you should persuade Us, whom you claim to be so totally unacquainted with this doctrine, in a simple and rational manner. Instead you immediately threaten Us with eternal punishments.

  Rubruck succeeded in converting just one Nestorian to the Church of Rome, and baptised six children. He did, however, take part in a debate between all the religions at the court, presented before an amused Great Khan and his courtiers. In a remarkable atmosphere of religious freedom, the representative of each creed was expected to challenge the others while at the same time presenting a rational explanation of the virtues and benefits of his own doctrine. In any other regime it would have been an exercise fraught with dangers; at the Mongol court it was an event of some entertainment. As might be expected, William took up the spirit of the debate and immediately launched into an attack against the Buddhists. In the meantime, the eastern Christians took on the Islamic representatives, who were not much interested in a debate and refused to respond; so the eastern Christians rounded on the Uighur Buddhists instead. The Taoists seemed to have escaped unscathed; however, the proceedings soon dissolved into a raucous carouse, leaving a disillusioned Rubruck to record that his arguments had captured not one single convert. With his Christian work a complete failure, Rubruck resigned himself to the secondary aspect of his mission – that of gathering intelligence on behalf of King Louis.

  If he was not well suited to the role of evangelist, he was even less well equipped to be a spy. Apart from his valuable observations of Mongol life, which were never properly appreciated until they were rediscovered by scholars in the nineteenth century, Rubruck gleaned little of Mongol policies or plans that they were not willing for him to know. The most obvious development taking place throughout his stay at Qaraqorum was the preparations being made for a massive military undertaking. Rubruck learned that, at a quriltai held in 1252, Mongke Khan had set out the objectives of his reign: a campaign against the Sung in China and, at the same time, a separate and even larger expedition into Persia and Syria, ‘as far as the borders of Egypt’, which was to be led by his younger brother, Hulegu.

  PLANNING THE MIDDLE EASTERN CAMPAIGN

  The decision to extend the empire deep into Persia would have tremendous political ramifications in western Asia. Ever since Genghis Khan had swept through Transoxiana and Khurasan, the Mongols had maintained no more than a partial military presence. Under the first military commander, Chormaghun, the remnants of the Khwarazm Shah’s empire had been swept away and with it all civil administration. During Batu’s great expansion to the west the land between the Caspian and the Black Seas, Azerbaijan, came solidly under Mongol control; the next military governor of the area, Baiju, pushed Mongol influence into Rum – now Turkey – and crushed the Seljuks. When Baiju was replaced by the devious Eljigidei there was talk of a campaign against Baghdad, but nothing came of it. With the accession of Mongke, Eljigidei was swept away with the old regime and Baiju was reinstated as governor. However, Baiju made no sign of any move upon Baghdad, being fully occupied quelling uprisings in Asia Minor and Georgia. Throughout this period there were no substantial Mongol forces garrisoned further south than Azerbaijan and the Araxes valley, so control remained sporadic and chaos reigned.

  From the Mongol perspective, a campaign into Persia and Syria was the logical pursuit of their philosophy of world domination. But the essential point behind Mongke’s objectives was that further expansion in the west was going to happen in the Middle East, not in Europe. For centuries the Mongols had been familiar with the great influence that Muslim merchants from Persia and the Gulf area enjoyed throughout Asia. More significant was the reputation of Persian scientists, astronomers, astrologers, mathematicians and technologists, who were without equal anywhere in the world. Apart from the sciences, there were also the arts: painting, carpetmaking, music and poetry. The Islamic Middle East was by any standards a vastly sophisticated, wealthy and advanced civilisation, and the Mongols could hardly allow it to flourish outside of their sphere. Mongke’s objectives were obvious: by invading both the Sung empire in southern China and Persia, he was attempting to place the two great civilisations of the era under Mongol control. It stands as one of the most grandiose plans for world domination ever conceived.

  One obvious conclusion that can be drawn from Mongke’s decision was that the Mongols appeared to have lost interest in Europe. Indeed, there is no evidence that after Batu’s withdrawal from eastern Europe the Mongols ever saw Europe as a prize worthy of the effort it would have taken to conquer. Although the pronouncements of the Great Khans continued to reiterate the conviction that it was the Mongols’ God-given right to rule the world, and that all kings were obliged to offer tribute to the Great Khan, the reality was that in global terms Europe really did not matter that much.

  Rubruck never imagined that the proposed expedition to the Middle East would benefit the cause of the crusaders in Palestine; on the other hand, the eastern Christian community had become convinced that the Mongols were about to unleash a holy war against their ancient enemies, the Muslims. The Mongols’ prime objective was the Caliph of Baghdad, but before confronting him they meant to eliminate the other major power in the region, the Ismailis or Assassins. They had emerged because of a schism in the Shia Muslim sect and established themselves in northern and eastern Persia by taking and controlling a series of mountain fortifications. Behind their walls they lived a contemplative life, producing beautifully wrought paintings and metalwork, but beyond their retreats they terrorised those civilisations they deemed heretical and so earned the enmity not just of the rest of the Islamic world but eventually of Europe. The local Ismaili leader had done little to enhance their reputation. Rather than confront his enemies in open combat he preferred to sponsor a campaign of political murder, usually executed with a dagger in the back, as the means to his end.

  The Mongols had their own reasons for launching a campaign against the Assassins. First, they had received a plea of help from an Islamic judge in Qazwin, a town near the Assassins’ stronghold at Alamut, who had complained that his fellow citizens were forced to wear armour all the time as protection from the Assassins’ daggers. According to Rubruck, another reason that determined Mongol attitudes was the discovery of a plot to send no fewer than 400 dagger-wielding Assassins in disguise to Qaraqorum with instructions to murder the Great Khan. The Assassins had encountered the Mongols once before, during Chormaghun’s terror raids through northern Persia in 1237–8, which led them to send an envoy to Europe begging for help.

  Gradually the new imperial army took shape. It would be the grandest expedition since Batu’s invasion of Europe. Mongke Khan allocated one-fifth of the entire Mongol force to Hulegu’s command. One thousand ‘teams’ of Chinese engineers were recruited to manufacture and operate the siege machines, while fifth-columnists were sent ahead to prepare the way. This meant appropriating vast tracts of grazing land for the herds, stockpiling reserves of flour, grain, wine and other stores, building roads and bridges and then organising a massive round-up of the thousands of horses that grazed across the steppes of western Asia. In the spring of 1253, the first contingents left Mongolia, and in the autumn Hulegu rode out at the head of an enormous army, which then moved gradually across central Asia to the outskirts of Samarqand, where it made ready for the final march.

  As preparations continued throughout 1254 and 1255, the Eastern Christian community became ever more enthusiastic for a war they believed would soon return them to their original home, the lands of Mesopotamia, from which they had emigrated to escape persecution under the Muslims. Soon contingents of Eastern Christians arrived from Batu’s Golden Horde; there were Georgians, Turks and Alans; all wanted to ride with Hulegu’s tumens. It also happened that Hulegu’s most senior commander, Ked-Buqa, was a Christian Naiman, while Hulegu’s chief wife, Doquz-Khatun, was renowned for her Christian convictions. To a community that had suffered under the Muslims for centuries, Hulegu’s campaign had all the hallmarks of a Christian holy war; however, Rubruck knew better. His observations of the Mongol court told him a religious war was as alien to the Mongol generals as were the concepts of mercy and forgiveness. Although the character of Hulegu’s army was, in parts, heavily Christian, the commander himself was a Buddhist.

  RUBRUCK’S RETURN

  While the great army was encamped near Samarqand, Rubruck finally began his long journey home. Mongke gave the friar a letter for Louis in which the Great Khan repudiated the earlier diplomatic missives sent by Guyuk Khan and his regent Oghul-Ghaimish. He explained to Louis: ‘How could that wicked woman, more vile than a dog, know about matters of war and affairs of peace?’ Mongke goes on to describe his visions of a united world ‘from sunrise to sunset’ under Mongol rule, and, although he urged Louis to send peace envoys, he did not make any demands for tribute. It was a far more conciliatory letter than previous communications, and one might speculate that perhaps Mongke could see some advantage in trying to win Europe’s trust.

  Rubruck delayed his departure as long as possible, in the hope that he might glean a clearer signal of Mongol attitudes towards Europe. He had heard that King Hayton, from Armenia, was travelling secretly to Qaraqorum in order to see the Great Khan in connection with the planned expedition, and Rubruck imagined he might learn more of the expedition’s real objectives from a fellow Roman Christian. However, by the beginning of July he had tired of waiting and decided to leave. Friar Bartholomew remained behind. Too ill to travel, he remained in Qaraqorum; it is presumed that he died there, the first Italian to die in the Far East.

  A few months after Rubruck’s departure, King Hayton finally arrived at Qaraqorum. Having heard of the planned campaign, Hayton had immediately realised that an all-out war against the main Islamic powers would have tremendous advantages for Christian Asia. He was received by Mongke and eventually spent fifty days at the capital, during which time he convinced the Great Khan that the entire expedition would be assured of allies in Palestine if it was made clear that Hulegu’s expedition was nothing less than a Christian Crusade. Hayton then returned with a yarligh, an edict that, in effect, enfranchised the Christian Churches throughout the empire – and in those areas not yet conquered. He returned to Armenia, and made preparations to join Hulegu’s force.

  Had Rubruck managed to encounter King Hayton, he might have delivered a completely different report to Louis. In the event, his was yet another depressing account of Mongol intransigence. His mission both as an evangelist and as a spy had been a failure. He brought no accounts of fabled monsters, nor of Prester John. He bitterly regretted not having managed very many conversions and railed against the ‘pernicious influence’ that the Church of the East, in preference to Rome, enjoyed at the Mongol court. He did, however, confirm that a massive army was currently advancing upon Persia and Syria, but he made no recommendation of an alliance – quite the opposite. He had become so disenchanted with the Mongols that he saw only one policy for Europe. ‘Were it allowed me,’ he wrote, ‘I would to the utmost of my power preach war against them throughout the whole world.’ Rubruck’s report had a tremendous influence, not just on the French King, but on the rest of the courts of Europe. It dealt another blow to the Prester John legend; but, perhaps more significantly, it was a great discouragement to those who still imagined the possibility of an alliance with a great Eastern Christian king against the Muslim nations.

  ACROSS THE OXUS INTO PERSIA

  On 1 January 1256, Hulegu’s army crossed the Oxus River and brought into Persia the most formidable war machine ever seen. It possessed the very latest in siege engineering, gunpowder from China, catapults that would send balls of flaming naphtha into their enemy’s cities, and divisions of rigorously trained mounted archers led by generals who had learned their skills at the feet of Genghis Khan and Subedei. As news of Hulegu’s army spread, he was soon presented with a succession of sultans, emirs and atabaks from as far apart as Asia Minor and Herat, all come to pay homage. Its sheer presence brought to an end nearly forty years of rebellion and unrest in the old lands of Khwarazmia, but to the inhabitants of Persia and Syria it was the dawn of a new world order.

 

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