The Testimony of the Russian ‘Archbishop’ Peter Concerning the Mongols (1244/5): Precious Intelligence or Timely Disinformation?

Abstract

The first decade of the 21st century proved remarkably fertile in yielding up manuscripts relevant to the earliest direct contacts between Latin Europe and the Mongol empire – namely, those framed by the devastation of Rus´ (1237-40), Poland, Moravia and Hungary (1241-2) by the Mongols (or ‘Tartars’) and the subsequent despatch to the Mongol world of three parties of friars (1245-7) as envoys of Pope Innocent IV. These texts include:- (1) an early manuscript of the Epistula de vita secta et origine Tartarorum of the Hungarian Dominican Julian, who travelled to the Ural region in 1236–7 in search of the Hungarians’ pagan kinsmen in what was known as ‘Greater Hungary’, and returned with news of the imminent Mongol assault on Rus´; (2) two hitherto unknown letters from the Nestorian monk Simeon Rabban-ata to the Emperor Frederick II and King Louis IX of France, brought back from Azerbaijan in 1247 by one of Innocent IV's envoys, the Dominican André de Longjumeau; and (3) a second copy of the so-called ‘Tartar Relation’, an account produced in Poland in mid July 1247 by a Franciscan friar calling himself ‘C. de Bridia’ and closely linked with the most celebrated of the papal embassies to the Mongols, which was led by the Franciscan John of Plano Carpini and travelled across the Eurasian steppes as far as the court of the Qaghan Güyük in Mongolia.