Grove Koger

Today’s post from When the Going Was Good involves a thirteenth-century account of an epic journey from Europe across Central Asia.

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Itinerarium fratris Willielmi de Rubruquis de ordine fratrum Minorum, Galli, Anno gratiae 1253 ad partes Orientales (The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck)

Seeking allies against the Muslims who had seized the Holy Land in 1187 under Saladin, Louis IX of France hoped that the Mongols, who had themselves swept into Eastern Europe in the mid-thirteenth century, might be converted to Christianity and deflected from their “savage” ways. Among those who ventured east to present Louis’s proposal was Friar William of the Flemish town of Rubruck.

William’s journey took him and a handful of companions from Constantinople (now Istanbul) in mid-1253 across the Black Sea and through western Asia into Mongol territory. The party then found themselves sent under escort thousands of miles further east, to meet the Great Khan himself in the city of Karakorum in Mongolia. William returned two years later, having failed (perhaps not surprisingly) in his mission.

William wrote his Itinerarium in Acre, on the coast of what is now Israel, and eventually delivered the manuscript to Louis in Paris. Despite his ostensible failure, William made several notable discoveries, ascertaining that the Caspian Sea is landlocked and establishing the truth about legendary Christian ruler Prester John. He also succeeded in writing what is by general agreement the liveliest travel account of the Middle Ages. His Mission preceded Marco Polo’s Description of the World by decades and surpasses it in overall readability, although it enjoyed much less vogue than Polo’s admittedly more ambitious work. William may be criticized for his ethnic, religious and even culinary intolerance. But as Polo would later demonstrate, a traveler’s tale told without at least some acerbity is much like bread baked without salt.

If you’d like to read William’s account, the edition translated by Peter Jackson as The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck: His Journey to the Court of the Great Khan Möngke, 1253–1255 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1990) includes an introduction, notes and appendices by Jackson and David Morgan. You’ll find another trranslation in Manuel Komroff, ed., Contemporaries of Marco Polo (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1928), which also includes the accounts of John of Pian de Carpini and Odoric of Pordenone.

The image at the top of today’s post is the cover of the Hakluyt Society edition of William’s Itinerarium, which reproduces an initial from a 14th-century copy of the account. The second is the initial itself, with the upper portion showing Louis IX instructing William and a companion (or possibly receiving their report) and the lower portion showing the two on their way home. It’s reproduced courtesy of Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The map is reproduced courtesy of the University of Washington.

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