Jackson - The Mongols and the West 1221-1410

The Mongols and the West provides a comprehensive survey of relations between the Catholic West and the Mongol Empire from the first appearance of Chinggis (Genghis) Khans armies on Europes horizons in 1221 to the battle of Tannenberg in 1410. This book has been designed to provide a synthesis of previous scholarship on relations between the Mongols and the Catholic world, as well as to offer new approaches and conclusions on the subject. It considers the tension between the Western hopes of the Mongols as allies against the growing Muslim powers and the Mongols position as conquerors with their own agenda, and evaluates the impact of MongolWestern contacts on the Wests expanding knowledge of the world.

This second edition takes into account the wealth of scholarly literature that has emerged in the years since the previous edition and contains significantly extended chapters on trade and mission. It charts the course of military confrontation and diplomatic relations between the Mongols and the West, and re-examines the commercial opportunities offered to Western merchants by Mongol rule and the failure of Catholic missionaries to convert the Mongols to Christianity.

Fully revised and containing a range of maps, genealogical tables and both European and non-European sources throughout, The Mongols and the West is ideal for students of medieval European history and the Crusades.

Peter Jackson is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at Keele University and a Fellow of the British Academy. His publications cover the Mongols, the Crusades and medieval Islam, and his most recent book is The Mongols and the Islamic World from Conquest to Conversion (2017).

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Second Edition

Peter Jackson

This edition published 2018
by Routledge
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2018 Peter Jackson

The right of Peter Jackson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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First edition published by Pearson Education Limited 2005

Reprinted by Routledge 2015

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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ISBN: 978-1-138-84842-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-84848-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-18284-3 (ebk)

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For Rebecca

In this timely book, Peter Jackson introduces us to the last great pulse of nomads from the inner Asian steppe to encounter the utterly different world of sedentary, urbanized European peoples. The military context of this story is a long front along the eastern fringe of late medieval Christendom, from Poland to the Crusader strongholds on the Syrian coast. Its cultural context is one of prejudice and curiosity stretching from Scotland to Japan, for this narrative of military encounters and diplomatic manoeuvring is set against a backdrop of fears of the unknown, rumours frequently apocalyptic and the details of everyday life which characterize one culture rather than another. In a fascinating exploration of the interactions between the Mongols and the Latin West, Professor Jackson invites the reader to follow Mongol armies west to Germany and to travel east to China with Christian missionaries, diplomats and traders, stopping at courts and camps at all points in between. This latest addition to the Longmans Medieval World series is thus a sustained reflection on what makes one culture, or civilization, different from another, and reminds us that the history of the European Middle Ages has a world historical context.

In the chapters which follow, we meet many famous men, real and imagined, who have excited the European imagination: Chinggis Khan, Temr (Tamerlane), Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus; Prester John, Sir John Mandeville, Gog and Magog. With skilful analysis, sensitive scholarship and wry humour, Jackson locates their actions or stories about their actions in a world characterized by the immense difficulty of long distance travel. It is a world of challenges: those facing nomads as they sought pasturage for their horses in the Syrian desert, the linguistic difficulties to be surmounted by Italian friars trying to preach Christianity to speakers of Turkish and Mongolian, the efforts of scholars in quiet European libraries trying to make sense of the limited information and mass of hearsay about the world beyond their direct experience. This is a story of the adjustments of reality to imagination and of imagination to reality on a vast geographical canvas, a story Peter Jackson tells with immense learning and deep humanity. I welcome it for that very reason.

Julia M. H. Smith

The bibliography has been extensively updated, and I have made alterations to the text and notes throughout, to reflect both new editions/translations of primary sources and relevant secondary literature published since 2004 and, in addition, the helpful points made by scholars who reviewed the original edition. I have in some measure restructured the book, transposing , which now gives enhanced attention to the Asian cultural impact upon Latin Europe. I have also omitted the Appendix on the authenticity of Marco Polos travels, which has been placed beyond doubt, in my view, by the publication of Stephen G. Haw, Marco Polo in China (2006), and J. P. Vogel, Marco Polo Was in China (2013).

Peter Jackson
Madeley, Staffordshire
August 2017

Three fortunate circumstances are responsible for the fact that this book has not taken rather longer to appear in print. The first is the enthusiastic response in 1997 of Andrew MacLennan, at that time History editor for Longman, to the information that I was contemplating a book on the Mongols and the Latin West. Andrews support at an early stage was instrumental in persuading me to undertake to write the book. I am also grateful to his successor, Heather MacCallum, for her sustained interest in the manuscript and for seeing the finished product into the first stages of publication.