'We are no other than a Colony of Tatars'
Editorial contextThe anonymous English translator argues that Europeans should despise the Tatars less because Europeans descend from them: the Cimbrians, Celts, Gauls, Goths, Huns, Vandals and Franks were all 'swarms from the same hive' out of Tatary. On the next page he even toys with the idea that the Saxons were akin to the Uzbeks. This is 18th-century speculation about 'Scythian' origins, using 'Tatar' for any northern Asian people.
Our Contempt for the Tatars would still lessen perhaps, did we consider how nearly we stand related to them: that our Ancestors came originally from the North of Asia, and that our Customs, Laws, and way of Living were formerly the same with theirs: In short, that we are no other than a Colony of Tatars.
About Europeans and 'Tatars' in the translator's broad sense
Keep in mind
The translator's own theory, offered without evidence; nothing in Abu'l Ghazi's text says this.
Transcribed from the page image (corpus OCR for this volume is unreadable); long s normalized.
A 13th-century poem calls the Tartars cannibals
Editorial contextIn his notes d'Avezac prints lines, copied by Thomas Wright from a Cotton manuscript, of John of Garland's poem On the Triumphs of the Church. It paints the Tartars as Satan's household and the Church's plague who eat human flesh: no lion eats a lion and no wolf tears a wolf, but these men roast human limbs on spits. D'Avezac traces the poet's 'reliable' information to atrocity letters from priests in central Europe.
A people exceedingly savage, of Satan's household, a plague to the Church, at odds with the faith, in love with slaughter. … Hungry, man gnaws man; no lion fills its slack belly with lion's flesh; no wolf tears a wolf with its claw; this people turns limbs spitted on hazel skewers over the fire.
Working translation
Original wording
Gens est sæva nimis, Sathanæque domestica, pestis Ecclesiæ, fidei dissona, cædis amans. … Esuriens hominem corrodit homo; leo nullus Carne leonina viscera laxa replet; Non lupus ungue lupum lacerat; gens ista colurnis In veribus vertit membra veruta foco.
About Tartars (Mongols invading Europe, 1241)
Keep in mind
War propaganda built on rumour; Garland never met a Mongol. The poem's Latin is quoted from a single manuscript copy and the OCR is rough.
Scholars decide they are the peoples before Antichrist
Editorial contextAfter the Hungarian disaster, Thomas says, the whole world trembled. Even the emperor Frederick II was said to be thinking not of resistance but of a hiding place. Learned men searched old writings and concluded, above all from the prophecies attributed to Methodius, that these were the peoples who must come before Antichrist, and cities began fortifying themselves in case the Tartars marched on Rome.
Even Frederick, the Roman emperor, is said to have thought not of resisting but of a hiding place. Then many learned men, searching the old writings, conjectured, above all from the sayings of Methodius the Martyr, that these were those peoples who must come before the advent of Antichrist.
Working translation
Original wording
Ipse etiam Fredericus Rom. Imperator non de resistendo, sed de latibulo dicitur cogitasse. Tunc litterati plerique viri veteres scrutantes scripturas, conjiciebant maxime ex dictis Methodii Martyris has fore illas gentes, quae praecedere debent antichristi adventum.
About Tartars as seen by Latin scholars
Keep in mind
The claim about Frederick is gossip ('is said'); the Methodius prophecy is the Pseudo-Methodius apocalypse, which linked enclosed northern nations with the end of the world.
The scan is too rough to double-check this quote by machine. Compare it with the page.
Scholars who moved Atlantis to Spitsbergen
Editorial contextPallas rejects the theory, pushed by the Augustinian friar Georgi, that Tibetan and Mongol Buddhism grew out of Nestorian Christianity or Manichaeism, calling it a heap of rubble glued together in a polemical spirit. He lumps it with other learned fantasies: the Chinese and Indians as an Egyptian colony, the Lapps as Israelites, pagan gods as biblical patriarchs, and the recent placing of Atlantis and the first seat of all learning as far north as Spitsbergen.
With such learned bombast the Chinese and Indians have before now been made into an Egyptian colony, the Lapps into Israelites, the idols of heathendom into patriarchs of the Bible, and only recently the Atlanteans, and with them the first seat of all learning, have been moved as far as Spitsbergen
Working translation
Original wording
Mit dergleichen gelehrtem Schwall sind wohl eher die Chineser und Indianer zu einer ägyptischen Colonie, die Lappländer zu Israeliten, die Götzen des Heydenthums zu Patriarchen der Bibel gemacht, und noch neulich die Atlanten und mit ihnen, der erste Sitz aller Wissenschaften bis nach Spitzbergen verlegt worden
About Mongol and Tibetan Buddhists; European theorists
Keep in mind
Pallas does not name the Atlantis author; it fits J.-S. Bailly's northern Atlantis letters of 1779.
