Omyl, a city the Mongols rebuilt
Editorial contextIn the country of the Black Kitayans (Kara-Khitai), Carpini found a city the Mongols had built anew, with a house put up by the Emperor, where the friars were invited to drink. Rockhill's note explains that Imil was first built by the Kara-Khitai around 1125 and was Guyuk's own appanage.
After that we entered the country of the Black Kitayans, in which they (i.e., the Mongols) have built anew, as it were, a city called Omyl, in which the Emperor has erected a house where we were invited to drink
About Mongols in the land of the Kara-Khitai
Derbent's stone towers, cut down by the Tartars
Editorial contextRubruck passed through the Iron Gate (Derbent) on the Caspian. He credits Alexander the Great with building it, following medieval legend, and describes a narrow town with strong walls and towers of dressed stone. The Tartars had levelled the tops of the towers and the parapets, making them even with the walls. Rockhill's note says Muslim geographers credited the Persian king Khosrow Anushirvan.
The next day we came to the Iron Gate, which Alexander the Macedonian made … It has very strong walls without moats, and towers of great dressed (politis) stones ; but the Tartars have destroyed the tops of the towers and the parapets of the walls, making the towers even with the walls.
About Tartars (Mongols)
Keep in mind
The Alexander attribution is legend; the walls are Sasanian Persian work.
A round frame of sticks covered with white felt
Editorial contextRubruck describes the Mongol dwelling (the yurt or ger): a circular frame of interlaced sticks meeting in a hoop at the top with a chimney collar, covered in felt. The felt is whitened with chalk, clay or bone powder and embroidered with vines, trees, birds and beasts. Rockhill's note adds Carpini's description of the same round felt tents.
converging into a little round hoop on the top, from which projects above a collar as a chimney, and this (framework) they cover over with white felt. Frequently they coat the felt with chalk, or white clay, or powdered bone, to make it appear whiter, and sometimes also (they make the felt) black.
About Tartars (Mongols of the Golden Horde)
A house thirty feet wide, pulled by twenty-two oxen
Editorial contextSome Mongol houses were never taken down but rode on huge carts. Rubruck measured one cart himself and counted the oxen. The axle was as thick as a ship's mast and a driver stood in the doorway of the house. On the next pages he describes felt-covered chests on carts and a rich man's camp of one or two hundred carts.
I myself once measured the width between the wheel-tracks of a cart xx feet, and when the house was on the cart it projected beyond the wheels on either side v feet at least. I have myself counted to one cart xxii oxen drawing one house, eleven abreast across the width of the cart, and the other eleven before them.
About Tartars (Mongols of the Golden Horde)
Keep in mind
Rockhill thinks these carts were exceptionally large ones.
Karakorum's mud wall and its Chinese artisans
Editorial contextRubruck describes who lived in and built up Karakorum: a Muslim ('Saracen') quarter with the markets, and a quarter of Cathayans (northern Chinese), all artisans. There were twelve temples of various peoples, two mosques and one church, inside a mud wall with four gates, each gate with its own market. Rockhill's note adds that the Mongols themselves mostly lived in tents even at the capital.
one of the Saracens in which are the markets … the other is the quarter of the Cathayans, all of whom are artisans. … There are there twelve idol temples of different nations, two mahummeries in which is cried the law of Machomet, and one church of Christians in the extreme end of the city. The city is surrounded by a mud wall and has iiii gates.
About Mongols, with Muslim merchants and Chinese (Cathayan) craftsmen
Keep in mind
'Mahummeries' means mosques; 'idol temples' are mostly Buddhist.
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A silver fountain-tree made by a captive Parisian goldsmith
Editorial contextAt the entrance of Mongke Khan's palace stood a silver tree built by 'master William', a Paris goldsmith taken captive in Hungary. Four silver lions spouted mare's milk, and pipes in the tree poured wine, clarified kumiss, honey mead and rice wine when a hidden man blew a trumpet-blowing angel on top. On the next page Rubruck says the palace itself was laid out like a church with a nave and two rows of pillars.
master William the Parisian had made for him a great silver tree, and at its roots are four lions of silver, each with a conduit through it, and all belching forth white milk of mares. … And from one of these pipes flows wine, from another caracosmos, or clarified mare's milk, from another bal, a drink made with honey, and from another rice mead
About Mongke Khan's court; Guillaume Boucher of Paris
Mounds, statues and brick towers over the dead
Editorial contextCrossing the steppe, Rubruck saw the tombs of the Comans: great mounds (kurgans) topped by a stone statue holding a cup, small pointed 'pyramids', tiled towers and stone houses, though there was no stone nearby. Just before, he notes that the burial places of Mongol nobles of Genghis's family were kept secret and guarded. Rockhill's note quotes Carpini on Mongol nobles buried with a horse and a mare.
raise a great tumulus over the dead, and set up a statue to him, its face to the east, and holding a cup in its hand at the height of the navel. They make also pyramids to the rich, that is to say, little pointed structures, and in some places I saw great tiled covered towers, and in others stone houses, though there were no stones thereabout.
About Comans (Cumans or Kipchaks), subjects of the Tartars
Keep in mind
These tombs are Cuman, not Mongol; the subject 'The Comans' is on the previous page.
The Golden Orda: a tent on gold-plated pillars
Editorial contextCarpini attended the enthronement of Guyuk near Karakorum. After a first great tent called the Sira Orda, the court moved to the Golden Orda, a tent whose pillars were plated in gold with gold nails and whose roof and sides were hung with precious cloth. Guyuk was then seated on the throne and everyone drank until evening.
where another tent was set up, and it is called by them the Golden Orda … This tent rested on pillars covered with gold plates, fastened with gold nails and other woods, and the top and sides of it were covered with baldakins; the outside, however, being of other kinds of stuff.
About Mongols at the enthronement of Guyuk Khan
A note on this quote
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How kumiss is made
Editorial contextRubruck gives a step-by-step account of kumiss, fermented mare's milk: foals tied to a rope, mares milked, the milk churned in a skin with a club until it bubbles like new wine and turns pungent. He found it tasted of almond milk and 'intoxicates weak heads'. On the next page he says Batu received the milk of three thousand mares every day.
When they have got together a great quantity of milk, which is as sweet as cow's as long as it is fresh, they pour it into a big skin or bottle, and they set to churning it with a stick prepared for that purpose
About Tartars (Mongols of the Golden Horde)
Women whose headdresses look like helmets and lances
Editorial contextMarried Mongol women wore the bocca (bogtak), a tall bark frame covered with silk and topped with a tuft of quills and peacock feathers. Rubruck says a group of ladies riding in the distance looked like soldiers in helmets with lances raised, and that women rode astride like men. He adds, less kindly, that the fattest women with the smallest noses were thought the most beautiful.
and one sees them from afar, they look like soldiers, helmets on head and lances erect. For this bocca looks like a helmet, and the tuft above it is like a lance. And all the women sit their horses astraddle like men.
About Tartar (Mongol) married women
Mongke Khan: one God, many ways, like fingers on a hand
Editorial contextAfter a debate between Christians, Muslims and Buddhists at his court, Mongke Khan explained the Mongol faith to Rubruck. The Moal believe in one God, he said, but God gives different peoples different ways, as he gives the hand different fingers. It is a vivid statement of the Mongol court's religious tolerance, spoken through an interpreter.
"We Moal," he said, "believe that there is only one God, by whom we live and by whom we die, and for whom we have an upright heart." … "But as God gives us the different fingers of the hand, so he gives to men divers ways.
About Mongke Khan of the Mongols
Keep in mind
Mongke's words reached Rubruck through an interpreter, William Boucher's son.
Poured forth from Tartarus, so rightly called Tartars
Editorial contextRockhill's introduction quotes the English chronicler Matthew Paris, writing from St Albans, who never met a Mongol. He plays on the name: the Tartars burst out like devils from Tartarus, the classical underworld, so the name fits. The same passage goes on to call them monsters who drink blood and eat the flesh of dogs and men, a good example of wartime rumour.
a detestable nation of Satan, to wit, the countless army of the Tartars, broke loose from its mountain-environed home, and piercing the solid rocks (of the Caucasus), poured forth like devils from the Tartarus, so that they are rightly called Tartari or Tartarians.
About Tartars (Mongols invading eastern Europe)
Keep in mind
Hearsay and propaganda from a monk in England; the pun on Tartarus is why Europeans wrote 'Tartar' with an extra r.
The Mongols would like to erase the Tartar name
Editorial contextRubruck, told at the Mongol court, explains that the Tartars were a separate poor people living next to the Moal (Mongols). Chingis (Genghis) united both and sent the Tartars ahead in every war, so Europeans heard only 'The Tartars are coming!'. By Rubruck's time the Tartars had mostly been killed off and the Mongols disliked the name. Rockhill's note quotes Rashid al-Din saying the same.
Now this Chingis used to despatch the Tartars in every direction, and so their name spread abroad, for everywhere was heard the cry : "The Tartars are coming !" But through the many wars they have been nearly all killed off, and now these Moal would like to extinguish even the name and raise their own in its stead.
About Moal (Mongols) and the Tatar tribe
Keep in mind
Rubruck's story of Genghis's rise (as a blacksmith, and Prester John's brother 'Unc chan') mixes real events with legend.
Water-Mongols who took their name from the river Tatar
Editorial contextIn a footnote Rockhill quotes Carpini's account of the four nations of Mongolia before Genghis Khan. One, the Su-Mongal or 'Water-Mongols', called themselves Tartars after a river named Tatar. Rockhill's longer note on the next page traces the name Tatar back to a Turkic inscription of AD 732 and to Chinese annals.
That country had once four nations : one called Yeka Mongal, or the Great Mongals, the second called Su-Mongal, or Aquatic-Mongals, though they called themselves Tartars from a certain river which flows through their country and which is called Tatar (or Tartar)
About Su-Mongal, who called themselves Tartars
Keep in mind
Editorial footnote quoting Carpini; the river etymology is one of several medieval guesses.
Were the Tartars the lost tribes shut up by Alexander?
Editorial contextMatthew Paris repeats the belief that the Tartars were the ten lost tribes of Israel, whom Alexander the Great walled up in the Caspian mountains, the peoples who would break out at the end of the world (the Gog and Magog legend). Interestingly, he admits a doubt: these Tartars speak no Hebrew and do not know the law of Moses.
having forsaken the Mosaic law, followed after the golden calves, and whom Alexander the Macedonian endeavoured at first to shut up in the rugged mountains of the Caspians with bitumen-covered rocks. … There arises, however, a doubt whether the Tartars now coming from there be really they, for they do not use the Hebrew tongue
About Tartars (Mongols), imagined as the ten lost tribes
Keep in mind
Legend repeated by a chronicler far from the events; the sentence begins on the previous page ('these Tartars, of cursed memory, are of the ten tribes who').
No monsters, but hairy little men who cry 'chin, chin'
Editorial contextRubruck asked priests at Karakorum about the dog-headed and one-eyed monsters described by Isidore and Solinus. They told him they had never seen any, which surprised him. Then a priest from Cathay told him of tiny hairy creatures with stiff knees living among rocks east of Cathay, caught by leaving out mead to get them drunk, whose blood made a red dye.
They told me they had never seen such, which astonished me greatly, if it be true. … in the countries east of Cathay there are high rocks, among which dwell creatures who have in all respects human forms, except that their knees do not bend, so that they get along by some kind of jumping motion
About Priests at the Mongol court; Cathay
Keep in mind
The creature story is hearsay from a single informant; the denial of monsters is a useful check on older book-learning.
Dog-headed men and people who live on smells
Editorial contextBenedict the Pole's short report lists the peoples beside the friars' route: Mordvins, Bashkirs, and then the Cynocephali with dogs' heads and the Parossites who cannot chew and live on the smell of food. He also notes the rich city of Ornarum taken by the Tartars with floods of water. Rockhill's note traces the monsters to Pliny and Solinus.
then the Cynocephales, who have dogs' heads ; and then the Parocitae, who have a small narrow mouth, who can masticate nothing, but who live on liquids and sustain themselves on the odours of meats and fruits.
About Peoples on the northern edge of the Tartar lands
Keep in mind
Book-learned legend placed on the map, not something Benedict saw.