The History of Mar Yahballaha and Rabban Sauma

An unnamed Syriac author wrote this history in the early fourteenth century. It tells of two Christian monks from the Mongol-ruled east, Rabban Sauma and Markos, who journeyed west in the late thirteenth century. Markos became the patriarch Mar Yahballaha, and Sauma later went to Rome and France as an envoy of the Mongol ruler Arghun. The card lists E. A. Wallis Budge's 1928 English translation as a web text. The atlas does not hold the text of this edition: no copy was harvested into the corpus, so nothing from it was read for this guide.

How they knew

Part eyewitness

Who “Tartar” means here

Not recorded. The people at the centre are the Mongol rulers of China and Persia and the Christians who served them. Which words the Syriac text and Budge's English use for them is not stated on the card.

Why read it

It gives an east-to-west Christian view from inside the Mongol world, the reverse of the usual European travel story.

Watch out

The card says it is not a surviving personal travel diary, so narrative and transmission must be kept apart. The English is Budge's 1928 translation.