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The first mention of the Mongols appear in Latin sources in 1221. According to these sources, the Mongol army, which accomplished a number of conquests in Central Asia, Persia, and Transcaucasia, consisted of baptized nomads. Latin authors asserted that at the head of this army stood a certain David, “king of the Indies”, which sought to help the Middle Eastern Christians and “liberate” Jerusalem from Muslim rule. Undoubtedly, the Latin sources meant by the “deeds of King David” the first western campaign of the Mongols led by Genghis Khan, which began in 1219 and was directed against the Central Asian sultanate of Khwarezm. These Latin sources were written at the time, when the troops of Genghis Khan had already conquered Khwarezmian territory in Central Asia and began military actions in Khorasan, while the separate divisions of the Mongols led by Jebe and Subedei invaded Transcaucasia and inflicted the first serious defeat to the Christian kingdom of Georgia. Even though the later Oriental sources indicate the presence of certain baptized nomads in the Mongol army, at the moment it is known for certain that the bulk of the nomadic army of Genghis Khan did not adhere to the Christian religion and the Mongol divisions led by Jebe and Subedei were sent by Genghis Khan in the west in pursuit of the former Khwarezmian Sultan Muhammad rather than for the “liberation” of Jerusalem or provision of any tangible support to the Middle Eastern Christians. Thus, the early Latin information about the Mongols contains relatively accurate description of the western conquests of Genghis Khan, but represent a specific explanation for the Mongol expansion, which does not correspond to historical reality. This article represents an attempt to explain this distortion of reality. In the first part of the article, the author gives a brief description of the Latin sources containing information about the “king David’s” advance to the west. In the second part, the author attempts to find an explanation for the distortion of historical reality in Latin sources by considering the information of these sources in the ideological context of the Fifth Crusade.
The author of this article tried to trace the evolution of the Mongols’ perception in Latin sources based on information about their military expansion in the Middle East. The first mention of the Mongols appear in Latin sources in 1221. According to these sources, the Mongol army, which accomplished a number of conquests in Central Asia, Persia, and Transcaucasia, consisted of baptized nomads. Latin authors asserted that at the head of this army stood a certain David, “king of the Indies”, which sought to help the Middle Eastern Christians and “liberate” Jerusalem from Muslim rule. Undoubtedly, the Latin sources meant by the “deeds of king David” the first western campaign of the Mongols led by Genghis Khan, which began in 1219 and was directed against the Central Asian sultanate of Khwarezm. These Latin sources were written at the time, when the troops of Genghis Khan had already conquered Khwarezmian territory in Central Asia and began military actions in Khorasan, while the separate divisions of the Mongols led by Jebe and Subedei invaded Transcaucasia and inflicted the first serious defeat to the Christian kingdom of Georgia. Later, however, a positive Mongols’ perception in the West began to gradually change. First of all, this change was affected by reports of the Georgian rulers expressing obvious doubts about former confidence that the Mongol army was entirely composed of Christians. Even greater impact had information about beginning of the Mongol re-conquest of Transcaucasia. An early report of the Patriarch of Jerusalem about the Mongol units’ appearance in Transcaucasia headed by Chormaqan noyan still reflected the hope for the Mongols’ adherence to the Christian faith. However, subsequent reports on the beginning of the Mongol conquest of Great Armenia radically changed European perceptions of the Mongols. Starting from 1236, Latin sources began to represent the Mongols as fiends trying to interpret their appearance in accordance with apocalyptic scenarios of popular eschatological writings.
At the end of 2015 Sh.Marjani Institute of History of AS RT published a new monograph by Roman Hautala in the framework of a special project «Textual Heritage» of Usmanov Center for Research on the Golden Horde and Tatar Khanates dedicated to publication and translation of a variety of medieval sources on the Golden Horde history. In his book Hautala presented major part of Latin sources containing early European information about the Tatar-Mongols and written in the period preceding the invasion of Hungary by nomadic army headed by Batu. Thus, the monograph contains historical documents and fragments of Latin chronicles, which were compiled before 1241. This anthology is aimed at presenting evolution of the European perception of the Tatar-Mongols gradually changing due to accumulation of fragmented information obtained from the East. The monograph’s main section entitled “Sources” contains 91 fragments from Latin sources with information on the growing territorial expansion of the Mongol Empire. Each of these fragments contains, in turn, information about the author and circumstances of their compilation, original text with all significant discrepancies, and Russian translation with detailed comments. The “Sources” section is preceded by an introductory part containing a detailed analysis of the sources in the context of contemporary historical research. At the end of the monograph the author has placed Latin and Russian index of names and places, which facilitates the search for materials on a particular historical, geographical, or prosopographical topics. The author classifies the presented information on the Tatar-Mongols ac-cording to two main geographical regions of its origin and subsequent arrival to Europe. Subsection “Mentions of the Mongol Expansion in Reports from the Middle East” contains the earliest information about the Tatar-Mongols during the period of Chinggis Khan’s campaign against Khwarezm and further conquest by the Mongol Empire of the Transcaucasian region. Next subsection “Infor-mation on the Relations between the Kingdom of Hungary and Cumans” provides information about intensification of the relations between the Árpád monarchy and neighboring nomads on the eve of the Tatar invasion. These relations had a direct impact on the course of the imminent attack of the army of Batu against Hungary and subsequent interactions between the ulus of Jochi and Kingdom of Hungary, which included in its structure a significant number of Cumans escaped the subordination to the Mongol Empire. The third and last subsection “Information on the Mongol Western Campaign” includes reports about the impending Tatar attack that arrived to Western Europe through the Hungarian Kingdom. In each subsection the author arranged the sources in chronological order al-lowing to trace the process of accumulation of Western information about the Tatar-Mongols. In addition, this order also allows to trace the evolution of the perception of the Tatar-Mongols in the Latin world. In particular, the information received from the Middle East reflect the initial perception of the Tatar-Mongols as potential allies of the Christians in their fight against the Muslims of Syria and Egypt. Later, during the Mongol re-conquest of the Transcaucasian region, the Tatar-Mongols began to be depicted as “noble savages” who avoided “corrupt-ing” influence of civilization, but were not deprived of sympathy toward Christi-anity. It was only due to the news of the persecution against Christians in the Middle East that the Tatar-Mongols came to be perceived the “devil incarnates”, performing, nevertheless, the role that was prepared for them in eschatological scenarios of Latin Christianity (this evolution has a direct impact on the choice of the title of this anthology). In turn, the information coming from the Kingdom of Hungary (that was not deprived of similar eschatological interpretations) contains more specific and realistic information about the Tatar-Mongols including detailed information on the warfare and composition of the nomadic army, which was approaching the eastern borders of the Latin World. Keywords: history of the Mongol Empire, nomads of Eastern Europe, Árpád monarch, Latin sources, medieval eschatology.
Zolotoordynskoe Obozrenie
Image of the Golden Horde Tatar-Mongols and Ilkhans in the Writings of Crusade Propagandists (late 13th – early 14th centuries) »2015 •
By the end of the 13th century, when the Tatar-Mongols were already well-known in Latin Europe, several experts in the Near East affairs tried to specify the real place of the Tatars of the Golden Horde and the Ilkhan Horde in the complicated geopolitical complex, related to the struggle for the liberation of the Holy Land and the Holy Sepulchre from the "yoke of the Saracens". The experts had to explain to the Western European elites how they should perceive the two Western uluses of the formerly united Mongol Empire of the Chinggisids. The relations with the Golden Horde and the Ilkhans of Iran appeared to be of crucial importance for the liberation and preservation of the Holy Land. Thus, two images of the Tatars took shape gradually: that of potential enemies in the case of the Golden Horde, and the possible allies in the case of the Ilkhans. This text is dedicated to several treatises of these propagandists, unified under the title and the slogan De Recuperatione Terr...
2018 •
The crusading movement influenced Muslim-Crusader thoughts and imaginations. It, in turn, changed the way in which West and East perceived each other. Thereby the legends played a role in transferring some imaginative and legendary conceptions shaped the Crusades’ events. This paper studies the legend of Prester John and its development over space and time, examining how Prester John was perceived in the fact of a Christian saviour and a Mongol ruler during the 12th and 13th century. Additionally, I strive to measure the extent to which such connections and imaginations shaped the historical events of the conflict between the Muslims and the Crusaders at the time.
Despite a large number of academic publications, the process of early Islamization of the Golden Horde is still insufficiently studied. Review of contemporary studies, found at the beginning of this paper, serves both to present a general view on the causes and nature of Islamization and demonstrate certain drawbacks of this opinion. The following brief overview of the sources used by researchers is intended to demonstrate the need to consider content of alternative sources. In this context, the most valuable are those written sources that were drawn up in the territory of the Golden Horde during the reign of Uzbek Khan. Therefore, the author finds it perfectly appropriate to present, in the second part of this paper, the content of those Latin sources that contain valuable information on the religious situation in the Golden Horde.
Medieval Encounters 20, no.1
Armenian Involvement in the Latin-Mongol Crusade: Uses of the Magi and Prester John in Constable Smbat’s Letter and Hayton of Corycus’s “Flos historiarum terre orientis,” 1248–13072014 •
Trivent Publishing
The Prester John Legend between East and West during the Crusades. Entangled Eastern-Latin Mythical Legacies2022 •
This book considers the history of the Prester John legend and its impact on the Crusades, investigating its entangled mythical history between East and West during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The present study thus responds to the still pressing need for a comprehensive historical investigation of the twelfth and thirteenth crusading history of the legend and its impact on the Muslim-Crusader encounters, examining various Latin, Arabic, Syriac, and Coptic accounts. It further reflects on new eastern aspects of the legend, presenting a new Arab scholarly view. This book first charts a pre-history of the legend in the late ancient Christian prophecy of the Last Emperor down to the emergence of the legend in the mid-twelfth century. Second, the work presents a historical discussion of the legend and its association with actual occurrences in the Far East and the Levant, analysing the legend history under the crusading crisis and the imperial papal schism in Europe. Meanwhile, the work considers the vague Prester John Letter addressed to Manuel I Komnenus, Byzantine Emperor, and its elaborate conception of a mythical eastern kingdom, revealing imaginative parallels on the wondrous East and legendary Eastern Christian kings in Arabic Muslim and Christian accounts of the Muslim geographer and cartographer al-Idrīsī, the Coptic Ābū al-Makārim and the Syriac Ibn al-ʿIbrī (Bar Hebraeus), among others. Moreover, the book examines how the legend impacted war and peace processes between the Ayyubids and the Crusaders during the Fifth Crusade against Egypt (1217-1221), revealing how it was mingled with Arabic and Eastern Christian prophecies at the time. The study concludes by investigating the perception of Prester John by the papal and European envoys to the Mongols in the thirteenth century, revealing how the legend was instrumentalised (and even weaponised) to establish a Latin-Mongol crusade through a parallel exploration of relevant Latin, Arabic and Syriac sources. The book introduction is available for download from here: https://trivent-publishing.eu/home/142-180-the-prester-john-legend-between-east-and-west-during-the-crusades-entangled-eastern-latin-mythical-legacies.html#/27-cover-paperback
Journal Journal of Millenial Studies 1, 1
Nota sectam Maometicam atterendam a tartaris et Christianis. The Mongols as non-believing apocalyptic friends around the year 12601998 •
Journal of Near Eastern Studies
Review: History of the Mongols: Based on Eastern and Western Accounts of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries1997 •
Huerta, R. & Panciroli, C. (2023). La belleza de la muerte. Patrimonio y memoria en la formación pedagógica. Revista Gearte, 10, 1-29. http://dx.doi.org/10.22456/2357-9854.129293
La belleza de la muerte. Patrimonio y memoria en la formación pedagógica2021 •
1998 •
Grafologia medica
Correlazione tra linguistica e grafologia: Camillo Baldi e il contesto investigativo2023 •
LES TRAITÉS DU MANUSCRIT 744 DE BERKELEY (1375) Édition de travail bilingue, traduction et commentaires
THE TREATIES FROM THE BERKELEY MANUSCRIPT (1375) latin:Français2024 •
Историческая информатика: методологические и историографические аспекты развития
Историческая информатика: методологические и историографические аспекты развития. Диссертация на соискание учкной степени доктора исторических наук.2018 •
The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
Extended Adaptation Database Construction for Oriental Medicine Prescriptions Based on Academic Information2021 •
Chinese Physics B
Electronic structures and thermoelectric properties of solid solutions CuGa1−xInxTe2: A first-principles study2014 •
2012 •
Indonesian Journal of Society Engagement
Manajemen Kewirausahaan Bagi Para Penggiat Bisnis Pemula Pimpinan Ranting Gerakan Pemuda Ansor Kelurahan Petir, Kecamatan Cipondoh, Kota Tangerang2021 •