B. Campbell, Michael Uebel, and Michèle Guéret-Laferté are among those who have argued for medieval texts’ construction of a strange eastern Other to aid in the formation of European identity.41 Matters of the alienation or at least discomfiture experienced by particular travelers in eastern locations should of course not be ignored. William of Rubruck’s statement that upon entering Mongolian territory “it seemed indeed to me as if I were stepping into some other world [aliud saeculum]” has often been quoted.42 Yet my own view coincides closely with Albrecht Classen’s assessment that “intolerance might well have been the birthmark of the early modern age, whereas in the Middle Ages the relationship between ‘self’ and ‘other’ was still a matter of complex and open-ended negotiation,” and with Paul Freedman’s persuasive dismissal of any easy application of anxieties about “Otherness” to medieval perceptions.43 Furthermore, it is worth pointing out that definitional boundaries are not only drawn by appeal to binaries and opposites. They are also made by recourse to synonyms—by drawing attention to similarity and sameness as much as to difference. This is, after all, the principle on which modern dictionaries work. The development of a European identity was aided by its reading public’s interest in places and peoples akin to them as well as alien.
Moreover, the relationship between medieval European and Asian regions was by no means one of a submissive, feminine East to the masterful, masculine West, as in Said’s construction of Orientalism. Europeans were conscious of the much greater military might, economic force, and social organization found in various eastern contexts. Even when writing of places with simpler and poorer societies, such as parts of southeast Asia, it was not with a colonial or imperial eye. When travel writers offered negative views on eastern peoples this was due to the threat the latter posed as actual or potential enemies to Christian Europe (especially in depictions of Mongols up to the late thirteenth century) or due to ancient European bias against unsettled peoples. With regard to the latter, W. R. Jones has demonstrated how medieval authors inherited ancient Greek and Roman views of “Barbarian,” “sylvan,” or nomadic peoples as belligerent, cruel, lawless, deceitful, and senseless.44 To Cicero, for example, sylvestres homines were truly “brutes” barely distinguishable from wild animals, lacking in all reason, law, discipline, or civility and likely to eat raw human flesh and drink blood from skulls. Early medieval authors added “pagan” to this list of defects. Barbarian imagery was successively applied to Cimmerians, Scythians, Celts, and Germans, and by the thirteenth century the Mongols had become the obvious target; later it would be the turn of the Turks. In subsequent chapters we will see that not only nomadic Mongols but also some southeast Asian villagers were more often constructed through images of barbarism such as anthropophagic habits and monstrous morphology than were the dwellers of the great cities of China and south India. Yet even while we pay heed to such ancient influences, we must be wary of assuming that medieval travel writers imposed a simple template on the peoples observed. This will be particularly apparent in the complex perspectives on Mongolians supplied by such intelligent observers as Carpini and Rubruck.
“Europe”
What, then, was “Europe"? Denys Hay’s 1957 work on the medieval formation of European identity insists on a distinction between Europe and Christendom. He argues that the latter, which had already existed from late antiquity to refer to a more abstract body of the Christian faithful without territorial limits, began to emerge as a geographical entity and political identity with the Muslim expansion of the sixth to ninth centuries and became stronger during the period of Gregorian reform and the production of crusading propaganda from the late eleventh century.45 In Hay’s exercise in “historical semantics,” however, “Europe” is found to have been employed very sparingly by writers before the later thirteenth century, most often in geographic texts or cartography.46 The scriptural tradition of the partition of the world between the three sons of Noah—Asia to Shem, Africa to Ham, and Europe to Japheth—was elaborated in Latin and vernacular writings across the medieval centuries and this, too, helped keep the idea of Europe culturally current. Yet before the later thirteenth century, Europe “is a word devoid of sentiment, Christendom a word with profound emotional overtones.”47 This began to change, Hay argues, with the late medieval crisis of confidence concerning papal authority arising out of the “Babylonian captivity,” Great Schism, and Conciliar movement, which were damaging to Christian unity. The situation was compounded by the Reformation movements of the sixteenth century. In the meantime Humanists were turning to the word “Europe,” which had appeal for its classical resonances, and the development of portolani (maps charting shorelines) gave the geographic outline of Europe clearer visual expression. The process was slow, however, and it was not really until the eighteenth century that “Europe” fully supplanted “Christendom” as a magnet for loyalties and site for the projection of personal and group identities. (Even today it remains a fragile unity without a singular linguistic, religious, racial, legal, or political identity.) Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is also skeptical, suggesting that ‘“Europe” as a unifying concept is a fairly recent fiction.48
On the other side, there have been several attempts to supply a genealogy of Europe in recent years, especially since the formation of the European Union in 1993. Jacques le Goff finds references to “Europe” scattered in a number of early and high medieval texts and argues ardently for a medieval conception of Europe.49 Robert Bartlett, in his magisterial account, argues for its emergence by the later Middle Ages. “By 1300,” he asserts, “Europe existed as an identifiable cultural entity.”50 He examines the emergence of “Christendom” (the region under the spiritual jurisdiction of the pope, following the rites and liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church) as a territory and “Christian” as a racial category, though “Europe” and “European” are not studied in the same fashion.51 William Chester Jordan’s essay on the subject, which argues strongly for a sense of unity within the Latin West from the eleventh century, avoids the terminological problem by averring that people “rarely used the word Europe (Latin, Europa)”; instead their “word of choice … was Christianitas (Christendom).”52 The view of Timothy Reuter is that “Europe” (though not “Europeans” so much) emerged “to denote the Roman, Latin-speaking lands to the north of the Mediterranean” between 300 and 600 CE and that although it appears only infrequently in medieval texts it retains a continuity as a way of expressing an “usness” (Wir-Gefühl) even within polyethnic early medieval empires and should be seen as far from negligible before the late Middle Ages.53
Particularly relevant to the present book is Felicitas Schmieder’s contention that European contact with Mongols and journeys to eastern regions in the thirteenth century constituted a “world historical moment,” as from that time some Latin Christians became increasingly aware of themselves as Europeans and chose “Europe” rather than “Christendom” to convey a collective identity.54 We might add that in 1241, according to Matthew Paris’s Chronica majora, Emperor Frederick II wrote to King Henry III of England imploring for help in countering the Mongol onslaughts, and his letter moves from speaking of “the whole of Christendom [totius Christianitatis]” to “the West [Occident]” and “the European empire [imperialis Europae].” His letter identifies Germany, France, Spain, England, Almaine, Dacia, Italy, Burgundy, Apulia, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and Norway, each with its own virtues in valor and topography yet together lying under “the royal star of the West [sub occiduo cardine regio]” in a manner indicating a conception of Europe composed of autonomous powers and united not only by Christianity but also by military cause against a common enemy. However, his is not a modern way of thinking about Europe: Frederick’s “European empire” is his own domain as Holy Roman Emperor and his key conflict is with the papal leader of Christendom.55
Clearly “Europe” existed as a medieval construct: what is more difficult to determine is how widely its influence was felt among the kinds of readers who sought out travelers’ accounts of the far Orient. For our purposes, it is interesting to note that at least one Irish person in the fifteenth century, Prince Finghin MacCarthy Reagh, wanted a copy of Marco Polo’s Divisament translated into his vernacular so that he could read it alongside lives of Irish saints and a historical narrative of Patrick’s conversion of pagan