A PRECURSOR OF MARCO POLO.
The merchants and missionaries who were the first travellers and ambassadors of Christian times little thought, absorbed as they were in the object of their quest, how large a share of interest in the eyes of posterity would centre in the quaint observations, descriptions, and drawings which they were able incidentally to gather or make. Marco Polo’s name, and even those of his father and uncle, Niccolo and Matteo Polo, are well known, and are associated with all that barbaric magnificence the memory of which had a great share in keeping alive the perseverance of subsequent explorers. It was fitting that traders in jewels should reach the more civilized and splendid Tartars, and no doubt their store of rich presents, and their garments of ample dimensions as well as fine texture, would prove a passport through tribes so passionately acquisitive as the Tartars seem to have been. Nomads are not always simple-minded or unambitious. The Franciscan whose travels come just between the expedition of the elder Polo and the more famous Marco—Friar William Rubruquis—did not have the good-luck to see the wonders his successor described; but he mentions repeatedly that his entertainers made reiterated and minute inquiries as to the abundance of flocks and herds in the country he came from, and that they wondered—rather contemptuously—at the presents of sweet wine, dried fruits, and delicate cakes which were all he had to offer their great princes.
Rubruquis was traveller, missionary, and ambassador, but in the two pursuits denoted by the last-mentioned titles his success was but small. As a traveller, however, he was hardy, persevering, and observant. Though not bred a horseman, he often rode thirty leagues a day, and half the time at full gallop, he says. His companions, monks like himself, could not stand the fatigue, and both, at different intervals, parted company from him. But Rubruquis was young and strong, though, as he himself says, corpulent and heavy; and, above all, he was enterprising. He was not more than five-and-twenty when he started on his quest of the Christian monarch whom all the rulers of Europe firmly believed in, and whose name has come down to us as Prester John.
Born in 1230, he devoted himself early to the church, and during the Fourth Crusade went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. His real name was Ruysbroek, but, according to the unpatriotic fashion of the times, he Latinized it into Rubruquis. S. Louis, King of France, eager for the Christian alliance which the supposed Prester John would be able to enter into with him, had once already sent an embassy of monks to seek him; but they had failed to perform a sixth part of the journey set down for them, and had heard no tidings of a monarch answering to the description. The king, nothing daunted, determined to send another embassy on a voyage of discovery Vague news of a Christian Tartar chief, by name Sartach, had come to him; probably the toleration extended by the Tartars to Christians—a contrast to the behavior of most Saracenic chiefs—led to this obstinate belief in a remote Christian empire of the East.
William de Rubruquis, Bartholomew of Cremona, and a companion named Andrew, all Franciscan friars, were chosen for this new expedition. On the 7th of May, 1253 (says his narrative, though it has since been calculated that, as S. Louis was a captive at the time, the date 1255 is more likely to be correct), the travellers, having crossed the Black Sea from Constantinople, landed at Soldaia, near Cherson. The king, somewhat unwisely as it proved, had told his envoy to represent himself as a private individual travelling on his own account. But the Tartars were acute and jealous of foreigners; they knew that travelling entailed too much fatigue and danger to be undertaken simply for pleasure, and they had small regard for any stranger, unless the representative of a prince. They guessed his mission, and taxed him with it, till he was obliged to acknowledge that he was the bearer of letters from the Christian King of France to the mighty khan, Sartach. But though the people do not seem to have taken him for a private person, they were puzzled by the poverty of his dress and the scantiness of the presents he offered them. Even small dignitaries expected to be royally propitiated. He explained his vow of poverty to them, but this did not impress the Tartars as favorably as he wished. Still, he met with nothing but civility and hospitality.
Rubruquis says that Soldaia was a great mart for furs, which the Russians exchanged with the merchants of Constantinople for silks, cotton, spices, etc. The third day after his departure he met a wandering tribe, “among whom being entered,” he says, “methought I was come into a new world.”
He goes on to describe their houses on wheels, no despicable or narrow habitations, even according to modern ideas:
“Their houses, in which they sleep, they raise upon a round foundation of wickers artificially wrought and compacted together, the roof consisting of wickers also meeting above in one little roundel, out of which there rises upwards a neck like a chimney, which they cover with white felt; and often they lay mortar or white earth upon the felt with the powder of bones, that it may shine and look white; sometimes, also, they cover their houses with black felt. This cupola … they adorn with a variety of pictures. Before the door they hang a felt curiously painted over; for they spend all their colored felt in painting vines, trees, birds, and beasts thereupon. These houses they make so large that they contain thirty feet in breadth; for, measuring once the breadth between the wheel-ruts, … I found it to be twenty feet over, and when the house was upon the cart it stretched over the wheels on each side five feet at least. I told two-and-twenty oxen in one draught, drawing an house upon a cart, and eleven more on the other side. (Two rows, one in front of the other, we suppose.) … A fellow stood in the door of the house, driving the oxen.”
Sometimes a woman drove, or walked at the head of the leaders to guide them. “One woman will guide twenty or thirty carts at once; for their country is very flat, and they fasten the carts with camels or oxen one behind another. A girl sits in the foremost cart, driving the oxen, and all the rest of themselves follow at a like pace. When they come to a place which is a bad passage, they loose them, and guide them one by one.…”
The baggage was so arranged as to be taken through the smaller rivers of Asia without being injured or wetted. It consisted of square chests of wicker-work, with a hollow lid or cover of the same, “covered with black felt, rubbed over with tallow or sheep’s milk to keep the rain from soaking through, which they also adorn with painting or white feathers.” These were placed on carts with very high wheels, and drawn by camels instead of oxen. The encampment was like a large village, well defended by palisades formed of the carts off which the houses had been taken, and which were drawn up in two compact lines, one in front and one in the rear of the dwellings, “as it were between two walls,” says our traveller. A rich Tartar commonly had one hundred, or even two hundred, such cart-houses. Each house had several small houses belonging to it, placed behind it, serving as closets, store-rooms, and sleeping chambers, and often as many as two hundred chests and their necessary carts. This made immense numbers of camels and oxen for draught necessary; and, besides, there were the animals for food and milk, and the horses for the men. They had cow’s milk and mare’s milk, two species of food which they used very differently, and even made of social and religious importance. Only the men were allowed to milk the mares, while the women attended to the cows; and any interchange of these offices would have been deemed, in a man, unpardonable effeminacy, and in a woman indelicacy. At the door of the houses stood two tutelary deities, monsters of both sexes. The cow’s milk served for the food of women and children, while the mare’s milk was made into a fermented liquor called cosmos. This was supposed to make a heathen of the man who drank it; for the Nestorian Christians found among them, “who keep their own laws very strictly, will not drink thereof; they account themselves no Christians after they have once drunk of it; and their priests reconcile them to the church as if they had renounced the Christian faith.”
This cosmos was made thus: The milk was poured into a large skin bag, and the bag beaten with a wooden club until the milk began to ferment and turn sour. The bag was then shaken and cudgelled again until most of it turned to butter; after which the liquid was supposed to be fit for drinking. Rubruquis evidently liked it; says it was exhilarating to the spirits, and even intoxicating to weak heads; pungent to the taste, “like raspberry wine,” but left a flavor on the palate “like almond-milk.” Cara-cosmos, a rarer quality of the same, and reserved for the chiefs only, was produced by prolonging the beating of the bag until the coagulated portions subsided to the bottom. These drinks were received as tribute or taxes. Baatu, a chief with sixteen wives, received the produce of three thousand mares daily, besides a quantity of common cosmos, a bowl of which almost always stood on the threshold of every rich man’s house. The Tartars often drank of it to excess, and their banquets were relieved by music.
At these feasts, in which both sexes participated, the guests clapped their hands and danced to the music, the men before their host, the women before his principal wife. The host always drank first. The moment he put his lips to the bowl of cosmos, his cup-bearer cried aloud “Ha!” and the musicians struck up. This almost sounds like a mediæval Twelfth-night banquet, when all the guests rose and shouted, “The king drinks!” and then drained their goblets in imitation of the monarch of the night. The Tartars respectfully waited till the lord of the feast had finished his draught, when the cup-bearer again cried “Ha!” and the music ceased. After a pause, the guests, male and female, drank round in turns, each one to the sound of music, with a pause and silence before the next person took up the cup. This fashion of drinking continued unchanged for many centuries, and later travellers, amid the increased pomp of the court of the Tartar emperors of China, found it still in force—music, cries, pauses, and all. We have also seen, not many years ago, on the occasion of the marriage of the late young emperor of China, illustrations of the wedding procession, representing immensely wide carts, drawn by eleven oxen abreast, laden with costly state furniture; and if we take away the pomp and gilding, the picture is not unlike that of the Tartar camp-carts seen by our traveller. Rubruquis hints that the Tartars were not a temperate people; they drank much and not cleanly, and the way of “inviting” a person to drink was to seize his ears and pull them forcibly. The sweet wine, of which the monk had a small supply, pleased them very well, but they thought him not lavish enough in his hospitality; for once, on his offering the master of the house one flagon of this wine, the man gravely drained it and asked for another, saying that “a man does not go into a house with one foot.” In return, however, they did not give him much to eat; but perhaps he suffered hunger rather from his prejudice to the meat they ate than from their niggardliness in giving. He at last learned to eat horse-flesh, but was disgusted at his friends’ eating the bodies of animals that had died of disease. The Tartars were honest enough, and, never even took things by force; but they begged for everything that took their fancy as unblushingly as some of Paul Du Chaillu’s negroes in Africa. It surprised them to be refused anything—knives, gloves, purses, etc.—and, when gratified, never thought it necessary to thank their guests.
After a while Rubruquis met the carts of Zagatai, one of the chieftains, to whom he brought a letter from the Emperor of Constantinople. Here the Tartars asked “what we had in our carts—whether it were gold, or silver, or rich garments”; and both Zagatai and his interpreter were haughtily discontented at finding that at least some garment of value was not forthcoming. This is not wonderful, considering the wealth of their own great khans, of whom a later one, Kooblai, so celebrated in Marco Polo’s travels, gave his twelve lords, twelve times in the year, robes of gold-colored silk, embroidered with gold and precious stones. Zagatai, however, received the ambassador graciously. “He sat on his bed,”[45] says Rubruquis, “holding a musical instrument in his hand, and his wife sat by him, who, in my opinion, had cut and pared her nose between the eyes, that she might seem to be more flat-nosed; for she had left herself no nose at all in that place, having anointed the very scar with black ointment, as she also did her eyebrows, which sight seemed to me most ugly.… I besought him that he would accept this small gift at our hands, excusing myself that I was a monk, and that it was against our profession to possess gold, silver, or precious garments, and therefore that I had not any such thing to give him, unless he would receive some part of our victuals instead of a blessing.” The Tartars were always eager to receive a blessing over and above any present. He was constantly asked to make over them the sign of the cross; but it is to be feared that they looked upon it as a charm, and of charms they couldn’t have too many. From Zagatai, Rubruquis went to Sartach, who said he had no power of treating with him, and sent him on to his father-in-law, Baatu, the patriarch with sixteen wives and several hundred houses. Losing his ox-wagons and baggage on the way—for the independent tribes did not scruple to exact tribute from a traveller, even if he was a friend of their neighbors—he never lost his courage and his determination to sow the seeds of truth in Tartary. He did not know the language at first, and only learnt it very imperfectly at the last. Here and there a captive Christian, mostly Hungarians, or a Tartar who had learnt the rudiments of Christianity during an invasion of his tribe into Europe, acted as interpreter. All were uniformly kind to him. One of them, who understood Latin and psalmody, was in great request at all the funerals of his neighborhood; but the “Christianity” of the natives was but a shred of Nestorianism worked into a web of paganism, so that, the farther he advanced, the farther the great, powerful, united Christian community headed by Prester John seemed to recede. The people took kindly to Christian usages, and had some respect for the forms and ceremonies which the monk and his companions endeavored to keep up; but when it came to doctrine and morality, they grew impatient and unresponsive. One of Rubruquis’ interpreters often refused to do his office. “And thus,” says the traveller, “it caused me great chagrin when I wished to address to them a few words of edification; for he would say to me, ‘You shall not make me preach to-day; I understand nothing of all you tell me.’ … And then he spoke the truth; for afterwards, as I began to understand a little of their tongue, I perceived that when I told him one thing he repeated another, just according to his fancy. Therefore, seeing it was no use to talk or preach, I held my tongue.”
Hard riding was not the only thing that distressed the ambassador of the King of France. His companions gave him meat that was less than half-cooked, and sometimes positively raw. Then the cold began to be severe, and still there were at least four months’ travel before him. The Tartars were kind to him in their rough way, and gave him some of their thick sheepskins and hide shoes. He had insisted on journeying most of the time in his Franciscan sandals, and, full of ardor for his rule, had constantly refused gifts of costly garments. This the Tartars never quite understood, but they respected the principle which caused him to make so many sacrifices for the sake and furtherance of his religion. Wherever he passed, he and his companions endeared themselves to the inhabitants by many little services (doubtless also by cures wrought by simple remedies), and generally by their gentle, unselfish conduct towards all men. Rubruquis observed everything minutely as he passed. The manners and customs of the people interested him, and perhaps he did not consider them quite such barbarians as we of later days are apt to do. When we read the accounts of domestic life among the majority of people in mediæval times, and see that refinement of manner was less thought of than costliness of apparel and wealth of plate and cattle, the difference between such manners and those of the Tartars is not appreciable. Few in those days were learned, and learning it is that has always made the real difference between a gentleman and a boor. The marauding chieftains of feudal times were only romantic and titled highwaymen after all. So were the wandering Tartars. The difference that has since sprung up between the descendants of the marauding barons and those of the Tartar chiefs is mainly one of race. The former are of an enterprising, improving race, the latter of a stagnant one; and while the European nations that then trembled before the invading hordes of Jengis-Khan have now developed into intellectual superiority over every other race in the world, the Tartar is still, socially and intellectually, on the same old level, and his political advantages have vanished with his rude warlike superiority before the diplomacy and the military organization of his former victims.
Rubruquis noticed that among the superstitions common in Tartary was a belief that it was unlucky for a visitor to touch the threshold of a Tartar’s door. Modern travellers assert the same of the Chinese. Whenever our envoy paid a visit, he deferred to this belief by carefully stepping across the threshold of the house or tent, without letting any part of his person or dress come in contact with it. Their dress, on festive occasions, was rich; for they traded with China, Persia, and other southern and eastern countries for “stuffs of silk, cloths of gold, and cotton cloths, which they wear in time of summer; but out of Russia, Bulgaria, Hungaria, and out of Chersis (all which are northern regions and full of woods), … the inhabitants bring them rich and costly skins and furs of divers sorts, which I never saw in our countries, wherewithal they are clad in winter.” The rough sheepskin coats had their place also in their toilet, and a material made of two-thirds wool and one-third horsehair furnished them with caps, saddle-cloths, and felt for covering their wagons.
The women’s dress was distinguished from the men’s simply by its greater length, and they often rode, like the men, astride their horses, their faces protected by a white veil, crossing the nose just below the eyes and descending to the breast. Immense size and flat noses were the great desiderata among them. Marriage was a mere bargain, and daughters were generally sold to the highest bidder. Though expert hunters, the Tartars were scarcely what we should call sportsmen. They hunted on the battue system, spreading themselves in a wide circle, and gradually contracting this as they drove the game before them, until the unfortunate animals being penned in in a small space, they were easily shot down by wholesale. Hawking was also in vogue among the Tartars, and was reduced as much to a science as in Europe. They strenuously punished great crimes with death, as, for instance, murder, theft, adultery, and even minor offences against chastity. This, however, was less the consequence of a regard for virtue per se than of a vivid perception of the rights of property. No code but the Jewish and the Christian ever protected the honor of women for its own sake. In mourning for the dead it is strange that violent howling and lamentation, even on the part of those not personally concerned, should be a form common to almost all nations, not only of different religions, but of various and widely-separated races. The Tartars, as well as the Celts, practised it. Rubruquis mentions that they made various monuments over the graves of their dead, sometimes mere mounds or barrows of earth, or towers of brick and even of stone—though no stone was to be found near the spot—and sometimes large open spaces, paved with stone, with four large stones placed upright at the corners, always facing the four cardinal points.
It was during winter that the envoy arrived at the court or encampment of Mandchu-Khan. He says that it was at the distance of twenty days’ journey from Cataya, or Cathay (China), but it is difficult to say exactly where that was. Here Rubruquis found a number of Nestorian priests peacefully living under the khan’s protection, and among them one who had only arrived a month before the Franciscan friar, and said he had come, in consequence of a vision, to convert the khan and his people. He was an Armenian from the Holy Land. Our missionary describes him thus in his terse, direct way, which has this advantage over the long-winded and minute descriptions of our day, that we seem to see the man before us: “He was a monk, somewhat black and lean, clad with a rough hair-coat to the knees, having over it a black cloak of bristles, furred with spotted skins, girt with iron under his hair-cloth.” Mandchu-Khan was tolerant and liberal, and rather well disposed than otherwise to the Christian religion. His favorite wife, whom he had lately lost, had been a Christian, and so was his first secretary, but both Nestorian Christians. The khan, or his servants—who doubtless expected to be propitiated with the usual gifts if they could only succeed in wearying out the patience of the new-comers—made the envoy wait nine days for an audience. The Tartars thought it strange that a king’s ambassador should come to court bare-foot; but a boy, a Hungarian captive, again gave the required and often-repeated explanation. Before entering the large hall, whose entrance was closed by curtains of gayly-painted felt, the monks were searched, to see if they carried any concealed arms; and then the procession formed, the Christian missionaries entering the khan’s presence singing the hymn A Solis ortus cardine. The khan, like the lesser chieftains Rubruquis had already met, was seated on a “bed” or divan, dressed “in a spotted skin or fur, bright and shining.” The multitudinous bowings and prostrations in use at the Chinese court were very likely exacted, though the envoy says in general terms that “he had to bend the knee.” Such simplicity is, however, very far from the ceremonious Oriental ideal of homage, and it was not then, as it is now, esteemed an honor to receive Frankish envoys in the Frankish manner. Mandchu first offered his guests a drink of fermented milk, of which they partook sparingly, not to offend him; but the interpreter soon made himself unfit for his office by his indulgence in his favorite beverage. Rubruquis stated his mission with modest simplicity. In his quality of ambassador he might have resented the delay in receiving him; he might have complained of the familiarity and want of respect with which he had been often treated, and of the advantage taken of his gentleness and ignorance of the language to plunder him; but he was more than a king’s messenger. He was intent upon preaching the “good tidings” to the Tartars, and only used human means to compass a divine end. He acknowledged that he had no rich presents nor temporal goods to offer, but only spiritual benefits to impart. His practice certainly did not belie his theory. The people never disbelieved him, nor suspected him of being a political emissary. But still, he was unsuccessful. He soon perceived that his interpreter was blundering, and says: “I easily found he was drunk, and Mandchu-Khan himself was drunk also, as I thought.” All he could obtain was leave to remain in the country during the cold season. Inquiries met him on all sides as to the wealth and state of Europe; but of religion, beyond the few forms that pleased their eye, the people did not seem to think. They looked down with lofty indifference on the faith of those various adventurers whom their sovereign kindly sheltered, and ranked the Christian priests they already knew in the same category with conjurers and quack doctors. The Christianity of these Nestorians was even more imperfect than that of the Abyssinians at the time of the late English invasion of the unlucky King Theodore’s dominions. Rubruquis was horrified to find in these priests mere superstitious mountebanks. They mingled Tartar rites with corrupt ceremonies of the Catholic Church, and practised all manner of deceptions, mixing rhubarb with holy water as a medicinal drink, and carrying to the bedside of the sick lances and swords half-drawn from their sheaths along with the crucifix. Upon these grounds they pretended to the power of working miracles and curing the sick by spiritual means alone. The Franciscan zealously tried to reform these abuses and to convert the Nestorians before he undertook to preach to the Tartars; but here again he was unsuccessful. The self-interest of these debased men was in question, and truth was little to them in comparison with the comfort and consideration they enjoyed as leeches.
A curious scene occurred while at this encampment of the khan. There were many Mahometans in the country, and the sovereign, with impartial tolerance, protected them and their commerce as he did the person and property of other refugees. They, the Christians, and some representative Tartars were all assembled one day, by order of Mandchu, to discuss in public the merits of their respective faiths. But even on this occasion no bitterness was evinced, and the meeting, though it turned out useless in a spiritual sense, ended in a friendly banquet. Rubruquis did his best to improve this opportunity of teaching the truth; but the hour of successful evangelization had not yet struck, and much of the indifference of the Tartars is to be attributed to the culpable practices of the Nestorians, whose behavior was enough to discredit the religion they pretended to profess. But if the missionary, notwithstanding all his zeal, was unable to convert the heathens, he at least comforted and strengthened many captive Christians. We have already mentioned a few of these, and in Mandchu’s camp he met with another, a woman from Metz in Lorraine, who had been taken prisoner in Hungary, and been carried back into their own country by the invaders. She had at first suffered many hardships, but ended by marrying a young Russian, a captive like herself, who was skilful in the art of building wooden houses. The Tartars prized this kind of knowledge, and were kind to the young couple, who were now leading a tolerably comfortable life, and had a family of three children. To fancy their joy at seeing a genuine Christian missionary is almost out of our power in these days of swift communication, when nothing is any longer a marvel; but if we could put ourselves in their place, we might paint a wonderful picture of thankfulness, surprise, and simple, rock-like faith. The latter part of Lent was spent in travelling, as the khan broke up his encampment, and went on across a chain of mountains to a great city, Karakorum, or Karakûm, on the river Orchon. Every vestige of such a city has disappeared centuries ago, but Marco Polo mentions it and describes its streets, situation, defences, etc. He arrived there nearly twenty years later, and noticed that it was surrounded by a strong rampart of earth, there being no good supply of stone in those parts.
The passage of the Changai Mountains was a terrible undertaking; the cold was intense and the weather stormy, and the khan, with his usual bland eclecticism, begged Rubruquis to “pray to God in his own fashion” for milder weather, chiefly for the sake of the cattle. On Palm Sunday the envoy blessed the willow-boughs he saw on his way, though he says there were no buds on them yet; but they were near the city now, and the weather had become more promising. Rubruquis had his eyes wide open as he came to the first organized city of the Tartars, as Marco Polo affirms this to have been. It had scarcely been built twenty years when our monk visited it, and owed its origin to the son and successor of Jengis-Khan. “There were two grand streets in it,” says Rubruquis, “one of the Saracens, where the fairs are kept (held), and many merchants resort thither, and one other street of the Cathayans (Chinese), who are all artificers.” Many of the latter were captives, or at least subjects, of the khan; for the Tartars had already conquered the greater part of Northern China. The khan lived in a castle or palace outside the earthen rampart. In Karakorum, again, the monk found many Christians, Armenian, Georgian, Hungarian, and even of Western European origin. Among others he mentions an Englishman—whom he calls Basilicus, and who had been born in Hungary—and a few Germans. But the most important personage of foreign birth was a French goldsmith, William Bouchier, whose wife was a Hungarian, but of Mahometan parentage. This Benvenuto Cellini of the East was rich and liberal, an excellent interpreter, thoroughly at home in the Tartar dialects, a skilful artist, and in high favor at court. He had just finished a masterpiece of mechanism and beauty which Rubruquis thus minutely describes: “In the khan’s palace, because it was unseemly to carry about bottles of milk and other drinks there, Master William made him a great silver tree, at the root whereof were four silver lions, having each one pipe, through which flowed pure cow’s milk; and four other pipes were conveyed within the body of the tree unto the top thereof, and the tops spread back again downwards, and upon every one of them was a golden serpent, whose tails twined about the body of the tree. And one of these pipes ran with wine, another with cara-cosmos, another with ball—a drink made of honey—and another with a drink made of rice. Between the pipes, at the top of the tree, he made an angel holding a trumpet, and under the tree a hollow vault, wherein a man might be hid; and a pipe ascended from this vault through the tree to the angel. He first made bellows, but they gave not wind enough. Without the palace walls there was a chamber wherein the several drinks were brought; and there were servants there ready to pour them out when they heard the angel sounding his trumpet. And the boughs of the tree were of silver, and the leaves and the fruit. When, therefore, they want drink, the master-butler crieth to the angel that he sound the trumpet. Then he hearing (who is hid in the vault), bloweth the pipe, which goeth to the angel, and the angel sets his trumpet to his mouth, and the trumpet soundeth very shrill. Then the servants which are in the chamber hearing, each of them poureth forth his drink into its proper pipe, and all the pipes pour them forth from above, and they are received below in vessels prepared for that purpose.”
This elaborate piece of plate makes one think rather of the XVIth century banquets of the Medici and the Este than of feastings given by a nomad Tartar in the wilds of Central Asia. The goldsmith was not unknown to fame even in Europe, where he was called William of Paris. Several old chroniclers speak of him, and his brother Roger was well known as a goldsmith “living upon the great bridge at Paris.” This clever artist very nearly fell a victim to the quackery of a Nestorian monk, whereupon Rubruquis significantly comments thus: “He entreated him to proceed either as an apostle doing miracles indeed, by virtue of prayer, or to administer his potion as a physician, according to the art of medicine.” Besides the Tartars and their Christian captives, Rubruquis had opportunities of observing the numerous Chinese, or Cathayans, as they were called, who have been mentioned as the artificers of the town. There were also knots of Siberians, Kamtchatkans, and even inhabitants of the islands between the extremities of Asia and America, where at times the sea was frozen over. Rubruquis picked up a good deal of miscellaneous information, chiefly about the Chinese. He mentions their paper currency—a fact which Marco Polo subsequently verified—and their mode of writing; i.e., with small paint-brushes, and each character or figure signifying a whole word. The standard of value of the Russians, he says, consisted in spotted furs—a currency which still exists in the remoter parts of Siberia.
It was not without good reason, no doubt, that the monk-envoy made up his mind to leave the country he had hoped either to evangelize or to find already as orthodox as his own, and ruled by a great Christian potentate. Such perseverance as he showed throughout his journey was not likely to be daunted by slight obstacles; but finding the object of his mission as far from attainment as when he first entered Tartary, he at last reluctantly left the field. Only one European besides himself had ventured so far—Friar Bartholomew of Cremona; but even he shrank before a renewal of the hardships of mountain and desert travel, and chose rather to stay behind with Master William, the hospitable goldsmith, till some more convenient opportunity should present itself of returning to his own country. Rubruquis accordingly started alone, with a servant, an interpreter, and a guide; but though he had asked for leave to go on Whitsunday, the permission was delayed till the festival of S. John Baptist, the 24th of June. The khan made him a few trifling presents, and gave him a complimentary letter to the King of France; but no definite results were obtained. The homeward journey was long and tedious, and the only provision made for the sustenance of the party was a permission from the khan to take a sheep “once in four days, wherever they could find it.” Sometimes they had nothing to eat for three days together, and only a little cosmos to drink, and more than once, having missed the stations of the wandering tribes whom they had reckoned on meeting, even the supply of cosmos was exhausted. About two months after his departure from Karakorum, Rubruquis met Sartach, the great chief who had sheltered him for some time on his way to the river Don. Some belongings of the mission having been left in Sartach’s care, the envoy asked him to return them, but was told they were in charge of Baatu, Rubruquis’ other friend and protector. Sartach was on his way to join Mandchu-Khan, and was of course surrounded by the two hundred houses and innumerable chests which belonged to the establishment of a Tartar patriarch. If this was not exactly civilization, it was companionship, and the envoy must have been glad of a meeting which replenished his exhausted stores and suggested domestic comfort and abundance. More rough travelling on horseback, more experiences of hunger and cold (for the autumn was already coming on), more fording of rivers, and the monk found himself at Baatu’s court. It was the 16th of September—a year after he had left the chieftain to push on to the court of the Grand-Khan. Here he was joyfully and courteously received, and recovered nearly all his property; but as the Tartars had concluded that the whole embassy must have perished long ago, they had allowed some Nestorian priest, a wanderer under the protection now of Sartach, now of Baatu and other khans, to appropriate various Psalters, books, and ecclesiastical vestments. Three young men, Europeans, whom Rubruquis had left behind, had nearly been reduced to bondage under the same pretext, but they had not suffered personal ill-treatment. The kind offices of some influential Armenians had staved off the evil day, and the timely arrival of the long-missing envoy secured them their freedom. Rubruquis now joined Baatu’s court, which was journeying westward to a town called Sarai, on the eastern bank of the Volga; but the progress of the encumbered Tartars was so slow that he left them after a month’s companionship, and pushed on with his party, till he reached Sarai on the feast of All Saints. After this the country was almost an unbroken desert; but our traveller once more fell in with one of his Tartar friends, a son of Sartach, who was out upon a hawking expedition, and gave him a guard to protect him from various fierce Mahometan tribes that infested the neighborhood.
Here ended his travels in Tartary proper; but his hardships were far from ended yet. Through Armenia and the territories of Turkish and Koordish princes he journeyed slowly and uncomfortably, in dread of the violence of his own guides and guards, as well as of the insults of the populations whose country he traversed. He says these delays “arose in part from the difficulty of procuring horses, but chiefly because the guide chose to stop, often for three days together, in one place, for his own business; and, though much dissatisfied, I durst not complain, as he might have slain me and those with me, or sold us all for slaves, and there was none to hinder it.”
Journeying across Asia Minor and over Mount Taurus, he took ship at last for Cyprus. Here he learnt that S. Louis, who had been in the Holy Land at the time of his departure, had gone back to France. He would very much have wished to deliver his letters and presents of silk pelisses and furs to the king in person; but this was not granted him. The provincial of his order, whom he met at Cyprus, desired him to write his account and send his gifts to the king; and as in those days there was creeping in among the monks a habit of restless wandering, his superior, who was, it seems, a reformer and strict disciplinarian, tried the obedience and humility of the famous traveller by sending him to his convent at Acre, whence, by the king’s order, he had started. Rubruquis stood the test, but could not forbear imploring the king, by writing, to use his influence with the provincial to allow him a short stay in France and one audience of his royal master. Little is known of the great traveller and pioneer after this; and whether he ever got leave to see the king is doubtful. He fell back into obscurity, and it is presumed that Marco Polo did not even know of his previous travels over the same ground as the Polos explored. No record of his embassy remained but the Latin letter addressed to S. Louis, and even in France his fame was unknown for many centuries. It was not till after the invention of printing that his adventures became fairly known to the literary world, although Roger Bacon, one of his own order, had given a spirited abstract of his travels in one of his works. This, too, was in Latin, and after a time became a sealed book to the vulgar; so that it was not at least till the year 1600 that the old traveller’s name was again known. Hakluyt’s Collection of Voyages and Travels contains an English translation of Rubruquis’ letter, and twenty-five years later Purchas reproduced it in toto from a copy found in a college library at Cambridge. Bergeron, a French priest, put it into French, not from the original, but from Purchas’ English version. Since then Rubruquis has taken his place among the few famous voyagers of olden times; but from the vagueness of his language, the lack of geographical science in his day, and perhaps also the mistakes of careless copyists, it is not easy to trace his course upon the map. One fact, however, he ascertained and insisted upon, which a geographical society, had it existed in his time, would have been glad to register, together with an honorable mention of the discoverer—i.e., the nature of the great lake called the Caspian Sea. The old Greeks had correctly called it an inland sea, but an idea had since prevailed that it possessed some communication with the Northern Ocean. Rubruquis proved the contrary, but no attention was paid to his single assertion, and books of geography, compiled at home from ancient maps and MSS., without a reference, however distant, to the facts recorded by adventurous men who had seen foreign shores with their eyes, calmly continued to propagate the old error.