869, Ep. 160 with Mark Cruse, author of The Mongol Archive in Late Medieval France
7:47PM Mar 11, 2025
Speakers:
Jonathan Hall
Mark Cruse
Keywords:
Mongol archive
late medieval France
Marco Polo
King Louis the Ninth
Genghis Khan
medieval manuscripts
global medieval objects
French contact
diplomatic contact
Mongol expansion
art objects
intellectual tradition
crusade treatises
encyclopedias
travel accounts.
Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. iIn this episode, we speak with Mark Cruse, author of the new book The Mongol Archive in Late Medieval France: Texts, Objects, Encounters, 1221 -1422. Marc Cruse is Associate Professor of French at Arizona State University. His books include, as author, Illuminating the "Roman d'Alexandre" and as editor, Performance and Theatricality in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. We spoke to Mark about the wide range of materials, including chronicles, encyclopedias, manuscript Illuminations, maps, romances and travel accounts that detail the contact between the French and the Mongols in the late Middle Ages, how the French made sense of a people previously unknown to the European intellectual tradition and the prominent individuals that make up this history, including Marco Polo, King Louis the ninth and Genghis Khan.
Hello, Mark. Welcome to the podcast.
Thanks very much for having me. Jonathan.
Well, it's our pleasure, and I'm excited to talk to you about your new book, The Mongol Archive in Late Medieval France: Texts, Objects, Encounters, 1221-1422. Your book is the first comprehensive study of contact between France and the Mongols in the late Middle Ages. Tell us the backstory to this book. How did it come to be?
So this book is really the confluence of three major interests of mine, and these interests go back to my time in graduate school in medieval French literature at New York University. And the first interest was in Alexander the Great he's the person I wrote my dissertation on, and specifically on the reception of his legend in late medieval France, when there's a lot of writing about Alexander, and people are re imagining his story. And so Alexander the Great got me interested in thinking about the relationship between Europe and Asia, because, of course, Alexander is a world conqueror. He's someone who travels out from Greece and into North Africa and into Asia. And at the same time that I was writing that dissertation in first book, I was lecturing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at the Met, we have a remarkable collection of global medieval objects. So we have ivories that come from Elephant ivory from Africa, but the ivories were carved in Paris in the 13th and 14th centuries. Or we have art objects made in Europe, but the materials came from as far afield as China or from India or from Central Africa. So as I was learning about this collection and presenting it to the public, I realized that in art and in artifacts, there is a whole record of global history that I found really fascinating, and I wanted to explore more. And then finally, what happened was I was interested in writing a book about Marco Polo. It may surprise listeners to know that Marco Polo although he was a Venetian, born in 1254, died in 1324, he wrote his famous book in a dialect of Old French. And he did that because he was trying to reach an international audience. So initially I was going to write a book about the reception of Marco Polos text in France itself, where there was a lot of interest, especially among very elite readers, but it turns out that a French scholar wrote that book and wrote a very large book about Marco Polo. So that stole my thunder. So then I had to think differently about how I was going to pursue these interests in France and the global middle ages, and I realized that you really couldn't tell the story of Marco Polo without telling the story of French contact with the Mongols more broadly. So Marco Polo was still a very important figure in my book. But now the book, as you said when you gave the title, spans the period from 1221, to 1422, which is the end of the Middle Ages in many ways, and which is the high point of contact between France and the Mongols. It's when the Mongol Empire, of course, exists. And those three interests really come together in the book, and I think are visible in the way that I've structured it, and in the kinds of things that I discuss,
Nice, nice. It's interesting the trajectory of your research. And once you determine that you're going to study the Mongols and the connection between the Mongols in France, you've been a busy man in the book, you've. Selected and compiled two really well. One's very massive, large data set. The second one is, is not as massive, but still very, very helpful and impressive. The first one that I'm mentioning that it's quite large. It's a list of any text written or archived in France between 1221, and 1422, that makes a reference to the Mongols. And then be the smaller list, which a list of objects that may attest to the connections between late medieval France the Mongols tell us more about these data sets that you've created and some of the examples of Franco Mongol time tack that you found within them.
Sure. So I spent about 10 years calling through various resources, published sources and unpublished, so medieval manuscripts in particular, looking for any text that was either composed in France or archived in France in the late Middle Ages that mentions the Mongols. And I'm not saying that this list is necessarily definitive. What I'm hoping is that this catalog that I have compiled will spur further research and be a really useful resource for people, but I do think that it is pretty comprehensive, and it includes 178 entries. And one of the most surprising things about this research was the wide range of sources in which the Mongols figure. So everything from private letters to maps to Chronicles to crusade treatises, some of these works are very well known. Some of these works have, frankly, never been studied or completely overlooked. And so one thing that I'm trying to give people with this database, basically this table is a sweeping panorama of contact between France and the Mongols and the many ways in which the Mongols were thought about and described and discussed in late medieval France. But as I say, I also want it to be a real reference for people and something that they can go to and build on the research that I have done, I'm very hopeful for that. And I would say that two of the most interesting entries in that large data set are, well, first of all, one is not a text at all. One One is a person. One is a lineage. And that is to say that there's a Valois dynasty. So this dynasty of kings, which reigns from the 14th to the 16th centuries. Some very famous figures in this dynasty. Well, that dynasty, the first king was Philip the sixth and 1328, to 1350, and his great grandmother was a cumon Turk. So the Cumans were a nomadic people who live north of the Black Sea in the Caspian in what is sometimes referred to as the Cuman step or cumania, and they were pushed into Hungary by the Mongol invasions, and eventually this woman will become one of the ancestors of the French royal dynasty. Now, as far as I know, that's been completely overlooked in the scholarship. And the reason I think it's important is because it illustrates one of the really infinite number of ways in which France, in particular, but Europe more generally, was influenced by the Mongols and their expansion, which is to say that not only were there acts of violence. There was warfare, there was invasion, there was commerce, very famously, the silk road gets a big boost under the Mongols. But there was also this moving around of peoples. And there were relationships that were severed because of death and because of imprisonment or enslavement. But there were also new relationships created because of Mongol expansion. And so there is a genealogical history, and what I would call a bio history of Mongol expansion, which this figure, Elizabeth the Cuban, illustrates very well. And then one of the marching texts in this data set comes from a man named Philippe de Messier, who lives in the second half of the 1300s and Philippe writes on a couple of occasions about how the Mongols are exemplary in terms of their society and their kingdom and the way that they've organized themselves politically and especially militarily, and that the Europeans should be imitating the Mongols. And he insists upon this. He says that this is the way for us to conquer the world and convert it to Christianity. We must be we must model ourselves on the Mongols. And it's a rather extraordinary moment in not only medieval, but I would say Western history, because it's a great example of how we have a Western reader and a western audience who are both scared of and anxious about the Mongols, but also truly fascinated by them and see them as inspirational and as examples. So. For that very large data set of 117 entries, then the second data set you refer to is a second appendix, which discusses specifically art objects that reflect this global contact, and especially between France and the Mongols. And here my favorite example is an object that is at the cloisters Museum, which is the medieval branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And it is a tomb effigy of a night. The it's the lid of a sarcophagus, basically, and it shows the night carved in high relief. It was carved between around 1250 and 1270 about an hour and a half outside of Paris, near the city of tour. And what's remarkable about this piece is it's thoroughly French, it's thoroughly European, and it's inspiration. It's very traditional. But when you look at this knights sword hilt, you see that it is Chinese, and it's of a type that was produced in China between the ninth and the 18th centuries. AD, so here we have a European night, a European art object, a tomb effigy that has this Chinese trace, this Chinese vestige, on it. Now we're not sure who the tomb effigy belongs to. We don't know exactly how this sword would have come into the possession of this person, but it is one of the more remarkable physical artistic vestiges of this contact between East and West, and specifically between France and ultimately, China in the 13th century, in a period well before what we think of as being the era of globalization. So as I say in the preface to the book where I have a brief reflection on my time lecturing at the Metropolitan Museum. In many ways, the book began with that tomb effigy and with reflecting on what it means to have this object from the Far East in France in the 13th century.
Wow, that's amazing. It must have been an amazing sword.
Well, here's what I'll say. It makes it so interesting. The face of the night is still very visible. It's beautifully preserved, but the face is thoroughly stylized. It produced before the return of portraiture into Western art, which came about two generations after the effigy was produced. But the sword is a portrait. That's what's so remarkable, is that here we are, eight centuries later, and we can identify this object, which means that it actually existed and that the artist was told by the patron, by the person who commissioned the tomb, you must carve this. This belonged to him. It was crucial to his identity and our memories of him, and we want it to be commemorated on his tomb. And why that would be raises all kinds of interesting questions. Was it because it seems so foreign and it has sort of exotic or even magical appeal? Was it because they associated stories of his travels with it? We can't know, but this is the kind of really wonderful and evocative object and trace that we have when we start to pay attention to these global medieval artifacts and texts.
Oh, that's fantastic. That's really cool. Very cool. Yep. So, so, yeah. So there's all these different objects, as you mentioned, and there's written materials, Chronicles, crusade, treatises, encyclopedias, romances, travel accounts. And this shows how the French made sense of the Mongols, who they had never encountered before in their intellectual tradition. Why was this a challenge, and how were the Mongols both humanized and also turned into powerful symbols of the other
so what I would say is that this project is a great example of why medieval studies are so much fun and so exciting is that it is challenging in that it requires multiple languages. It requires the ability to work with multiple kinds of sources. So as I mentioned, I work with art history as well as well as with textual history, and that gives me an advantage in a project like this. So you have to be interdisciplinary, but really, when you're working with the medieval past, that is a natural stance to have. It's a very useful approach, because so many objects can speak to a specific theme or problem or question, and so the challenge becomes, and the fun becomes, putting these things into dialog and getting them to tell a coherent and interesting story. And I think that it's one of the privileges of being a medievalist, is that you get to work with such a broad array of sources, and you get to tell such interesting stories now as to how the Mongols were humanized, and turns and turned into symbols. It's very interesting, because initially, the Europeans are not sure what the Mongols are. They think that they might be sent by Satan. They think that they might be demonic or pun. Sent by God. But very quickly, they send embassies out to the Mongols. They also interview some captives very early in the 1230s already, and they figure out, no, the Mongols are people. They just don't figure in the Bible or in Greco Roman ancient sources. They're completely new to our epistemological world, to the knowledge framework that we have inherited from the past. And so that's why the Mongols are so important in the history of the Western intellectual tradition, specifically, not just politically speaking, they are a challenge to how the European medieval intellectuals understood the world and interpreted it, and they forced people to think outside the box, to change their way of understanding the intellectual traditions that they have received. They are forced to acknowledge that the sources that they have do not account for all of the world, that there is more out there to learn about. And to the great credit of the medievals, they don't just sit around and wring their hands and say, Oh no, we're going to ignore this. They actually go out and try to assimilate a great deal of information about the Mongols. And that's a big part of my story. Is how the church, but also the King of France, Louis the ninth, who reigns from 1226 to 1270 how they send emissaries to the Mongols in order to get as much information as they can, basically to spy on the Mongols and figure out what it is the Mongols want, where they come from and who they are. And it is through this process of initially ambassadorial spying, ambassadorial espionage, and later through diplomatic contact, that the Mongols will become thoroughly humanized in European eyes. But then what's going to happen is there will be less and less contact with the Mongols in the 1300s especially in the wake of the plague 13, eight to 1349, when that explodes in Europe, as it had already been wreaking havoc in other parts of Eurasia, and then the Mongol Dynasty in China, what we call the UN empire, falls in 1368, at which point there is effectively no contact between Europe and China for a little over 200 years, until The 1580s so that second phase, when there is less contact and eventually no contact, with the Mongols, means that people keep reading the same texts, which are very quickly out of date, but people keep reading them in Europe as if they were still accurate. So people will read Marco Polo literally for centuries and interpreting polos text as if he were described describing a contemporary reality and polos text will influence mapping into the 16th and 17th centuries. People will assume that there is still a Mongol Khan out there in China somewhere, for example. So we go through a phase of fear with the initial invasions in the 1230s and 1240s to a period of humanization, and then when we get to the end of the 1300s and thereafter we have a basically allegorizing of the Mongols. They become detached from history. They become symbols, or they become a kind of timeless kingdom that people imagine is out there and dream about and write about. So it's a fascinating trajectory. And I end my book by talking a little bit about what happens in the 15th and 16th centuries, but that really is a whole other topic which scholars are working on and have worked on but that is really beyond the scope of my book.
Okay, okay, interesting, interesting. Well, a couple big names, and you've mentioned several of them, or two of them, at least, already. We're coming up on some very significant anniversaries involved with these individuals. So you mentioned Marco Polo last year, 2020, 2024, was the 750th anniversary of the death of Marco Polo, and he plays a big, important role in chapter three of your book next year. 2026 is the 800th anniversary of the coronation of King Louis, the ninth St Louis, and that's he's figured in chapter two. And then 2027 is the 800th anniversary of the death of Genghis Khan, and he figures out throughout the book, tell us some things that you found or you uncovered in your research about each of these individuals.
Sure. So I'll do this in chronological order, beginning with Genghis Khan. And frankly, one of the most interesting facts, it's very obvious, but it's really wonderful for someone in my position, is that Genghis Khan was almost an exact contemporary of King Philip Augustus. Philip Augustus reigned in France from 1180 to 1223, he's one of the most important kings in French history. He helped to centralize power. In Paris. He created the archive. He built the louver, which, of course, today is a great museum, but started out as a royal palace. Well, he and Genghis Khan are pretty much exact contemporaries. They were born, we think around the same time, around 1165, and they die within four years of each other. 1223, Philip Augustus. 1227, Genghis Khan, So that right there is a whole different way of thinking about relationships between East and West and between different kingdoms, because it is in the lifetimes of Genghis Khan and Philip Augustus that the French will first learn about the Mongols through reports that come into the Middle East that the French pick up around the year 1221, so that's one interesting aspect of Genghis Khan from a French perspective. Another is simply that Genghis Khan is perceived very positively. And this may surprise modern audiences, because we have this idea that Genghis Khan was a mass murderer, that he was a great conqueror, that he was very brutal. But in the texts that we have from medieval France and other parts of medieval Europe, there's also an emphasis on the fact that Genghis Khan was commissioned by God to go out and conquer. Some people will see Genghis Khan as a form of punishment for Christians in Asia who are not keeping true to the faith um, Genghis Khan is described as the first lawgiver of the Mongols, and he gets a lot of respect for that in the European texts. So that's uh, one way in which Genghis Khan is imagined very positively in the medieval European tradition. Now as to Louis the ninth. So King Louis the ninth, whom we know is St Louis as well, ranged from 1226 to 1270 and what's really interesting about Louis is that he made a very serious attempt to establish diplomatic contact with the Mongols in the year 1249, and thereafter, he sent an embassy which was intended to go all the way to Mongolia, but he had bad timing, because the Khan, who was GUC, died, and his wife took over, and there was essentially a civil war. There was internecine strife within the Mongol elite, and so Louis diplomatic attempt basically fell flat. And it's interesting because it raises one of these, uh, what if moments in history, we can really ask ourselves, what might have happened had there, had the con lived, or had the next con already been established, who seems to have been more open to dialog with the West? But in any event, um, what's interesting about Louis is that we can contrast him with the Mongols, and this is what I do at the end of chapter two. And we can think about Louis the ninth, who wanted to be a crusader King and really wish to impose a mono confessional, mono religious, monocultural view on the world in many ways, and was not successful in doing so. We can contrast that to the Mongol model, which was much more open and fluid and spontaneous and improvisational, where the Mongols are open to allowing people to practice their religion. The Mongols want tribute. Of course, they're brutal and they're oppressive in their way, but once they establish their power, they are very happy to let you live your life as long as you provide tribute. And so I contrast these two models of conquest, of projecting power by pointing out that ultimately, the Mongols were much more successful, and you could argue that that's because they were much more fluid and open in their understanding of what it meant to rule and occupy other lands. Now the final example you mentioned was Marco Polo. Again, born 1254, dies, 1324, and what I find most interesting about polo, at least in the research I did this time around, was that Polo was read in France as a justification for French royal power. In other words, I think that one of the reasons his book is so interesting to elite French readers is that polo describes a Mongol realm that is, in many ways ideal. It is what the French elite would like their kingdom to be. It's the how they imagine a perfect French kingdom. And there are three specific aspects of this. There is territorial expansion, so a king who is constantly expanding his realm and bringing more people and territory under his sway, which is what the Mongol Khans do. Of course, on a continental scale, there is centralized government. The Mongols are very effective at centralizing their government and having centralized communication and taxation. And the French are at the time that they're reading about the Mongols in the 13th and 14th centuries. The French themselves are implementing a very bureaucracy. High, centralized government. And then finally, the Mongols provide a model for just rule. Model Marco Polo describes Kublai Khan as the greatest ruler who's ever lived, greater than all European potentates put together. He rules according to virtues of generosity and justice and mercy, and all of these are values in the Western tradition as well. And I actually compare Marco Polos description of Kublai Khan to the most famous political treatise in medieval France, and we can see that Kublai Khan basically checks all the boxes of what makes an ideal monarch. So I don't have anything to contribute as concerns Marco Polos biography, but concerning his reception in France, and frankly, more broadly in Europe, I think that there's a lot more to say, and I hope to have contributed to that conversation.
Wow, that was amazing, just just to see that here's a completely different culture, and obviously there's much to be feared with this, with this clash of different civilizations. But it's really fascinating to hear the respect that was given to the Mongols and also admiration for their system. And we can learn from these people, rather than them being the complete other and the enemy and things like that. That's really right,
and I'm glad you raised that, because it really is one of the points I'm trying to make in this book. There's been a great deal of scholarship, and rightly so, on the ways in which the Mongols are othered and are perceived as other and bestial or threatening, all of that certainly true. But I think that the other side of the equation is equally important, and that is that there is constructive and meaningful contact between France, in particular, in the Mongols, but Europe more widely, and that the Europeans actually learn a great deal from the Mongols, and as you say, hold them up as examples in a time when I think we often emphasize cultural tensions, and we talk about the crusades, and we imagine that there's a lot of violence and misunderstanding. That's all certainly true, but there are also moments of very interesting, constructive and enlightening contact between different cultures. And I think that in my book, I am able to illustrate some of those moments.
That's great. That's great, such great insights. Well, if anyone listening to this is fascinated by this, we strongly encourage you to get out there and get Mark cruises, new book, The Mongol archive in late medieval France. Texts, objects, encounters, 1221, to 1422, it was really interesting and fascinating to talk with you, Mark. Thank
you very much, Jonathan. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.
That was Mark Cruse, author of the new book The Mongol Archive in Late Medieval France: Texts, Objects, Encounters, 1221-1422. If you'd like to purchase Mark's new book, use the promo code 09 pod to save 30% off at our website: cornell press.cornell.edu, if you live in the UK, use the discount code CSANNOUNCE and visit the website combined academic.co.uk Thank you for listening to 1869 the Cornell University Press podcast.