William of Rubruck (fl. 1248-1257, esp. 1253-1255)

by Caroline Stone (see Chinese translation)

William of Rubruck was a Franciscan monk from the Flemish town of Rubruck, who set out under orders from Louis IX (St Louis) of France to the Mongol Khan in what was known as Tartary. His journey forms part of a series of missions, beginning in Cyprus in 1248, which attempted to make contact with the Mongol Khans and sought to win their support for Christendom, in particular against the Mamluk Dynasty of Egypt.

These missions were also a reaction to the disastrous incursions of the Mongols into Hungary and Poland, under the military commander Sübedei, in the course of which the European army was essentially wiped out at the Battle of Liegnitz (Legnica) on 9th April 1241. The Mongols reached the borders of Friuli, and Western Europe was only spared invasion by the death of the Great Khan Ögodei, as a result of which host withdrew, returning to their homeland to elect a successor. Indeed, one of William of Rubruck's tasks was to find and provide comfort for German slaves taken in the 1241-1242 invasion.

The missions began when envoys, purporting to come from the Great Khan Ilchikadai to propose an alliance, were received by King Louis. The king sent back Friar Andrew of Lonjumel (Longjumeau), whose account is lost, and other ecclesiastics, but they were ill-received and returned with a letter so offensive "that the king was sorry he had ever sent them".

In 1252, however, King Louis heard that one of the princes, Sartaq, had been baptized – this was a period when the Central Asian tribes were examining various religious possibilities, as the mission of Chang Chun (Ch'ang Ch'un) shows – and decided to renew contact. Friar William was chosen to go, not as an official diplomat, but as a preacher of the gospel, who incidentally was carrying letters and gifts to deliver to the Great Khan at Karakorum. This meant that any slights he might receive would reflect on the Church, rather than on the king.

William of Rubruck set out from Acre on 7th May 1253 and stopped at Constantinople (modern Istanbul) to consult Baldwin of Hainault, who had recently returned from Karakorum. He was accompanied by Bartolomeo da Cremona, a servant and an interpreter. Travelling at this stage with oxcarts, they reached Sudak in the Crimea, crossed the Don and, after meeting Sartaq Khan of the Kipchaq Khanate, were sent on to his father, Batu Khan, at Sarai on the Volga, a five week journey, taking the route that ran to the north of the Syr Darya and the Caspian. They were then sent on to the Great Khan Möngke at Karakorum, setting off on 16th September 1253, this time on horseback. They were granted an audience with Möngke on 4th January 1254.

William describes Karakorum in some detail and was much surprised at the very cosmopolitan nature of the city, with separate quarters for Chinese and Muslims and a considerable number of Europeans some, but not all, captured in the earlier invasions. Observant and careful to check his facts whenever possible, he also provides invaluable information on the Nestorians and was the first European to write about Buddhism and Shamanism. In May 1254, shortly before leaving, he participated in a debate among the various major religions -- a courtly entertainment among the Mongols, mentioned on other occasions -- in which he was paired with a Chinese Nestorian to defend the Christian Faith.

On 10th July 1254, they set out on the return journey. William of Rubruck describes it as follows:

In two months and ten days we came to Baatu, and (on the way there) we never saw a town, nor the trace of any building save tombs, with the exception of one little village, in which we did not eat bread; neither did we ever take a rest in those two months and ten days, except for one day only, when we could not get horses. We came back for the most part of the way through the same peoples, though generally through different districts; for we went in winter and came back in summer.

They reached Tripoli more than a year later, on the 15th August 1255, but by that time King Louis had already left for France. William asked permission to follow him and it is there that he would have presented his report: Itinerarium fratris Willielmi de Rubruquis de ordine fratrum Minorum, Galli, Anno gratiae 1253 ad partes Orientales, which would have provided his contemporaries with much needed information about hitherto unknown lands -- although judging by the few surviving manuscripts, it was not widely circulated.

William of Rubruck’s Latin was rough, but clear and expressive. He added to European knowledge in many fields, correcting a number of geographical errors (his main source before he set out would probably have been the 7th century encyclopaedist, St. Isidore of Seville), such as the mistaken belief that the Caspian Sea had an outlet on the Arctic Ocean. This would have been known to the Rus and Scandinavian travellers, and to some of the Arab geographers, such as Ibn Fadlan, but not to Western Europe.

He also provided up-to-date information on the manners, customs and religious tenets of the areas he visited, which occupy the first ten chapters of his book, while the journey itself is covered in the following thirty. He even included such practical matters as the exact nature of Chinese money, probably for the use of other possible envoys. He was particularly interested in language and tried to establish relationships among the different tongues he heard, explaining the various writing systems in use – Chinese, Tibetan, and others.

Little is known of William beyond the evidence of his own text, from which he appears, to quote Colonel Henry Yule, famous scholar of Marco Polo and the Silk Road, as "an honest, pious, stout-hearted, acute, and most intelligent observer, keen in the acquisition of knowledge, and the author of one of the best narratives in existence". Rubruck describes himself as being, like his predecessor John of Plano Carpini, a very heavy man, but that is all we know of his appearance. He is mentioned several times by his fellow Franciscan, Roger Bacon, who seems to have met him in France, but provides no description.

Nothing is known of the later career of William of Rubruck, and the Franciscan Order is curiously silent about him. It is thought that he died not long after his return to the West in 1255.