Manuscript Tradition

Scholarly Reception

The critical study of the letter was slow to develop. Beyond their allusion to missionary letters from China, de la Roncière and Dorez did not analyze it. Davidsohn, meanwhile, offered only a potential date of 1251–53, without further comment. It was not until 1961 that it received proper attention, from Jean Richard. Richard transcribed the text of M and accompanied his transcription with brief notes, suggesting that the document may pertain to the Mongol invasions. Bearing in mind that he did not know MSS C and G, where the letter appears alongside other works pertaining to the Mongols, such an identification of this curious text, entirely isolated in M (that is, the only witness known to him at that time) would not have been immediately obvious. His conclusions were cautious, but he usefully drew attention to the letter's similarity to the Relatio de Davide, a very early account of the reign of Chinggis Khan that mistook his Christian neighbor Küchlüg for King David.Footnote ²³ Briefly, he also remarked on the letter's possible relationship with the Middle Eastern Christian myth of the “Last Emperor.” This was an unorthodox apocalyptic tradition that prophesied a victorious ruler on Earth prior to the appearance of Antichrist and the End Times, which had arisen initially from Judaism and that was preserved by Syriac-speaking Christians in the medieval Middle East. He proposed a date range of 1220s–1240s for its composition, though he leaned towards the earlier end, until he adjusted his hypotheses upon hearing of Davidsohn's text.Footnote ²⁴

When Claverie reedited the text of M, he came to a number of much firmer conclusions. These conclusions were unfortunately hampered by his lack of awareness of any other witnesses. Claverie considered the portion of the text that survives in M to refer to the Mongol campaigns that Chinggis Khan led into Transoxiana and Iran in 1220–23. The text of M states that the invaders have “already subjected five kingdoms to themselves” (et iam quinque regna sibi subiugaverunt), which Claverie identifies as Khorāsān, Khwārazm, Fārs, Marv, and Iran. In fact, only the very late text of L shares this reading (“quinque”) with M, all other witnesses mentioning “fifteen” (15, xv, or “quindecim”) kingdoms. His analysis can therefore not be taken as certain. As MS M contains the attribution, noted above, that “the lord Patriarch of Jerusalem wrote this letter to the lord Pope,” Claverie decided on the basis of his dating that he could identify the letter as a communication from Raoul de Mérencourt to Honorius III, written at Damietta. He placed its composition in June 1221.Footnote ²⁵ In her synthetic study of the reception of the Mongol Empire, Denise Aigle has repeated Claverie's hypotheses as if they were proven.Footnote ²⁶ Claverie's extremely early and precise dating of the letter cannot, I believe, be accepted with confidence. Likewise, the many details contained in the latter part of the letter not present in M suggest a potentially different context from which the letter arose. It is one of the challenges facing the current study to date the text convincingly.

One of the most sensitive appraisals of the letter is Roman Hautala's recent article on Latin writers’ sources for the Mongols’ second appearance in Transcaucasia. (The Mongols reemerged in the region from 1228, having first burst onto the scene in 1220–21 and subsequently retreated. The most destructive invasions of the region occurred in the mid-1230s.Footnote ²⁷) Hautala reckons the letter “Ad flagellum” to be the earliest Latin document to refer to this phase of the Mongol conquests. Since it does not share some early sources’ (naïve) hope that the Mongols would serve as Christian allies, Hautala believes the text cannot belong to the first phase of the Mongol conquests in the Middle East — pace Claverie's dating of the text to 1221. He also sees the lack of any use of the term “Tartarus,”Footnote ²⁸ a common Latin term in sources after 1236, as an indication that the letter belongs to the earlier 1230s. (Indeed, the letter uses no proper noun at all in reference to the invaders.) This allows him to attribute it to Gerold of Lausanne, then Patriarch of Jerusalem (r. 1225–38; arrived in Jerusalem 1228).Footnote ²⁹ Hautala's analysis merely scratches the surface of the letter, but his conclusions are convincing. In particular, his association of the text with the second wave of conquests in Transcaucasia offers a likely eastern Christian milieu for the intelligence that formed the basis of the document.

Peter Jackson has also contributed some remarks on the provenance of the letter “Ad flagellum.” These are contained in his recent article on the Tractatus de ortu Tartarorum, two of the copies of which survive in MSS C and G.Footnote ³⁰ The letter's narrator (whose identity is not easy to ascertain) talks of the invaders as menacing “our borders”: Jackson understands this to mean the borders of the Franks in Syria, thus suggesting a date of 1244, at which time the Mongol incursions into the crusader states began.Footnote ³¹ It is however possible that the letter does not have a Latin, Frankish origin at all, but that it may be instead the product of communication between eastern Christians (those of the Church of the East,Footnote ³² Syrian Orthodox, Armenians, or Georgians) with the ruling classes of the crusader states. If Jackson's association of the letter with the incursions of 1244 is challenged, his dating is implicitly challenged too.

It is not possible to suggest with confidence any precise date for the letter, since both internal and external evidence is too equivocal. Taking manuscript evidence surveyed in the previous section alone, B's position next to a letter describing planetary phenomena of 1255 corroborates the details found in the initial lines of F, claiming that the letter was sent by Hugo of St. Sabina, thus suggesting a date of 1251–53. This passage is probably not, though, a claim for Hugo's authorship, but rather merely an indication that he saw a copy of the letter in the early 1250s and took it to be recent news that should be spread abroad. Thus, at least one text of the letter came to bear an interpolation from him. Historical circumstances militate against such a late date, and it is, on this basis, possible to establish firm parameters outside of which it is unlikely that the text was composed. It can be said with some confidence that it was not composed before the Mongols’ appearance in Islamic Central Asia in 1220. It may also seem improbable that such distorted information should have emerged in the Latin East after the dispatch of Innocent IV's mission to the Mongol center at Qara-Qorum in 1244, following which western Europeans were in personal, direct contact with the Mongol court; but there is plenty of evidence to demonstrate that precisely that often happened.Footnote ³³ Its date cannot therefore be firmly established by negative evidence. A detailed analysis of the letter's content, placed side-by-side with other Latin accounts of the Mongols from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, suggests that the letter should be dated more or less with Hautala, though more especially in 1235–36, in the context of the high point of the Mongol invasions of Transcaucasia. It is the objective of the next two sections of this article to make this case.

Eastern Christianity and the Mythologizing of the Mongols

My hypothetical reconstruction of the sources of the letter “Ad flagellum” is based primarily on the process of information transfer suggested by the paragraph quoted above. Here, the author mentions the existence of an apparent new volume of scripture, and goes on to state that this text is available in multiple languages. The author (that is, the person whose voice is represented, and who may not be the same person as the Latin redactor) himself came to possess a copy, which he claims to have related verbatim to the addressee of the letter (“We send you a copy of this just as our messengers received it, and Our Lordship [that is, the author] has written to you”). This paragraph raises several questions: who was the author of the letter? Who was the addressee of the letter? What was the nature of “The Book of the Accomplishment of the New Testament”? In this and the following two sections of this study, I suggest possible answers to all of these questions.

The authorial voice in the letter appears to be that of someone associated with the messengers who spent time with the army of the Pseudo-Prophet. This person may not actually have been a Latin Christian at all, though, but himself an eastern Christian, and the letter “Ad flagellum” for the most part an attempt at a direct Latin translation of a combination of written and probably also oral evidence brought by this eastern Christian to authorities in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The language used by this messenger cannot be known, but may have been Armenian, Georgian, Arabic, or Syriac, those being the major languages (apart from Latin) used by the Christians of the Middle East.

In order to evaluate this hypothesis, it is necessary to draw attention to the importance of Christians of the Church of the East and non-Chalcedonian (Armenian and Syriac Orthodox) Christians in the period of Mongol expansion. It is well known that Christians of the Church of the East were employed widely in chancery positions by Mongol leaders. Not only that, but many tribes that the Mongols absorbed early on were partly or entirely Christians of the Church of the East: Keraits, Naimans, Onguts, Uyghurs, and Merkits. The Armenians of Cilicia, meanwhile, became the (quite possibly willing) clients of the Mongols, often requiring Latin Christian military or diplomatic support: this meant that much of the contemporary documentary evidence emanating from Armenian circles played up such supposed Mongol characteristics as sympathy towards (or even practice of) Christianity, and readiness for military cooperation.Footnote ³⁴ The implications of this for western Christians were chiefly two: first, that a network of Christian peoples created an avenue of communication between Europe and Central Asia; second, that the Mongols were often misunderstood (and/or misrepresented) as being Christians themselves.Footnote ³⁵

When the Mongols first moved westward through Central Asia in 1220–21, their advances were recorded by Christian and Muslim authors in a manner that was to prove programmatic for the ways in which they would continue to be perceived. The Iraqi historian Ibn al-Athīr (1160–1233) wrote that the advance of the Mongols (Arabic “Tatar”Footnote ³⁶) afflicted especially Muslims, since as the Mongols first swept westward, it was the Dār al-Islām that bore the brunt of the onslaught. He also placed the invaders into an apocalyptic framework, considering that, before the End Times, the terror of the Mongols might be equaled only by the coming of Gog and Magog.Footnote ³⁷ This apocalyptic framework had a pervasive influence among European and Middle Eastern writers who described the characteristics of the Mongols. His notion that the Mongol terror affected especially Muslims was also remarked upon by many Christian authors; and the belief that they were sympathetic to Christians, or Christians themselves, persisted stubbornly for around two centuries (at least).Footnote ³⁸

Eastern Christians were themselves both the subjects and the perpetuators of this belief. The most famous example of all is the cleric-king “Prester John,” a mythological Christian ruler believed to be located either in the extreme East, in India, or (especially after the fourteenth century) in Abyssinia. This is no place to rehearse the extraordinary and complex mythologies of Prester John, but it is important to acknowledge here his significance for European attitudes towards Central and East Asia. At some point between around 1143 and 1180, a Latin letter was forged, attributed to Prester John, and apparently written to the Byzantine Emperor Manuel I Komnenos. It met with wide circulation and was translated into most of the vernaculars of Western Europe, as well as into Hebrew. The mythology of Prester John attached itself to real personages in the early phases of Mongol expansion, specifically Toghrul of the Keraites, who was baptized as a Christian with the name David, and later Küchlüg of the Naimans, who was a Christian of the Church of the East. When in 1203 Chinggis Khan defeated Toghrul, he married a daughter of the latter's younger brother, Jakha Gambu; Chinggis's son, Tolui, married her sister, Sorghaghtani Beki. This brought a connection with the Christian Church of the East into the family of Chinggis Khan and gave rise to legends that the invaders were really Christians. However, the image of Prester John did not retain an especially strong association with peoples connected to the Mongols. This may have been in part because when Latin Christian knowledge of Asia opened up in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, no strong contenders for identification with him emerged.Footnote ³⁹ The fact that the letter “Ad flagellum” has apparently no reliance whatsoever on the famous myths of Prester John is a very interesting point and something that will be explored more fully later.Footnote ⁴⁰

As well as being conflated with the Mongols, eastern Christians were also key for informing Latin Christians (and indeed misinforming them, whether intentionally or not) about the character and intention of the invaders. Specifically, the Mongols were rumored to be Christians who would save their coreligionists from the aggression of Islam: the flipside of the perspective represented by Ibn al-Athīr. The Armenian historian Kirakos Gandzaketsʿi describes this eloquently:

Gandzaketsʿi was here describing precisely that period of the 1220s–1230s in which I argue the substance of the letter “Ad flagellum” arose. It is clear that the broad belief in the Mongols’ purported Christianity and supposed supernatural abilities was an underlying premise of the letter.

There are a number of precedents for documents being translated and transmitted by Christians of the Church of the East or non-Chalcedonians. Latin, the main written language of the Franks, was not understood in the Mongol world, where Turkic languages and Persian were used instead. Letters from Louis IX of France to Batu and Möngke Khan were translated from their original Latin into Arabic and Syriac in the Holy Land: these were “bridge languages” that then allowed Armenian clerics to write a Turkic version more widely intelligible in the Mongol world.Footnote ⁴² Similarly, a letter of Constable Smbat, brother of Hetʿum I of Cilician Armenia, was conveyed to Cyprus from Samarqand, probably by Uighur intermediaries of the Christian Church of the East.Footnote ⁴³ For the letter “Ad flagellum,” however, an even closer and still more instructive parallel than these texts is the Relatio de Davide.

The latter is a complex source that survives in three related versions, the longest of which is called the Historia gestorum David regis Indorum. It arose in the context of the Fifth Crusade, directed against Damietta in Egypt (1217–21). Unlike the letter “Ad flagellum,” external evidence furnishes a precise date for the Relatio: Bishop Jacques de Vitry included parts of the text in a letter addressed to each of Pope Honorius III, Duke Leopold of Austria, and the University of Paris — a letter explicitly dated as having been sent on 18 April 1221. De Vitry's letter informs his readers that the Relatio is a dossier of intelligence compiled originally in Arabic by informants of Bohemond IV of Antioch in neighboring, Muslim regions. The author of the Relatio believed Küchlüg of the Naimans to be the Christian King David, victor over the “heathen” Qara-Khitai. He was apparently unaware of Küchlüg's turn from the Christian Church of the East to a peculiarly militaristic Buddhism. Likewise, he ascribes the Mongol conquest of Khwārazm to “David” (that is, Küchlüg), who was in fact dead by 1218, before this invasion took place.Footnote ⁴⁴ The confused details of the Relatio are not of key importance to an analysis of the letter “Ad flagellum,” but its underlying assumptions and process of transmission most definitely are: the Relatio framed the Mongol conquests as a Christian attack from the extreme East; not only that, its information was compiled by local Christians in a local (in this case Semitic) language for Latin Christian consumption. My suggestion is that the letter “Ad flagellum” is similar to the Relatio in both of these respects.

The circumstances of the Fifth Crusade generated other documents that conform to patterns found in the Relatio. Three are mentioned by Oliver of Paderborn (also known as Thomas Oliver or Oliver of Cologne) in his detailed account of the siege and short-lived occupation of Damietta by the Franks (November 1219–August 1221). Of these three communiqués that reached the crusaders, two came while the siege was in progress, and one after it was completed. The first and third of these texts were both, Oliver reports, Arabic letters prophesying Christian successes in the Crusade, the first promising the help of a Christian Nubian king, and the third the help of a certain King David.Footnote ⁴⁵ These texts thus bear certain similarities to the Relatio de Davide, although it is in fact the second of the three communiqués that embodies a more compelling case for comparison with the letter “Ad flagellum.”

While the crusaders were laying siege, a letter arrived from the Kingdom of Georgia, which was meant to participate in the crusade, responding to preemptive rumors of the success of the attack. This document apparently began by expressing embarrassment felt by the Georgians: despite being situated very close to the “Saracens,” they had made no military progress, while the crusaders had meanwhile undertaken an enormous journey overseas and then (so they believed) scored a significant victory in Egypt. The Georgians suggested that they therefore turn their attention to an attack on Damascus or another Muslim stronghold. Perhaps more interesting than the alleged contents of this letter (the report of which may equally represent the crusaders’ wishes), is Oliver's appended description of the Georgians: he knew that they were a Christian people who lived in the mountains by the Caspian Sea, but he also believed that just behind the mountains at the edge of their kingdom the Ten Lost Tribes lay in wait for the coming of Antichrist.Footnote ⁴⁶ If such a notion had been circulating in the Latin East in the period of the Fifth Crusade, it may well have remained current and influential in the drafting of “Ad flagellum”: news of the appearance in Georgia of Mongol invaders claiming a divine mandate may have awakened memories in a Latin milieu of such apocalyptic rumors pertaining to Transcaucasia.

The perceptions of the Georgians and their lands found in Oliver's report are consistent with those recorded in the crusading treatise of the Dominican William (Guillaume) of Adam (written perhaps 1316–18), to whose life and writings this study will later return.Footnote ⁴⁷ He believed that the military strength of the Georgians was of huge importance to the successes of the Il-Khanate in their conflicts with the Mamlūk Sultanate, and could be turned to the benefit of the crusaders:

I would venture to suggest that either the Kingdom of Georgia, at this time under Queen Rusudan (r. 1223–45), or else a lordship or principality of Greater Armenia, are the most likely origins of the envoys mentioned in the letter “Ad flagellum.” It has been established here that both the Mongols and the Georgians were viewed by Latin authors in the thirteenth century through an apocalyptic lens, and that Armenian writers were involved in the transmission of myths about the Mongols’ purported Christianity. The Georgians’ southern neighbors, the Armenians of Cilicia, were comparatively far better known to the Franks (and probably likewise more familiar in the Latin East than the Cilician Kingdom's cousins in Greater Armenia), and the two groups remained strongly politically intertwined for the duration of their coexistence.Footnote ⁴⁹

The chronology of Kirakos Gandzaketsʿi places the initial Mongol invasion of Georgia in 1220–21, the same years for which Ibn al-Athīr noted the invasions of Islamic territories to his northeast. The Mongol subjugation of Transcaucasia occurred during the period 1222–42, reaching its most aggressive stage under the leadership of the general Chormaghan in the mid-1230s, during the reign of the Great Khan Ögedei (r. 1229–41). In 1236, Chormaghan's men effected significant advances in the Zakʿarid lands in Georgia and Greater Armenia.Footnote ⁵⁰ Could the chief source of the letter “Ad flagellum” have been a group of envoys from the kingdom of Georgia or a principality or lordship of Greater Armenia who were sent to or otherwise encountered the army of Chormaghan in 1235/36?

Details of the Armenians’ submissions to the Mongol khans survive.Footnote ⁵¹ For Greater Armenia, Gandzaketsʿi notes that the Armenian noble of Kayen, Awag Zakʿarian, submitted individually to Chormaghan in 1236. His lead was followed that same year by a number of other Armenian princes.Footnote ⁵² The Armenians of Cilicia submitted in the next decade. The English chronicler Matthew Paris, monk of the Benedictine abbey of St. Albans (d. 1259), reports their capitulation as early as 1244 in his Chronica Majora. The Chronica is one of the best known Latin sources for the earlier stages of Mongol expansion, and justly so: it is remarkably well informed for a source so greatly removed, preserving a number of original documents — some of them eyewitness testimonies — that may have been sourced from travelers, in London or via other Benedictine monasteries throughout Europe. In the case of the Armenian capitulation, Matthew's information might have come either from a Latin Levantine source, or else perhaps more likely from a group of Armenian visitors who traveled to St. Albans in 1252.Footnote ⁵³ His dating of this delegation of submission to 1244 is corroborated by Armenian sources, though they reveal that it actually set out the previous year.Footnote ⁵⁴ The constable Smbat, brother of King Hetʿum I, conveyed a further capitulation to the Great Khan Güyük before or during 1248 (departing 1246), while in 1254–55 the king himself journeyed to Central Asia in order to submit once more, this time in person.Footnote ⁵⁵ The process of submission, in other words, occurred in progressive stages.

It is quite possible that the redactor of the letter “Ad flagellum,” when drawing on the oral report and written dossier of his informants, blurred the distinction between the myths he had heard about the Georgians with the information that these (potentially) Georgian or Greater Armenian informants were communicating to him about the Mongols. “David” appeared as a warlike Christian figure in both the Relatio de Davide, where he was in reality Küchlüg of the Central Asian Naimans,Footnote ⁵⁶ and in tales of the Georgians such as the description in William of Adam's treatise.Footnote ⁵⁷ It is quite plausible that these myths, or some very similar, became confused and cross-contaminated in the letter “Ad flagellum.” At any rate, the circumstantial similarities between the content of the letter and descriptions of Georgia and Georgians in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (which may have a broader significance for Greater Armenia too) suggests that the intelligence underpinning the letter may have derived from sources rooted there.

Provenance: Intelligence, Diplomacy, Texts

The letter brings to mind several biblical passages that may have provided underlying tropes, or else in some respects have influenced it. The imagery of God as Light is of course omnipresent in the Bible, but specifically the description of a chariot providing such great light that those around it cannot perceive night is an apocalyptic image paralleled right at the end of the Revelation of John. In his vision of the New Jerusalem, the New Heaven, and New Earth in Revelation 21–22, the narrator states twice that the light provided by God and, through him, Christ, is sufficient to render the sun redundant.Footnote ⁵⁸ It is entirely feasible that the redactor of the letter “Ad flagellum,” writing it himself in the manner of an apocalyptic vision, associated this trope with the messianic overtones of his intelligence. The large amount of descriptive material that constitutes the second half or so of the letter recalls, whether incidentally or otherwise, Habakkuk 1:6–10; especially in the particular antipathy directed by the aggressors in both texts towards royalty and nobility:

This passage in fact preempts many of the common topoi associated with the Mongols’ invasions, offering a biblical precedent for describing a destructive nomadic host. Of course, exploiting the topoi of Revelation and of Habakkuk is not exclusive of deploying actual (if misapprehended) intelligence about the historical Mongol invasions.

The letter's description of the invaders as people who ate no meat and drank no alcohol, and who had almost magical abilities as sailors, are details that do not recall any typical stereotypes (or accurate insights) associated with the Mongols. William of Rubruck's well-known account, for example, written in the aftermath of his journey to Central Asia in 1253–55, quite unambiguously talks of the Mongols as a sociable people who drank liberally and ate all kinds of meat. His narrative is replete with references to kumis, the famous fermented mare's milk drunk ubiquitously on the Central Asian Steppe.Footnote ⁶⁰ True, the reference to the use of basic animal hides as clothing is quite in keeping with other accounts, such as Odoric of Pordenone's early fourteenth-century description of the court of the Chaghatai Khanate;Footnote ⁶¹ but otherwise, the additional ascetic details cannot be explained as a description of any accuracy of the Great Mongol Army.

While these characteristics are at odds with other observations made regarding the Mongols, some elements of the letter's description do anticipate later accounts. In 1245–47, a group of Franciscan friars comprising John of Plano Carpini, Benedict the Pole, and Stephen of Bohemia traveled to Mongolia as ambassadors of Pope Innocent IV. They were the first western Europeans to reach the Mongol court, and even witnessed the enthronement of Güyük Khan at Syra-Orda, his camp. Both missionaries describe the golden throne, decorated with precious stones. However, it is at the regional court of Batu Khan, further west, that the closest parallel to the letter “Ad flagellum” is found. The friars reached Batu on 4 April 1246; Benedict notes how,

This passage recalls not just the chariot of the letter, but also its emphasis on the animal skins worn by the Pseudo-Prophet's followers. This suggests that the sources for the letter's intelligence — the messengers apparently with the Pseudo-Prophet's army for over a month — may really have had contact with a Mongol court or important military commander's camp, perhaps in this case that of Chormaghan.

The unexpected asceticism described in the letter may reflect non-Mongol religious communities from Central, South, and East Asia. These may include Christians of the Church of the East, Buddhists, and Taoists, though due to the lack of clarity in the letter this observation must remain largely speculative.Footnote ⁶³ Later western medieval accounts refer variously to colossal golden (Buddhist) “idols” larger than Christian depictions of the giant Saint Christopher: these were encountered by Odoric in India (possibly Marwar),Footnote ⁶⁴ and William of Rubruck (who traveled in the years 1253–55) in the Mongol center at Qara-Qorum in Mongolia.Footnote ⁶⁵ The vegetarianism mentioned in the letter might reflect equally Buddhism and Taoism, both of which encourage abstention from meat, though fasting is also a part of eastern Christian practice, as it is western. Latin observers were keenly aware of Buddhist monasticism in particular, and noted that Buddhist monks were similar to the Franciscans in dress and lifestyle. John of Montecorvino, Catholic archbishop of Beijing and Latin patriarch of the Orient in the early fourteenth century, observed in one of his three known letters that there were “many sects of idolaters,” “wearing different habits,” and that these men “practise greater abstinence and austerity than our Latin monks.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The Latin redactor who compiled the material in the letter “Ad flagellum” would unlikely have had sufficient knowledge of these people and practices to distinguish between their various different religious groups, and this means ultimately that it is unclear to which people in particular the text might refer.

Slightly later western accounts noted not only Buddhist asceticism but also its adherents’ supernatural abilities. The intriguing description in the letter “Ad flagellum” of the invaders’ smooth, wooden boats that seem to fly across the water at incredible speed may be a manifestation of the general medieval western European perception that magic was a defining feature of Buddhism. Riccoldo di Montecroce (c. 1243–1320) talks of baxite or boxite (surely Buddhists), who “all know the magic arts” and who “do not fly, but walk next to the ground without touching it, and when they seem to sit, nothing solid is holding them up.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Once again, these observations remain speculative, but it is just possible that groups of eastern Christians in the Levant had already picked up a smattering of stories about Buddhism and Taoism in Central, East, and South Asia as early as the 1230s. It is a tantalizing thought that this letter may reflect these stories and have circulated them in the Latin world (without clear knowledge of their origins or significance) before the famous merchants’ and missionaries’ travel accounts were written during the following decades.

At this early time, however, western Christians were consistently predisposed to interpreting the unfamiliar by creating reflections of their own world. Given this tendency, perhaps an even more obvious potential parallel for the messianic figure in the letter would be the mythical hierocrat Prester John, mentioned briefly above.Footnote ⁶⁸ However, a comparison of the letter “Ad flagellum” with the apocryphal correspondence of Prester John with Byzantine Emperor Manuel I Komnenos reveals, rather interestingly, no convincing similarities. The forged letter of Prester John refers to a kingdom of internal peace and great bounty: a far cry from the violent asceticism of the letter “Ad flagellum.” In Prester John's kingdom,

The only point at which Prester John's portrait of his own domains in any way recalls the letter “Ad flagellum” is in his description of his men's conduct in battle. The letter “Ad flagellum” is, however, a thoroughly violent text, and so it is perhaps little wonder that some basic similarity would be found here. He informs Manuel of how,

Despite the presence of a chariot in both letters, there is no convincing case that this was a borrowed trope, and the letter “Ad flagellum” seems, all things considered, to be entirely independent of the correspondence of Prester John. Of all the potential tropes of Prester John's letter to Manuel, the only vague similarity is that the chariot of the letter is gilded and jeweled like Prester John's processional crucifixes and his palace. While in the letter “Ad flagellum” the poverty and primitivism of the invading hosts are stressed, the letter of Prester John evokes images of immense riches and high levels of (behavioral) civilization. It is a curious thing that the redactor of the letter does not appear to have borrowed from what was arguably his most obvious model. Indeed, the letter “Ad flagellum” could be considered an isolated mythological cul-de-sac, insomuch as it neither appears to have borrowed from nor to have contributed to other mythological traditions regarding the extreme East. A possible reason for this is that it is (rather like the Relatio de Davide) a dossier of genuine intelligence tied to an immediate and specific context — that is, the second and more destructive wave of Mongol attacks on Transcaucasia and eastern Anatolia in the mid-1230s. This intelligence was heavily distorted and was quickly superseded but was not entirely fanciful.

1235–36: An Otherwise Unattested Mongol Edict in Transcaucasia?

It appears that the nuncii mentioned by the narrator of the letter “Ad flagellum” brought a considerable amount of written and probably also oral firsthand intelligence with them. This, I propose, was then compiled into what eventually became the text as it survives. In addition to this intelligence, it is a contention of this article that the letter also references an order of submission drafted by or on behalf of the Mongols. This was directed to a Christian group in Transcaucasia, or to several, most likely the Georgian Kingdom or a lordship or principality of Greater Armenia. This edict then came into the possession of this group's envoys while in the presence of a Mongol army, probably that of Chormaghan: this was the so-called Liber executionis Novi Testamenti. This hypothetical edict was prefaced with a statement of the Mongols’ professed prerogative of universal domination and was made available in a number of translations for the benefit of the foreign envoys. This interpretation explains why the protagonist of the letter is portrayed as a false Christ; why the book is “to restrain rebellious power and to preserve the justice of the meek”; why the invaders claim that they will subject the whole world with their arrows; and why interpreters were said to be there to translate the text into “all languages.” All of these aspects were paralleled in letters received by Christians and Muslims from the Mongols in the mid-thirteenth century.

One reason for the proposed date of the mid-1230s for the letter “Ad flagellum” is the extent to which the situation of the Middle East at the time marries with the content of the letter. The historian of the Saljūq Sultanate of Rūm, Ibn Bībī, writes that in 1236 the Amīr Shams al-Dīn ʿUmar Qazwīnī was trading in Turkestān. There, he was asked by a Mongol noble about his standing with the Saljūq Sultanate and, on the basis of his connections with the latter's ruling elites, was sent back to Anatolia with an edict. The edict stated that God had given the Mongols domination of the whole of the earth's surface and invited the Saljūqs’ submission, threatening an invasion with mass slaughter and enslavement.Footnote ⁷¹ This language entirely foreshadows the much more famous letter given to John of Plano Carpini just under a decade later, also considered later in the present section. Furthermore, the role of Shams al-Dīn ʿUmar Qazwīnī is essentially as an envoy brought in from outside, and adopted into Mongol service: he was part of the chain of individuals used to communicate with rulers in Central Asia and the Middle East, represented in the letter “Ad flagellum” by the “interpreters whom they have of all languages.”

In 1235, a Hungarian Dominican friar called Julian traveled east in search of Magyar in Greater Hungary. In 1237, after returning west, he visited Greater Hungary once again: he found the place overrun by the Mongols and received an order of submission from Khan Batu, to be delivered to Bela IV of Hungary. Julian's Epistula de vita Tartarorum (“Letter regarding the life of the Tartars”) preserves a Latin version of this order:

Most of this edict is specific to the case of Bela, citing his imprisonment of Cuman subjects of the Mongols as a justification for invasion. The introductory sentence, however, is highly instructive: it suggests the existence already, by the mid-1230s, of the Mongol doctrine of divine mandate for universal rule.

Friar Riccardus, a brother of Julian's in the Dominican Order and also from Hungary, recorded the first two of the friars’ missions to the Mongols (1231–33 and 1234–35) in a letter to Pope Gregory IX. In his text, he notes that they encountered “a messenger of the leader of the Tartars, who knew Hungarian, Ruthenian, Cuman, German, ‘Saracen’ [probably Persian] and Tartar.”Footnote ⁷³ Hence in the 1230s Christians made contact with the Mongols through polyglot envoys, perhaps in a comparable manner to that seen for Saljūq Rūm. This much appears to be reflected in the letter “Ad flagellum,” in its claims that the so-called Liber executionis exists in multiple languages and that the invaders have interpreters for all languages. The fact that the languages named are Latin, Greek, and Hebrew surely represents only the Latin Christian redactor's bias towards familiarity: the real breadth of languages was probably nearer the far more practical gamut known by Riccardus's contact.

Both of these edicts from the mid-1230s (to the Kingdom of Hungary and the Saljūq Sultanate of Rūm) contain claims to a divine mandate for universal rule and aggressive threats of invasion and destruction. These elements are present in the letter “Ad flagellum”:

I suggest that this is not mere coincidence but that the letter “Ad flagellum” in fact preserves the confused vestige of an edict delivered to an eastern Christian group that lay in the Mongols’ path in the mid-1230s, which may have been included in full translation alongside the report in the letter. Bearing in mind that the Mongols would turn their attention south towards Cilician Armenia chiefly in the following decade, I once again return to my tentative suggestion that this edict should be associated with Chormaghan's campaigns in Georgia and Greater Armenia in 1236. The edict was perhaps published immediately preceding his arrival (thus, 1235–36), since the letter mentions at its end that the invaders “are twenty days’ travel distant from us, and already have broken through our borders.”

This identification is plausible also on the strength of similarities between the apocalyptical overtones of the letter “Ad flagellum” and the picture of the Georgians that circulated at the time of the Fifth Crusade. Georgian, Armenian, and Arab Christians all compiled material for the benefit of or communicated on friendly terms with the authorities of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, especially so around the time of the attack on Damietta.Footnote ⁷⁴ I thus agree with Hautala's identification of the letter with the patriarchate and probably the wider circle of Gerold of Lausanne (who was active in Jerusalem for the decade 1228–38).Footnote ⁷⁵ The edict and this other information was misunderstood and consequently misrepresented in the communiqué sent westwards to Europe. It is a tantalizing consideration that two phrases towards the letter's beginning and end, respectively (“A little of their manner and habits is revealed to you here, and in greater depth in the book assembled here in your presence,” and “They have other statutes that are accordingly contained more fully in the book sent to you”), may suggest that translations of the edict, or at least of a separate dossier of material, were originally sent west to accompany the letter. It will be fascinating to see if future manuscript finds contain any such associated material. This reconstruction of events would be entirely consistent with the evidence for Mongol policy in Eastern Europe and Anatolia in the mid-1230s.

These points explain the sinister omnipotence ascribed to the central figure of the letter “Ad flagellum.” The claim that he is immortal looks at first sight like a borrowing from apocalyptic traditions about the Second Coming of Christ. However, in the specific context of the Mongols, this perception was probably a warped reflection of a real characteristic of the great khans: that they looked to prolong their (earthly) life. (This is perhaps unlikely to be a reference to the general Chormaghan, and more likely pertains to the Great Khan of the time, Ögedei.) This longevity was sought, in particular, through appeals to holy men of all religions and denominations, explaining why many clergy of the Church of the East, for instance, were often found at the court of the khan: they were personally spared the violence of invasions and assembled in order that the aggregate of their prayer be devoted to the ruler's health.Footnote ⁷⁶

In the middle of the following decade, the famous mission of Benedict the Pole and John of Plano Carpini left for the Mongol court. Benedict's account of this mission has already been cited.Footnote ⁷⁷ They took with them two papal letters of Innocent IV, Dei Patris immensa and Cum non solum, of 5 and 13 March 1245, respectively.Footnote ⁷⁸ The first encourages the Mongols’ conversion to Christianity, and the second asks the reasons for their attacks on Christians and requests peace. In November 1246, Khan Güyük responded with a letter written in Persian with a Turkish preamble and a Mongol seal. The themes of the documents of the 1230s recur in this response. The letter of Güyük suggests that Innocent's request for peace was interpreted as an act of submission. The Mongols claimed that they did not understand the request for baptism (though, since we know that the Mongols were very well acquainted with the Christian Church of the East, this was probably a mere pretext). In the response, the Mongols articulate clearly their belief in the divine mandate of their conquests and the need for the pope to submit. The Mongols probably understood the pope to be the supreme ruler of western Christendom, hence why he is invited ahead of other rulers:

Peter Jackson has written that “the earliest direct evidence for the belief in such a programme [that is, a mandate for universal domination] dates, in fact, from the 1240s.” Jackson refers here to this mission of 1245–46, which gave rise to the first known instance of a Mongol letter surviving in its original form.Footnote ⁸⁰ There is, however, a compelling case to be made on the evidence of the Latin letters and the account of Ibn Bībī referenced above that such an ideology was already being articulated in orders for submission as early as the mid-1230s. What is presented in black and white in this letter of Güyük's may be less clear in the reports of the previous decade, but there is a strong argument to be made that a basic statement of the Mongols’ god-given right to rule the world was included in each of these edicts. The letter “Ad flagellum,” arguably, is one further (if much distorted) instance of this.

Another element of Mongol political ideology can be discerned in the Liber executionis. This is the basic division that the Mongols made between the two types of peoples in the world: those that had submitted to them and so were in “harmony” (il), and those that had not and so were considered to be in “rebellion” (bol γ a). This formulation is present in the Mongol-language seal attached to the letter sent by Güyük Khan to Innocent IV (“il bolγa irgän-dür,” translated in Christopher Dawson's text as “people who have made their submission”).Footnote ⁸¹ The two terms also appear in the Secret History of the Mongols, chapter 5, section 150. This document is the only known, extensive early Mongol source written from the Mongol perspective, in the Mongol language. It was perhaps first drafted around 1228, but seems to have been later interpolated. In this particular instance, the author distinguishes between two parties in the Kerait tribe, one of which submitted to Chinggis Khan, the other of which challenged him.Footnote ⁸² This distinction is almost certainly what is meant by the phrases “provinciis nobis oboedientibus et provinciis nobis rebellantibus” found in the Latin translation of the edict of Güyük Khan sent through his military commander Baiju. This edict has been transmitted in the Speculum Historiale of Vincent of Beauvais:

The full incipit given in the letter “Ad flagellum” to this apparent book is “Liber executionis novi testamenti, ad refrenandam rebellium partem, et humilium iusticiam conservandam”:Footnote ⁸⁴ it likewise distinguishes between “rebellious” peoples and “humble” peoples, the former clearly mirrored by the term bol γ a, and the latter arguably reflecting il, or the oboedientes. This ideological distinction may also have been expressed in the document upon which Julian drew in his Epistula de vita Tartarorum. This edict had at its beginning a phrase that was translated into Latin as “subicientes mihi se exaltare et deprimere adversantes,” which bears a striking resemblance to the phrases “ad refrenandam rebellium potestatem et humilium iusticiam conservandam” and “provinciis nobis oboedientibus et provinciis nobis rebellantibus,” and in turn also to the bol γ a/il dichotomy of the Mongol-language sources. For this reason, too, it appears that the letter “Ad flagellum” in fact draws on a translation of a Mongol edict for its basic written source, supplemented by the oral and/or written evidence of the Christian party to which it was directed.

Claverie identified the Liber executionis as being rather an apocalyptic pamphlet. He proposed that this might have been the work of Christians of the Church of the East living in northern Iraq, close to Mongol Azerbaijan. He adds that the work was clearly not written in Syriac (the local Christian language), but that there was from the very beginning a Latin version, for the attention of Latin Christian readers.Footnote ⁸⁵ Claverie's suggestions for where the document was written, and for the involvement of Christians of the Church of the East, are very plausible. However, rather than being written by them for Latin attention, I suggest that this was a document emanating from the Mongols that was translated by eastern Christians (those of the Church of the East, Syrian Orthodox, or — I believe most likely — Armenians of Greater Armenia or Georgians) for the benefit of their Latin neighbors. A detailed comparison with those Latin documents of the 1230s and 1240s associated with the Mongols supports the contention that the Liber executionis had a later origin, bearing particular similarities to documents produced in the years 1235–36. Not only that, as we have seen, the text strongly echoes contemporary perceptions of Transcaucasia in the Latin East, while the proposed dating fits hand in glove with what is known of the chronology of and responses to the second Mongol invasion of the region when it reached its high point at precisely this time. There are therefore reasonable grounds for placing the provenance of the underlying intelligence of the letter “Ad flagellum” in Georgia or Greater Armenia in the years 1235 or 1236.

Reception (1): Crusade Theory

Earlier, this study considered the incipient stages of contact between western Christendom and the Mongols, and suggested that it was in the context of this period that the letter “Ad flagellum” was originally drafted.Footnote ⁸⁶ The letter was, however, widely copied for over a century more, and the contexts for these manuscripts require detailed consideration in order to explain why there remained sufficient interest well into the fourteenth century for these later copies to be made. Here, it is suggested that the letter “Ad flagellum” assumed roles within two distinct but often closely connected types of later medieval literature: crusade theory and prophecy. The assumption of these roles may also tell us much about how medieval readers and copyists understood the letter's significance and origins. To this end, the present section attempts to reconstruct the contexts of the various later manuscripts with reference to the wider landscape of European diplomacy with the Mongol world. Other relevant evidence, where it may have impacted upon the copying of parts of the manuscript tradition now lost or as yet unknown, is also considered here.

Between the first confused reports reaching the crusader states in the early 1220s and the final defeat of the Franks at Acre seventy years later, the Mongol world fractured into various regional polities. At Chinggis's death in 1227, his third son, Ögedei (r. 1229–41), succeeded as Great Khan; he was in turn succeeded by his son Güyük (1246–48). In 1251, however, Möngke came to the title after an interregnum of three years; Möngke was descended from Tolui, Chinggis's fourth son and Ögedei's younger brother. Competition between the families of these two sons became especially destructive following Möngke's death in China (1259), after which point any idea of the Mongol conquests being shared between the Chinggisids disintegrated, and competing, regional khanates emerged. Möngke drew vital support from the Jochids of the Volga region (the so-called Golden Horde), while one of his brothers, Hülegü, led Mongol expansion against the Abbasids in the Middle East, and would rule there as the first Il-Khan of Iran until early 1265.Footnote ⁸⁷

These two khanates were those with which Latin Christendom had the closest and longest lasting relationships. Quickly, they emerged as two mutually antagonistic power blocs, the precise composition of which altered slightly with time, but the broad structure of which remained similar. These power blocs were shaped by economic and political concerns: the Mamlūk Sultanate relied upon the Golden Horde (through Genoese intermediaries) to provide slaves from the regions north of the Black Sea that lay under its control, the income from which benefitted the Jochids; meanwhile, the beginning of war in 1261–62 between Berke of the Golden Horde and Hülegü of the Il-Khanate resulted in the beginnings of cooperation between the Jochids and the Mamlūk Sultanate under Baybars al-Bunduqdārī, already at war with the Il-Khanate.Footnote ⁸⁸ Because any crusades would be directed against territory ruled by the Mamlūks, the developments of the 1260s made the Il-Khanate a possible ally of Latin Europe and the Golden Horde a far less likely collaborator.

The prospects of this alliance have perhaps seemed more immediately evident to historians than they may originally have appeared to the Franks of the thirteenth-century crusader states. The notion was first mooted back in the late 1240s: Matthew Paris reports that two envoys were sent to the pope in the summer of 1248.Footnote ⁸⁹ Later that year, on 19 December, Louis IX of France received an embassy from Güyük's powerful deputy in Tabriz (Iran), Eljigidei; the envoys were two Christians of Mosul: Sayf al-Dīn Muẓaffar Dāwūd, the other known only as Mark. Louis was at that time in Cyprus, readying for an invasion of Egypt: Eljigidei offered Mongol support in the form of a parallel attack on the Mamlūks. Unlike the Mongol letters that precede it (those analyzed in the previous section), this document was not a demand for surrender, but a more cordial suggestion of cooperation. It is possible, though, that this cordiality masked a sophisticated, hidden agenda to channel the crusaders’ aggression away from Mongol subjects situated to the north of the Mamlūk Sultanate. Although Louis dispatched an embassy in return, the approach ultimately led to nothing concrete, and his campaign failed.Footnote ⁹⁰

The next significant developments, so far as we know, occurred in 1260, when Hülegü’s commander Kitbuqa led a small army south into Syria. The Franks stood by and allowed it to be defeated by the Mamlūks at the battle of ʿAyn Jālūt. At that time, the potential risks of antagonizing the Sultanate — their long-term, familiar enemy — probably seemed too dangerous for them to entertain a new friendship with the Il-Khanate. At this early stage, the papacy also took a very dim view of the Mongols: in language that strikingly recalls the letter “Ad flagellum,” a missive of Alexander IV to Henry III of England dated 17 November 1260 reports with breathless anxiety that “a scourge of Heaven's anger in the hand of the monstrous Tartars, bursting forth as if from the hidden borders of hell, has hard-pressed and brought together the Earth.”Footnote ⁹¹

A general change of attitude would take place over the following few years, although the idea of allying with the Il-Khanate never received as widespread backing as the idea of placing an embargo on trade with the Mamlūks.Footnote ⁹² The Il-Khanate itself often initiated diplomatic missions to the West to foster collaboration, as it stood to benefit from outside help against the powerful Mamlūks.Footnote ⁹³ Otherwise, the arguments for such an alliance tended to be emphasized in communications from the Kingdom of Cilician Armenia to the crusader states and Latin Europe. Cilician Armenia had emerged as a product of the crusading movement, and in many respects needed continued Frankish support to survive. It is possible that the Kingdom had welcomed the coming of the Mongols in the 1230s and 1240s as a potential counterweight to the hostile Saljūq Sultanate of Rūm that lay to its north and west. It may therefore have become an essentially willing client of the Chinggisids (apparently submitting variously in 1244, 1247, and 1253), and subsequently of their Il-Khanid successors in Iran.Footnote ⁹⁴

It was noted earlier that various eastern Christian groups, including the Armenians of both Greater Armenia and Cilicia, naïvely misunderstood or else deliberately misrepresented the Mongols as being Christians.Footnote ⁹⁵ This was one reason for the vogue of the idea of a crusader-Il-Khanid coordinated attack in the treatises of a number of crusade theorists in the later thirteenth and earlier fourteenth centuries. Hayton of Gorigos's (or Corycus) Flos historiarum terre orientis (“Flower of the Histories of the East”) was completed in August 1307 and written in response to an embassy of the Il-Khan Öljeitü to the papal curia. It was intended to encourage the pope and European monarchs to respond favorably to these overtures; in order to serve this agenda, Hayton heavily distorted his descriptions of the Il-Khanate and highly exaggerated any sympathy they might have felt (or be perceived to feel) towards Christianity.Footnote ⁹⁶

Some western crusade theorists came apparently independently to the conclusion that Il-Khanid-crusader cooperation could prove fruitful, but Hayton's treatise subsequently galvanized some of this support. These theorists are one group among a larger milieu of writers, by no means all of whom shared their views: some did not mention the idea of an alliance at all, while others actively opposed it.Footnote ⁹⁷ What follows is a brief survey of some of the main proponents of the cause.

One of the earliest crusade theorists to propose the alliance was Fidenzio of Padua, a Franciscan who had spent much time in the Middle East and who knew Arabic. He wrote a treatise, Liber recuperationis Terrae Sanctae (“Book of the Recovery of the Holy Land”), in response to a request from Pope Gregory X at the Second Council of Lyons, 1274; it was completed in 1291.Footnote ⁹⁸ Another project, written in French and known as the Via ad Terram Sanctam (“The Way to the Holy Land”) (the date of the original version of which is unclear, but may precede Fidenzio's treatise) similarly advocated cooperation.Footnote ⁹⁹

In the early fourteenth century, the Venetian publicist and statesman Marino Sanudo Torsello wrote his Liber secretorum fidelium crucis (“The Book of the Secrets of the Faithful of the Cross”). The first part of the work was written in 1306–9, the second in 1312, and the last completed in 1321. His text was distributed to Pope John XXII and Charles IV of France, and in voluminous correspondence (with which the letter “Ad flagellum” was to be associated in MS R) he energetically publicized his ideas to any potentially interested parties: Sanudo was an extremely well-connected figure. He traveled widely in the eastern Mediterranean and knew much about the region and its economic structure firsthand. The augmentations he made to his treatise between 1312 and 1321 addressed Armenian-Mamlūk-Il-Khanid relations and were influenced by the writings of Hayton of Gorigos. Sanudo had supported the idea of an alliance with the Il-Khans before he read Hayton's Flos historiarum, but after he came to know this text, it became a larger component of his crusading theory.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Between the composition of the second and final versions of the Liber secretorum, the Dominican friar William (Guillaume) of Adam wrote a treatise originally untitled but most recently edited as the Tractatus quomodo Sarraceni sunt expugnandi (“Treatise on How to Defeat the Saracens,” written c. 1316–18). He was maybe one of the best informed of all crusade theorists, having spent time in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean, though he does not appear to have visited Mamlūk Egypt, which he nevertheless loathed. Adam was also, together with Hayton, one of the only two theorists to be aware that the Mongol world consisted at this time of multiple khanates and to be aware that the Mamlūks and the Golden Horde were then aligned against the Il-Khanate.Footnote ¹⁰¹

In 1332, an anonymous Dominican authored a text called the Directorium ad faciendum passagium (“The Route for Carrying out a Crusade”) for King Philip VI of France. Like William of Adam, the author had traveled to Constantinople, Iran, and the Indian Ocean, and this circumstantial evidence raises the possibility that both texts were written by one and the same man, though it is maybe more probable that the author merely used Adam's text. The Directorium mentions the conquests of “Casan” (the Il-Khan Ghazan) in Syria in 1300, and makes the case that the Mongols would cooperate against the mutual Mamlūk enemy in the event of a crusade.Footnote ¹⁰² By the early 1330s, the circumstances that might favor such cooperation were more or less passed.Footnote ¹⁰³

Crusade theorists derived the information on which they based their proposals either from personal observation, written or oral secondhand intelligence, or from a combination. This need for information is an important context for the study of the letter “Ad flagellum,” because it almost certainly explains the copying of the text in the manuscript Paris, nouv. acq. fr. 5842 (R). Furthermore, bearing in mind how much of the transmission process remains obscure, this context may very well have led to the copying of the letter in other instances too. The transmission of a copy of the letter “Ad flagellum” (regardless of how mutilated) together with a small dossier of letters by the important crusade theorist Marino Sanudo Torsello would suggest that at least one copyist found some sort of shared, common interest in these texts.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Naturally, this argument for common interest could not be made for every manuscript, since many contain no uniting theme running through their contents; but in this case there is a positive argument to be made for connections to be drawn between apocalyptic-prophetic texts and crusade theory. In Florence, BN Centrale, MS Landau Finaly 17 (F), the letter is transmitted alongside a large volume of correspondence written by senior ecclesiastics, concerned largely with northern Italy, but rooted in a wider Mediterranean context, touching upon relations with the crusader states, the Saljūq Sultanate of Rūm, and the Mongols.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In the search for understanding the world around and beyond the Holy Land, any intelligence might prove useful, even if some of these reports may, with the benefit of hindsight, appear farfetched or manifestly false. This desire to accumulate all available reports on what was happening in the various regions to the east and across the Mediterranean basin most likely underpinned the creation of such document collections as those found in MSS F and R.

Sanudo himself was not, it seems, directly influenced by the letter “Ad flagellum,” and we do not know whether he himself read it. (Whatever the precise date of the copying of R, the association of the letter in this manuscript with documents — including Sanudo's own correspondence — dated to 1334–37 does make this feasible, since he did not die until 1338.) It is at least quite plausible, on the evidence of MS R, that it was circulating among people interested in crusade theory, for whom its implications of potential disruption to the balance of power in the East would have been highly significant. Sanudo was perhaps less likely than some to be influenced by the ambiguous and distorted contents of the letter, since he had traveled widely in the Levant and did not have to rely solely on the often confused accounts of others.

But by no means all theorists worked from a basis of personal, firsthand knowledge of the eastern Mediterranean: Pierre Dubois (c. 1255–after 1321), a publicist and apologist writing for Philip IV “the Fair” of France, alleged in his De recuperatione Terrae Sanctae (“On the Recovery of the Holy Land”) that the strengths of the Mamlūk Sultanate came from long-lived, clairvoyant, evil spirits.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ To take another example, extraordinarily, over four decades after the main Mongol invasions of Eastern and Central Europe, a chronicler in Mantua recorded that “in that year [1285], a certain David John, King of the Tarses [most likely meaning ‘people of the city of Tarsus’], the Tartars, and the Enclosed Tribe, entered Hungary and destroyed it for the most part.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ These two cases gesture towards a larger reality: that the gathering of more accurate intelligence regarding the Mongols did not necessarily displace or prevent the fabrication and elaboration of myths, because the two were able to coexist quite happily — and perhaps this was especially so in northwestern Europe, where the number of people in direct and regular contact with the Mongols was, particularly in the fourteenth century, far lower than in the Levant or the Italian maritime cities.

Significantly, it was in the far northwest of Europe, in England, that at least three of the surviving witnesses of the letter “Ad flagellum” were copied (C, G, and L). Furthermore, these three copies represent two quite separate lines of transmission.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ This poses the question of why a text of this nature was apparently so interesting to English scribes in the fourteenth century. A partial answer to this question can be found in a consideration of England's diplomatic exchanges with the Il-Khanate during the reigns of Edwards I (r. 1272–1307) and II (r. 1307–27). Another part of the answer can be found in an examination of the popularity of political prophecy in England at this time, which is addressed below.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Particularly after the failure of the Eighth Crusade (Tunis, 1270), which resulted in the death of Louis IX of France, Edward of England (not yet king) came to be regarded increasingly as the preeminent champion of the crusading cause. Edward first came across ambassadors of Il-Khan Abaqa in Tunis shortly after Louis's death, and upon his arrival in the Holy Land, where he had traveled to fulfill his crusading vows, established contact with the Il-Khanate. The reigns of Abaqa (r. 1265–82) and Arghun (r. 1284–91) were characterized by frequent communication with Edward I. There followed a hiatus during the reigns of Geikhatu, Baidu, and the Muslim Ghazan (1291–1304), and then a revival under Öljeitü (r. 1304–16). Edward II responded enthusiastically to an embassy of the last of these in 1307 but did not follow it up with action. In the winter of 1312–13, Öljeitü launched a small and unsuccessful attack on Syria, after which he sent what seems to have been the last Il-Khanid embassy to the West, similarly destined for Edward II. Two last false Mongol victories over the Mamlūks were reported in England for 1312 and 1317, after which time direct contacts appear to have stopped, and the steady flow of (increasingly inaccurate) intelligence to have all but dried up (for the time being).Footnote ¹¹⁰ Interest in the Mongols, however, did not then cease, as is evident in the continued copying of texts relevant to the Mongols in the MSS Copenhagen, Kongelige Bibliotek, Acc. 2011/5 (C) and Cambridge, Gonville and Caius MS 162/83 (G).Footnote ¹¹¹

The three known English manuscripts of the letter “Ad flagellum” were copied during the fourteenth century and so postdate the high tide of English-Il-Khanid relations. I have suggested that the common ancestor shared by MSS C and G was not an immediate archetype, but perhaps at one or two generations’ remove; similarly, the distinct peculiarities of L would point to common ancestry with C and G only at many degrees’ remove.Footnote ¹¹² This means that the two branches of fourteenth-century English transmission must have involved many witnesses either now lost or as yet unknown. It therefore remains impossible to know at precisely what time the text first reached England and, by extension, whether or not its importance for English scribes was directly connected with Edward I's and Edward II's diplomacy with the Il-Khanate. This diplomatic context seems very likely to have encouraged interest in information pertaining to the Mongols, and the interest of this information — including an appetite for new hearsay — did not entirely pale with the final mission of Öljeitü.Footnote ¹¹³ On the other hand, English writers, most exceptionally in the case of Matthew Paris, had long had an interest in the Mongol world; to such chroniclers, a document like the letter “Ad flagellum” would have been of considerable interest.

The realistic possibility of a crusade carried out with Il-Khanid help waned in the first decade of the fourteenth century. The second, brief, and final Il-Khanid occupation of Syria in 1299–1300 incited enormous hopes, but ended with no permanent benefits for Western Europe. This campaign, led by the Il-Khan Ghazan, resulted in the temporary conquest between January and May 1300 of Mamlūk territory as far south as Gaza. Extravagant rumors circulated among chroniclers of the West, to the effect that an Il-Khanid-Armenian-Cypriot coalition had wrested the Holy Land from the Mamlūks on behalf of Christendom, while Ghazan (himself a Muslim from his accession in 1294) was sometimes said to have converted to Christianity.Footnote ¹¹⁴ It appears that the realization of the baselessness of these rumors cooled enthusiasm for the proposed alliance. Hayton of Gorigos's treatise of August 1307, the Flos historiarum, represented one of the later exhortations to form a crusader-Il-Khanid alliance.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Yet, even in August 1307, the circumstances had been very precarious, and just three months later the assassinations of Hetʿum II and Leo III of Cilician Armenia at Il-Khanid hands would pour a great deal of cold water over the idea. The last Mongol attempts to secure an alliance petered out in these years, ending (as we have seen) with Öljeitü’s final embassy to Edward II in 1313. Furthermore, in 1320 the last Il-Khan, Abu Saʿīd, would sign an entente and in 1322 a full truce with the Mamlūk Sultanate, officially spelling the end of the hostilities that had for so long provided much of the rationale for crusader-Il-Khanid co-operation.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Though English chroniclers would continue to record numerous tales about the Mongol world, the future of its diplomatic relations with Europe would, from then on, become predominantly the preserve of Venetians and Genoese.

These Italo-Mongol relations represent the final of the various stages of contact between the Mongols and the West. The Il-Khanate itself was only to remain intact until the death (from plague or poison) of the last Il-Khan, Abū Saʿīd, in late 1335. His death precipitated unrest, causing extreme difficulties for Italian traders settled in Iran. Despite these hardships, the maritime cities continued to interact with the Mongols of the Golden Horde and post-Il-Khanid Mongol rulers in Iran. These interactions were concerned with securing economic and religious privileges for Christians, often hommes d'affaires, in the Mongols’ territories.Footnote ¹¹⁷ While this context does not appear (so far as we know) to have been of direct relevance for the transmission of the letter “Ad flagellum,” three of the latest copies of which were made in England, it is plausible that the letter might have been read and copied in Venetian and Genoese circles at this late time: Sanudo's broader Venetian context was certainly significant for the text of MS R.

Around a century after the high point of English-Il-Khanid diplomacy came rejuvenated effort from some quarters to reinstate a rapprochement. The reign of Tīmūr-i Lang (“the Lame,” d. 1405; also Temür, European Tamerlane) saw the revival of two themes familiar from earlier times: over-optimistic calls for a crusader alliance and false reports of Tīmūr's conversion to Christianity. The impetus for cooperation came this time from John, a Dominican and archbishop of Sulṭāniyya (in today's northwestern Iran) in the early fifteenth century. He doctored missives from Tīmūr in order to make collaboration look more attractive to European rulers, emphasizing their common hostility to the Ottomans and offering a highly exaggerated (arguably totally untrue) sense of how sympathetic Tīmūr was to Christians. Just as in the case of Hayton of Gorigos, John of Sulṭāniyya was a Christian living with the realities of Mongol (non-Christian) hegemony in the East, trying to solicit the help of fellow Christians with carefully chosen language and distorted information.Footnote ¹¹⁸

So sympathetic an image of Tīmūr was not, however, unique to those with such vested interests as John. Thousands of miles to the west, some English chroniclers reported Tīmūr's advance with interest, others with enthusiasm: being hostile to the Muslim Ottomans, he might be a friend of Christendom. Adam of Usk was in Rome when he heard news of the Battle of Ankara (20 July 1402). His account, more cautious than some of his contemporaries’, recalls greatly the manner in which Ghazan's occupation of Syria in 1300 was received in the West. The claim that Tīmūr followed up his victory with the sacking of Jerusalem is false.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Thomas Walsingham, a successor of Matthew Paris as chronicler in St. Albans, heard rumors in England that took this news one step further still into the realms of fiction. These rumors arrived during the visit of the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos to the court of Henry IV of England. He reported that

Though by no means an exhaustive survey, these two passages provide a glimpse of how the news of the Tīmūrid advance was received in northwestern Europe. The false hopes embodied here are familiar refrains of leitmotifs first heard nearly two centuries earlier.

These themes of cooperation and pseudo-Christianity, which had originally emerged during the siege and capture of Damietta in 1218–21,Footnote ¹²² did not, therefore, completely disappear with the waning of the Il-Khanate. It is not clear to what degree these diplomatic contexts influenced the transmission of the letter “Ad flagellum,” because so much of the manuscript tradition remains obscure: the strength of this influence would be easier to evaluate if we knew more about precisely when the text began to circulate in England, something that cannot be gleaned from the three known fourteenth-century copies. Furthermore, while it is important to note that European relations with the Mongol world long outlasted the end of formal diplomatic contact with the Il-Khanate, I believe that the more immediate reasons for the copying of the letter in northwestern Europe in the later 1330s actually lie elsewhere: in the spread of prophetic literature.

Reception (2): Prophecy

The previous section has explored possible reasons why the letter “Ad flagellum” might originally have grasped the attention of English copyists and why a mutilated copy of the text was at least once circulated alongside the correspondence of the crusade theorist Marino Sanudo Torsello. I have argued here that the letter “Ad flagellum” is, in its origins, not a solely prophetic text, but rather an intelligence communiqué expressed in the language of apocalyptic prophecy. Contemporaries might have understood this text as a factual report, as a prophecy, or as anything in between; the manuscript tradition suggests as much. Having seen an overview of the ways in which crusade theorists gathered and processed information when writing about conditions in the Middle East, it will have become clear that all manner of sources were employed, and not necessarily with the sorts of critical approaches that historians apply today. This section turns its attention to some prophetic texts. The later medieval prophecies addressed here were sometimes grounded, however loosely, in events or conditions in the Middle East and more distant parts of Asia, but were frequently expressed in allegorical rather than literal terms; they may therefore be treated as essentially different from, for example, intelligence reports that were influenced by mythological tropes (such as, William of Adam's image of the Kingdom of GeorgiaFootnote ¹²³).

Many of these prophecies concerned the events that would surround the coming of Antichrist. From Late Antiquity, pessimism about the End Times, influenced by the writings of Augustine, had prevailed in Western Europe. Later, this pessimism was sometimes replaced with an optimism that predicted better times either preceding or following the coming of Antichrist, only after which would come the End Times. Those prophecies that placed the better times before the coming of Antichrist are known as “chiliast,” or “Sibylline,” after the foundational late antique eastern Christian Sibylline texts upon the traditions of which later prophecies drew.Footnote ¹²⁴ Those that placed the better times after the coming of Antichrist are called “Joachite,” because they are usually understood as influenced by the writings of Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202).Footnote ¹²⁵ The much older and more established Sibylline, chiliast model seems to have dominated in the prophecies entering Europe from the Middle East in the later Middle Ages, though not exclusively so.

Some of the most influential prophetic texts of this period circulated in a large number of different versions, adapted and translated to fit the requirements of changing circumstances and audiences. (It is in a context such as this that Claverie has read the letter “Ad flagellum,” in his attribution of it as a piece of eastern Christian apocalypticism from the northern region of Iraq, where it bordered Mongol Azerbaijan.Footnote ¹²⁶) One example of such a contemporary text is the “Vision of Tripoli”: first emerging c. 1239 in the context of the Mongol invasions of Hungary, it quickly spawned many variants, some of which survived into the late fifteenth century. Written as an allegory involving various animals, it prophesied great destruction to the crusader states by Muslims, followed by the ultimate triumph of a crusade and then the appearance of Antichrist. Another text, the “Prophecy of Merlin,” drew on traditions from the tenth century, predicting the triumph of a French king, crowned emperor in Jerusalem. He would vanquish the rampaging tribes long ago constrained behind the Black Sea by Alexander the Great, and the “Saracens” would be converted to Christianity. He would then relinquish his power, and before the ultimate triumph of God, Antichrist would reign on Earth.Footnote ¹²⁷ Both prophecies are therefore chiliastic, which is entirely consistent with the tenor of the two prophetic Arabic letters that Oliver of Paderborn reports were received by the crusaders at Damietta during the Fifth Crusade.Footnote ¹²⁸

In addition to these texts, prophecies connected with events in the East that were either Joachite in origin, or later assumed Joachite associations, circulated in England at this time. The additions to the Chronica Majora of Matthew Paris, found in BL Cotton Nero D I, contain material of considerable interest for the subjects both of apocalyptic prophecy and of intelligence regarding the Mongols. Matthew himself oversaw the composition of this text, and so this prophecy must have been circulating in England before his death in 1256. For the year 1242, Matthew reproduces a letter from the abbot of the Benedictine abbey of St. Mary in Hungary, dated 4 January, that describes the destruction caused by the Mongol invaders. Immediately following the end of this letter, the chronicler states that worrying rumors were circulating at that time about the advent of Antichrist, including a short set of verses that predicted his coming for the year 1250 (thus apt to the Joachite prediction of terror until the year 1260).Footnote ¹²⁹ The connection drawn here by Matthew Paris is entirely similar to that which seems to underpin the letter “Ad flagellum”: the attacks of the Mongols, even in cases where documents such as the Hungarian report of 1242 existed, might be inserted into a framework of apocalyptic prophecy, the origins of which were separate. Perhaps the association of the letter in MSS F and B with texts pertinent to the earlier 1250s had something to do with the spread of Joachite prophecies at this time and the significance of that decade in the Joachite apocalyptic chronology.Footnote ¹³⁰

The letter “Ad flagellum” itself is far more a description of a group with apocalyptic associations rather than a prophecy in its own right. In fact, the letter actually refers quite separately to the prophecies of the invaders themselves, claiming that,

In other words, the redactor of the letter “Ad flagellum” (once again, not necessarily the same person as the authorial voiceFootnote ¹³¹) understood that prophecies were contained in the book borne by the Pseudo-Prophet, rather than that he was himself composing a prophetic text. For these reasons, I do not believe that the letter began its life as an exposition of chiliastic or Joachite predictions about the coming of Antichrist in a Transcaucasian, Middle Eastern, or eastern European context, in the sense of the other texts mentioned here, but I do believe that it is quite possible the letter came to be read alongside such other texts and understood as part of this broader corpus. One example of such a reading of the text is arguably evident in the late MS Royal 12 C xii (L).

Slightly later political prophecies, current in England in the earlier fourteenth century, can help further to explain the presence of the letter “Ad flagellum” in MS L. The other question that remains to be answered is why in this particular copy the text bears a date of summer 1335.

The ascription to 1335 may, of course, simply be a scribal error for 1235, which would also fit neatly with the dating of the text proposed by this study. In MS L the date is clearly written out in full, but this text (or a close ancestor) may have been based on a hyparchetype that read “MCCXXXV,” accidentally (or perhaps even earnestly) misread by a fourteenth-century copyist as “MCCCXXXV.” On the other hand, in MS L the letter takes on a new role as a piece of apocalyptic prophecy for English consumption. Understanding the particular prominence of prophetic literature in England during the reigns of Edwards I, II, and III is probably the most important context in which this new role, and the new date, is to be understood. This literature, in turn, had its own wider context among a significant corpus of apocalyptic and political prophecies circulating in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Europe and the Middle East.

Bound with the letter in MS L is the prophecy “Lilium regnans” (fol. 16r): this is an allegory in which the Son of Man and the Eagle of the East ally in repelling the Lily from invading the Lion's territory. The Son of Man wrests control from the Lily, and a golden age is ushered in. Also in this booklet (fol. 16v) is the prophecy of the Holy Oil of Thomas Becket, a text associated with Old Testament stories of David and concerned with the restoration of the church of God: this prophecy, like the letter “Ad flagellum,” in which a supreme pontifex of the church is disallowed by the Pseudo-Prophet, has anti-papal overtones. Furthermore, another manuscript, BL Cotton Claudius B VII, preserves a version of the fictitious letter of Prester John to Manuel I Komnenos.Footnote ¹³² It is very probable that the compiler of MS L associated the letter with the other prophecies that he copied, but scholars addressing his manuscript have tended to separate the prophecies from the letter, meaning that this context has not been understood. The compiler of the manuscript may have found these prophecies already grouped together, or may himself have brought them together. Either way, an English scribe in the period c. 1335–38 drew a connection between them.

Did the compiler of MS L, or the compiler of his hyparchetype, take the date of summer 1335 from a specific source? In MS Paris, nouv. acq. fr. 5842 (R), there is some tantalizing evidence that suggests this could have been possible. The correspondence of Sanudo's preserved in these folia dates from the years 1334–37:Footnote ¹³³ the copy of the letter “Ad flagellum” is situated after a report concerning the pontificate of Benedict XII dated to spring 1335 and immediately before an intriguing account of a man of Narbonne who claimed to be Christ, the latter concerning a theme that is obviously very similar to the claims of the letter “Ad flagellum.” It seems plausible that the compiler of these two folia heard of the news of the arrest of the Narbonnais Pseudo-Prophet, which recalled to him another letter of which he had a copy. This text may be the key to understanding how and why the letter was appropriated into an apocalyptic, prophetic context at this late stage:

There is another text in R, this time a letter of Sanudo himself, that further suggests the possible importance of this grouping of documents for the broader reception of the letter “Ad flagellum.” In early 1335, Sanudo wrote from Venice to Paulino, bishop of Pozzuoli (Campania), reporting an embassy of two brothers called Jacobini from the Golden Horde, at this time under the rule of Özbek Khan, to the European courts of Hungary, Austria, Venice, the papacy, and Byzantium. They took with them messages from unspecified Christian rulers in the regions around the Khanate. Sanudo describes these envoys as “learned in many languages” (scientes ydiomata plura), which is strongly reminiscent of the Latin reports of the 1230s. The order in which the three letters mentioned here appear — “Ad flagellum,” the heretic of Narbonne, and the report of the Jacobini embassy — might be mere coincidence, but it may also reflect the reception of the letter “Ad flagellum” as both a report on conditions in the extreme East (to complement the information concerning the Golden Horde), and as a piece of apocalyptic prophecy (mirrored in contemporary southern France).Footnote ¹³⁵

MS R, despite comprising a mere two folios, thus fulfilled a number of roles. It circulated information that might be of interest to crusade theorists, but some of this selfsame information could subsequently be read — in other contexts — in a primarily or purely prophetic light. It is possible that the content and relative dates of the letters collected in MS R influenced the prophetic collection in MS L, the compilation of which was likely completed around 1338.Footnote ¹³⁶ After these two folios were disseminated, it seems plausible that the copyist who collated the hyparchetype on which the booklet in MS L drew attached a date of summer 1335 based on the context of these two other letters in this selection of correspondence, or on a closely associated document. Other than this, it is difficult to account for how this copy might have ended up with this date, markedly later as it is than most other correspondence regarding the Mongols, and clearly not the original date of the text, which is already attested from the middle of the thirteenth century.