Aftermath

The origins of the ‘evil Tatars’ were as much of a mystery to the rest of Europe as they had been to the Russians. At the beginning of the thirteenth century the knowledge which the peoples of Europe and Asia had of each others’ continents amounted to nothing more than a miscellany of myth and superstition. As they had been told in Latin legends and by the ancient Chinese geographers’ Classic of Mountains and Seas, each still believed that, apart from humans such as themselves, the other continent was inhabited by men with dogs’ heads or even men with no heads at all. Although silk worms had already been imported into Italy and cotton had been planted in India, the Europeans generally believed that silk threads were combed from the leaves of trees, while the Chinese thought that cotton threads were combed out of the fleeces of ‘water sheep’.

Trade between the two continents had continued uninterrupted since before the time of the Roman Empire, but the merchant communities did not deal directly with each other. They bought and sold through the caravaneers and market owners of the Middle East, and the spread of Islam, which had established a monopoly for the Arab and Turkish merchants, had created such a barrier that the people of mediaeval Europe. had no more knowledge of the east than had the citizens of imperial Rome.

Such second-hand intelligence as did seep through the commercial gossip was always adapted to fit in with already accepted myths, which had been embellished by legends of chivalry, and endorsed, and even in some cases added to, by the Christian church. When news of the Mongol advances first arrived in Europe, therefore, it was confidently interpreted in the light of these accredited superstitions, particularly the myths which had grown out of the campaigns of Alexander the Great and the new legend of Prester John.

The cult of chivalry had led to the veneration of some of the heroes of history, whom it had endowed with all the knightly virtues, and throughout Europe a series of fictional letters had been allowed to circulate, which, it was claimed, had been written by one of the foremost of these heroes, Alexander the Great, and which purported to recount his adventures in India. Since chivalric romanticism required that some of his enemies should be exemplary as well as supernatural, the letters described a continent that contained not only tribes of fiendish barbarians, but also utopian principalities. Although mediaeval maps, which depicted India as one enormous continent made up of most of Asia and Africa, could not support the story by locating these principalities, they were more precise as to the whereabouts of at least some of the fiendish barbarians. Alexander the Great had apparently driven back the children of Gog and Magog and shut them up in the Caucasus behind the ‘Iron Gate’ in the pass beyond Derbend, from whence, according to Christian prophecy, they would one day emerge to destroy Christendom. It was the church, however, that was to supply further information about the utopian principalities. Although their whereabouts were unknown, it was claimed that many of them were Christian, having been converted by Saint Thomas, who had visited India to bring the word of Christ to the land of the Magi. As was often to be the case, the story did contain a grain of truth. There were many Christians in the east who followed the teachings of Nestorius, a former patriarch of Constantinople who had set out for the east in the fifth century, after being deposed by the Council of Ephesus for refusing to recognize the Virgin Mary as the ‘Mother of*God’ and preaching that Christ was merely a man who had been endued with the Holy Spirit. The followers of Nestorius had carried his teaching across Mesopotamia and Persia to China.

It was a series of possibly unconnected events, spiced by these combinations of fact and fiction, that gave rise to the legend of Prester John. As early as 1122 an eastern prelate called John, claiming to have come from India, had visited Rome and had been received with great hospitality by Pope Calixtus ii. The visit may have been nothing more than an elaborate confidence trick, but it is also possible that the prelate was a Nestorian. The legend developed when in 1145 Pope Eugenius iii received a letter from the Bishop of Gabala in Syria, describing reports of a royal priest who ruled over the Nestorian Christians in the east, while at the same time a fictional letter was being borne to Rome signed by this priest-king, Prester John, declaring his intention to invade and liberate the Holy Land. Although the Christian army from the east never materialized and a papal ambassador sent by Alexander iii vanished without trace, the existence of Prester John became universally accepted.

While the Mongol armies were preparing for the invasion of Khwarizm, Pope Honorius iii was preaching a crusade which, although it had received some support from Hungary and Austria, was meeting with little enthusiasm throughout the rest of Europe. To increase confidence in the crusade, Jacques de Vitry, the Bishop of Acre, wrote a letter to the pope in 1217 saying that many of the Christian princes in the east were massing under the banner of Prester John to advance against the Saracens. The report was supported not only by rumours, but also by another series of those forged letters for which there seems to have been such a vogue in mediaeval Europe. Although the letters may have come from the Nestorian Christians living in Islam, who also had an interest in encouraging the crusade that would relieve them from Moslem persecution, it is more probable that their source was the same as the original report. Whatever the source, the authors of some of the letters at least realized that Prester John would by then have been over a hundred years old and so they persuaded Europe that the man who was marching to destroy Islam was his grandson, ‘King David of India’.

One of the letters which reached northern Europe contained ‘King David of India’ miscopied as ‘King David of Israel’, which induced the Jewish population to make a collection of gold and send it to the invading army. Unfortunately the gold never got further than the Caucasus where it fell into the hands of Georgian bandits. If it had reached its destination, it would have ended in the coffers of Chingis Khan.

In 1221, when the conquest of Khwarizm was entering its final stage, Jacques de Vitry, amazed to discover that his propaganda had contained so much truth, reported to the pope that there really was an invading army and that it was now advancing through Persia. What he was never to realize was that there had been even more truth to his story than that: not only were many of the soldiers in the advancing army Nestorian Christians, but also their commander was related to Prester John.

The Nestorian Christians who rode with Chingis Khan were Kerait Mongols. Their chief, Wang Khan, had made a treaty of friendship with Temujin’s father, Yesukai. This had entitled Temujin to look upon him as a guardian after his father’s death, but during the tribal wars the old man had betrayed him and it was not until after the bloody battle of Gupta and the death of Wang Khan that the Karaits joined the armies of Temujin. It was this Wang Khan that Marco Polo later identified as Prester John; he had never been to Europe, but he was the only Christian ruler of an eastern people, and, just as the word Mongol became Mogul in India, so, as it passed from language to language, the name Wang came to sound like John. Although Chingis Khan could not therefore be described as Prester John’s grandson, he could be described as his ward.

A small number of Christian scholars had argued all along that the invading army could not possibly be Christian, but most European observers wanted to believe the story and, as more accurate reports of the Mongol campaign began to reach the west, they eagerly accepted any explanation that would sustain the authenticity of ‘King David’. They decided that there were strategic reasons for the raids on Azerbaijan: ‘King David’ would not be advancing into the Holy Land until he had prepared for his invasion by securing his right flank. But it would have been more difficult to come to terms with the march into Georgia, particularly since Queen Rusudan had identified the invaders as ‘a savage people of Tatars’, if it had not been for the fact that she also identified them as Christians. In her letter to Honorius iii she wrote that the invaders must have been of Christian origin since they carried an oblique white cross on their banners. There may have been Keraits in Jebe and Subedei’s army, but there is no evidence that they carried the white cross on their standards. The standard of the Mongol army was a Greek cross made from the shoulder-blades of sheep, from which hung nine yak tails, and it was probably a very unspecific report of this that caused the queen’s misunderstanding; after all, the only Georgian soldiers who had seen the Mongol army and survived had not been very close to it.

With the news of Jebe and Subedei’s ride across Russia the confused opinion-makers of western Christendom at last divided into two schools of thought. The majority, supported by King Andreas ii of Hungary, in whose country some of the Cumans had taken refuge, still adhered to the theory of 'King David'. In the same year as Queen Rusudan's letter, Andreas ii reported the battle of Kalka to Honorius iii, saying that the army of ‘King David' or Prester John as he was better known, which carried with it the body of Saint Thomas, had slaughtered two hundred thousand Russians and Cumans. Once again the theory was adjusted - obviously the objective had been misunderstood and King David had not sent his armies to liberate the Holy Land: he had sent them to punish the followers of the eastern orthodox church who had broken away from the true faith and the dominion of Rome.

The second school of thought, which had not been prepared to reject the theory of ‘King David' and a Christian army on the basis of scholarly logic, abandoned it in favour of superstition and legend. Since the savage Tatars had entered Russia through the pass at Derbend, they argued that they were the children of Gog and Magog, who had been driven beyond the pass by Alexander, and that these soldiers of Antichrist had been released again by the devil to bring about the destruction of Christendom.

As early as June 1218 the Fifth Crusade had begun with the siege of Damietta in the Nile delta. Under an old but capable commander, John of Brienne, who was then titular King of Jerusalem, the crusaders had hoped that after the capture of Damietta the Egyptian sultan, al-Kamil, who also ruled Syria and most of Palestine, might exchange Damietta for Jerusalem. After a frustrating seventeen months of siege the sultan did offer to restore all the Kingdom of Jerusalem west of the Jordan in return for a Christian evacuation of Egypt. By then, however, the Christian command had been taken over by the impatient papal legate. Cardinal Pelagius, and, incredibly, the offer was refused. The stubborn Spanish cardinal had believed that the crusaders were strong enough to go on to capture Cairo and the rest of Egypt, but after the fall of Damietta the war went on for nearly two more fruitless years until in August 1221 the crusaders were trapped by a sudden flooding of the Nile and only the negotiating powers of John of Brienne and the clemency of the sultan saved them from annihilation by the Moslem soldiers. Damietta was returned, an eight-year truce was signed and the crusaders sailed back to Acre, where, ironically, the bishop had just sent off his second report confirming that ‘King David’ was advancing from the east.

Cardinal Pelagius had turned success into disaster. By the time the reports of King Andreas and Queen Rusudan arrived, the confidence of Europe had already been severely shaken by the incompetence and collapse of the Fifth Crusade. It may have been the consequent anxiety that induced so many optimists to accept the theory of ‘King David’ or despair that drove the pessimists to believe in the soldiers of Antichrist, but when the invaders had gone the inhabitants of western Europe were even less curious than the Russians, and their capacity for self-deception seems to have been even greater.

If the invaders had been the savage soldiers of Antichrist they would have fallen before the true cross and the knights of European chivalry; but the primitive armies of Europe had been no match for the armies of Islam, and the more advanced armies of Islam had been no match for the Mongols. If they had been the armies of ‘King David’, they had proved unreliable; but nobody bothered to find out why.

There were men in Venice who knew the truth, but they were bound by treaty and self-interest to keep silent.