The Middle Ages by Johannes Fried

Author:Johannes Fried [Fried, Johannes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780674055629
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2015-01-13T08:00:00+00:00

The Mongol Invasion of 1238–1242: A New Impulse toward Globalization

All of a sudden, a new enemy appeared on Europe’s horizon—one that was utterly alien and terrifying, and which swept all before it. Yet while most rulers took note of this threat, with the exception of the Hungarian king, none of them made any attempt to find out about these horsemen from the East who were spreading terror. They overran everything that dared to stand in their way. The first empire to fall victim to them was Kievan Rus (1240), and soon after the Polish-Silesian army was annihilated in battle at the pilgrimage site of Legnica (1241). That same year, Hungary was depopulated, and its king, Béla IV, took refuge on an island in the Adriatic. A sense of apocalyptic fear became widespread. Sinister rumors spread, claiming that the mythical peoples of Gog and Magog, whose coming signaled the end of the world, had sallied forth to usher in the end of days; other people pinned their hopes on the mysterious Christian ruler Prester John (whose kingdom was said to lie in Africa) arriving with his armed hordes to defend Christianity against Muslim incursion. And yet, however strange, threatening, and catastrophic everything appeared to be, and however paralyzed the West was by horror and fear, the Mongol invasion—for this was the event in question here—brought about, despite heavy losses in places, especially in Hungary, a key moment of transformation in world history.

Except for the single engagement at Legnica, the West did not respond with force, which it was ill-equipped to do anyway, but rather with a rational and systematic application of reason and with the intellectual adeptness that it had acquired. It also reacted with a sense of curiosity and thirst for knowledge, underpinned by the entrepreneurial spirit of merchants and the dauntless zeal of Christian missionaries. It was not the temporal powers that took the initiative in this but the pope. Innocent IV sent the Franciscan Giovanni da Pian del Carpine as an envoy to find out what the Mongol’s objectives were, to spy out their military strategies and tactics with an eye to devising more effective countermeasures, and above all to investigate the possibilities of dispatching missionaries to them (1245–1247). Carpine’s report was a unique attestation of his skill in ethnographic observation; and, in the modes of perception and powers of discrimination and deduction it employed, it bore eloquent practical witness to how well the style of thinking practiced in the West for the past three and a half centuries had proved itself. A few years later, William of Rubruck set off on a mission, yet reaching his ultimate goal, the court of the Great Khan, required a commission as a royal envoy. King Louis IX of France (Saint Louis) duly granted him one while he was resident in the Holy Land (1253–1255). William’s depiction of the Mongols surpassed any ethnographic work that had been written hitherto. All aspects of their lives were described in exhaustive detail: their government

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