Giovanni da Pian del Carpini

Giovanni da Pian del Carpini (born c. 1180, Pian del Carpine?, near Perugia, Umbria [Italy]—died August 1, 1252, Antivari [Bar], Dalmatia?) was a Franciscan friar, the first noteworthy European traveler in the Mongol empire, to which he was sent on a formal mission by Pope Innocent IV. He wrote the earliest important Western work on Central Asia.

Giovanni was a contemporary and disciple of St. Francis of Assisi. By 1220 he was a member of the Franciscan order and subsequently became a leading Franciscan teacher in northern Europe; he held successively the offices of custos (“warden”) in Saxony and of minister (“subordinate officer”) in Germany and afterward in Spain (perhaps also in Barbary and Cologne). He was in Cologne at the time of the great Mongol invasion of eastern Europe and of the disastrous Battle of Liegnitz (April 9, 1241).

Fear of the Mongols had not abated when four years later Pope Innocent IV dispatched the first formal Catholic mission to them, partly to protest against their invasion of Christian territory and partly to gain reliable information about their numbers and their plans; there may also have been the hope of alliance with a power that might be invaluable against Islam. At the head of the mission the pope placed Giovanni, then already more than 60 years of age.

On Easter day, 1245, Giovanni set out. He was accompanied by Stephen of Bohemia, another friar, who was subsequently to be left behind at Kyiv. After seeking the counsel of Wenceslaus, king of Bohemia, the friars were joined at Breslau (now Wrocław) by Benedict the Pole, another Franciscan appointed to act as interpreter. The mission entered the Mongol posts at Kanev and thereafter crossed the Dnieper, Don, and Volga rivers. On the Volga stood the ordu, or “camp,” of Batu, the supreme commander on the western frontiers of the Mongol empire and the conqueror of eastern Europe. Giovanni and his companions, with their presents, had to pass between two fires before being presented to Batu at the beginning of April 1246. Batu ordered them to proceed to the court of the supreme khan in Mongolia, and accordingly, on Easter day, April 8, 1246, they began the second and more formidable part of their journey. Their bodies were tightly bandaged to enable them to endure the excessive fatigue of their great ride through Central Asia. Their route was across the Ural (Yaik) River and north of the Caspian Sea and the Aral Sea to the Syr Darya (Jaxartes) and the Muslim cities, which then stood on its banks, then along the shores of the Dzungarian lakes and thence to the imperial camp of Sira Ordu (i.e., the “yellow pavilion”) near Karakorum and the Orkhon River. They reached their destination on July 22, after a ride of about 3,000 miles in just over 106 days.

On arriving at Sira Ordu, the Franciscans found that the interregnum that had followed the death of Ögödei, the supreme khan, or imperial ruler, had ended. His eldest son, Güyük (Kuyuk), had been designated to the throne; his formal election in a great kuriltai, or general assembly of shamans, was witnessed by the friars along with more than 3,000 envoys and deputies from all parts of the Mongol empire. On August 24 they were present at the formal enthronement at the nearby camp of the “Golden” Ordu and were presented to the supreme khan. They were detained until November and were then dismissed with a letter for the pope; this letter, written in Mongol, Arabic, and Latin, was little more than a brief imperious assertion of the khan’s role as the scourge of God. The friars suffered greatly on their long winter journey homeward, and not until June 9, 1247, did they reach Kyiv, where they were welcomed by the Slavic Christians as risen from the dead. Subsequently they delivered the khan’s letter and made their report to the pope, who was still at Lyon.

Immediately after his return, Giovanni recorded his observations in a large work variously styled in the manuscripts extant as Historia Mongalorum quos nos Tartaros appellamus (“History of the Mongols Whom We Call the Tartars”) and Liber Tartarorum (“Book of the Tartars”), or Tatarorum. He divided his treatise into eight chapters on the country of the Mongols, their climate, customs, religion, character, history, policy, and tactics, and on the best way of resisting them; in a ninth chapter he described the regions traversed. He added four name lists: of the peoples conquered by the Mongols, of those who had successfully to his time (1245–47) remained unconquered, of the Mongol princes, and of witnesses to the truth of his Historia, including several merchants trading in Kyiv. His Historia discredited the many fables concerning the Mongols current in Western Christendom. Its account of Mongol customs and history is probably the best treatment of the subject by any medieval Christian writer, and only on geographical and personal detail is it inferior to one written a few years later by the papal envoy to the Mongols William of Rubruquis, or Rubrouck. Giovanni’s companion, Benedict the Pole, also left a brief account of the mission, taken down from his dictation. Not long after his return, Giovanni was installed as archbishop of Antivari in Dalmatia and was sent as legate to Louis IX.

For a long time the Historia was only partially known through an abstract in the great compendium of Vincent of Beauvais (Speculum historiale), made a generation after Giovanni’s own and first printed in 1473. R. Hakluyt (1598) and P. Bergeron (1634) published portions of the text, but the complete work was not printed until 1839: M.A.P. d’Avezac (ed.) in Recueil de voyages et de mémoires, vol. 4, Geographical Society of Paris.