The Monk from Beijing Who Met the Kings of Europe

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Today, a monk who was born in the city we now call Beijing, set out on a pilgrimage he never finished, and ended up, as an old man, giving communion to the King of England. Welcome to Hidden History. Take a break from the modern world and journey into the thirteenth century, when the Mongol Empire ran from the Pacific to the edge of Europe, and a man with patience and the right letters could cross the whole of it.

His name was Sauma. He was born around 1220 in the city that became Kublai Khan's capital. His family were Turkic, Uyghur or Öngüd depending on which source you follow, and they were Christians. They belonged to the Church of the East, which had its head in Baghdad, prayed in Syriac, and had been sending monks and bishops down the trade roads into China for more than six hundred years. Sauma's father was a church official, and a rich one.

At twenty the son gave up meat and wine and said he wanted to be a monk. His parents wept and asked who would inherit. He gave them three more years, then handed his clothes and belongings to the poor and took his vows. In time he moved to a cave in the mountains, a day's journey from the city, beside a spring. People climbed up to hear him talk, and he became Rabban Sauma. Rabban means master.

One visitor stayed. He was a young man named Markos, who had walked fifteen days to get there. Years later the two of them decided to go to Jerusalem. The Christians of the capital told them they had no idea how far it was. The monks replied that they counted themselves already dead to the world. "Toil doth not terrify us," runs the old English translation, "neither doth fear disturb us."

They left around 1275, about when a young Venetian named Marco Polo was arriving in China from the other direction. Two Mongol princes pressed gold and riding animals on them, and told them, politely, that they did not know what this trip was going to cost.

The princes were right. The two crossed two months of desert where sweet water turned up on only eight days. A war pinned them in Khotan for six months. They found Kashgar plundered and empty. By the time they reached a monastery in northeastern Persia they had lost most of what they carried.

They never saw Jerusalem. The road through Georgia was closed by robbery and murder, and the head of their church, the Catholicos, told them the shrines they had already visited would count just as well. Then, in 1281, the Catholicos died, and the bishops chose a successor. They chose Markos. He was about thirty-six, and he protested that he could not even speak Syriac, the language of the church. The bishops had a practical reason. Persia was ruled by Mongols, and here was a churchman who knew their language and their ways. Markos became the Catholicos Yahballaha the Third, and Sauma ran his household.

Six years later the Mongol ruler of Persia, Arghun, wanted an ambassador. He meant to take Syria and Palestine from the sultans of Egypt, and he wanted the Christian kings of Europe to attack at the same time. He needed someone they would believe. Sauma said, "I desire this embassy greatly, and I long to go."

He kept a record of the trip, in Persian, and he tried to miss nothing. From the ship he saw a mountain that smoked all day and showed fire at night. At Naples, in June of 1287, he sat on a rooftop and watched a sea battle in the bay, and admired the fact that the Franks, as he called all western Europeans, attacked only the fighting men.

In Rome the pope had just died. The cardinals could give him no answer about Jerusalem, so they examined his theology instead. He argued with them for a while, and then he had had enough. "I have come from remote countries neither to discuss, nor to instruct," he said. He had come for a blessing and to deliver a message. Could someone show him the churches?

In Paris the king, Philip the Fair, nineteen years old, stood up to greet him. Sauma stayed a month. He reported thirty thousand students in the city, which is his figure, and Philip himself showed him the Crown of Thorns in its crystal case.

From Paris he rode twenty days southwest to Gascony, which belonged to the English crown. Edward the First was there, most likely at Bordeaux. Edward was forty-eight and had gone on crusade as a young man, and he was delighted. "We the kings of these cities bear upon our bodies the sign of the Cross," he said, "and we have no subject of thought except this matter."

Then the king asked his visitor to celebrate the Eucharist. So a monk from north China, probably in his sixties, celebrated the liturgy of the Church of the East, in Syriac, in the southwest of France. By Sauma's account the king and his officers stood, and Edward took the sacrament from his hand. Then the king gave a feast. Rome held Sauma's church to be in error. That day nobody brought it up.

He wintered in Genoa, fretting. A year on the road, and still no pope. "What answer can I make to the Mongols?" he asked a visiting churchman.

A pope was elected in February of 1288, Nicholas the Fourth, one of the cardinals who had questioned him. Sauma spent Holy Week in Rome. He celebrated his own liturgy before a crowd, and the verdict was, "The language is different, but the use is the same." On Palm Sunday the pope gave him communion ahead of everyone else, and the old man wept. He asked for relics. The pope pointed out that if Rome handed them to every pilgrim, they would have run out long ago, even if the relics were as large as mountains. Then he gave him some.

Sauma went home with gifts, warm letters, and no army. Arghun tried again. His letter of 1289 to the King of France survives in the French national archives, six feet of Mongolian script. It names Sauma and proposes a meeting at Damascus in the spring of 1291. That spring Arghun died, and Acre, the last crusader city, fell to Egypt. No king came.

Sauma spent his last years building a church, and died in Baghdad in January of 1294. His Persian journal is lost. A Syriac writer had abridged it, apologizing for leaving out what he called the unimportant things, and a copy of that came to light in Persia in the 1880s.

Europe has Marco Polo's book about China. This is the view the other way, the only one we have from that century, and what the visitor wrote down was how many pillars a church had, a city with no king, and a vine in Genoa that bore grapes seven times a year.

Thanks for listening to Hidden History.