Abstract
John of Plano Carpini vs Simon of Saint-Quentin: 13th-century Emotions in the Eurasian Steppe
Highlights
My research materials include the two mendicant reports produced by John and Simon as well as extant scholarly discussions of various aspects of the Mongol Other, apocalyptic literature, and the relations between Western Christendom and the Mongol Empire in the mid-13th century
The aim of this paper is to show that in interpreting medieval European texts about the Mongols, one should combine approaches from various fields, including history of emotions, cultural and literal history, anthropology, cross-cultural sociology, and others
These interpretations were the result of sediment layers of events in the 1240s: the violent contact of the Mongol armies with Western Christendom, contemporary Christian attempts to put the newcomers into known apocalyptic frameworks, and most probably the personal trauma of the author who had been threatened with death after an inaction with the Mongols, might be explained both as a cross-cultural misunderstanding and a display of power
Summary
My research materials include the two mendicant reports produced by John and Simon as well as extant scholarly discussions of various aspects of the Mongol Other, apocalyptic literature, and the relations between Western Christendom and the Mongol Empire in the mid-13th century. Research results: Comparison of the two accounts, one written by John of Plano Carpini and the other by Simon of Saint-Quentin, the contextualization of these sources within 13th-century missionary literature, parallel analysis of the imagery, as well as reference to other contemporary texts on the Mongols, offer a sound starting point for a complex process of re-creating the imagined Mongol conceived by Europeans in the late Middle Ages.
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