Racialisation, Objectification, Dehumanisation: Missionary and Merchant in the Mongolian Empire

When we arrived among those barbarians, it seemed to me as if I were stepping into another world.
The men surrounded us and gazed at us as if we were monsters.

- William of Rubruck (1248–1255).

In the early 13th century, a new military and cultural power rose in the East. Both Pope Innocent IV and some years later, King Louis IX of France sent out Franciscan friars as official envoys from Europe to reach the Mongol court. William of Rubruck was the one who wrote the most expansive account of what he encountered on this journey. Geraldine Heng explains that what we see in these texts is how Mongols gradually became familiar aliens in less than a decade during these early missionary encounters. They transmuted “from the inhuman barbarians without civilised practices, mores, and customs described by the Pope’s alarmed ambassador into the possessors of rudimentary culture and ceremony.” As William of Rubruck lived with the Mongols, took part in their customs, and familiarised himself with their practices, their inhumanness began to recede. In this micro-history, Heng argues, we can instead see how questions of Christian practices, liturgies and questions of faith between Nestorians and Roman Catholics constitute a virtual race that predominates questions of ethnic differences.

Some 50 years later, also the son of a Venetian merchant: Marco Polo (1254-1324), travelled East and spent time in the Great Khan’s Cathay. Once he returned, a book capturing his fascination for the magnificence of Mongol China, was written by Rusticello da Pisa. He praises its cities, ports, and hinterlands and details a vision of modernity, security, efficiency, welfare, success, and unimaginable prosperity and power, the like of which is found nowhere else in the world. From the gigantic tax receipts of its ports to the glories of imperial gardens and architecture; from exorbitant feasts to massive granaries; from the exquisite abstraction of paper money as symbolic currency to the high-speed postal relay gridding the empire; from welfare and disaster relief to a panoptic surveillance system; from military might to statesmanlike innovations in governance – Mongol China’s incarnation of an economic, aesthetic, technological, and ethical sublime. Marco Polo transmutes the Mongol race and empire into an object of fascination and desire under the Western gaze. At the same time as his gaze seems to eradicate racialised differences based on ethnic and religious grounds, the commodification of bodies, places and space grows strong. For example, a new form of objectification of women as goods is something that Heng brings to the forefront of her reading of Polo.

During this Summer Symposium, we will thus explore two different accounts of Mongol China: William of Rubruck’s Itinerarium fratris Willielmi de Rubruquis de ordine fratrum Minorum from 1253 and The Description of the World from 1300. This enables us to compare and contrast how a liturgically trained gaze reads and understands customs and cultural practices to how a profit-minded merchant will see and describe what he encounters. The accounts are also full of descriptions of trade, customs, landscape, nature, food preparation and descriptions of people, so the texts of this session will be of particular interest to students of economy, democracy, engineering, chemistry, geography and gender studies as well as our core group of religious, historical and artistic scholars.