William of Rubruck

William of Rubruck, a Franciscan friar from Flanders, was the author of the most detailed European account of the Mongol world before Marco Polo. He travelled from Constantinople to the Mongol capital of Karakorum between 1253 and 1255, as the missionary envoy of King Louis IX of France, and the report he submitted on his return is one of the foundational documents of medieval Eurasian geography. Read alongside the accounts of Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, the journey of William of Rubruck is the central Western eyewitness account of the Pax Mongolica at its high point.

Background and mission

William of Rubruck entered the Franciscan order in the 1220s, at a time when the order was, under the leadership of figures like John of Plano Carpini and Raymond of Peñafort, energetically engaged in the conversion of the Mongol and Turkic peoples. King Louis IX of France, the leading crusader monarch of Latin Christendom, had received a series of letters from the Great Khan Möngke and was persuaded that the Mongols might, in some circumstances, be converted to Christianity and turned into allies against the Muslim powers of the Middle East. William was sent east in 1253, partly to gather information about the Mongols, partly to assess the prospects of conversion, and partly to deliver a royal letter to the Great Khan.

William of Rubruck is, of the medieval travelers, the one with the sharpest eye.

The mission was not authorised by the pope, and it is doubtful that the Mongol court regarded William as anything more than an interesting foreign priest. He travelled in the company of a small group of Franciscan brothers, an interpreter, and a body of attendants, and was given an escort by the local Mongol authorities from the moment he crossed the empire’s borders.

The journey east

William sailed from Constantinople to the Crimea in 1253, and then travelled overland across the southern Russian steppe, the Volga, and the Qipchaq pastures of the eastern khanate, reaching the camp of the khan Sartaq and, after a delay of several months, the camp of his father Batu, the khan of the Golden Horde. From there he was conducted, in a journey of more than five months, across the Central Asian steppe and through the cities of the Chagatai realm to the Mongol capital at Karakorum, in present-day Mongolia, where he arrived in early 1254.

The route he followed was the same that earlier missions — notably that of John of Plano Carpini in 1246 — had taken in the opposite direction, and was the principal artery of the Mongol postal system. The caravanserais of the Silk Road, the imperial yam stations, and the Mongol paiza pass system that the Mongol Empire had put in place made the journey possible, and William used the same infrastructure that the merchants used.

A personal note

A note on the source. The William of Rubruck text is unique: a single manuscript in the Cambridge University library, edited for the first time by the Hakluyt Society in 1900 (Rockhill) and again in 1990 (Jackson and Morgan). The reader who wants the experience of the text should read the Jackson/Morgan 1990 edition, which has the best modern English translation and the most thorough commentary.

Further reading

• Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford, 2012). The single best modern overview.
• The relevant chapter of The Cambridge History of Inner Asia (Cambridge, multiple dates).
• One article from a recent issue of Central Asiatic Journal or Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (JESHO) for current scholarship.
• Susan Whitfield, ed., The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith (British Library, 2018) for the British Library’s own primary-source scholarship.

Related pages

See also Famous travelers of the Silk Road, The Mongol Empire and the Silk Road, and The Pax Mongolica.