Morris Rossabi · 1992 · overland

Morris Rossabi's life of the Nestorian monk who went the other way. Born in Beijing under the Mongols, Rabban Bar Sauma set out for Jerusalem, ended up ambassador from the Ilkhan to the courts of Europe, and met the Pope, Philip IV and Edward I in the space of a year.

1. 1
   Khanbaliq

   Beijing under the Mongols, and a Turkic Nestorian Christian born there who sets out about 1275 with his student Markos to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem - which neither of them will reach.

2. 2
   Kashgar

   West along the Silk Road through country in the middle of a Mongol civil war - the two monks travelling with caravans, sheltering in Nestorian communities that had been there for six hundred years.

3. 3
   Tus

   Khorasan, and the roads to Jerusalem closed by fighting - so they go to Baghdad instead, which changes both their lives and eventually the diplomatic history of Europe.

4. 4
   Baghdad

   The seat of the Nestorian Catholicos - and in 1281 the student Markos is elected Patriarch of the whole Church of the East, at thirty-seven, having arrived as a pilgrim from China six years earlier.

5. 5
   Maragheh

   The Ilkhanid capital, and Arghun looking for allies against the Mamluks - so the Patriarch proposes his old teacher as ambassador to the kings of the Franks, who has never been west of Persia.

6. 6
   Constantinople

   1287, and Andronikos II receives him - Bar Sauma describing Hagia Sophia in an account that survives in Syriac and is the mirror image of Marco Polo, written by the man going the other way.

7. 7
   Naples

   Landing in Italy in time to watch a naval battle in the bay from the roof of his lodgings - and recording the numbers of dead with the detachment of a man from a much larger empire.

8. 8
   Rome

   The papal see vacant, so he is examined on doctrine by the cardinals - and holds his own, which surprises them, since they had assumed the Church of the East was a heresy and its envoy a curiosity.

9. 9
   Paris

   A month with Philip IV, shown the Sainte-Chapelle and the crown of thorns - and given an answer about a crusade that is warm, unspecific and worth nothing at all.

10. 10
    Bordeaux

    Gascony, and Edward I of England, who takes communion from him and is enthusiastic - and does nothing either, being occupied with Wales, Scotland and money.

11. 11
    Rome

    Back for Easter 1288 and a new pope, Nicholas IV, who gives him communion at mass on Palm Sunday - the high point of the embassy and the last thing about it that went well.

12. 12
    Baghdad

    Home with letters and no army - and the rest of his life spent at the Patriarch's side writing the account of it, which sat unread in Syriac until the nineteenth century.