This post exists, as I suspect many future ones will, as a result of a particularly fruitful Wikipedia hunting expedition. Beginning with a brief survey of the Wars of the Roses, I found myself plumbing (yet again) the endlessly fascinating effects of the Mongol attacks on Europe in the 1200s, the obscure embassies sent between various Popes and Khans, and ultimately, the title of this post.
Lost to the vagaries of time there are indeed many macro-historical what-ifs: What if Stauffenberg had succeeded in his 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler? What if Franklin had not been able to convince Louis XVI to aid the Americans in the revolutionary war? (France’s help was, after all, essential to America’s independence, but did end up bankrupting France, which in turn assisted in the French revolution’s emergence). And, somewhere down that list, what if 13th century France and the Ilkhanate (a Khanate that emerged after the Mongol conquest of Persia) had managed to conclude an alliance against the various Islamic potentates of the time? Would this have assisted the Crusader states in maintaing their tenuous grasp of the Levant further? (Also, come on! The Mongols and France trying to form an alliance in the 13th century?)
The origins of such an alliance, as indicated in the wikipedia article are pretty fuzzy:
Among Europeans, there had long been rumors and expectations that a great Christian ally would come from the East. These rumors circulated as early as the First Crusade, and usually surged in popularity after the loss of a battle by the Crusaders. A legend developed about a figure known as Prester John, who lived in far off India, Central Asia, or perhaps even Ethiopia. This legend fed upon itself, and some individuals who came from the East were greeted with the expectations that they might be the long-awaited Christian heroes. In 1210, news reached the West of the battles of the Mongol Kuchlug, leader of the largely Christian tribe of the Naimans. Kuchlug’s forces had been battling the powerfulKhwarezmian Empire, whose leader was Muhammad II of Khwarezm. Rumors circulated in Europe that Kuchlug was the mythical Prester John, and was again battling the Muslims in the East.
The Mongols as Christian Ally! This was certainly news to me. Before we get into that, let’s set up some context. What’s rather crazy here is that the later Crusades coincided with the great westward Mongol expansion of the 1200s. So if you think the Middle-East is complicated now, the 10th-14th centuries were absolutely insane. Armies rampaging back and forth, foreign invaders from France and England in the west, and Mongolia and China in the east! In terms of momentous events, the fall of Baghdad and the Abbasid Caliphate in 1248 to the Mongols is perhaps akin to the sack of Rome, in that it marked the end of a great state and a revered center of learning and commerce. It’s also an instructive event because the shamanist Hulagu Khan (one of Genghis’ grandsons) who lead the Middle-Eastern campaign was pretty tolerant of Christians (he married one), and received the assistance and submission of Georgia and Armenia. These two Christian kingdoms took the sensible step of submitting to the Khan as vassals rather than be razed to the ground, likely saving their relatively small societies from complete annihilation. The Eastern Christians were thus, all this being equal, fans of the Mongols for eliminating the threats to the South and/or their Islamic suzerains. Hethum I, king of Armenia, in fact tried to convince his co-religionists in the West that it was to their benefit to submit as vassals to the Mongols, and fight their common enemy: the Abbasids and the Ayyubids (in Syria and Egypt). It’s unclear that this attempt by Hethum actually assisted in the conception of a Franco-Mongol alliance, but it’s an interesting sidebar nonetheless. And ultimately, the key takeaway here is that the notion of the Mongols as Eastern (and potentially Christian?) saviors of the Crusader states was in the air.
What then was the proximate reason behind the concept of this alliance arising? The story’s pretty complex. As an example of the chaos the Mongol expansion was causing think about what was happening before the fall of Baghdad: the Khawarizmi Turks had been overrun by the Mongols and fled west, and were ‘invited’ by the Ayyubids in Cairo to retake Jerusalem on the way west. That they did, razing it to the ground in 1244, thereby provoking the Seventh Crusade (which was a giant failure). The failure of this latter crusade, did however make Europe think more positively about allying with the Ilkhanate Mongols in the Middle East against the Ayyubids, and later the Mamluks. And therein lie the roots of this wild idea of allying two powers separated by thousands of miles in medieval times. (Though let’s remember that the Frankish conception of world geography in the 13th century was pretty iffy at best)
But wait, weren’t the Mongols also invading Central Europe in the 1240s? Indeed they were, but in another big what-if, Ogedei Khan died in 1241 (after binge drinking during a hunting trip no less) as Batu and Subotai Khan were ravaging Hungary and Eastern Europe. Batu and Subotai immediately rode east with their armies to Karakorum for the kurultai (which, one assumes, was quite a spectacle). And thus, conventional historiography holds, Germany, Austria and Western Europe were spared a potentially devastating Mongol attack. And, for the purposes of this discussion, the nature of the Mongol Threat from the Golden Horde in Eastern Europe diminished enough, for Frankish kings and nobles to contemplate and discuss a potential alliance with the Ilkhanate in the Middle East. The external existential threat had shifted back from the feared Mongols to the ‘Moslems’ after the failure of the seventh Crusade.
Not to ruin the end of this story, but here’s one important thing I should probably point out now: this ‘alliance’ was a delusional idea from the beginning, given the distances and incongruities in attitudes and fighting forces involved. And.. it probably didn’t even exist in the modern sense of the word ‘alliance’. But! The fact that it even came up, tells you how unexpected, fascinating and weird history can be, and how the world was often wildly interdependent even 800 years ago. (see also: Roman contacts with China)
To be continued in a future post…
