ABSTRACT
The Prologue to the Description of the World makes it clear that the elder Marco Polos arrived in Karakorum as religious tokens, they left as Christian ambassadors, bearing a letter to the Pope and promising to return with various religious tokens. By the time that the Polos set off on their second journey to the East, which covered much of European Russia, the Levant, which reached from Eastern Persia to the Mediterranean, and the Central Asian Chaghatai khanate in Turkestan. The earliest Christian missionaries, armed with papal letters and charged with finding Christian converts and potential allies amongst the Mongols, arrived in Karakorum some time before the Polos made their first and far better known trip eastward. Lamb-bearing vegetables aside, the surprising number of missionary visitors to the mysterious Mongols in Karakorum, and the flow of papal letters and their responses, indicate that, though the Polos were by no means pioneers in European– Mongol contact.
