ABSTRACT
At the dawn of the thirteenth century, and before the emergence of the Mongol empire, the horizons of Latin Christendom extended only as far as the Hungarians and Rus in Eastern Europe and the Byzantine empire and Islamic powers of the Near East. Beyond lay a world of which educated Catholic Christians had only the haziest and most inaccurate ideas, derived from two sources. One was the Bible; the other was the lore of Classical Antiquity. Beyond the frontiers of Christendom, the obvious location of barbarism was the steppe zone south of the Rus–'Scythia', to use the designation in vogue since Classical times–through which Western Europe had suffered repeated invasions. Occupying the spectrum between fellow Christians and monsters were those societies whose unnatural and barbarous practices put them beyond the pale, such as the Anthropophagi.
