ABSTRACT
This paper aims to examine various questions relating to the Mongols’ attitude towards religious matters: specifically, the way in which the Mongols exploited the religious allegiances of their unsubdued enemies, their much-vaunted “religious toleration,” their attitude towards the “religious classes” within their conquests, and the possible contexts for their eventual conversion to Islam or Buddhism. Further discussion of these questions is important, not least in order to reach a fuller explanation of the failure of Latin missionaries from Western Europe to win over the Mongol rulers: in a recent article, Professor James Ryan lays the blame for this squarely at the door of the missionaries themselves.2 The scope of the paper will largely be confined to the thirteenth century.
