ABSTRACT
In the course of the last few chapters, reference has been made to allthe accounts, written by Western Christians on the basis of their travels in the Mongol world between the 1240s and the early fifteenth century, that have come down to us: those of Carpini (1247), Simon of Saint-Quentin (via Vincent of Beauvais, 1253), Rubruck (1255), Marco Polo (1298), Jordanus (1328), Odoric (1330), Marignolli (c.1353), John of Sul¢Äniyya (1404) and Clavijo (1404). We have also noticed the expatriate Armenian prince Hayton of Gorigos, who travelled in the opposite direction, to Western Europe, and whose Flor des estoires (1307) contained a description of the East, composed for a Latin Christian readership. This circumstance, even more than his status as a member of a church that was in union with Rome – an ‘honorary Latin’, as it were – and a Premonstratensian canon, requires him to be ranked together with the Western writers just listed.
