Essay

Creed

Middle East

Monastic life

Royalty

11 August 2023

9 min read

Edward I and the monk from China

A tale of a Chinese priest meeting a medieval monarch sheds a different light on the extent of Christendom. Benjamin Sharkey tells the surprising tale of the historic Asian church.

Benjamin Sharkey

Benjamin is a DPhil student in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford. He is researching the experience of Christian communities in medieval Central Asia.

A medieval illustration of two sets of monks seated and facing each other. One gestures towards the sky

A 13th Century depiction of a meeting between Latin and east Syrian clerics.

AtlasAtlas des Croisades, Jonathan Riley-Smith, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In the summer of 1288, outside the city of Bordeaux in Gascony, a small group of travellers approached the city walls. The inhabitants of the city gathered, curious to meet this collection of strange looking clergymen who were clearly far from home. The strangers told them that they had come from ‘over the eastern sea’ with letters and gifts from the ‘Mongol kings’ and the Patriarch in the east. Such strange reports, from visitors emerging from the unseen world over the horizon, a world known only from fantastical stories, deserved the immediate attention of the king.

Edward I, the Duke of Gascony and King of England had been resident in Bordeaux for the last two years, overseeing the affairs of his duchy. Assembling his court, he welcomed these visitors from the east. The leader of the travellers was a monk named Rabban Sawma. He was a Uyghur Turk from China. He presented to Edward letters and gifts from the Mongol ruler of Persia, the ilkhan, Arghun, a great-great-grandson of Genghis Khan, and from the patriarch, Mar Yahbalaha, the head of the Church of the East.

As a young lord, Edward had taken the crusader’s oath to go and fight to attempt to regain Jerusalem for Latin Christendom from the rule of unbelievers. Jerusalem had fallen from crusader control in 1244 after the city had been sacked by a large force of Kipchak warriors, nomads from the Central Asian steppes who had been displaced by the expanding Mongol empire. Arriving in 1271, Lord Edward managed to break the siege of the port-city of Acre, one of the last cities held by the King of Jerusalem. Over the next two years, however, his small force accomplished little, mostly skirmishing with herdsmen and burning houses and crops. His time in Acre came ignominiously to an end when he was stabbed with a poisoned dagger by one of his Muslim courtiers leading to lengthy and painful surgery. He left the dream of reaching Jerusalem behind him. Returning from crusade, Lord Edward was greeted with the news of his father Henry III’s death, heralding the start of his own reign. It wasn’t until 1274 that he finally reached England for his coronation. There in Westminster Abbey, he was invested with the splendour of Christian kingship. He swore on the gospel books to uphold and dispense justice and, having been anointed, he was dressed by the bishops in priestly robes and given a sword for the defence of the weak and ‘constraining those who do wrong to the Church’. Now, here in Bordeaux, these new visitors represented something quite outside his experience.

When we dig (literally, archaeologically), we consistently find the evidence of Christian communities that no text ever told us about.

Edward would have been familiar with the stories of Prester John. Reports of a grand and mysterious figure, a Christian ruler somewhere in the east who was both a priest and king, had begun circulating in the mid-twelfth century and were still current in European imaginations, especially as they tried to make sense of the new world that was opening up to them through contact with the Mongols. While there was not really any great Christian king in the Mongol empire, this legend does reflect the (correct) sense of medieval Europeans that a whole world of Christianity was going on beyond their horizon.

Many historians today believe that until perhaps as late as the fourteenth century there were more Christians outside than inside Europe. Yet, in our books of global church history these believers rarely get more than a slim chapter, unrepresentative of their large share of the historical Christian demographic and experience. Throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages there were significant numbers of Christians across Asia and Africa, in Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt; Syria, Mesopotamia and Persia; India, Central Asia and China. Christians had been present in China as early as the sixth century, with significant numbers elsewhere much earlier. Meanwhile Egypt and many other areas of the Middle East had predominantly Christian populations until at least the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, which continued to makeup significant minorities into the twentieth century. In the Middle Ages these areas were global centres of population and development. Bordeaux was one of the largest cities in Europe at the time with a population of nearly 30,000 but cities like Alexandria, Baghdad, Merv (in present-day Turkmenistan) and Samarqand (in present-day Uzbekistan) were among the biggest in the world with populations in the hundreds of thousands, far larger than any in Europe. Present in the historical record of all these urban centres were Christian communities. We find them scattered across the textual record, although for many of these regions this record is far patchier than for medieval Europe, but when we dig (literally, archaeologically), we consistently find the evidence of Christian communities that no text ever told us about.

Most Christians throughout history have lived outside Europe and North America, in pluralistic societies, ruled over by and living alongside non-Christians.

By far the largest group of Christians outside Europe was the Church of the East. This church, once termed, inaccurately, Nestorian, was entirely distinct from the Eastern Orthodox churches but had rather grown out of those early churches that had been founded to the east of Judea, outside of the Roman empire in Persian ruled Mesopotamia. They soon rapidly grew to include communities across Asia, from Syria to China, and India to Mongolia. Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, was the primary language of worship, prayer, and literature in these communities but the gospels, psalms and hymns were often translated into local vernaculars. Growing up outside the Constantinian revolution, which had seen the ushering in of the conception of Christian kingship with the Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, and never succeeding in converting the Persian Shah or any other significant rulers, these eastern Christians had no experience of existing in a Christian state. Throughout the Church of the East, Christians always lived in pluralistic societies. The patriarch, the head of the church, was indeed for most of the Middle Ages based in Baghdad, also the seat of the Muslim Caliph, from where he oversaw the affairs of more communities than the Pope in Rome.

By the time that Rabban Sawma made his journey to Europe, there were Christians throughout the Mongol empire (the largest empire until then ever seen). These included many Mongol queens, Khatuns, such as Sorqaqtani Beki, the mother of Kublai Khan, as well as many ordinary Mongols. Christianity had been present in Mongolia for at least a century by the rise of Genghis Khan in the early-thirteenth century and was very popular among many of the tribes he subordinated.

Christianity for well over the first two thirds of its existence then was not a majority European faith and today it is again not majority western. Most Christians throughout history have lived outside Europe and North America, in pluralistic societies, ruled over by and living alongside non-Christians. The western experience is not just unrepresentative of Christianity today but unrepresentative of Christianity in the past. Christendom has been only a small part of the Christian experience.

There in Bordeaux, near where the Garonne flows into the Atlantic, the king of England knelt as the monk who had grown up not far from the banks of the Yellow River began singing in Syriac.

This was the experience of the monk who stood before Edward I. Rabban Sawma had grown up near Khanbaliq, ‘the city of the khan’ (present day Beijing). When still in his early twenties, out of ‘the love of his Lord’ he had become a hermit, living in a cave near a mountain spring, in the manner of many Chinese Taoist, Buddhist, poet and artist ascetics. People would regularly make the day’s journey from the city to come to hear him preach. He was later joined in his secluded life by another young man with a desire to lead a life for Christ named Mark. The two had lived together for some time when one day Mark shared with the older hermit his desire to visit Jerusalem. Together they set out on the long and perilous journey to see Jerusalem and all the sites of the life of Jesus. Like a reverse Marco Polo they travelled west across the Mongol Empire, sometime in the early 1270s, perhaps indeed at the same time as Marco Polo, taking the opportunity for long distance travel which the continent-spanning Mongol empire had made possible.

When the two monks eventually reached Iraq they were told that fighting between the Mongols and the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt, who then controlled Jerusalem, had made travelling the final part of the journey impossible. So they settled down in Iraq until the time might come when it would be safe to make the journey. Such a time never came but while they were in Iraq they became involved in the life of the church and when in 1281 the patriarch died it was with some surprise that Sawma’s young companion Mark found himself chosen by the bishops to be the new patriarch. He chose the new name Yahbalaha.[3] He was the first believer from the more eastern regions of the church to be chosen as patriarch, reflecting the greater involvement such believers were able to have in the life of the whole church under the Mongols. In 1287 the Mongol ilkhan Arghun, seeking to use the European desire to regain Jerusalem to coordinate attacks against his enemy in Egypt, asked Yahbalaha to provide a Christian messenger to go to Europe with gifts and letters for its Christian kings. Yahbalaha recommended his mentor Sawma, also providing him with his own letters of friendship for the Europeans.

A year later, having visited the cardinals in Rome, who had quizzed him on his beliefs and been left perfectly satisfied that he shared the same beliefs as them, and in Paris the King of France, who had shown him around the rapidly expanding city with its sprawling universities, Sawma met the king of ‘Inglatar’. In their audience Edward’s attention was particularly caught by the reference in the ilkhan’s letter to Jerusalem, having again taken the crusading oath only the spring before. But Sawma was far more interested in using his trip to see artefacts associated with characters from the gospels, to hear stories of heroes of humility and of the miracles God had worked in the lives of saints, and to observe the novelty of life in a predominantly Christian society.

In the evening Sawma was invited to lead the king in worship. There in Bordeaux, near where the Garonne flows into the Atlantic, the king of England knelt as the monk who had grown up not far from the banks of the Yellow River began singing in Syriac:

‘Teshbuhta l-alaha ba-mrawme’ ‘Glory to God in the highest…’

On the altar Sawma broke the bread and made the sign of the cross over the chalice of wine. As he broke up the bread he sang: ‘Abun d-ba-shmaya’ ‘Our father in heaven…’ Edward and some of his courtiers and clerics might have recognised the prayer and tried to repeat the strange words or to follow along reciting in Latin. The king and his courtiers approached and Sawma served them. The king of England and the Chinese monk together participating in the divine mystery of Christ’s incarnation and sacrifice.

Marilynne Robinson: “an ordinary person is as metaphysically amazing as Julius Caesar”

The self-confessed daydreamer and slacker talks with Graham Tomlin

Nick Jones

Nick is the senior editor of Seen & Unseen.

Marilynne Robinson is the author of best-selling novels including Housekeeping, the winner of the Hemingway Award, and Gilead, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. She has also written numerous non-fiction works, including her most recent book, of which the New York Times said: ‘Reading Genesis is alive with questions of kindness, community and how to express what we so often struggle to put into words’. Rowan Williams has described Robinson as "one of the world's most compelling English-speaking novelists".

This interview is an edited transcript of a Seen & Unseen Live event.

Graham
I've got a number of your books on my table here. I've got my copy of Gilead, Housekeeping. I've got Jack, all the novels. I also have a whole series of other books of essays you've written, like When I Was A Child I Read Books and The Givenness of Things - I love that title. You write a lot of different things, but you're primarily known as a novelist, and I wanted to ask how and why you became a novelist. Did you always want to write stories? Was that always part of your kind of your mind? Was it made up when you were a child growing up? Was storytelling always part of your life?

Marilynne
You know I have very vague ideas about that. I was encouraged by teachers, and so on, to feel that I could write well. That if I made a choice I could follow up on it. I took a writing class in college, a workshop. I felt I had come to Brown [University], which is in Rhode Island, from Idaho - which is definitely not in Rhode Island! I listened to people talking about the West, basically where my ancestors had settled, and it reminded me of how differently I experienced it than the way that people talked about it. So, in a way, I wanted to create a West as I felt it as a child. Especially with the importance of women in that culture, which was very great. It gave me an opportunity to just recover the sense of the strange loveliness of a very wild place, and this richness of being there. So that was my first try at fiction.

Talking about Gilead for a moment, which is the first novel of yours that I read and probably the one I still enjoy the enjoy the most. It's always struck me it's a kind of unlikely novel to become very well known. It's the story of an elderly pastor writing a long letter to his son. It's a book in which, in one sense, not many things happen. It's doesn't have big plot changes. It's not set against seismic events in history like a war or an earthquake, or a disaster. It's small-town America, quite local in many ways. Was it a real surprise to you that it became so popular? Why do you think people resonated with it in quite the way that they did?

You know, those are the kinds of questions that I hesitate to ask myself. I feel as though the ordinary with which I am identified is extremely rich, and it has a very important place in any life. An ordinary moment in its own way is sort of metaphysically unaccountable as the most spectacular moment at least as we perceive these things. An ordinary person is as metaphysically amazing as Julius Caesar. I mean, there's no point pretending that we can make gradations of interest, I think, among people. And, if I have one aesthetic banner that I fly, basically, that's it. That anything that is looked at closely, and with an eye to the fact that the beautiful is sort of the signature of reality, there's everything to be done there.

There’s a sense that everything matters, even the small things are of real significance if you look at them closely enough. And that's one of the things that comes out of the book. And rereading it recently, that focus on ordinary things came out for me. Maybe because I was aware of some close friends who died recently, the theme of death also struck me. It's a novel that is kind of anticipating death. It's about an elderly man, 76 years old, who thinks he's probably going to die soon, writing a letter to his son. Did you sense that it was a meditation on death when you were writing it?

Well, I started it simply because I had a voice in my head, and the voice in the head was saying, you know I'm going to die soon. That was the the situation of the voice that was central to the novel for me. And so it necessarily became a meditation on death, whatever death is - the cessation of life in any case. Which is a profound retrospect on things that seem trivial as we pass through them, and are amazing in retrospect, just voices and gestures, and other people.

One of the lines that stays with me from the book is one from John Ames, the main character. He says something like: ‘I've been trying to think about heaven. But I found it quite difficult to do so. But then again, I wouldn't have been able to describe this world if I hadn't spent the last 70 years walking around on it’. Has writing the book helped you think about death in a different kind of way? As we get older, I suppose it becomes more part of not our experience, but of our anticipation. Do you find you think about these things more?

I think that one of the things that's wonderful about writing novels or poetry is that it makes coherence, it puts things in relation to each other. It lets you explore your mind and understand what you read and what you are attracted to, and all the rest. I think that just the fact of writing has sort of transformed my ideas of both life and death. The need to make them, as it were, palpable or visual in one's own imagination. You have to make choices in terms of what is beautiful or what matters, So, yes, my sense of death is no doubt very much modified by having written that book and also my sense of being alive.

The other book I wanted to talk about is your latest book, Reading Genesis. It a bit of a departure for you. You've mainly written novels, essays and books of cultural commentary. You suddenly find yourself writing a book about a book of the Bible. What led you to do that? Why did you focus on Genesis rather than one of the Gospels, or the Psalms, or any other book within the Bible?

Genesis establishes so much that becomes an assumption for the rest of the Bible. It establishes the basic metaphysical circumstance of humankind in relation to God. You find it echoed everywhere. It's so basic to the whole literature that the fact is that it is very much underread and it's been exposed to centuries of criticism that was very condescending to it, as if it were a primitive literature when, of course, ancient people were capable of extremely sophisticated thinking and perceiving. I thought that in order to clarify anything subsequent to Genesis, you had to clarify Genesis. It seemed to me as if it functioned so beautifully in terms of self-referential qualities, structure, the argument was there to be made. it's not recherché or anything. It's in the text that it is literary and that certain meanings are developed by literary methods through the course of the of the book.

How did you find coming at it as a as a novelist? Most books I've read on Genesis have been technical commentaries by Biblical scholars who've researched the history of the times, and the texts around it. You come at it as a storyteller, as a novelist. Did that give you an advantage in telling the story of Genesis, looking at again, or a different angle than you'd find in many of the commentaries?

I have my limitations. I looked at it, of course, in the way that was natural for me to look at it. But I felt as if it was badly treated by critics. I asked a friend of mine, a theologian, if people still used JEDP, the old 'documentary hypothesis'. He did a poll of people that he knew that wrote in the area, and one of them said any self-respecting scholar uses the documentary hypothesis. So, I thought, well, that's not me, you know. I'm not a scholar. The documentary hypothesis is very old at this point and however many ways it's been modified its impact is essentially the same. It makes the text incoherent in its most crucial parts.

This is the hypothesis that breaks it down into different sources, and tries to identify which part of the book comes from J, or E, or D, or P?

Yes, exactly, exactly. And they question the reality of Moses, but they believe deeply in J or D. I mean, it's kind of ridiculous, and they proceed as if they were a kind of documentary evidence that really does not exist. So, I thought the fact that scholarship has been manacled to this one theory for 150 years does not oblige me to be shackled to it also.

If you ask the average person their view of the God of the Old Testament they might imagine a kind of vengeful, capricious, angry character who smites people because he doesn't like them. Yet your depiction of the story seems to say, actually, no it’s God who is faithful and good and patient. It's the humans in the story who are angry and vengeful and capricious. You're turning that on its head. Some people may not be convinced by that, and are still wedded to this idea, that that the God of the Old Testament is this vengeful character. How do you respond to that when you read people who depict God in that way?

This is a very ancient thing, this making the sharp distinction between the God of the Old Testament, the God of the New Testament, giving Moses horns and all the rest of it. This is dualism, it's a violation of the assumptions of monotheism. which I think are very beautiful and important. I'm very ready to defend monotheism, but in any case, I think that if there's a punitive structure in the narratives of the Old Testament, what they are telling us is that most of the world's evil is created by human beings and there are certain points at which it becomes intolerable under almost all circumstances. The evil that is insupportable is violence against human beings. It is the tendency of human beings who are images of God to act revoltingly badly toward human beings who are images of God. If you think of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, war and famine and plague, and so on, all of these things are humanly created in the vast majority of cases, perhaps every case, and I think it's an evasion of of the fact of human moral competence to say that you know God is to blame for the violence that we do.

And letting ourselves off the hook by doing that....

Yes, exactly.

You make quite a contrast between what the Book of Genesis says about humanity, for example, and some of the Babylonian myths of the time, similar creation stories like the Gilgamesh epic or the Enūma Elish. You contrasted them because they seem to give a very different understanding of humanity from what you get in in Genesis. Why does the view of humanity in Genesis have much more nobility and grandeur than these other origin stories?

Well, the idea that human beings are images of God, that is utterly Biblical. There is nothing to compare with it. Human beings are made in the Babylonian myths to do groundwork basically, to spare gods having to do work that would fall to them because they lost the war among gods. A certain number of people are created. They are not named. They are no objects of any god's devotion or anything like that. Brilliant as the Babylonians were, they're not assumed to be a creation of the status of an Adam. ‘What is man, that thou art mindful of him?’ The way that Genesis sets up, so that the beginning is this wonderful explosion of being, and at the end is this human being that reflects it all basically, that is the adequate second presence in this amazing moment. And you find that picked up in the Gospel of John. That's just very beautiful, and I know of nothing that is comparable to it in any way. Certainly not myths that were current in antiquity. Certainly not in our very declined anthropology since then.

Genesis probably is one of the most influential books in the whole of Western intellectual history, given that it's given us a whole language for thinking about the way the world is, the way we are, who God is, how we relate to one another as human beings, how human society works. Would you pick out other themes or ideas apart from that anthropology, that you think were revolutionary in the Book of Genesis?

One of the things that is amazing about it is that the people upon whom God's attention rests are very ordinary people. Abraham is not a king, or a magnate, or anything like that. He's just a wandering herdsman. The idea that the whole of history and meaning can rest on the person of someone who would have seemed quite unexceptional to the people around him as he lived. That means any of us. That's a way of re-understanding the fact that the Adamic figure at the beginning of Genesis is simply humankind. You know the grandeur and the the ordinariness are simultaneous.

The significance of each individual as a significant moral actor within the world.

Yes, exactly.

So, if Abraham has had such a role, then you and I can. And everyone listening to this or reading this conversation can do the same.

And assume that we do it. One of the things that I think is very clear historically is that people are morally competent, for one thing, and then deeply consequential. When you have an election and you make a very appalling choice, 51% of the individuals in the United States made that choice. They truly did. We can't hide behind the idea that what we do does not matter, that we're minor figures, and so on, that God knows what the ultimate consequences of these kinds of things might be. :

In writing the book, did you find yourself reflecting on the kind of current situation in America and what was going on in it? You were writing it before the recent election, but did it have any reflections for you on where your nation is right now?

Well, it necessarily has reflections on history in general, because it is about what human beings are, and how things happen among them. I would not have anticipated anything of our present circumstance, even a re-election of Trump. This is horrifying, astonishing.

I want to ask one more question. I was reading recently one of your essays, and I think it started with the line ‘I reached the point in my life when I can see what has mattered’. I wondered if you wanted to reflect back on your life as a as a novelist, as a writer, as a thinker, as a Christian? What do you find has mattered more as time has gone on, and what has mattered less? What are the things that really do matter for you now, as you look back and you see what has mattered?

I have found out how important teaching was to me. No doubt you know things become radiant in memory. I think I enjoyed the interaction of my life, and my mind, and my literary interest in that particular moment more than I've ever done in any other circumstance. One of the most important things to me was my first experience writing Housekeeping when I was in isolation more or less. Trying to remember things that had happened two decades earlier, experiences I had had, and finding out in those circumstances that I remembered them, that I knew what kind of flower bloomed, in what place, at what time, that my memory was much more active and alert than I think my conscious attention was. I found out that from that that I had lived a much broader life, a much more intense life than I realised. I would never have known that if I hadn't made the kind of demand on myself that writing that book made, writing any book makes really, but fiction especially, because you're trying to conjure a sense of reality. Even from the point of view of when I talk to my students, I say, don't imagine that you know your mind. It is much larger. There's it's almost another life beside your life. The finding that out was just incredibly important to me, not just because it helps me write, but also to find out something about what I am as a human being.

Linking that to the previous point about the the significance of each individual as a moral actor, it also maybe says something about that each of us lives much richer lives than we think we do.

Absolutely.

Maybe memory brings those things to the surface in a way that that we don't often recognize?

Exactly, and that we don't normally access. I was in a kind of an extreme situation, trying to remember Idaho while I was living in France - kind of an eccentric project. It's finding the place at which the past is evoked in the mind. Very powerful.

I'm noticing the things that otherwise you might not see which is, again back to the point about the ordinary, the ordinary being significant.

Yes.

Are there things that seemed very important to you when you were younger, that now don't seem quite so important?

You know I think of myself as a sort of a slacker. I think I have friends who could affirm my view of things as a slacker. I've always enjoyed just simply being in my own head. To the extent that it's a distraction for me. I know people who have lives like mine, who are much more productive than I am. Where did my time go? Well, daydreaming, thinking, watching, just being in my head. I was told when I was a student when I was in high school. that I should give myself a mind that I wanted to live in because I would live in it for the rest of my life, and I did that, and I have done that. And you know it's been a great pleasure, finally. Maybe I should have done more!

Well, the the daydreaming has been a very beneficial thing for the rest of us who've been able to read some of the product of that daydreaming. So, we're very grateful, Marilynne. Thank you.

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