Rabban Bar Sauma

Rabban Bar Sauma was born to a Christian family of the Onggud people near Khanbaliq, the city that became Beijing, at a time when the Church of the East had spread Christian communities across much of Asia under Mongol rule. He became a monk and, in his later years, decided along with a younger companion named Markos to make the long overland pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Political turmoil along the route into the Holy Land forced them to stop in Baghdad, where Markos was unexpectedly elected patriarch of the Church of the East and took the name Yaballaha III. When the Mongol ruler of Persia needed an envoy to propose a military alliance with Christian Europe against shared Muslim rivals, the new patriarch put forward his elderly travelling companion for the job, since Bar Sauma had already shown he could survive a long journey.

Between 1287 and 1288 Bar Sauma travelled through Constantinople, Naples, Rome, Paris and Bordeaux, meeting the Byzantine emperor, the King of France, the King of England and, eventually, a newly elected Pope. He described European cathedrals, customs and courts in detail for readers back home, producing one of the earliest surviving accounts of Western Europe written by a traveller from East Asia. The military alliance he sought was never concluded, but the journey itself was unprecedented.