Mongols, Apocalyptic Messianism, and Later Medieval Christian Fears of Mass Conversion to Judaism

Abstract

The capture of Jerusalem during the First Crusade, the extirpation of various heresies in the twelfth and thirteen centuries, the gradual expansion of Christian rule in the Iberian peninsula, and the mass conversion of Jews to Christianity there during the fourteenth century, all seemed to support a Christian triumphalism that imagined that as the End Time approached, Jews and other infidels would inevitably be absorbed into the Church. Nonetheless, an expanding medieval awareness of the many ‘Others’ beyond Christendom contributed to Christian anxieties that Jews (or Muslims) might expand their number through mass conversion, and not Christians. This paper will examine some sources of this anxiety.

1. Introduction

In the earlier Middle Ages, there were occasional Christian converts to Judaism who were often drawn from the upper classes; nevertheless, Christian society following the capture of Jerusalem during the First Crusade could expect with ever greater confidence that it would triumphantly bring all peoples everywhere to the Christian faith.1 A few decades later, although Peter the Venerable acknowledged with concern that Islam, “the sect of the Saracens,” had overcome nearly half the world’s population (I. M. Resnick 2016, pp. 49, 72)2 to occupy by force of arms “the largest parts of Asia with the whole of Africa and part of Spain … (I. M. Resnick 2016, pp. 45, 66)”,3 he still opposed the claim of his constructed Jewish interlocutor that Islam’s dramatic expansion throughout the world provided evidence that it had eclipsed Christianity.4 Peter insisted that only the Christian faith had fulfilled prophecy and subjected the entire world to itself: “I said the entire world, because even though the heathens (gentiles) or the Saracens exercise dominion over some parts of it, even though the Jews lurk among the Christians and the heathens (ethnici), there is still no part of the earth, … that is not inhabited by Christians that either rule or are subjects there, so that what Scripture says about Christ appears to be true: ‘And he shall rule from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth (Ps. 71.8)’ (I. M. Resnick 2013, p. 191).”5 Indeed, the geographical spread of the Christian faith is key to Peter’s defense of Christianity. In his polemic against the Jews, he reminds his interlocutor that “across the entire world churches of Christ are constructed, altars are consecrated in every place, the Lamb of God, whom you slew on the Cross, is offered without end upon the same altars in these same churches to the Father Almighty for the salvation of the world (I. M. Resnick 2013, pp. 135–36).” In contrast, the forced dispersion of the Jews throughout the world, as anticipated at Ps. 58.12—“scatter them by your might” (Vulg.)—is a sign of their punishment and eternal servitude: “after that land, which in the past had been given to the Jews by God, spewed forth all the Jews just like useless vomit, spreading them across the entire world, and exposed them to be trodden under the feet of all the Gentiles, you know that not only were they unable to aspire to any government or kingdom but they were unable in any fashion even to recover from ignominious servitude (I. M. Resnick 2013, p. 146).” By contrast, Christian miracles appear everywhere, and Jews “see that not just some parts of the world but almost the entire world is itself subject to Christian laws (I. M. Resnick 2013, p. 188).”

2. Challenges to Christian Triumphalism: Conversion

By the second half of the thirteenth century, however, Christian confidence in the triumphal expansion of Christendom seems to have been badly shaken. Jewish polemical texts against Christianity collected in the late thirteenth-century Nizzahon vetus contend that in fact Christians do not constitute a majority religion that has spread across the earth. Instead, “only eleven nations have erred after the belief in Jesus, and all of them together do not equal the one of the Ishmaelites [Muslims] (Berger 1979, no. 204, p. 203 [Hebrew, p. 141]).” Similarly, Meir ben Simon ha-Meili’s Holy War (Milḥemet Miẓvah), composed in Provence in the mid-to-late thirteenth century by this halakhist from Narbonne, notes that it is Muslims (and not Christians) who rule half the world.6

Likewise, despite fictive conversions of Muslims that appeared in thirteenth-century vernacular epics (Tolan 2008), Christian efforts at converting Muslim populations showed little success. Not only would European Christians fail to convert North African Muslims, but Muslim converts to Christianity in Iberia often returned to Islam when given the opportunity. Contrariwise, rumors and tales spread of a growing number of European Christians who had converted to Islam (e.g., in the Levantine Crusader kingdoms) or to Judaism. In 1233 Pope Gregory IX had complained to King Andrew of Hungary of Christians who converted to Islam, either because they had been sold as slaves to Muslims or in order to satisfy Muslim marriage partners (Grayzel 1966, pp. 208–9). At around the same time, the Dominican Raymund of Peñafort, who compiled the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX, expresses concern over crypto-Christians who live in Saracen [Muslim] cities, who praise Mohammad, and who appear in public to be Muslims but in private they comport themselves as Christians, and considers whether or not they should be regarded as Christians at all (Raymund of Peñafort 1975, Lib. I, tit. 7, pp. 334–35).

Moreover, during the thirteenth century, there emerged an exaggerated fear within the Church of religious instability and new possibilities for conversion that refocused attention upon Jews “as agents of Christian apostasy” who promoted conversion to Judaism or to Islam and various Christian heresies (Tartakoff 2020, p. 21). Christian conversions to Judaism were a particular source of anxiety. For example, in the second half of the thirteenth century, the Passau Anonymous reports that a suspiciously large number of Christians converted to Judaism, based on information received from a Christian in the diocese of Passau who had himself been circumcised as a convert to Judaism, but who later returned to the Christian faith. This repentant Christian apostate reported that 100 others, including Christian clerics and members of religious orders, had also “circumcised themselves”, i.e., converted to Judaism (Patschovsky 1968, p. 152). The Passau Anonymous claims that Jews effectively encouraged these conversions with inducements of temporal gifts (Niesner 2005, p. 502).

The Nizzahon vetus, however, acknowledges that although material inducements might lead some medieval Jews to convert to Christianity, Christians who converted to Judaism faced only hardship. Indeed, the male proselyte “knows that he must wound himself by removing his foreskin through circumcision, that he must exile himself from place to place, that he must deprive himself of worldly good and fear for his life from the external threat of being killed by the uncircumcised, …” Moreover, “It is evident that they [i.e., Christian converts] would not do this unless they knew for certain that their faith is without foundation and that it is all a lie … (Berger 1979, no. 211, pp. 206–7 [Hebrew, pp. 144–45]; Berger 2008)” Christian conversions to Judaism, precisely due to the special hardship attached to them, carried a significance that far outweighed their number.

Moreover, as Tartakoff remarks, “Christian conversionary aspirations and anxieties about Christian apostasy intertwined insofar as apostasy was the logical inverse of conversion (Tartakoff 2020, p. 35).” The greater the Church’s missionizing efforts, then, the more it feared apostasy. Its coercive conversionary efforts are well documented: by the early 1250s, Dominicans in Mallorca were given licenses to command both Jews and Muslims to attend missionizing sermons. Pope Nicholas III’s (r. 1277–1280) bull Vinea Soreth velut (Synan 1965, pp. 119–20) required Jews in Europe to attend conversionary sermons in their own synagogues to encourage their adoption of Christianity (Chazan 1973, pp. 593–94). Paradoxically, then, a growing number of reports of conversion to Judaism attest to the intense commitment of the thirteenth-century Church to the conversion of the ‘Other’ at the same time that they attest to the enduring appeal of Judaism, raising doubts and fears about the ultimate victory of Christianity.

Such fears undoubtedly lay behind Pope Clement IV’s (r. 1265–1268) bull Turbato Corde, “with troubled heart”, dated 27 July 1267 (Grayzel 1989, 2:102–104), in which the Pope expressed concern over the “exceedingly numerous reprobate Christians, denying the truth of the Catholic faith, [who] have gone over, in a way worthy of damnation, to the rite of the Jews (Synan 1965, p. 241 [Latin]; p. 118 [English]).” Although Pope Clement IV—born Guy Fulcodi of Saint-Gilles and subsequently Bishop of Le Puy and Archbishop of Narbonne—did not quantify the number of such Christian apostates, he did remark that this “plague that makes for damnation … is growing outrageously … (Synan 1965, p. 241 [Latin]; p. 118 [English])” This bull, which was reissued by subsequent popes, ordered Dominican and Franciscan inquisitors to take necessary measures against Christian apostates and the Jews responsible for seducing them to join their religious community.

In addition to the Passau Anonymous, other Jewish and Christian sources identify thirteenth-century Christian converts to Judaism. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, Gerald of Wales reported in his Speculum ecclesiae that in his own day, two Cistercians were circumcised as converts to Judaism (Brewer 1873, pp. 139–40; Tartakoff 2020, p. 25). In 1222, a provincial church council convened by Archbishop Stephen Langton of Canterbury resulted in the execution of a nameless apostate deacon who had converted to Judaism,7 sometimes mistakenly identified as the London Dominican Robert of Reading who is said to have converted to Judaism in 1275 (Gransden 1964, p. 58).8 In Norwich in 1230, Jews were seized and accused of having circumcised, i.e., converted, a Christian boy (Tartakoff 2020, pp. 19–21, 44–46, 49–62; Tartakoff 2018). On 6 April 1245, a royal writ was sent to the sheriff of Oxfordshire ordering him to imprison an unnamed Oxford cleric who was a Jewish convert to Christianity, but who had relapsed and resumed his Jewish identity (Logan 1972, p. 224). In 1278, Rabbi Isaac Males of Toulouse was executed for having supervised the conversion of a cradle Christian (i.e., a Christian by birth) identified only as “Perrot” (Cohen 2001, pp. 304–5).9 Near the end of the thirteenth century, the Nuremberg Memorbuch memorialized a number of Christian converts to Judaism who had suffered persecution and martyrdom (Salfeld 1898). Henry of Herford’s mid-fourteenth-century Liber de rebus memorabilibus mentions that sometime prior to 1297, an Augustinian canon from Lemgo was circumcised and both Henry of Herford and a later Cistercian chronicler identified a canon of Soest named Robert who was circumcised before 1299 (Tartakoff 2020, pp. 77, 83). In 1290, a Jew of Naples was fined for converting a Christian, who had likely previously converted from Judaism (Starr 1946, p. 206). In 1312 large fines were imposed on the Jews of Tarragona because ten of them helped two Germans to convert to Judaism in Toledo. In Majorca in 1315, several Jews were condemned and fined for having circumcised two Christians, while in 1326, the property of two Jews of Tarragona was confiscated because they had converted a French girl to Judaism. In the next year, the entire community of Calatayud was condemned for converting Christians and helping a baptized Jew to relapse (Patai and Patai Wing 1975, p. 75; Baron 1952–1983, 10: 134 and 13: 14–16, 29).

The true number of Christian converts to Judaism was likely quite small, despite fears and rumors that suggested otherwise. Paola Tartakoff cautions that we have only about 60 documented Christian conversions to Judaism from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries (Tartakoff 2017, p. 272), in contrast to more than 1000 documented Jewish conversions to Christianity found in thirteenth-century sources alone (Tartakoff 2019, p. 504; Tartakoff 2015, p. 733). Norman Golb, however, extrapolating from Hebrew manuscript testimonies in the Cairo Genizah, suggests that as many as 15,000 Christian converts fled Christendom between 1000 and 1200 CE for the relative safety of Jewish communities in Islamic lands (Golb 1987, p. 36).

Although Golb’s estimate seems implausible, regardless of the true number of converts to Judaism, the mere existence of Christian converts to Judaism presented a persistent and annoying challenge to Christian supersessionism. The challenge represented by Christian converts to Judaism was surely exacerbated by rabbinic texts that discouraged their conversion—in part because of the risks they brought to Jewish communities. As already noted above, the Nizzahon vetus remarks that the Christian convert will “fear for his life from the external threat of being killed by the uncircumcised, …” Additionally, Jewish communities rightly feared threats from secular and ecclesiastical authorities if they harbored apostate Christians. Finally, conversions might also be discouraged by rabbinic judgments that “even if they [Edomites; i.e., Christians] repent and become proselytes, they cannot enter the congregation of the Lord until the third generation (Berger 1979, no. 123, p. 134 [Hebrew, p. 81]).”

Nevertheless, growing Christian anxiety over Christian conversions will inform papal concerns. In November 1286, Pope Honorius IV dispatched the bull Nimis in partibus to the archbishops of York, Evreux, and Canterbury, in which he condemned those “Jews [who] try to attract to their sect, not only faithful Christians … [but] also criminally invite the orthodox to worship with them on Sabbaths and holidays in the synagogues … [where] many of them Judaize … (Grayzel 1989, 2:157–79).” Even though this bull may have been principally concerned with Jewish converts to Christianity who were drawn back into the orbit of Judaism, it also applied to cradle Christians who had apostatized (Synan 1965, pp. 121–22), and therefore reinforced fears that Judaism retained a powerful allure.

3. Ramon Llull for the Conversion of the Mongols

It may have been similar Christian anxieties over conversions to Judaism or, equally, to Islam that led Ramon Llull to express his own concerns. Llull introduces an additional fear that Jews might not merely convert some individual Christians, but that they might even succeed at a program of mass conversion. This new concern may simply be a natural extension of fears of Jews as “agents of Christian apostasy”, although it also stemmed from a recognition of the effect of sectarian discord among Christians.

Internal divisions among Christians, Llull reckoned, not only jeopardized the success of Christian efforts to convert the Muslims but even directly undermined them. In a late crusade treatise dating from 1309, the Liber de acquisitione Terrae Sanctae, Llull tells a tale of a certain Saracen who wanted to become a Christian, but because of the many schisms that divided the Christian world, he did not know whether he should join the Greeks, the Nestorians, or the Roman Catholics. Then, seeing that the Jews had no such sectarian divisions, in order to escape doubt (propter dubium euitandum), he decided to become a Jew (Beattie 1995, p. 93), which, for later medieval Christian canonists, represented a choice even worse than conversion to Islam (I. Resnick 2017).10 As Harvey J. Hames points out, in Llull’s Disputació de cinc savis—a debate between four different Christian sects—a Jew makes an appearance to reinforce the same point: “one of the reasons that we Jews doubt the veracity of the Christian faith is because of the discord that one [Christian] has with others, with one believing in God in a certain way, and another in a contrary manner, and one is the enemy of the other … for among Jews and Saracens there is not as much division regarding the issue of belief as among the Christians (Hames 2000, pp. 95–96).” For Llull, then, imagined Jewish unity strengthened its appeal, while real sectarian divisions within the Christian world threatened its own conversionary program.

Furthermore, during the very brief papacy of Celestine V (r. 5 July–13 December 1294), in his Petition (for the conversion of the infidels) to Celestine V addressed to the pope and the papal curia, Llull acknowledged a demographic reality unknown to Peter the Venerable that across the world, “there are one hundred or more who are not Christian for every one Christian … (Golubovich 1906, p. 373)”.11 Faced with these calculations, Llull called upon the Church to open its treasury to support a new ‘crusade’ to Christianize the entire world by converting the Muslims and by reuniting the Roman Church with the Christian communities of the East. He had expressed the same goal earlier in his Liber super Psalmum ‘Quicumque vult’/Liber tartari et christiani (ca. 1288), which was prompted by the Mongol embassy sent to Rome in 1288 by the great Khan Argon/Arghun (r. 1284–1291) and led by the Nestorian priest Rabban Sauma. In this work by Llull, an imaginary Tartar is converted to Christianity and baptized by the pope, just as Argon himself intimated that he would consider baptism in Jerusalem following a successful military campaign, with western support, against the Mamluks. Llull continued to exhort the Church to pursue the conversion of the Mongols, also known in the West as the Tartars, a name that linked this people etymologically with Tartarus, i.e., Hell (Gow 1995, p. 56). Llull’s missionizing program hoped for the conversion of the Islamic world through an alliance with, and conversion of, the Mongols.

Latin Christians had become better informed of the nature of Mongol culture during the 1240s. In 1245 Pope Innocent IV sent Ascelin of Lombardia with the Dominican Simon of Saint-Quentin as ambassadors to the Mongols, and dispatched letters as well in which he invited the Mongols to embrace Christianity (Pertz 1887, vol. 2, nos. 102 and 105, pp. 72–75; Dawson 1955, pp. 73–75). Although Simon of Saint-Quentin’s original report contained in his History of the Tartars (Gesta Tartarorum) was lost, the text survived in part as epitomized in the Speculum historiale, which constitutes the fourth part of the massive Speculum maius compiled by the Dominican Vincent of Beauvais (d. 1264). Vincent of Beauvais’s encyclopedia also incorporates elements from the report of the Franciscan Friar Giovanni di Plano Carpini, whom Pope Innocent IV also dispatched in 1245 on an embassy to the Mongols, along with Benedict the Pole and Stephen of Bohemia. Friar Giovanni completed his History of the Mongols (Historia Mongalorum) in 1247.12 Although these early Christian accounts remark that the Mongols desire the complete annihilation of Christians (Vincent of Beauvais [1624] 1964, 29.77, p. 1212),13 whom Mongols regard as “dogs” and idolaters because they worship the wood of the Cross (Vincent of Beauvais [1624] 1964, 29.74.1, p. 1211),14 these accounts also acknowledge nonetheless that the Mongols permit Christians and other religious minorities to worship and preach freely among them (Vincent of Beauvais [1624] 1964, 29.84, p. 1214).15 By the middle of the thirteenth century, western Christians often expressed optimism over the potential to convert the Mongols and to form an alliance with them to overcome the Saracens (Burkhardt 2020, 2: 980–84; Grant 2018).

Such optimism had begun to fade by the end of the century, but it did not completely disappear. On 12 September 1290, King Edward I of England wrote to the Khan Argon/Arghun, King of the Tartars and ruler of the Ilkhanate Mongol kingdom. Argon’s rise to power is described in an early fourteenth-century work, Het’um the Historian’s History of the Tartars or The Flower of Histories of the East.16 Argon had come to power after leading a successful rebellion against his uncle Aḥmad Takūdār, who had converted to Islam. Although Argon was a Buddhist, he tolerated Christian missionaries and he promoted Saʿd-al-dawla, a Jewish physician, to the rank of vizier in 1289. Prior to the latter’s execution in March 1291, Saʿd-al-dawla had secured governorships for his brothers and nephews, expanding the power or influence of Jews in the Ilkhanate Mongol kingdom. Moreover, as an ardent opponent of the Islamic Mamluk Sultanate, Argon sent embassies to Latin Christian rulers to obtain military assistance against this shared enemy (Jackson 1986, pp. 402–4) to Pope Honorius IV (d. 1285), to Pope Nicholas IV (d. 1292), to the French King Philip IV (r. 1285–1314), and to England’s King Edward I (r. 1272–1307). Argon indicated that in exchange for military assistance to conquer the Mamluks in Egypt, he would confer the city of Jerusalem upon King Philip IV and Argon intimated too that he would receive baptism in Jerusalem once the city had been liberated. Neither came to pass. But his efforts to enlist aid from popes and Christian monarchs seemed to justify Edward I’s conviction that Argon would “rise against the perfidy of the sultan of Babylon [i.e., Cairo] and his people, in aid of the Holy Land and of the Christian faith (Calendar of the Close Rolls 1904, p. 145).”

Despite disappointment over a failed Mongol–Christian anti-Islamic alliance, Ramon Llull advises nonetheless that a mission to the Tartars can proceed without fear because the Tartars permit Christians to proselytize in their lands.17 This was certainly true under Argon. The more tolerant attitude of the Tartars toward religious minorities is also confirmed by Llull’s contemporary Riccoldo da Monte di Croce (d. 1320), who had been sent as a missionary to the court of the Mongol ruler Argon, in his description of Baghdad under Tartar rule at the very end of the thirteenth century in his Liber peregrinationis.18 But more important for our investigation is Llull’s warning that if the Church should fail to undertake this mission to the Tartars, “either the Saracens or the Jews will be able to convert them to their religion and all of Christendom will be in great danger (Golubovich 1906, p. 374).”19

His concern that Saracens might convert the Tartars could be justified by an appeal to the example of Aḥmad Takūdār, Argon’s uncle, who had in fact converted to Islam. And although it seems rather implausible that the Jews might convert the Tartars, the rise of the Jewish vizier Saʿd-al-dawla might provide some basis for Llull’s concern. Not only would a failure to support such a mission provide an opportunity to Saracens or Jews to convert the Tartar kingdom, but it would also sustain the conviction that “Christians are losing their lands and the boldness which they were accustomed to have against the Saracens (Golubovich 1906, p. 374).”20 Llull’s sense that Christians are losing their boldness against the Saracens may reflect the impact of the fall of Acre to the Egyptian Mamluks in 1291, thereby ending the Latin presence in the Holy Land. Not surprisingly, later Llull identified the Saracens as the chief impediment to efforts to spread Christianity throughout the world.21 The failure of Llull’s petition and his awareness, at the time he composed his Liber de acquisitione Terrae Sanctae in 1309 (Beattie 2019, p. 205), that one of the great Tartar rulers had converted to Islam, may have diverted his attention thereafter away from these distant lands to refocus instead on converting Jews and Muslims within Christendom. Nonetheless, Lull’s anxious concern that should the Church fail to support a missionizing crusade to the Mongols, “either the Saracens or the Jews will be able to convert them to their religion …” is a stunning recognition of the religious appeal of Islam and Judaism, as well as a remarkable acknowledgment of the power of Jews as agents of apostasy.

4. The Mongols and Apocalyptic Eschatology

One of the most striking features of Llull’s petition to Pope Celestine V, however, is its sober assessment and demythologized characterization of the Mongols. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Llull does not predict a successful effort to convert the Mongols following a victorious military campaign under the mythical Christian ruler in the East, Prester John.22 For much of the thirteenth century, the Prester John myth had been employed to corroborate the medieval Christian conviction that the apostles had evangelized everywhere throughout the world. Medieval Latin Christians therefore expected that Christians would be found in remote locations, a belief encouraged by the Crusaders’ encounters with eastern or oriental Christians (Hamilton 1996), and anticipated that these distant brethren would naturally ally themselves with the western conversionary program. The Prester John legend, which was elaborated in a Latin letter attributed to Prester John that was dispatched to the Byzantine Emperor Manuel I Komnenos (ca. 1165), describes the utopian kingdom of Prester John; this material later even entered Jewish communities in Hebrew translation.23 The Priest-King Prester John was thought to have been descended from one of the Magi in the East who had brought gifts to the infant Jesus. In the Relatio de Davide, whose most elaborate composition bears the title Historia gestorum David regis Indorum (and was excerpted by Jacques de Vitry and sent to Pope Honorius III), the gesta or deeds of Prester John also became conflated with deeds of Genghis Khan and the Mongols (Richard 1996, p. 140). Prester John’s descendants were even imagined to be living among the Mongols and preparing (or inclining) them toward conversion to Christianity (Sheir 2018, p. 36).

Just as Llull’s Petition does not anticipate a successful conversionary crusade owing to assistance from the descendants of Prester John, neither does it suggest that Jews might better succeed at converting the Mongols because of the latter’s supposed links to the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel and their shared genealogy with the Jews. This claim regarding the imaginary origins of the Mongols had been popularized before the middle of the thirteenth century by Matthew Paris and others.24 With information derived from interviews with Mongol prisoners conducted by a Hungarian bishop, Matthew Paris not only identified the Mongols with the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel but even added that their language uses ‘Jewish’, i.e., Hebrew characters. This conviction that the Mongols were themselves descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes was no longer the stuff of fable or myth; according to the Dominican Simon of Saint-Quentin’s lost History of the Tartars (Gesta Tartarorum), other Dominicans in the city of Tbilisi inquired of the Georgians, the Persians, and the Jews to learn what they knew of those ‘lost’ Jews that, according to Petrus Comestor’s popular twelfth-century Historia scholastica, had been enclosed by Alexander the Great in the Caspian Mountains (Vincent of Beauvais [1624] 1964, 29.89, p. 1215; Petrus Comestor 1855, cap. 5, vol. 198:1498), although Simon remarked with disappointment that his fellow Dominicans were able to learn nothing whatsoever to confirm the fictive historical narrative (Vincent of Beauvais [1624] 1964, 29.89, p. 1215).

This fictive Mongol history was not only the product of a Christian imagination. Mongol conquests in Iraq, Syria, and Palestine in the period 1258–1260, buttressed by astrological calculations, had even led some Jewish kabbalists to identify the Mongols with the Ten Lost Tribes and to view the Mongol campaign as a harbinger of the coming of messiah. Even the Mamluk defeat of the Mongols in ‘Ein Jhalud in September 1260 did not deter Abraham Abulafia, who had searched for the Ten Tribes by first seeking the land of Prester John and who later sought to convert Pope Nicholas III to Judaism (Synan 1965, p. 120), from envisioning a future eschatological battle in which the Mongols will prevail over both the Saracens and the Christians (Idel 2014, pp. 156, 162; Menache 1996, p. 337) prior to the appearance of the messiah.

Such reports aroused Jewish eschatological hopes for liberation and redemption but also exacerbated Christian eschatological anxieties (Schmieder 2006; Kogman-Appel 2015; Benmelech 2016; Yuval 2006, p. 290). Already the Marbach Annals (Annales Marbacenses) had noted that after the appearance of the Mongol armies in the East in 1222, Christians living in Cologne had fearfully embraced the rumor that the Mongol army intended to descend upon Cologne to ‘liberate’ (that is, repatriate) the relics of the Three Magi or Three Kings, who had belonged to their race, and whose relics were housed in the Cologne Cathedral. Equally important, this text adds that the Jews of Cologne rejoiced when they heard this rumor, since they viewed the Mongols as belonging to their nation and even called the Mongol king the son of David (filium David).25 Bezzola (1974, pp. 34–35) remarks that this is the earliest source to link the origin of the Three Magi or Three Kings to Central Asia and to the Mongols. More importantly, however, the rumor allied the Jews and the Mongols in a campaign against Christendom that underscored the renewed power of Jews as agents of apostasy.

Moreover, the title “son of David” carried messianic significance for both Christians and Jews. In the New Testament, Jesus is identified at Matt. 9.27 as a son of David, a title which relates to the conviction that the messiah will arise from David’s house or lineage. As Grant points out, however, it also could be linked to real personages in the early stages of the Mongol expansion, and specifically to Toghrul of the Keraites, who was baptized as a Christian and received the name David (Grant 2018, p. 133). Simon of Saint-Quentin’s History of the Tartars (Gesta Tartarorum), in Vincent of Beauvais’ epitome (Vincent of Beauvais [1624] 1964, 29.69, p. 1209), also reports that the Tartars “went forth to destroy nations” in 1202, having conspired against their “King David—that is, the son of Prester John …” The narrative in the Marbach Annals likely reawakened Christian concerns of a resurgent Jewish messianism: Jews still awaited their messiah, who would be a son of David. Moreover, the Mongol king, who stood at the head of a great army, was called filium David and was thought to be a son of Prester John, who was himself descended from one of the Three Magi. Indeed, by the middle of the thirteenth century, the Relatio de Davide or Historia gestorum David regis Indorum sometimes bore the altered title, rex Iudaeorum (King of the Jews) rather than rex Indorum, King of the Indians, which “created a precious meeting point between Jews and Mongols in the world of myth, …” (Menache 1996, p. 328). It was unsurprising, then, that the Mongol King would wish to recover from Cologne the corporeal remains of ones from his own lineage.

These sacred relics had been deposited in the Cologne Cathedral under Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (d. 1190), whose chancellor, Archbishop of Cologne Rainald of Dassel (d. 1167), had obtained relics in Milan alleged to be the bodies of the Three Kings or Magi. The basic elements of the tale of the Three Kings may be traced to the Gospel of Matthew (Matt. 2.1–2), in which these Three Kings (magi) bring gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the infant Jesus. According to legend, their relics had first been discovered by St. Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine the Great (d. 337), who brought the relics to Constantinople, and from there they later traveled to Milan.26 The Annales Egmundani then records for the year 1167 (sic) that Rainald acquired the relics from a Milanese nobleman (Pertz 1859, pp. 464–65). In fact, on 24 July 1164, Rainald solemnly translated the relics to the Cologne cathedral (after having first separated three fingers from the bodies for the cathedral of Hildesheim). By the end of the twelfth century, a collection of written legends about the Magi was housed in the Cologne cathedral and provided the basis for the fourteenth-century History of the Three Kings (Historia trium regum) by the Carmelite friar, John of Hildesheim.27 Rainald’s successor, Archbishop Philip of Cologne, enshrined the relics in a gold reliquary that is still visible today in the cathedral and which made the Cologne cathedral an important European pilgrimage destination to rival Rome, Compostella, and Canterbury. The Marbach Annals, then, highlight the threat that the Mongols posed to the most sacred objects of Christendom and drew a line from the Mongols to the Jews (Resnick and Kitchell 2022, pp. 26–27).

The Jews of Cologne were said to have rejoiced at news of the Mongol advance because of their shared genealogy. But the joy ascribed to them could only heighten Christian fears. Less than two decades later in 1241, Matthew Paris imagines a secret meeting of Jewish leaders who acknowledged their shared lineage with Tartars and Cumanians, who proclaimed that the time had arrived to liberate Jewish communities from Christians, and who conspired to deliver swords and daggers from Cologne to the Mongol army (Menache 1996, pp. 338–39). Christian eschatological anxieties are perhaps more perfectly epitomized later in John Mandeville’s Travels (ca. 1357), which located the Hebrew-speaking Ten Tribes near China and asserts that they conspire to form a double alliance with the Antichrist and diaspora Jewry to destroy Christendom itself (Seymour 1967, p. 193, lns. 22–28). As Andrew Gow (1995, pp. 80–81) has shown, before the end of the thirteenth century, German vernacular sources too had identified the Ten Tribes with the fearsome Red Jews, “disgusting and evil Jewish monsters—like ‘devilish’ Moors or Tatars …”

Although Llull did not appeal to the fictive Jewish origins of the Mongols, Christian eschatological anxieties and awareness of heightened Jewish eschatological expectation likely contributed to Llull’s concerns. Just as Christian eschatology anticipated the conversion of unbelievers at the Second Coming, the Extractiones de Talmud per Ordinem Thematicum from the middle of the thirteenth century attributes to R. Symeon the assertion that ultimately all the nations (gentes) must be converted to Judaism (Cecini et al. 2021, 5.8, p. 65). Judah Ha-Levi and Maimonides also lend support to the contention that at the End Time, the Gentiles will convert to Judaism, projecting an inverted image of Christian eschatological hopes.28

I am inclined to dismiss Baron’s (1952–1983, 17: 152) suggestion that Llull’s concern that Jews might succeed at the mass conversion of the Mongols may have been justified by an awareness that Jews had previously converted the Khazars. The story of the Khazars’ conversion to Judaism had been introduced ca. 865 CE by Christian Druthmar of Aquitaine (1851), also known as Christian Stavelot, within a longer narrative that seeks to demonstrate that there is no people that has not been exposed to Christian teachings, either by the apostles or by neighboring Christians. He identifies as exceptional the Khazar people, which “has been circumcised and observes the entire Jewish religion.”29 At the same time, however, this early medieval Christian writer insists that Christianity has spread throughout this distant region.

The legend of the conversion of the Khazars, reprised in the alleged correspondence between Hasdai ibn Shaprut of the court of the caliph of Cordoba and Qagan-beg Joseph of Khazaria ca. 965 CE, became a useful narrative or polemical device for medieval Jews, as illustrated by Judah ha-Levi’s twelfth-century Kuzari. Both the historical narrative and the date for this alleged conversion of the Khazars—or at least the Khazar elite—to Judaism remain in dispute.30 The episode is rarely mentioned by medieval Latin writers, however. In fact, in The Narrative of Brother Benedict the Pole, Benedict, who had traveled to the Mongols with John of Piano Campo, explicitly identifies the Guzari (Khazars) as Christians and not Jews (Dawson 1955, p. 80), and modern scholarship is increasingly suspicious of the claim that the Khazar kingdom had embraced Judaism (Stampfer 2013). Even though Hames (2000, pp. 141, 144, 156–59) has suggested that Llull may have been aware of the claim that the Khazars had embraced Judaism from the anonymous Hispanic Sefer ha-Yashar [Book of the Righteous], and that Llull’s own Liber tartari et christiani may have been inspired in its form and methodology by Ha-Levi’s Kuzari (Hames 2000, p. 96, n. 55; Liu 2005, pp. 297–98), Llull makes no mention of the Khazars in his appeal to the papacy.

Instead, Llull was likely aware of Saʿd-al-dawla, the Jewish vizier under Argon. He may also have been apprised of the actual presence of Jewish communities in the Crimean capital of the Golden Horde from the second half of the thirteenth century.31 Already in 1254, William of Rubruck had traveled to the Persian city of Derbent (i.e., modern Derbend in Dagestan, Russia, which he identifies as the “Iron Gate” made by Alexander the Great) and remarked that, after a two-day journey from there at Samaron, he encountered many Jews, and adds that “there are many Jews throughout all the cities of Persia (per omnes civitates Persidis sunt multi iudei; (Wyngaert 1929, 37.19–20, pp. 318–19)).” Such accounts contribute to a perception that Jews were virtually omnipresent and remained an enduring threat to Christian efforts to convert those beyond the borders of European Christendom.32 Although Llull was likely more concerned that the Tartars would embrace Islam rather than Judaism, fourteenth-century kings of Aragon were clearly concerned that Iberian Jews would convert individual Tartar slaves to Judaism (Liu 2005, pp. 298–99). But Llull’s anxiety is unique: his Petition did not concern itself principally with the threat of individual apostasy or conversion, nor does it rely on a mythic kinship between Jews and Mongols; instead, Llull alludes to the astonishing possibility that Jews, a small minority throughout the world, might succeed in a program of mass conversion precisely where the Christian Church had failed. Llull’s worry seems rooted in a real sense that the Mongols represent both a danger and an opportunity for the Latin Church. Moreover, by 1321, fears that Jews are intent upon the mass conversion of other peoples will reappear in a letter from Philippe de Valois, the future French king Philip VI, to Pope John XXII that falsely identifies European Jews, lepers, and Muslims as co-conspirators in a fantastic plot to destroy Christendom. This letter claimed that Jews had succeeded in bringing about the mass conversion of Saracen kingdoms in the East, and that Saracen rulers, having been circumcised as Jewish converts, had entered into an agreement to deliver to the Jews the Kingdom of France. This fantasy of Jewish efforts toward mass conversion will provide another justification for King Charles V’s expulsion of the Jews from France in 1323 (Ginzburg 1991, pp. 33–52; I. M. Resnick 2012, pp. 133–35).

5. Conclusions

It is difficult to establish clear causal connections. But Llull’s fear that either the Saracens or the Jews will be able to convert the Mongols, putting all of Christendom in great danger, appears to reflect both growing disappointment at Christian failures to convert the “Other”, and Llull’s perception that the demographics of an expanding world beyond known borders cautions against earlier Christian optimism. Ramon Llull’s (Madre 1981, dist. 1, ln. 605) remark that the Tartars, i.e., Mongols, “possess more power in this world than the Muslims and all Christians”33 and his awareness that “there are one hundred or more who are not Christian for every one Christian (Golubovich 1906, p. 373)” seems to have led him to contemplate that, for a time at least, a Christian conversionary mission faced real competition.