Western Europeans became more interested in the far east of Asia after the arrival of the Mongol hordes in Eastern Europe. Plenipotentiaries had been sent by the Pope and the King of Hungary to make contact with the Great Khan then ruling his empire from the town of Karakorum (Harhorin) to the west of present-day Ulan Bator. Louis IX of France despatched a messenger, the Flemish monk and traveller William of Rubruck, on a fact-finding mission (1253–1255); on his return William reported the presence of a French female cook, a German silversmith and the nephew of an English bishop. The court and town was a bustle of commercial activity with people from all parts of the empire and beyond, engaged in trade but also in serious open debate. There were not only mosques but there was also a Christian church. His report tempered the entrenched European opinion that the Tatars were all barbarians.
Nearly 750 years ago Niccolo and Maffeo Polo left Venice for a second visit to the Great Khan, this time accompanied by Niccolo’s son, seventeen-year-old Marco. They travelled through Herat and Bokhara (Bukhara) on the Silk Road, north of the Pamirs and north of the Karakoram mountains, passing through Samarkand, Kashgar (Kashi), Yarkand (Shache) and Khotan (Hotan). They were the guests of Kublai Khan from 1275 to 1292. Marco was a particularly welcome guest due to his flair for languages and administrative skills.
The Mughal capital had been relocated to Dadu (Beijing) with a summer palace at Xanadu. The family travelled widely around the realm until finally they were allowed to leave China in a flotilla of fourteen junks bound for Hormuz in Persia. Two years after leaving the Great Khan they were back home in Venice. Marco’s triumphant return was short-lived for while fighting for Venice against Genoa during a naval battle he was captured and imprisoned where his memoirs were recorded.
Although Marco had penetrated deep into the heart of the Mongol soul and way of life he wasn’t the only European to journey east as William of Rubruck revealed. There were many others who, no doubt, had interesting tales to tell. It is the old story that, if you are to be famous, then you must write books or have books written about you! As luck would have it for Marco and for us he was imprisoned with Rustichello of Pisa, a well-known author of romantic novels, who, over the three years of their incarceration, wrote up Marco’s account of his remarkable journey east and the time he spent with the Great Khan. The Western world had the benefit of Marco’s observations made within the Great Khan’s inner circle. These revelations in his book, Travels, helped to bring the educated elite of Europe closer to the Far East and encourage others to emulate such ventures.
Marco made very little reference to the Karakoram and no reference at all to their name. The first Europeans to travel into the high mountains of Asia were the Jesuit missionaries based in Goa. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they came in search of Prester John, a legendary Christian patriarch and king popular in European chronicles, following up on rumours, subsequently found to be false, that there were enclaves of Nestorian Christians practising their religion in the Himalaya and Tibet. Portuguese traders had long ago reported, on their return to Goa, that up in the Himalaya they had heard that the inhabitants were practising their religion with all the trappings of a Catholic church service. What their informants had actually witnessed was the Buddhists practising their faith, swinging incense, lighting candles and chanting traditional incantations.
This came to light only after the journeys made throughout the region by a Portuguese Jesuit, Bento de Goes, in 1603, who joined a trading caravan from Lahore to Kabul, and later through the Pamirs to Yarkand. In doing so he became the first European to cross from India over the mountains into Central Asia. In 1624 courageous Catholic priests Father Antonio de Andrade and Brother Manuel Marques made a difficult four-month journey from Agra, crossing the 18,000-foot Mana Pass, to arrive in Tsaparang on the Upper Sutlej. It was there they established a mission, subsequently visited by many other Jesuits, some via the Mana Pass but others through Kulu and over the Rohtang Pass further to the east.
Ippolito Desideri (1684–1733) will for ever be associated with the early explorations of Tibet. To know more about this it is worth referring to the comprehensive An Account of Tibet – The Travels of Ippolito Desideri of Pistoia, edited by Filippo de Filippi (1931). Early on in his travels Desideri became the first known European to have crossed the Zoji La when, in 1715, he journeyed from Srinagar in the Vale of Kashmir to Leh in Ladakh. Missionary necessity enabled him to overcome his horror of travelling into the mountains since he found them ‘the very picture of desolation, horror and death itself ’. Almost a century later, at the end of the eighteenth century, Westerners began to romanticise the mountains and hold them as places also for spiritual renewal.