The Church of the East under the Mongols

The Church of the East had spread far into Central Asia centuries earlier, and when the Mongols swept west a good many of the peoples they absorbed — the Kerait and the Öngüd among them — were already Christian in this tradition, as were several of the great khans' wives and mothers. For a few decades the church that Latin Europe called Nestorian had extraordinary access: tolerated and sometimes favoured at the Mongol court, and in 1281 a monk who had travelled the whole width of Asia from China was elected its catholicos as Yahballaha III. His teacher, Rabban Bar Sauma, had set out with him on pilgrimage toward Jerusalem and ended up instead as the Ilkhan's ambassador to the West, reaching Rome and the courts of France and England and writing the journey down — one of the very few medieval descriptions of Europe by a traveller from Asia. Yahballaha died in 1317, and the favour did not survive him.