History of Mar Yahballaha III and of Rabban Sauma

The work is anonymous. It follows Rabban Sauma and his disciple Mark from China to Persia, tells how Mark was chosen catholicos, recounts Sauma’s embassy to the West, and goes on with the history of the catholicos and his church under the Mongol kings down to his death, which it places in the year 1629 of the Greeks, AD 1317. Budge judges that the author saw much of what he describes in the life of Yahballaha III and that he probably wrote in the first half of the fourteenth century.

For the embassy the author was not an eyewitness. He says at the end of chapter 7 that he has abridged what Rabban Sauma himself wrote in Persian, shortening or enlarging “according to necessity”. The account of Rome and Paris is therefore Sauma’s own, at one remove and in another language, and the debate with the cardinals is reported from his side only. The narrative slips at times into the first person (“we blessed the king”). The Syriac text became known to scholars in the 1880s and was first printed by Bedjan in 1888.

The History gives few dates for the journey. The identifications of the kings, the pope and the places are Budge’s and Chabot’s, set in brackets or notes. The Latin letters that the pope gave the envoys survive in the papal register and can be set beside it: see Letters to the Mongol Court and to Yahballaha III and Rabban Sauma, a Monk from Beijing, Visits Rome and Paris.