Letters from Khanbaliq
Two letters that the Franciscan John of Montecorvino sent from Khanbaliq, the Mongol capital in China, in 1305 and 1306. They report his church, his baptisms and his choir of boys, and ask for helpers.
John of Montecorvino wrote the first letter after eleven years, as he says, without a companion and twelve without news from the papal court. It is dated at “Cambaliech in the kingdom of Cathay” on 8 January 1305. The second, addressed to the heads of the Franciscans and Dominicans in Persia, breaks off in the copy that survives; a passage that Yule takes to be its end is dated on Quinquagesima Sunday in February 1306.
The letters are his own account of his work and are the main evidence for it. The numbers of the baptised are his estimates: “some 6000” in the first letter, “more than five thousand” where the second summarises it. What he says of the Nestorians is the complaint of a rival. The letters are known from Wadding’s annals of the Franciscan order, which copy them from an earlier chronicler. See Franciscan Envoys to the Mongols and the Church of Khanbaliq.
Cited in
- 1245 to 1307, firm date