Letters to the Mongol Court and to Yahballaha III

The letters are dated at Saint Peter’s in Rome in the first year of Nicholas IV: two to Arghun on the fourth day before the nones of April (2 April 1288) and one to Yahballaha on the seventh before the ides (7 April). They name the envoys who had brought the king’s letters: “our venerable brother Bersauma, bishop in the parts of the East”, the nobleman Sabadinus, Thomas de Anfusis and the interpreter Uguetus.

The letter to Yahballaha III addresses him as a bishop in the parts of the East and not as a patriarch. It encloses the profession of faith that, as Chabot notes, Clement IV had sent to the Byzantine emperor in 1267, with its clauses on the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son, on purgatory, on the seven sacraments and on the Roman primacy. Chabot remarks that nothing in it corresponds to the grant of patriarchal authority that the Syriac History describes. The letters are the Roman side of the meeting told in History of Mar Yahballaha III and of Rabban Sauma. See Rabban Sauma, a Monk from Beijing, Visits Rome and Paris.