Journey to the Eastern Parts of the World (Itinerarium)

William of Rubruck addresses the work to King Louis, who, he says, had told him at parting to write down everything he saw among the Tartars. It is a first-person report in the order of the journey, dated by the feasts of the church. He insists throughout that he went as a friar and not as an ambassador.

He is an eyewitness for the court and for Karakorum, and a careful one: he distinguishes what he saw from what he was told. He worked through interpreters, one of whom he describes as drunk at his first audience, and his judgments on the clergy of the Church of the East, whom he calls Nestorians, are those of a Latin friar who found fault with their learning and their lives. The words he reports from the khan passed through an interpreter and through his own memory. Rockhill’s dates in brackets convert William’s feast days to days of the month. See Franciscan Envoys to the Mongols and the Church of Khanbaliq.