Mongol Archive in Late Medieval France
The Mongol Archive in Late Medieval France is the first comprehensive study of contact between France and the Mongols in the late Middle Ages. As these realms expanded across Eurasia—the French through crusade and settlement, the Mongols through conquest—their encounters altered each other's understanding of the world and their place in it.
The Mongol influence on French culture is visible in what Mark Cruse calls the Mongol archive—a wide range of materials including chronicles, crusade treatises, encyclopedias, manuscript illuminations, maps, romances, and travel accounts—revealing how the French court made sense of a people previously unknown to the European intellectual tradition. Cruse mines this archive of Franco-Mongol contact to reassess France's place in the continental history of medieval Eurasia.
By comparing the French and Mongol courts, Cruse shows how their similarities allowed meaningful communication between them and highlights the surprising connections—diplomatic, intellectual, and genealogical—across vast distances. The library of King Charles V (r. 1364–1380), one of the largest in medieval Europe, is a monument to the richness of these encounters, which anticipate the global interconnectedness of the modern world. Ultimately, the innovative approach in The Mongol Archive in Late Medieval France toward French conceptions of and relations with the Mongols demonstrates how a global perspective transforms our understanding of the medieval world.
Mark Cruse is Associate Professor of French at Arizona State University. His books, include, as author, Illuminating the "Roman d'Alexandre" and, as editor Performance and Theatricality in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.