While Marco Polo served Kublai Khan in China, a monk from Beijing toured Europe.
In 1287 Rabban Bar Sauma met the kings of France and England, and in 1288 the Pope.
The events
- Rabban Bar Sauma in Europe1287 · Paris. Rabban Bar Sauma, a Nestorian monk from Khanbaliq (Beijing), reached Europe as envoy of the Mongol Ilkhan. In 1287 he met King Philip IV of France and King Edward I of England, then the Pope.
- Travels of Marco Polo1271–1295 · Shangdu (Xanadu). The Venetian Marco Polo travelled to China with his father and uncle and spent some 17 years at the court of Kublai Khan. His book of travels became Europe's chief source of knowledge about Asia for centuries.
More amazing facts
- 1258 Chroniclers say that when the Mongols took Baghdad in 1258, the Tigris ran black with ink. So many books from the city's libraries, including the House of Wisdom, were thrown into it.
- 1260 The Middle Ages' most famous children's drawings were left by a Novgorod boy named Onfim.
- 1271 · 1661 Marco Polo marvelled that in Kublai Khan's empire people paid with paper.
- 1271 · 1368 Marco Polo never mentions the Great Wall, but that does not prove he lied.
- 1275 · 1797 Xanadu was real: Kublai Khan's summer capital, Shangdu.
- 1281 · 1944 The word kamikaze is over 660 years older than Japan's suicide pilots. "Divine wind" was the name given to the typhoons that scattered Kublai Khan's fleets off Japan in 1274 and 1281.