Christianity among the Mongols
Many Mongols had been proselytized by the Church of the East (sometimes called "Nestorian") since about the seventh century,[3] and some tribes' primary religion was Christian.
Some Mongolians rejected the church structure and what was orthodox for the time, and borrowed elements from other religions and merged beliefs from several Christian denominations together.
As the Mongols further expanded, the Christian sympathies of the court, primarily through the influential wives of the khans, led to changes in military strategy.
[5][6][7] Many Mongol tribes, such as the Keraites,[8] the Naimans, the Merkit, the Ongud,[9] and to a large extent the Qara Khitai (who practiced it side-by-side with Buddhism),[10] were Nestorian Christian.
The Mongols had no churches or monasteries, but claimed a set of beliefs that descended from the Apostle Thomas, which relied on wandering monks.
[23] Again according to Weatherford, the Mongols also adapted the Christian cross to their own belief system, making it sacred because it pointed to the four directions of the world.
[29] A later descendant of Hulagu, the Ilkhan Arghun, sent the Nestorian monk Rabban Bar Sauma as an ambassador to Western courts to offer an alliance between the Mongols and the Europeans.
The type of Christianity which the Mongols practiced was an Eastern Syriac form, which had an independent hierarchy from Western doctrine since the Nestorian Schism in the 5th century.
Even after contacts were re-established, there were still Western missionaries who proceeded eastward, to try and convert the Mongols to Roman Catholicism, away from what was regarded as heretical Nestorianism.
[32] In 1240, nine Dominicans led by Guichard of Cremone are known to have arrived in Tiflis, the capital of Christian Georgia, by the orders of Pope Gregory IX.
The first was led by the Dominican André de Longjumeau, who had already been sent to Constantinople once by Saint Louis to acquire the Crown of thorns from Baldwin II.
In 1253, the Franciscan William of Rubruck traveled to Karakorum, the western Mongol capital, and sought permission to serve its people in the name of Christ.
[35] In 1302, the Nestorian Catholicos Mar Yaballaha III, who as a young man had accompanied the older Rabban Bar Sauma from Khanbaliq (Beijing), sent a profession of faith to the Pope.
In 1271, the Polo brothers brought an invitation from Kublai Khan to Pope Gregory X, imploring him that a hundred teachers of science and religion be sent to reinforce the Christianity already present in his vast empire.
He was significantly successful, translated the New Testament and Psalms into the Mongol language, built a central church, and within a few years (by 1305) could report six thousand baptized converts.
But the Franciscan mission continued to grow, other priests joined him and centers were established in the coastal provinces of Jiangsu (Yangzhou), Zhejiang (Hangzhou) and Fujian (Zaitun).
Following the death of Monte Corvino, an embassy to the French Pope Benedict XII in Avignon was sent by Toghun Temür, the last Mongol emperor in the Yuan dynasty of China, in 1336.
[38] The Mongol ruler requested a new spiritual guide to replace Monte Corvino, so in 1338, a total of 50 ecclesiastics were sent by the Pope to Beijing, among them John of Marignolli.
First, the Black Death during the latter half of the fourteenth century in Europe so depleted Franciscan houses that they were unable to sustain the mission to China.
