This collection of pre-published essays forms the eleventh volume in Ashgate's The Expansion of Latin Europe, 1000–1500 series. The volume comprises seventeen essays originally published over a period of about eighty years, the oldest dating from 1926 and the most recent from 2005. The essays represent a tradition of largely but not exclusively Anglophone scholarship on medieval missionary activity: three of the essays were originally published in French and have been translated for this volume by Susan Edgington. The volume is divided into three parts: ‘Crusade and mission’, ‘Discovering Asia’ and ‘Missions within the Mongol empire’, preceded by an introduction by the editor.

New opportunities arose in the second half of the thirteenth century as a result of changing attitudes towards the West among the Mongol leadership. Christian missionaries were not only welcomed but even found some Great Khans willing to facilitate their activities through privileged access to preaching and the payment of stipends. In consequence, by c. 1300, Latin missionaries had begun to make an impact as far east as China; they also began to minister in places that had not fallen under Mongol rule, such as India.

Missionary activity has always been an integral part of Christian history, and at the point where this volume opens, in the late eleventh century, conversion on the fringes of Europe was still on-going. Although conversion was often accompanied by violence or political domination, the missionary activity covered in this book was peaceful and undertaken by individuals, albeit acting under religious authority. In order to establish a context for these activities, the four essays selected for the first section consider the relationship between conversion and crusade, a new phenomenon specific to circumstances in the West and near East in the closing years of the eleventh century.

In his ‘The First Crusade and the conversion of the “pagans”’, Jean Flori considers episodes in the First Crusade that indicate how contemporaries considered its function to be about conversion as well as military conquest, for example in their dealings with the Fatimids in 1098, and in the fruitless attempt by Peter the Hermit to convert Kerboga. Bernard Hamilton's essay ‘The Latin Church in the Crusader states' considers how the newly planted Church dealt with the indigenous Christians under Latin rule, and how the initial status quo established in the twelfth century led in the thirteenth to missionary activities toward schismatic Churches. Elizabeth Siberry, in ‘Missionaries and crusaders, 1095–1274: opponents or allies?’, reflects on the relationship between mission and crusade preaching, concluding that the two were not incompatible in the minds of preachers or missionaries. Jessalyn Bird's ‘Crusade and conversion after the Fourth Lateran Council (1215): Oliver of Paderborn's and James of Vitry's missions to Muslims reconsidered’ develops the theme by examining two noted crusade preachers, and arguing that conversion was in line with the reform agenda of the papacy under Innocent iii, and as such formed part of the approach to crusading of Honorius iii, Gregory ix and Innocent iv.

The essays grouped under the title ‘Discovering Asia’ comprise separate studies of specific missions to the East. Mary Dienes's essay ‘Eastern missions of the Hungarian Dominicans in the first half of the thirteenth century’, first published in 1937, is not as well known as it deserves to be, partly because it appeared in a scientific journal, Isis. It discusses attempts by Hungarian Dominicans to convert Mongols, in the knowledge that the two peoples were distantly related, and that the Magyars had originated in the steppes east of the Urals. In ‘Simon of Saint-Quentin and the Dominican mission to the Mongol Baiju: a reappraisal’, Gregory Guzman discusses the better-known mission sent by Innocent iv to the Mongols in the 1240s that resulted in Simon's now fragmentary History of the Mongols, one of the earliest western attempts to consider the Mongols in a period before much was known about their intentions regarding the West. The relationship between reportage and myth, and the reluctance of Europeans to dispense with theologically derived ideas about Mongols, is the subject of Charles Connell's ‘Western views of the origin of the “Tartars”: an example of the influence of myth in the second half of the thirteenth century’.

The oldest essay in this collection is Eileen Power's ‘The opening of the land routes to Cathay’. In the light of more recent scholarship since 1926, both her approach and the argument that the Mongol change of attitude should be linked to the defeat of the Mamluks in 1258 appear flawed, but this was a pioneering study whose narrative grip still makes it worthwhile reading. Equally ground-breaking in its day was Luciano Petech's analysis of mercantile activity in the mission field in his 1962 essay ‘Italian merchants in the Mongol Empire’ – here translated for the first time from the original French. Following Robert Lopez, Petech demonstrated how the archival records of the Italian republics could be used to show the close relationship between mission and trade. The final essay in this section, Arthur Moule's ‘Brother Jordan of Sévérac’, is anomalous in the volume in dealing with the mission to India. Jordan, a Dominican working on the west coast of India in the early fourteenth century, wrote an account of the martyrdom of four Francican missionaries at the hands of the Muslims of Tana, near Mumbai, which was examined in detail for the first time in this essay, published in 1928. The connection to the main Mongol theme of the book is that the Franciscans were on their way to China to join the mission that had been established at Beijing in 1295 by the Franciscan John of Montecorvino. John, who claimed 6,000 converts in his first ten years, was consecrated as archbishop of Khanbalik in 1306, and remained there until his death in 1328. Conversion was probably more successful among the Mongols, because of existing Nestorian sympathies among the ruling classes, than among the Han Chinese. The extent and process of conversion is examined in two essays in the third section ‘The missions within the Mongol Empire’. Frank Iklé's ‘The conversion of the Alani by the Franciscan missionaries in China in the fourteenth century’ examines the evidence for the supposed conversion by John of Montecorvino of the Alan bodyguards of the Great Khan, and discusses mass conversion activities more broadly, while James Ryan's ‘Christian wives of Mongol Khans: Tartar queens and missionary expectations in Asia’ deals with the pastoral letters addressed to queens by missionaries, and shows the queens’ perceived role in further conversion and the education of Mongol elites. Evidence of a different kind forms the basis of Francis Rouleau's essay ‘The Yangchow Latin tombstone as a landmark of medieval Christianity in China’, which reports the recent discovery (the essay was first published in 1954) of the tombstone of Katherine Vilionis (d. 1342), the daughter of a Genoese merchant who had married and raised a family in Yangchow. This discovery provides evidence for the deep roots sunk in China by some western Christians, but also raises the suspicion that the work of the Franciscan mission may have been as concerned with resident Europeans as with fresh conversion. Doubts about the successes claimed by missionaries are raised by Peter Jackson in his ‘The Mongols and the faith of the conquered’, arguing that European expectations of conversion were unrealistic and that their understanding of what conversion might mean to the Mongols was in any case based on misapprehensions. Encouragement of missions and protection for missionaries and Christian merchants in China, however, only lasted as long as Mongol rule there, and the expulsion of the Mongols by the Ming dynasty in 1368 also saw the expulsion of Christians. Yet, as Paul Meyvaert's essay ‘An unknown letter of Hulagu, Il-Khan of Persia, to King Louis ix of France’ demonstrates, missions and diplomatic exchange had never only gone in one direction, and the publication of a new piece of evidence helps to illuminate the mechanics of communication between the Mongols and the western powers at a time when a military alliance against the Mamluks was in the interests of both parties. John Andrew Boyle's essay ‘The Il-Khans of Persia and the princes of Europe’ is likewise concerned with the specific geopolitical sphere of Persia, but in this case through examination of Arab sources about western-Mongol diplomacy. The final essay in the volume, Jean Richard's ‘The missions to the north of the Black Sea (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries)’ – also translated from the original French – serves as a reminder of the wide extent of the Franciscan mission field, focusing especially on the settlement at Sarai, in the Crimea. The Golden Horde remained mission territory longer than the other Mongol khanates – as late as the fifteenth century – but it seems never to have featured as fully in papal thinking as the missions to the Great Khanate.