In 1286 the Dominican Mission in the Mongol Ilkhanate of Persia was reinforced by the Friar who was the destined instrument of its greatest triumph: Fra Ricold of Monte Croce. The mission was then more than forty years old, for it had been established in 1240, less than two years after the armies of Charmaghan and Baachu, lieutenants of Okkadai, successor to the terrible Ghengis Khan, had swept like a devastating flame over the land.

Pope Gregory IX had in that year sent eight friars to Tiflis, and in 1254 William de Rubruck, the Franciscan envoy of St. Louis to the Grand Khan, met one of them Bernard of Catalonia, in the half desolated city of Naxua, near Ararat. He had mastered the Tartar tongue and was still preaching zealously to the savage conquerors, with no companion in his isolation but a German lay brother whose language he did not understand.

At the time of Fra Ricold's arrival in the Ilkhanate the Mongols had lost some of their brutal savagery, but their character had suffered no change. If the Ilkhan and his court no longer went dressed in ox hides nor ate dog flesh and drank blood with the gusto of their parents, they remained deceitful, treacherous and insolent towards all not of their race, and still accounted the slaughter of others as naught.

Fra Ricold, born in the Tuscan village of Monte Croce in 1242, entered the Dominican noviciate at Santa Maria Novella, Florence, in his twenty-fifth year. In 1272 he graduated as Master of Arts, and was then sent to St. Catherine’s Convent, Pisa, where he soon gained renown as a Thomist and masterly expositor of the Angelic Doctor.