As regards the Mongols, our knowledge of their history,
of their customs, of their way of life, our
relations with them, England presents an interesting
case. We do not know the extent of the material lost
on the Continent, but, in this (for the Mongols)
remote corner of Europe, (in places safe from their
devastation) documentation is to be found. A monk of
Saint Albans, the chronicler Matthew Paris who died
in 1259, is an important source. He was the only
person to preserve Ivo of Narbonne's confession
(which reveals that an Englishman was one of the
first envoys of the Mongols to King Bela of
Hungary), the report of Bishop Peter of Russia given
at the council of Lyons in 1245 and information
about André of Longjumeau's mission after the
council. Incidently, twice at the end of his
Chronica Majora, in an entry for
the year 1257, Matthew Paris refers to a manuscript
concerning ‘Tartarorum immunditias, vitam
(spurcissimam) et mores (…) necnon et Assessinorum
furorem et superstitionem’. It is the
same work which is mentioned by John of Oxnead, in
his Chronka under the year 1258, as a written
command (mandatum scriptum) sent to
Simon de Montfort, containing letters the length of
a Psalter, and entitled De vita et moribus
Tartarorum (…) et de eorum
fortitudine etguerra, et de
adquisitionibus which was to be found in
the book of Additions. Unfortunately this work has
not survived. (Nevertheless it is tempting to see
here a mention of William of Rubruck's report of his
journey, which has the form of a letter and which
was written in 1257, but which has little
information about the Assassins. Later another
Englishman, the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon (†
1294) met William of Rubruck and became interested
in the Mongols.)