This book tells a story of serendipity. Two Christian monks left China about 1274 headed to
Jerusalem. Travelling on an itinerary similar to that of Marco Polo they reached Iran ruled
by a Mongol dynasty the Ilkhans. There what they never had expected happened: one of them
Mark by name was elected Patriarch of the Church of the East (with the name Yahballaha) while
the other Rabban Sauma was sent as ambassador to the pope and to the courts of France and
England by the Ilkhan Arghun. From Rabban Sauma's report of his embassy and the two monk's
memories of their journey from China to Mesopotamia an anonymous author compiled a biography
of Sauma and Mark. He interspersed their report and memories with a narrative about the
occurrences of their time - what happened to them through them or because of them relating
everything just as it happened. The result was a chronicle titled History of Mar Yahballaha and
Rabban Sauma of which a single manuscript was discovered in the late nineteenth century in the
remote mountains of Hakkari (Eastern Turkey). The History is one of the more recent examples of
classical Syriac literature a major Christian literary tradition of the Near East. While the
encounter with two Asian Marco Polos of sorts constitutes the History's most immediate element
of appeal for present-day readers the work deserves to be read in its entirety as a rich and
lively testimony of a time of unprecedented interconnectedness in the history of Eurasia in the
time of the Mongol Empire.
