Voyager from Xanadu: Rabban Sauma and the First Journey from China to the West

This is a dense, dazzlingly erudite overview of the complicated intrigues and upheavals of the 13th-century Mongol-Muslim-Christian worlds. For a framework, Rossabi ( Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times ) calls on the record left by Rabban Sauma, a Nestorian monk who in 1275 set out on a daring and dangerous pilgrimage from Peking to Jerusalem. Because Sauma's notes, much edited by their original translator, are fragmentary, Rossabi reconstructs what the traveler probably saw and experienced along his route and sets this in the religious and political background of the times. Interrupting his journey in Persia, Sauma was entrusted by the Mongol ruler to call on the pope and the Christian kings of the West to propose a joint crusade against their common enemy, the Muslims, who then held Jerusalem. Had this early attempt at an East-West alliance succeeded, speculates Rossabi, it might have changed world history. Illustrations. (June)