William of rubruck biography
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Voyage of William of Rubruck in 1253 – 1255
On January 4, 1254, FlemishFranciscan missionary and explorer William of Rubruck was granted the privilege of an audience at the great MongolMöngke Khan in his court in Karakorum. The Franciscan explorer was one of the first Europeans to study the culture of the Mongols.
William of Rubruck – Crusader and Missionary
The Flemish William of Rubruck, born in Rubrouck, Flanders, had joined the Franciscan Friars Minor at an early age, studied in Paris and in 1248 travelled to the Holy Land in the wake of King Louis IX and the seventh crusade, where he stayed for four years in Acre. In 1252, William was given the task to set out from Constantinople on a missionary journey to omvandla the Tatars to Christianity. Along with Bartolomeo da Cremona an attendant called Gosset, and an interpreter named in William’s report Homo Dei, he followed the rutt of the first journey of Friar Julian. Friar Julian was one of a group of Hungaria
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William of Rubruck
28: William of Rubruck Image 39: Audience with the Great Khan Möngke. An illustration from Ata-Malik Juvayni’s “Genghis Khan: The History of the World Conqueror” https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Audience_de_M%C3%B6ngke.jpeg Friar William of Rubruck enters history under his travel account composed in the aftermath of his journey. The writer fences his biography with a veil of obscurity--a feature that he shares with other medieval intellectuals. The French Franciscan was a companion of King Louis IX on the disastrous Seventh Crusade. During his stay in the Holy Land, the monarch got wind of the conversion of Sartak, the Mongol chief and the son of Batu Khan. The king commissioned Rubruck to deliver a pen-friend missive to the Tartar noble, attempting to break the ice. However, aware of the Mongol attitude to diplomatic overtures, the author wanted to avoid sounding like a loser. He disguised the delicate probe of the French court as a conventional missionar
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Long are the roads walked by the lonely, intrepid traveler. Not for him are the well-worn pathways of the conventional sightseer; for he is a seeker, and seekers by definition prefer the untrod vistas of the globe. He will deliberately chose the unknown road, the trails less walked, the scenes less scrutinized, and the more risky propositions: and he does this because he must, because some devilish inner compulsion drives him forward, like a demon nipping at his heels.
William of Rubruck (or William de Rubruquis) was one of the most fascinating explorers of Central Asia and the Far East, and is the only medieval traveler whose exploits are fit to be ranked with those of Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo. A native of Brabant, he was born in Flanders around 1220. In 1248 he joined the Seventh Crusade under the leadership of France’s pious king Louis IX. It seems that he gained the personal trust of the king through long association and his own strength of character,