So He Urgently
Desired Them To Undertake This Mission Along With One Of His Barons; And
They Replied That They Would Gladly Execute All His Commands As Those Of
Their Sovereign Lord.
Then the Prince sent to summon to his presence one
of his Barons whose name was COGATAL, and desired him to get ready, for it
was proposed to send him to the Pope along with the Two Brothers.
The
Baron replied that he would execute the Lord's commands to the best of his
ability.
After this the Prince caused letters from himself to the Pope to be
indited in the Tartar tongue,[NOTE 1] and committed them to the Two
Brothers and to that Baron of his own, and charged them with what he
wished them to say to the Pope. Now the contents of the letter were to
this purport: He begged that the Pope would send as many as an hundred
persons of our Christian faith; intelligent men, acquainted with the Seven
Arts,[NOTE 2] well qualified to enter into controversy, and able clearly
to prove by force of argument to idolaters and other kinds of folk, that
the Law of Christ was best, and that all other religions were false and
naught; and that if they would prove this, he and all under him would
become Christians and the Church's liegemen. Finally he charged his Envoys
to bring back to him some Oil of the Lamp which burns on the Sepulchre of
our Lord at Jerusalem.[NOTE 3]
NOTE 1. - + The appearance of the Great Kaan's letter may be illustrated
by two letters on so-called Corean paper preserved in the French archives;
one from Arghun Khan of Persia (1289), brought by Buscarel, and the other
from his son Oljaitu (May, 1305), to Philip the Fair. These are both in
the Mongol language, and according to Abel Remusat and other authorities,
in the Uighur character, the parent of the present Mongol writing.
Facsimiles of the letters are given in Remusat's paper on intercourse with
Mongol Princes, in Mem. de l' Acad. des Inscript. vols. vii. and viii.,
reproductions in J. B. Chabot's Hist. de Mar Jabalaha III., Paris, 1895,
and preferably in Prince Roland Bonaparte's beautiful Documents Mongols,
Pl. XIV., and we give samples of the two in vol. ii.[1]
NOTE 2. - "The Seven Arts," from a date reaching back nearly to classical
times, and down through the Middle Ages, expressed the whole circle of a
liberal education, and it is to these Seven Arts that the degrees in arts
were understood to apply. They were divided into the Trivium of
Rhetoric, Logic, and Grammar, and the Quadrivium of Arithmetic,
Astronomy, Music, and Geometry. The 38th epistle of Seneca was in many
MSS. (according to Lipsius) entitled "L. Annaei Senecae Liber de Septem
Artibus liberalibus." I do not find, however, that Seneca there mentions
categorically more than five, viz., Grammar, Geometry, Music, Astronomy,
and Arithmetic. In the 5th century we find the Seven Arts to form the
successive subjects of the last seven books of the work of Martianus
Capella, much used in the schools during the early Middle Ages.
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