Mongolian Connections: Christian Connections

I came to Mongolia (in part) to discover similarities across totally different cultures. My theory was that when similar themes appeared in cultures separated by distance, language, religion, and lifestyle, would reveal something about the nature of humanity as a whole. This tactic can be applied to more than humanity as a whole; looking at similarities between Christianity in the Mediterranean/Europe and Nestorian Christianity in the far East of the Mongol Empire, similar trends appear in different eras that might reveal some features of Christianity that are not immediately obvious.

Though Mongol rulers accepted all religions in their realms (and more on that later), Christians in the Mongol realms were sometimes given special treatment. Kublai Khan funded a spiritual journey of two Nestorian Christian monks to the Holy Land around 1275, and he also asked Marco Polo to send 100 Nestorian monks back to his capital when his party returned to the West. Nestorians were given appointments in the courts of various khanates, and when the aforementioned two Nestorian monks traveled through the Mongol realm, many lesser officials tried to convince them to stay at their court, often offering them wealth and material comfort.

Why did Mongol rulers like to keep Nestorian Christians around? Because they were useful. Mongols were not a very literate population (something that didn’t change even until the twentieth century), and, even up to Kublai’s day, they had little experience actually ruling an Empire. Nestorian monks spent years studying, and though they focused on Scripture and theological matters, their literacy and intellectual skill were prized by khans, so rulers courted favor with the Nestorian community in order to recruit members of the clergy to work in their administration. Of course, in Europe, too, literacy and learning was mostly encouraged by the Church. Monks recorded and preserved not only theological treatises, but also works of pagan philosophy and mythology. The university system began as a way for clerics to study theology, and, as I recently discovered, even Celtic myths about a magical island filled with beautiful women for young heroes to live on forever have only come down to us because they were recorded, at one point, by Christian monks. (If you want to know more about the Church’s role in European intellectual development, I have about 8 essays for you to read. And maybe I’ll write a few more for you, too.)

So Christians in different sects of Christianity and completely different cultures had a tendency to educate their clergy; what does this reveal about anything? For one, it shows the importance of learning and literacy in the Christian tradition. This isn’t necessarily ideological at all—it’s just because engagement with the Scriptures is an important aspect of the religion. Unlike other religions that focused on ritual, meditation, or submission to an authority (not that Christianity cut those out), Christianity had a tradition of placing a great deal of significance on interpreting the Scripture they had. (And perhaps this is just because it can be so vague and/or confusing?) But this isn’t to say that other religions haven’t nurtured educational systems. Universities here are often linked to Buddhist monasteries, and considering my recent unsuccessful forays into understanding Buddhism, I’m going to assume a lot of study needs to go into attempting Enlightenment. As for other traditions: The “madrasa” is an important aspect of many mosques, and the rabbinic course of study is one of the most intellectual and study-intensive ones I know (think pre-Madonna Kabbalah). Buddhist monks seem to have been recruited by khans as well, but not quite as vigorously as Nestorians. (Though this could just be the nature of my reading material.) So why did Nestorian Christians get more special treatment than Buddhist monks in Kublai’s realm or Muslims and Jews in the Ilkhanate? I don’t know. I’m thinking because it designated people whose sole function was to study, unlike Islam and Judaism whose scholars were also encouraged/mandated to participate in the world. And Buddhist training tended to have less of a practical aspect than Nestorian studies. (i.e. Buddhist monks doesn’t study law or medicine as much as Christians—but I don’t know about this.)

But a love of literacy is not the only similarity between Nestorian Christianity in Asia and European/Mediterranean Christianity. Throughout the history of the Mongol Empire, one story repeats itself a lot: the influence of khans’ wives and mothers on their decisions. And threaded through these stories comes, specifically, the influence of Christian wives and mothers on their decisions. One reason Kublai was supposed to have favored Nestorians (in addition to the practical reasons) was because his mother was Nestorian. The Catholicus (the Nestorian equivalent of Patriarch/Pope/Prophet) was once almost executed by the Ilkhan Ahmad, but Ahmad’s pious Nestorian wife convinced him not to go through with the execution. The Ilkhan Abakha was the son of a Christian and married to a Byzantine princess. Although there were not many prominent Nestorian men, many wives (and thus often mothers, as well) of khans were Christians. Part of this may have been simply the ratio—there were more khans’ wives than there were khans, so it was more likely that a wife would be Nestorian. (Nestorian Christianity never actively forbade polygamy.) But part of the reason was simply that women were more likely to convert. Although some khans participated in Nestorian rituals—the Ilkhan Arghun, though a Buddhist himself, had his son baptized—they tended not to be as fervent supporters of Nestorianism as many women of the Mongol elite.

Similarly, when Christianity was still a new religion, many of its converts were elite women. In fact, the growth of Christianity was in part attributable to these women; when one converted, she often convinced her husband to convert, and thus the entire household (the paterfamilias thing again). Just as women would be attracted to Nestorian Christianity later, in the first couple centuries of Christianity, many upper-class women in the Mediterranean world found something worth devoting themselves to (and in this case, dying for) in the Christian message.

What this reveals about Christianity is a little less clear. Some scholars speculate that Christianity initially attracted both women and the poor because of its emphasis on equality and its downplay of traditional markers of status. In a Christian service, women were just Christians like their husbands, which was appealing to them. This could apply to Mongol women, as well, and though (as noted), their husbands did not always convert with them. In a world where men held the power, women likely found something encouraging about finding a religion that didn’t isolate them as starkly as Islam and Buddhism may have. And, considering what I’ve found about women influencing just about everything from behind the scenes, the message of the last being first might have had a ring of truth to it.