The devastation of Hungary and Poland by the Mongols in 1241-2 prompted Pope Innocent IV to dispatch embassies to the invaders, remonstrating with them and urging them to accept Christianity. The papal envoys were Friars - members of the two recently founded Mendicant Orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans, who were beginning frequently to serve as instruments of papal policy. Their reports represent the first detailed and largely accurate testimony produced by European Christians about a people, hitherto virtually unknown in the West, who had become masters of much of Asia.

Early Missions to the Mongols (1245-1248) thus focuses on a watershed period in the relations of the Christian West with this new and formidable pagan power. It comprises translations of Pope Innocent's letters, together with the limited information available to the papacy prior to 1245; the menacing replies brought back by the Friars; and their reports, which include narratives of their journeys and accounts of the Mongols and their vast empire. The translations are accompanied by introductory material setting the documents in their historical context and by a full commentary.

The volume will be of interest not only to students and scholars working on the history of the Mongol empire, but also to those concerned with the early development of the Mendicant Orders, papal policy towards the non-Christian world, the relations between sedentary and nomadic societies in the Middle Ages, and the discovery by the Christian West of distant and extensive regions previously shrouded in myth and fantasy.