The Rashīdī History 10.1.5

10.1.5

Under such conditions as these Central Asia must have been impenetrable to European travellers, whether missionaries or merchants, while it is impossible to imagine that any European monarch would depute envoys to such rulers as Shaibani Khan or Mirza Aba Bakr, as they had done to the Mongol Khakans and to Timur. Even when these personages had disappeared, Uzbegs, Uzbeg-Kazaks, and Kirghiz, acting under chiefs whose names are scarcely known in history (but who were to the full as rude and lawless), were always at war with each other or with their neighbours. They kept the whole of the country north of the Sir and the Tian Shan in a state of tumult, and consequently closed to all foreign intercourse; whilst they were, besides, the means of weakening the governments — such as they were — of Khorasan, Transoxiana, and Alti-Shahr, and assisted in cutting them off from the West. In the days of the grandsons and early successors of Chingiz Khan, we find envoys like Piano Carpini and Rubruk traversing Asia with safety from the Ural to the northern confines of Mongolia, and there finding Europeans in the service of the Khakans; the Polos could march backwards and forwards from the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, to China, and carry with them their wares in security; while preaching friars and missionaries, such as Odoric of Pordenone, John of Marignolli, William of Modena, and their companions, were tolerated not only as travellers, but as propagandists.