André de Longjumeau

This article deals with the French Dominican Andreas von Longjumeau; for other namesake see Longjumeau (disambiguation) .

André de Longjumeau presents Louis the Saint with the crown of thorns of Christ, stained glass window in the Saint-Martin church in Longjumeau

André de Longjumeau ( German  Andreas von Longjumeau ; † after 1253) was a Dominican and Mongolian traveler in the 13th century.

Life

Longjumeau apparently belonged to the court administration of King Louis IX. from France onwards, for which he and his brother Jacob in 1238 transported the crown of thorns , which had been bought from the Latin emperor Baldwin II , from Constantinople to France.

At the Council of Lyon Longjumeau was entrusted by Pope Innocent IV in the spring of 1245 with the management of a legation trip to Asia to the rulership of the Great Khan of the Mongols. He traveled over Acre , Antioch and Aleppo to Mesopotamia and pushed seventeen days traveling east of Nineveh - Mosul , near Tabriz , in a Mongolian army. There he was entertained by Nestorian monks for twenty days. Longjumeau moved one of them, a certain Simeon , to write a letter to the Pope in which Simeon called himself "Rabban Ata" (monk father) and granted papal primacy over the Oriental Church. Longjumeau stayed in Persia for about a year and a half , where he learned the national language, among other things, and did not return to Lyon until the spring of 1247 .

Because of his knowledge of the national customs of the Orient, Longjumeau was on the part of King Louis IX. asked to take part in the sixth crusade . During the winter of the crusade army in Cyprus in 1249, two envoys of a Mongolian military leader were in December 1248 with King Louis IX. who suggested to him a benevolent concession from the Great Khan Güyük towards Christianity. With this they confirmed a letter from the Armenian nobleman Sempad that had arrived only a few months earlier . Now von Longjumeau was entrusted by the king with a trip to the court of the great khan, with the task of promoting the conversion of the great khan and negotiating an alliance between Christians and Mongols to fight the Saracens together . In addition, he was given a piece of the “ true cross ” and a red tent chapel as a gift for the Great Khan on the trip.

Accompanied by two royal officers, two secular clergy and two Dominican friars, Longjumeau left Cyprus on December 25, 1249. Again via Antioch he traveled to Persia, where he met the general Iltschikadai, whom he already knew from his first trip. From his camp, Longjumeau made a first report to King Ludwig by means of a letter that was no longer preserved. After a largely problem-free journey across the Talas north-east of Tashkent , where he met German prisoners of the Mongols, among others, he finally reached the large yurt camp of the Mongols, which is currently located on Lake Alakol , on the border of today's Russian-Chinese Altai , gathered. There Longjumeau could only hear the death of Güyük, the Kuriltai now held to elect a new Great Khan was ruled by the ruler's widow Ogul Qaimish . The latter wanted nothing to do with an alliance between Christians and Mongols and instead ordered Longjumeau, King Louis IX. to call for submission and tribute payments to the Mongols. In the event of disobedience, the regent threatened the annihilation of the rule of Ludwig and his people.

Longjumeau reached the court of King Louis IX in April 1251. in Caesarea , who, according to Joinville's words, had very much regretted the failed mission. However, Longjumeau was also able to tell the king about the election of Möngke as the new Great Khan, who was inclined to Christianity and had family ties with the priest-king John . He also reported that the Mongol nomadic community would own over eight hundred chapels on wheels. King Louis IX therefore sent the Franciscan Wilhelm von Rubruk on a new mission to the vastness of Asia in the hope of still being able to achieve an alliance with the Mongols. Wilhelm von Rubruk met André de Longjumeau and benefited from his travel experience for his own trip, but chose a different, somewhat more northerly route.

André de Longjumeau himself died shortly after 1253 while doing missionary work in Palestine. King Louis IX returned to France in 1254. The Rubruk mission was a political as well as a religious failure. In his report, however, Rubruk was able to dispel the popular myth of a Mongolian great power that was tolerant of Christianity.

See also

• Johannes de Plano Carpini
• Wilhelm von Rubruk
• Ascelino di Lombardia
• Lorenzo da Portugal
• Simon of St. Quentin

literature

• Bertold Altaner: The Dominican missions of the 13th century. Research on the history of the church unions and the mohammedan and pagan missions of the Middle Ages (= Joseph Wittig, FX Seppelt [Hrsg]: Breslauer studies on historical theology. Vol. 2). Frankes Buchhandlung, Habelschwerdt (Schles.) 1924.
• Jacques Le Goff : Louis the saint . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-608-91834-5 .