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Ultimo aggiornamento: 18 gennaio 2023
Dawson Ch.
The Mongol Mission
Narratives and Letters of the Franciscan Missionaries in Mongolia and China in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries
Sheed and Ward London 1995
Scheda a cura di: Dawson Ch.
The narratives by John of Piano Carpini and William of Rubruckof their journeys to Mongolia in the middle of the thirteenth
century differ from the majority of works in this series. Theauthors were not canonized saints or beati and their travels werenot missionary journeys in the strict sense, but were more of the
nature of political embassies. Nevertheless they were servants ofChristendom as few men have been. They endured all the hardships of which St. Paul speaks, in an entirely selfless devotion to
the service of Christendom. They were, moreover, disciples of
St. Francis of the first generation who possessed
the genuine
Franciscan spirit of simplicity and poverty and self-abnegation.
But above all they give an absolutely first-hand authentic account
of the first contact between Western Christendom and the Far
East, and this at the moment when the whole oriental world
from Korea to Hungary was being turned upside down andremade by one of the greatest catastrophes
in the history of
the world.
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