Alaskan Range: Travellers
With Spring in the air, columnist Greg Hill is prompted to go travelling on the page.
April in Fairbanks, Alaska, is always a time of breakup and taxes, brown lawns and vacation planning. Nothing to do about the first three, but some feel the urge to start thinking about getting out of Dodge, even if the trip’s next winter.
Travel books move fast at the public library. They’re generally divided into two categories: travelogues and guidebooks. Guidebooks like Fodor’s and Lonesome Planet are written for travellers physically going on trips to other places, and provide advice and suggestions about getting around there. Travelogues are accounts of other’s adventures on the road, often written autobiographically. As Candian Keath Fraser wrote in “Bad Trips” (“a collection of tales from poets, novelists, and journalists about the worst journeys they have ever taken”), “Bad journeys, it seems, lead straight to the confession box.” Travelogues are intended for armchair travellers who rather experience the rigors of the road vicariously.
Along the latter line are the recommendations of “best travel books” lists that litter the Internet. Most are compilations of travelogues, like “The 50 Greatest Travel Books of All Time” that appeared on www.bravenewtraveler.com several years ago. Like many such lists, this one is heavy on recent works and stretches the definition of travel book to include Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code” and other popular novels. Many of us believe true travel books are either non-fiction accounts of someone’s romantic, exciting or nasty adventures in an exotic location or they’re guidebooks to help future travelers along the same route.
William of Rubruck, a thirteenth century Franciscan priest wrote both. Born in Flanders in 1220 A.D., William was member of the French King Louis IX’s entourage during the Seventh Crusade of 1248. While in Constantinople, Louis heard about Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire, and in May, 1253 Louis dispatched William of Rubruck to call on the emperor of the Mongols. Genghis had died in 1227, and his horde had been divided among his sons into the subsidiary hordes, the Blue, White, and Golden Hordes. The Westernmost of the Mongol territories, the Golden Horde ruled from the Siberian Urals to the Danube, and visiting them was the first of Father William’s trials.
Travelling with a friend, a servant, and an interpreter, William travelled 9,000 kilometers from the Golden Horde’s capital by the Volga River to the Great Khan’s capital at Karakorum, near the geographic center of modern Mongolia. There Mangu Khan kept his horde and his hoard. The dictionaries agree that “hoard” is both a noun that means “a cache of something valuable,” and a verb that means “to accumulate, to keep secret.” A “horde”, on the other hand, is “any nomadic tribe, but specifically nomadic Mongol tribes of the 13th century, or any group with a negative connotation, as in “I expect a horde of wasps this summer.”
William stayed at the Great Khan’s camp for eight months before beginning his journey home and reached crusader-controlled Tripoli fourteen months later, in 1255. Before leaving Mangu’s court, William participated in a debate the khan arranged between the Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist clergymen. As Jack Weatherford wrote in “Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World,” lots of alcohol was consumed, the Chrsitians abandoned logic and began singing hymns, the Muslims tried to drown them out by reciting the Koran loudly, and the Buddhists went into meditation. “At the end of the bate, unable to convert or kill one another, they concluded the way most Mongol celebrations concluded, with everyone simply too drunk to continue.”
William’s report to King Louis on what he did and saw is described by Wikipedia as “very clear and precise,” describing “the peculiarities of Mongolia as well as many geographical observations, making it the first scientific description of central Asia. Fellow armchair travellers can read a translation of William of Rubruck’s account online at http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/rubruck.html.
Over 58,000 borough residents who have active library cards can now download e-book best-sellers for their Nook and Sony e-book readers for free by clicking the Listen Alaska icon on the library’s website, http://fnsblibrary.org. As the great Chinese philosopher-traveler Lao Tzu wrote a millennia-and-a-half before William of Rubruck, “One may know the world without going out of doors.”
