Shifting Alterity: The Mongol in the Visual and Literary Culture of the Late Middle Ages†

Abstract

This article details the shift in the nature of cultural representations of the Mongols that were articulated in Europe from the mid-thirteenth to the mid-fourteenth centuries by means of literary and visual texts. By examining reports of Franciscan missionaries to the court of the Khans, Marco Polo's famous travelogue Description of the World, and a fresco by the Sienese painter A mbrogio Lorenzetti, this essay endeavours to show that European cultural constructions of Otherness long predate the age of imperialism but also that such constructions eschewed a homogenous pattern as they issued from, and reinforced, the varied cultural identities harboured in late medi eval Europe.