Matthew Paris on the Mongol Invasion in Europe by Zsuzsanna Papp Reed (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Matthew Paris on the Mongol Invasion in Europe by Zsuzsanna Papp Reed
• Hélène Sirantoine

Papp Reed, Zsuzsanna, Matthew Paris on the Mongol Invasion in Europe (Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 38), Turnhout, Brepols, 2022; hardback; pp. 469; 1 colour, 11 b/w illustrations, 2 b/w tables; R.R.P. €125.00; ISBN 9782503595528.

Whether among medieval readers or in scholarship, citing one or other of the Mongol-related documents incorporated by St Albans monk and famed historian Matthew Paris (d. 1259) into his Chronica majora has become quite common to testify to both the irruption of the Mongols on the eastern European scene in the early 1240s and the impact that this event had on contemporary Christendom. However, Zsuzsanna Papp Reed argues, in this stimulating book, that there is much more to Matthew Paris’s entries about the Mongols than what excerpts detached from their context (manuscript, textual, and intertextual) reveal.

Scrutinising the forty occurrences of the Mongols and their bellicose interaction with western Eurasia in the later sections of the Chronica majora spanning two decades in entries from 1237 to 1257, Papp Reed challenges the sometimes-alleged assumption that the thirteenth-century English monk was an unorganised author who merely juxtaposed the abundant materials that converged on St Albans in order to compose his monumental chronicle.

This is first demonstrated in the first chapter, ‘Inside the Book’. Having pointed to emplotment and mise-en-abîme as the historian’s favourite literary tools in a first chapter thus entitled, Papp Reed diligently inspects, in Chapters 3 to 5, the contents and relative location of the relevant passages. Some are just snippets, while others are of much greater extent, as they contain documents fully quoted, many of them embedding multiple layers of recounting. Evidencing the interrelated character of the Mongol-focused occurrences, far from comprising scattered and disconnected mentions, Papp Reed thus allows a carefully crafted ‘Mongol story’ to emerge. Moreover, rather than a stand-alone narrative, she shows that this story constitutes a subplot of the author’s overarching interpretive historical framework, namely, that of the conflict between papal and imperial powers, which in his view dominated mid-thirteenth-century western European [End Page 236] politics, with glimpses of the antipapal stance that we know Matthew adopted in many parts of the chronicle to which he personally contributed. In other words, the Mongol story, with its many details accounting for the reaction of contemporary actors to the Mongol threat, provides another lens through which to observe the papal–imperial conflict.

Such a reading leads Papp Reed to reconsider in Chapter 6 the purpose of the Additamenta to the chronicle that Matthew Paris produced in the last decade of his life. These include a bundle of six undated and contiguously copied letters related to the Mongol attacks on Hungary already chronicled, mostly emanating from the afflicted region. More detailed about the reality of the Mongol invasion than the documents incorporated in the Chronica majora, because of the more local intelligence provided, these letters escaped the Mongol story and its papal–imperial subplot. Therefore, they were relegated, Papp Reed argues, to the status of appendices. Rather than supplements messily gathered by a compiler overwhelmed by the task at hand, the Mongol letter bundle evidences how the Additamenta must be conceived as an appendix in the modern sense, ‘a separate volume with no plot’ (p. 311), and Matthew Paris as a skilled historiographer.

Integral to her demonstration of the English historian’s talents is Papp Reed’s minute investigation of Matthew’s Mongol story from ‘Outside the Book’. This phrase, used as the title for Chapter 2, points to the laborious task of reconstruction of both Matthew Paris’s sources and the information chains that pushed Mongol-related news and documents in the direction of St Albans. Although scholarship has long identified several of the chronicler’s direct English informants, Papp Reed argues that the Chronica majora reveals a deeper textual mobility and interconnectedness, identifying individuals and institutions beyond England that formed hubs responsible for gathering and disseminating information.

For each of the forty occurrences of the Mongols in the chronicle, as well...