Customer Reviews

The Tartar Khan's Englishman

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Gabriel Ronay is one of the few people qualified to write this account. Born in Transylvania he graduated from Edinburgh and Budapest universities where he read history and studied Russian, German, Romance Languages and Finno-Ugrrian philology. He continued his medieval researches while working for the Times and BBC in London.

While studying the annals of Matthew Paris, the learned St Albans chronicler of thirteenth century events, he chanced upon a report, dated 1243, on the capture of the Tartar Khans chief diplomat, together with a group of Tartar officers participating in the siege of Wiener Neustadt in Austria. Astonishingly the envoy was a "native of England".

This chance discovery led Mr Ronay on a 3 year quest to discover the identity of this mysterious Englishman and how he got to be in such an unlikely place.

Based on his extensive research Mr Ronay has uncovered reports on three men, all English, all with the same name and all related to the church. It is Mr Ronays hypothesis that these three men are in fact the same person. The evidence is of course sketchy and would not stand up in a court of law but for at leat one of the cases it seems convincing.

If you believe Mr Ronays evidence then this story recounts an extraordinary life. The Englishman was present at Runnymede for the signing of the Magna Carta as the personal chaplin of Robert Fitz Walter the leader of the rebellious Barrons. He was excommunicated from the chiurch and banished from England for his part in the rebellion. He became a Templar traveled to the Holy land on the 5th Crusade and was present at the siege of Damietta in Egypt. He was expelled from the crusade by the Templars for gambling and wandered through the middle east ending up in Iraq where he was adopted by Monguls in need of literate men with multilungual skills for thier diplomatic core.

He rose through the Mogul diplomatic core and became the great Khans envoy for the European Invasion.

Even if you do not accept Mr Ronays evidence you will learn a great deal about Europe between 1200 and 1240. From the destruction of greater Hungary to the complicity of the Venetians in the Mogul invasion.

All in all a superb book that stretches the limits of professional historical analysis without breaking them.

A fascinating collection of chronicles and accounts of a mysterious Englisman turned Templar who was an envoy, spy, and diplomat, for Batu Khan's invasion of Europe. All of this occurred a generation before Marco Polo and a dozen years before the papal envoys made their visits to Karakorum.

Whether or not you ultimately agree with Ronay's conclusion, it is one of the most fascinating works of historical detection I have ever read! There is no hard evidence to prove or disprove his theory; however, in his detective work, he introduces the reader to more intimate details of the Magna Carta rebellion, the 5th crusade, the role of the Templars in the contemporary history; and--most interesting to me--the role of Yeliu Chut'sai's Mongolian chancellory, the administrative arm of the Mongol government, and how it worked.

Ronay's work opened up an entire new viewpoint to explore in my academic wanderings. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

An excellent historical description of the Mongol invasions of Europe and how an English man was part of this historical chapter of history. This is a must read book as far as I am concerned. As a child I read a book on the Mongol invasion and could never understand how this could be accomplished with a few horsemen, but after reading The Tartar Khan's Englishman one sees the magnitude of the army that moved across Europe, ten of thousands of riders that just laid to waste what ever was in their path. This book gave me new insights into ancient and almost forgotten history. The original research that must have gone into uncovering these facts is staggering. I would have to give this book a 5 star rating, the best.

One of the things I have noticed recently in the publishing industry; there is an entire genre of "history" books designed to be read on transcontinental airline flights. A couple of hours, even in the noisy confines of an airplane, and you're done. As such, these books do not contain much in the way of "meat" -though they will doubtless contain a 'zinger' of a topic; generally phrased as a historical detective novel.

This is one of those books. The subject is interesting: Batu Khan had an englishman as his chief negotiator and diplomat. How did the englishman come to be in the service of the Khan? That's the subject of this book. Unfortunately, we only know about this englishman because of one or two documents. While the author does a remarkable (or at least, believable) job of reconstructing who the Englishman was, and what some of his experiences may have been like, the actual material he has to work with is pretty spare. Like other examples of the "airplane history" genre, this could have been a chapter in a book, or a nice article in a journal (it probably originated as such). Most of it is filler. Since the topic is a fascinating one: including the Mongol invasion of Hungary and Iraq, the Magna Charta and King John, the filler is generally good stuff. It is marred by a few things. Despite the lurid nature of the topic, some of the passages are excessively dull. In fact, the first 100 pages, which should be fascinating (dealing as they do with the crusades and the Magna Charta rebellion), require some determination to get through. Considering it is only around 200 total pages, this is unacceptable. There are also passages which envince a naivete which is unbefitting a historian. Perhaps Mr. Ronay is pandering to his audience (i.e. tired mid-level executives flying across the country), but the idea that some exiled priest in the 1200s displayed some kind of complexity of character by "choosing" to be ambassador for the Khan and aiding in the destruction of christendom seems rather unsophisticated to me. Such characters and choices were more the norm in that time than the exception. Finally, the book doesn't seem to know what it is. Is this a serious work of scholarship? If so, why no detailed footnotes? Is it an airplane history book? If so, why quotations in french and latin (aka how many sleepy mid level executives on a 767 speak latin)?

Still, this is worth a bleary eyed read if you're stuck in an airport somewhere.

This is one of the most exciting and interesting books I've ever read. Where are Steven Spielberg or George Lucas when we need them? If this book were made into a film or a series of films, it would rock Hollywood. And the tale of how Ronay pieced together the evidence for this amazing life should be a PBS documentary, all in itself. Very few historians share his tenacity and skill in digging away at obsucrities and bringing them to life. A must read for the adventure, for the history and for the pure delight of a time trip back into the thirteenth century! Wow!

This is the astounding tale of a long forgotten Englishman and his role in the Mongol invasion of Europe that came within an ace of wiping the fledging nations and cultures of western Europe - not to mention eastern Europe and the middle east - off the face of the earth. In fact our not so distant ancestors were only saved from being slaughtered by sheer luck: at the next to last moment the Great Khan died, and the generals in charge of his unstoppable armies raced back to the far east to stake their claims to his vacant throne. As his armies turned back a small reconnaissance force of 10,000 men was defeated in Poland (a battle still celebrated in Poland to this day as a great victory), the bickering, disorganised and ineffectual Europeans unable to comprehend that the Mongol armies they faced were so overwhelmingly large that to them 10,000 men merely constituted a small force. And amongst the few captured Mongols was one of the Khans most important diplomats... an Englishman.

Gabriel Ronay unearths this long forgotten Englishman's incredible story in an extremely readable piece of historical research that will have you gripped from first to last. How this mysterious, long forgotten Englishman came to serve the great Khan is an incredible story in itself, but combine this with the equally little known story of how the Venetians, acting as the Khan's bankers, not only would have watched as Europe was annihilated in an unprecedented bloodbath but were actively aiding the Mongols in return for exclusive trading rights (which will have your blood boiling by the end of the book) - and then add the Mongol's chillingly thorough and calculated preparations for the invasion, compared and contrasted with the bickering Europeans' pathetic attempts to either a) ignore all the signs of the coming holocaust, or b) to make feeble attempts to turn it to their advantage in petty disputes against their neighbours, and you'll realise how close the modern world we know came to dying stillborn in a horrific and completely one sided bloodbath 700 years ago.

This is an incredible book. And I don't say that lightly. Highly recommended.

I was very pleased with the product as well as the timeliness of the delivery. It is the first time I paid more for shipping than for the product itself but the vendor's response was professional and great.

I'm not qualified to speak on the medieval European aspect, but the parts of the book dealing with the Mongols are very disappointing. There's absolutely no understanding, and no evidence of attempting to understand, the Mongols and their conquests or even Europe's role in them.

The information on the the Englishman himself is fairly interesting, but ultimately rather sketchy, and overshadowed by the poor work on the Mongols.

One of the very few (perhaps the only) book on Mongolia or the Mongols that I had to force myself to finish.

A thinly veiled attempt by the author to establish credibility as an historical and linguistic authority. Amateur in style, substance and scope, this novel does not deliver any new information. Vague speculation and trite phraseology combine to create a very disappointing read. Not recommended reading for those interested in the time period and subject matter.