The first trip of a European to the Volga region in the XIII century, right on the eve of the Mongol invasion, entered the top 100 greatest adventures in world history.
“In 1234, an extremely exhausted and sick man returned from a long, dangerous journey to the Hungarian capital Esztergom. He was already dying. His body was covered with wounds, his face was cut by the winds and burned by the hot sun of the steppes. Only a few recognized in this man the brother of Otto - a Dominican monk who three years ago, together with three other brothers, went in search of Hungaria Magna. Brother Otto lived for about a week. Before his death, he managed to tell that he had met people speaking Hungarian on the distant Volga. But Great Hungary itself lay somewhere further to the east,”says Nikolai Nepomniachtchi in the book“100 Great Adventures”.
Hungarians
The Hungarians came to the Carpathian basin led by their leader Arpad in 896, becoming one of the last waves of the Great Nations Migration. For several decades, they kept the whole of Central Europe at bay. Their further advance was stopped at the battle of Augsburg, and the Hungarians settled in the lands of Pannonia and Transylvania, from time to time raiding their neighbors.
But in the memory of the Danube Hungarians there was a legend that somewhere far, far in the east, their fellow tribesmen remained to live. Hungarian medieval chroniclers called this historical ancestral home "Great Hungary" - Hungaria Magna.
In the first days of May 1235, Prince Bela (in the future - the legendary King Bela IV) sent a new expedition in search of Hungaria Magna - four monks from the Dominican order (domini canes - the dogs of the Lord). The Dominicans were also spies: vague rumors about the Mongols began to reach Eastern Europe, and the monks had to find out as much as possible about them.
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The brothers Gerard, Jacob, John changed into mundane dresses, in addition, they let go of their beards and hair so as not to stand out. The main brother, Julian, later said in his report:
The monks found that Taman's trade was paralyzed: some new hordes appeared, disrupted trade … So Julian received the first news about the Mongols. It was impossible to find a guide: no one agreed to go on a dangerous path through the steppes. They have been fruitlessly in the Matrix for almost two months. Money was melting every day.
It seems that Julian was a charming monk, because soon one of the wives of the local governor helped them, with her assistance the Dominicans found horses and everything they needed. On August 21, a small caravan of five horsemen and two pack horses left the Matrika and went along the high right bank of the Kuban.
Torchikan
Not far from the mouth of the Itil (Volga) River, on the edge of the desert, lay the city of Torchikan, where Julian and his companions managed to find refuge with the Greek Nikifor. Winter was approaching. Julian wandered around the city all day, went to the caravanserais where merchants gathered, looking for people who would agree to go with him across the Itil River. But fear of the Mongols deterred even the most greedy from this venture … Winter has come. Hunger pangs were added to the pangs of cold - money came to an end. Brother Gerard carved spoons out of wood, Julian went to sell them. John and Jacob collected dry manure on the streets for the hearth.
Finally, Julian figured out how to get out of this difficult situation and continue their great mission. The plan was radical: he decided to sell his brother Jacob and brother John into slavery and travel with the proceeds. However, the deal did not take place: the monks did not know how to plow or sow, there were no buyers. Then Julian ordered John and Jacob to return back to Hungary. Nobody else heard anything about them.
In mid-March, as soon as the snow melted, the two remaining travelers left Torchikan with the first caravan. Soon they were very unlucky: Julian accidentally dropped the royal letter from the bag, the gilded seal flashed for a moment, and the caravan men immediately pounced on the monks, began to beat them and rummage through the bag. Finding nothing of value, they threw the beaten in the steppe.
After lying down and bandaging their wounds, Julian and Gerard went on - on foot, alone. After 37 days, they, finally exhausted, reached the country, which the locals called Vela (somewhere between the rivers Yaik and Emba). We met them here extremely unfriendly. The monks were forced to spend the night in an abandoned hut made of leaky skins. Gerard grew weaker every day. Julian left him in a hut, while he himself went to beg. Finally, the patient got a little stronger, and they continued on their way. However, it became very bad on the road, and brother Gerard, who knew how to carve spoons, died in the arms of Julian. Having buried a comrade, he was left alone in the steppe.
Julian and Gerard. Sculpture by Antal Karoi, Budapest.
Volga Bulgaria
And when Julian, probably, had completely lost heart and stopped hoping for anything, he began to be lucky. He suddenly met by chance a mullah traveling to the Volga Bulgaria. In that situation, there was no time for religious principles - the Catholic monk gladly agreed to become a servant when the mullah suddenly proposed.
In the Volga region, Julian first saw the Mongols. Several times they rushed to the caravan with warlike cries and frightening howls, but each time the mullah pulled out the paizu from his bosom, and the Mongols parted, letting the carts pass. On May 20, the caravan reached the limits of the Volga Bulgaria.
“Great Bulgaria is a great and powerful kingdom with rich cities, but everyone there is pagans. In that kingdom they say among the people that soon they should become Christians and submit to the Roman Church, but, as they say, they do not know the day, but they heard it from their sages,”Julian later said in a report to Pope Gregory IX.
In a large Bulgarian city, which, as Julian was told, could put up an army of 50 thousand people for battle, the monk said goodbye to the mullah. The Dominican wandered the streets, watched, listened. He brought to Europe the first stories about the Mongols - fables that were clearly heard in the market about the fact that Genghis Khan takes revenge on the Cumans (Cumans) for the life and honor of his raped and beheaded sister.
Great Hungary
Brother Julian was once again incredibly lucky in the same market. And in exactly the same way as a few years before the deceased brother Otto: once a Hungarian monk at a Bulgar bazaar suddenly heard a Hungarian female speech.
The woman turned out to be a Magyar woman, married to a Bulgar merchant: “She showed her brother the paths he should follow, claiming that in two days he, no doubt, could find those Hungarians he was looking for. And so it happened. For he found them near the great river Etil [p. White, two days - two days on horseback]. Those, seeing him and learning that he was Hungarian, rejoiced a lot at his arrival: they took him around their homes and villages, diligently asking about the king and kingdom of their Christian brothers. And they listened very attentively to everything that he only wanted to tell them, about faith and so on, since their language was completely Hungarian: they both understood it, and he understood them. They are pagans, they have no idea of God, but they do not worship idols, but live like animals. The land is not cultivated! They eat horse meat, wolf meat and the like; drink horse milk and blood. They are rich in horses and weapons and are very brave in wars. According to the legends of the ancients, they know that those Hungarians descended from them, but did not know where they were,”the report says.
The Hungarians living on the Belaya River have already had to deal with the Mongols, and Julian, having listened to them, realized that the peoples of Europe did not even imagine what scale the trouble was rolling down on them from the depths of future Russia. Julian realized that he was obliged to warn both the king and everyone who might be in the way of the Mongols, and if he does not do this, then no one will.
Kingdom of the Mordvans
From Julian's report: “When he wished to return, those Hungarians showed him another way, by which he could get there faster. The brother began his way back three days before the feast of St. John the Baptist (June 20, 1236), in 15 days the kingdom of the Mordvans passed along the river; these are pagans and such cruel people that they have that person who did not kill many people is not considered for anything; and when someone walks along the road, the heads of all the people killed by him are carried in front of him, and the more heads they carry in front of whom, the more he is valued. And from the heads of men they make cups and drink from them especially willingly. One who has not killed a person is not allowed to marry.
God knows why the Mordovians offended the Hungarian monk so much that he left such a trash review about her, which was not historically confirmed by anything. The message about the religious situation in the local lands remains on his conscience: “Having learned from their prophets that they were going to become Christians, they [pagan Mordvans] sent to the prince of the great Landemeria [the city of Vladimir] (this is a neighboring Russian country) to he sent priests to them to baptize them. He replied: “It is not for me to do this, but the Pope of Rome. After all, the time is near when we must all accept the faith of the Roman Church and submit to its authority. " However, what else could be expected in the Dominican's report to the Pope.
However, in his report on his second trip to the Volga region, brother Julian will show amazing, against the background of gossip about the raped sisters of Genghis Khan, historical accuracy, telling about the Mongol invasion of the Mordovian lands: “There were two princes: one prince with all his people and family submitted to the Tatar lord, but the other, with a few people, went to very fortified places to defend himself if he had enough strength. Indeed, it was so, and the names of these princes were Puresh and Purgas. Such awareness suggests that Julian at least passed, and, most likely, stopped somewhere quite nearby, in the Ulyanovsk-Penza-Saransk area.
Brother Julian's wandering route.
Second journey
At the beginning of 1237, Julian probably already returned to Hungary and was in Buda with a report to King Bela IV, and in the spring of the same year - in Rome, where his report to Pope Gregory IX was recorded by the monk Richard. Julian himself had no time to describe his adventures: the information he brought was considered very valuable, but insufficient. Straight from Rome, he set off on a new journey along the route Hungary - Russia - Volga Bulgaria, and if the first journey was a risky enterprise, the second was simply frostbitten. He entered Ancient Russia from the west at about the same time as the Mongols, who invaded it from the east.
Julian only reached Suzdal, where he was lucky again. The day before, the local prince detained the Mongol ambassadors carrying Batu's message to the Hungarian king Bela IV, composed in the inimitable Mongolian style: “I, khan, the ambassador of the heavenly king, to whom he gave power over the earth to raise the submissive and suppress the opposing ones, I am surprised at you, King of Hungary! You keep the slaves of my Cumans, who fled from my wrath, under your protection. I order you not to keep them with you, so that because of them I will not turn against you. After all, it is easier for the Kumans to run than for you, because they wander without houses, in tents. You have castles and cities, how can you escape my hand? (translation by Nepomniachtchi).
There are many versions, in addition to the raped and beheaded sister of Genghis Khan, why the Mongols disliked the Polovtsians so much. Maybe they once sheltered the Merkits - Temuchin's worst enemies, who stole his wife, maybe their khan Kotyan was married to the sister of the Khorezmshah, who was very guilty before Genghis Khan … and then, it seems, they went over to the Mongols. Something happened between them then, after which the Mongols, once and for all, with complete conviction of their righteousness, began to consider the Cumans-Cumans as their slaves. A little later, before the battle on Kalka, in a letter to the Russian princes, they will call the Polovtsians their escaped grooms.
The letter was so important that Julian canceled the further trip (and only therefore survived) and returned to Hungary. King Bela IV did not heed Batu's advice. Soon the 40-thousand-strong horde of Khan Kotyan migrated to Pannonia, who became related to the Hungarian king. It is not known whether the monk Julian participated in the Polovtsian-Hungarian negotiations. Bela's decision turned out to be a disaster: the Cumans were not at all Eastern Hungarians, whom the people were waiting for. Knowing, seeing how the balance of power in the state changed dramatically in favor of the king, solved the problem in a simple way: she burst into Kotyan's palace at night and began to cut everyone there. The old Polovtsian Khan, hearing their approach, committed suicide, having killed three of his most beloved wives before that. His horde, having fought a little with the Hungarians, went to Bulgaria, where it disappeared into the local population.
And shortly thereafter, the Mongols invaded Hungary. In the battle on the Shayo River, they almost completely destroyed the Hungarian-Croatian army, simply by shooting 30 thousand people with bows. Bela fled to Central Europe, where he had to give up his entire gold treasury for asylum. The fate of the Dominican monk Julian in these events is unknown.
Hungaria Magna Riddle
And scientists do not know what, in fact, Julian found behind Hungaria Magna in the XIII century in two horse crossings to the east of the Volga region? Local history does not remember any Great Hungary there.
But its existence is confirmed by archeology: at the beginning of our millennium, the Imenkovskaya culture of the Volga Slavs coexisted in the east with the Kushnarenkovskaya culture, which archaeologists call Proto-Hungarian.
The Hungarians are also remembered by local peoples. It is believed that the eastern Magyars participated in the ethnogenesis of the Bashkirs.
State TV and Radio Company "Bashkortostan"
And the Kazakhs believe that the Hungarians in the Middle Ages were looking for them.
Kipchaks and Magyars. Hungary - meeting through the centuries. Mysteries of history.
There is a version that in the Ural steppes, slightly east of the Volga region, at the beginning of the last millennium, the Huns stopped for 200 years in their centuries-old journey from the borders of China to Europe. And the Hungarians were divided because some of them went further after the Huns, and some remained in the Urals, where after the Mongol invasion they disappeared into the local Turkic peoples.
Author: Maxim Kuznetsov