ROMANCE IN OLD RECORDS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23618, 30 March 1940, Page 4 (Supplement)

ROMANCE IN OLD RECORDS

Sawma the Monk

By E. M BLAIKLOCK

MARCO POLO himself must have been at Kublai's court in IVkiu when two Chinese monks craved audience with the great Khan. On a mountain, in their hermit cave, the wanderlust had bitten them, and they desired a letter sealed with the king s seal to smooth the way to far Jerusalem. The blurred script of nil ancient Svriac manuscript tolls their amazing story. But for the mere 'chance of its survival, and the chance more slender still of its discoverv in Kurdistan fifty years ago, the Odyssey of Sawma and Markos, ;t monks of China, would have been lost in the oblivion which has covered romance and adventure untold. ! i Tt is n fact of history that the Christian church was foil titled in China by the third century, a fact, too. that a thousand years later its organisation (still functioned. It even survived the liorrors ot the iYlongol invasions, lor on the Moslems their cruel sword fed, and when the enlightened rule of Ivublai succeeded that of his unspeakable predecessors, the energy and enterprise of the Nestorian Christians was encouraged to move east. It was tho Indian summer of the church in China. Later, winter came, and she perished utterly. So Ivublai barkened. He may have had ideas. Mongol imperialism knew no east and west. Ghengis' hordes had once reached the Dnieper. Halagu had captured Damascus and threatened ' Jerusalem. Perhaps Sawma and Markos were Kublai's innocent spies., when they left Pekin in simple gladness, armed with the little gold passports inscribed with characters tvhicii read, "May tho name of the Kakhan be holy! He who doth not pay him reverence shall bo slain and must die."

Paris-Bagdad Axis The lonely Gobi and the bandits of Turkestan cannot all be charmed away , by a Kakhau's golden tab. There are troubles enough for Svriac scholars to spell from the sprawling script. But the kernel of our story is further 011, for something happened. The two monks did not reach Jerusalem. Saul, in the Bible, set out to find 11 is father's asses and found a kingdom instead. The two Chinese set out to pray at the Tomb, reached Bagdad, and found that they had already won a reputation. Loudly ' protesting, Markos was made Patriarch of the Nestorian Church, a diocese that extended from Palestine to Pekin, and Sawma Visitor-General. Had Kublai a hand in it from afar? It is significant that Sawma has an errand to do immediately. On it we shall follow him, leaving his friend in his "cell" in Bagdad—modest comfort, a "cell" in those days for a Patriarch was a palace of some dimensions. He was doubtless accompanied this time with another menacing gold tab. Wo know that he had sundry priests and deacons, and not a little Now' Persia in the late thirteenth century was independent. Its dynasty of II Khans, as the rulers were called, had the loosest of connections with the Pekin court, and it was Arghon, II Khan of Persia, who sped Sawma on his way. His eyes were on Jerusalem. The Holy City, he argued, must be the key to rich prestig;e. Had not armoured cavaliers come unimagined distances from the sunset to batter at its gates? And so Arghoia's cunning wits planned a great crusade, which might have changed history. Its strategy was perfect. If the kings of the west came 111 from the sea, and the Mongols came in from the desert behind, what chance then for the Moslems of Palestine? It was like the strategy of Lawrence and his Arabs. It was exactly the strategy . of the Moscow-Berlin axis against Poland. Indeed the blood of Arghon's race flows in Stalin's Georgian veins. And as for racial type, see any ancient picture* of Ghengis khan! _ We digress. Arghon wrote his idea in a letter and sent Sawma to see the Pope, and the kings of England and France. He was to explain that the 11 Khan envisaged a Paris-Bagdad axis against the Saracens, and was not averse to a London-Paris-Bagdad triangle. Frankish Chivalry

North to the Black Sea went tho Chinaman. He took ship for Byzantium where civilisation had not yet met tho dark ages, he "did" tho holy places, and shipped for Rome. We can date his voyage from two references in his unassuming narrative. "He went down to the sea," runs the text, "and came to the middle thereof, where ho saw a mountain from which smoke ascended all day long, and no man is able to approach because of tho stench of sulphur." There is a recorded eruption of Etna in June, 1287. Check this by a sea-fight. At Naples, Sawma met tho king, none other than Charles Martel. .James 11. of Aragon was at the moment in the offing with a fleet, considerably annoyed at Charles' seizure of Agosta in Sicily. "And the troops of the one had come in many ships," runs the tale, "and the troops of the other were ready, and they began to fight ono another." This battle, which James won, took place in tho Bay of Sorrento, June 24, 1287. The next paragraph is interesting. "Meanwhile Sawma and his friends sat on tho roof of the mansion in which they lived, and they admired the way in which the Franks made war, for they attacked none of the people except those who were actually combatants. We of the bombing 'planes might ponder the last remark, when next wo shudder at what we naively term tho dark ages!

Traveller's Palm Honorius IV. had just died when Sawnta reached Rome, and his successor had not been appointed. He spent a , pleasant week-end in brilliant theological argument with the cardinals in the Pope's '-cell"—the Vatican, to wit! Ho "did" again all the relics and miracle places, and made for Paris via "Ginoh," evidently Genoa. Rut wc must abridge. He interviewed King Philip ]e Bel in Paris, devoted a month to the inevitable shrines, and found our own Edward I. at Bordeaux, lie exhorted him, called on the now Pope, and "crossed the seas which he crossed when he came, and arrived in peace at the place where King Arghon was, >sound in body and with his soul safely kept " We always assume that the world of the Middle Ages was a pre'icarious environment for both. Marco Polo of Venice has till now held the palm for the most travelled man of his century, but our Syriae text claims it. for Sawma the Chinese monk, ■whose weary ways stretch from J'nris to Pekin. "And King Arghon rejoiced and was glad and said. 'We have made thee to suffer great fatigue for thou art old. Henceforth thou shall not leave us.' "