c.1220-1294

Chinese Nestorian Monk and Explorer

In the late 1280s, a Nestorian Christian monk named Rabban Bar Sauma took the opposite route of many of his contemporary explorers by venturing from his homeland in China to western Europe. He and a student also made a trip to Persia and Iraq.

Bar Sauma was born around 1220, but accounts differ about his place of birth, noting it as either Chung-tu, modern-day Beijing, or Khanbaligh, which lay to the northeast. He followed his Christian upbringing and when he was in his twenties, became a monk in the Church of the East, or the Nestorian Christian Church. The church traces its origins to around the time of Christ's crucifixion, when the disciple Thaddeus (Addai) went to Edessa, an ancient city in Mesopotamia (now in Turkey), to spread the Christian faith. The religion radiated east from there. Although...