Intelligence Available to the Papal Curia by March 1245

During the ten years preceding the First Council of Lyons, the Papal Curia received intelligence regarding the Mongols from various sources – nearly all of it authentic and certainly more detailed than the vague, distorted rumours and wishful thinking that had circulated at the time of the Mongol invasion of Western Asia in 1218-22 and the overthrow of the Khwārazmshāh's empire. Since the 1230s various missions from Hungary, comprising Dominican friars, had been engaged in reconnaissance beyond the Carpathians. These missions had not been dispatched to the Mongols themselves and did not make direct contact with them. The original purpose of the friars' journeys, rather, was twofold: to proselytise the Cumans/Polovtsy, 2 and to make contact with and convert the people to the east, whom the Hungarians regarded as their distant kin – the inhabitants of ‘Greater Hungary’ (now generally, if tentatively, identified with Bashkiria). 3 Both peoples, as it happened, lay immediately in the path of the Mongol advance.