The Initiatives of Pope Innocent IV

For Pope Innocent IV, writing just a few weeks after his election, the Mongols were ‘that savage race, agents of destruction’, ‘the enemy of God and the friend of demons’, ‘Satan’s emissaries and the servitors of Tartarus'. 1 Prior to 1245 we have no evidence whatever that he envisaged any course of action other than promoting measures to defend Christian territory against a future invasion and investigating attacks on the Hungarian kingdom, or the usurpation of King Béla's rights, by those who had sought to profit from the Mongol attack. 2 Within just four weeks of his election, he authorised the Patriarch Berthold of Aquileia to muster a crusade in the event of reliable reports of an impending Mongol invasion of Hungary [ doc. 7 ]. And yet by January 1245, despite this sign of his commitment to fostering military action against the invaders, Innocent was rumoured to be on the point of sending envoys to them, named by the English Franciscan Adam Marsh as two fellow Franciscans, John de Stanford and Abraham de Larde. 3 The Pope did not thereby abandon his previous policy of encouraging military resistance, and went so far as to promise a contribution towards the costs from the papal coffers. 4 And one purpose behind his embassies was to obtain the fullest intelligence on the grim new power that had arisen beyond Latin Christendom's eastern frontier. There is, incidentally, no evidence to support the idea – surely anachronistic in the context of the 1245-8 missions – that the Pope sought to win over the Mongols with a view to gaining their cooperation with a crusade against Islam. 5 In the circumstances, however, his bid to open diplomatic relations with them represented a marked shift of tactics. Hitherto, such a step had surely been unthinkable.