Peter C. PERDUE
Less well-known than his contemporary Marco Polo, Rabban Sauma was a Christian Uygur monk who traveled in the opposite direction as Polo, from China to western Europe. In France he presented to the king a proposal by the Mongol governor of Baghdad to form a Mongol-Christian alliance to recover Jerusalem from the Muslims. The alliance never materialized.
Rabban Sauma, a Christian Uygur monk, and his young colleague Rabban Markos traveled from