More than 25 years before the Venetian Marco Polo - at the time of the Crusades - the Vatican sent scouts and secret diplomats to faraway Asia. They should look for allies against the Muslims there.
The first disquieting news came from Georgia, then from Hungary and Wallachia, and however different the reports were, one sentence was common to them all: "The Tartars are coming!" Hurrying from victory to victory, the army of riders flooded East Europe, and after they had already subjugated the Russian principalities, they were now already in Poland and continued to advance in the direction of Schle-sien. The educated made their own rhyme - the memory of the Huns had faded, but not disappeared. Were these unknown invaders a renewed scourge of God? To others the similarity of the term "Tatars" with tar-tarus, the name of the underworld in antiquity: had the gates of the underworld been opened in order to punish sinful Christians with these infernal warriors? Knights army recruited at Legnica, which brought it to 30,000 men. Under the leadership of Duke Henry II, it moved in early April 1241 against the Tartars. The battle on April 9th was different than hoped: all the tactics that had been set were fizzling against this enemy, who did not follow the knightly rules, who did not seek man-to-man combat, but in safe archery distance felt most comfortable. He appeared like a swarm of hornets, but he could not grasp it and was even dangerous in retreating, because the strangers shot with their short Reexbögen just as accurately backwards and forwards. They caused the Knights' army a devastating defeat when the Tartars had impaled the head of Duke Henry on a long pole. And then the inexplicable happened: The strangers did not push farther westward, they turned south and disappeared again into the expanse of the Russian steppe.
The people in the west were confused: which European general would have broken off such a triumphal procession and left behind all that conquered? But one was also confused, because the experience was in such stark contrast to what one believed and what one hoped for. Should not the priest king John, who lived far to the east, come to Christendom to defeat the Muslims?
The expansion of the Arabs in the 7th and 8th centuries, which resulted in the loss of almost the entire eastern and southern Mediterranean region of Christendom, did not in any way lead to the complete Islamization of the affected areas, because the new masters tolerated the Christian religion. Although the Arabs had not succeeded in conquering the Frankish Empire, they had settled in Spain in the middle of the eighth century and founded the emirate of Cordoba. Therefore, they searched desperately for allies against the Muslim embrace, especially at the time of the Crusades.