The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation

Part of an Epistle written by one Yuo of Narbona into the Archbishop of Burdeaux, containing the confession of an Englishman as touching the barbarous demeanour of the Tartars, which had lived long among them, and was drawn along perforce with them in their expedition against Hungary: Recorded by Mathew Paris in the years of your Lord 1243.


The Lord therefore being provoked to indignation, by reason of this and other sinners committed among vs Christians, is become, as it were, a destroying enemies, and a dreadful avenger. This I may justly affirmed to be true, because a huge nation, and a barbarous and inhumane people, whose law is lawless, whose wrath is furious, even the rod of Gods anger, ouerrunneth, and utterly casteth infinite countries, cruelly abolishing all things where they come, with fire and sword. And this present Summer, the forelady nation, being called Tartars, departing out of Hungary, which they had surprised by treason, laid siege onto the very same town, wherein I my selfe abode, with many thousands of soldiers: neither were in the days townie on our part about 50. men of ware, whom, together with 20. crossbows, the captain had left in garrison. All these, out of certain high places, beholding the enemies waste armies, and abhorring the beastly cruelty of Antichrist his complies, signified forthwith onto their governor, the hideous lamentations of his Christian subjects, who suddenly being surprised in all the province adjoining, without any difference or respect of condition, fortune, sex, or age, were by manifold cruelties, all of them destroyed with whose carkeises, the Tartarian chieftains, and their brutish and savage followers, glutting themselves, as with delicious cakes, left nothing for vultures but the bare bones.