the scope of this study.^85 Several virtually self-explanatory examples suffice to
show how Sir John weaves all together in his travelogue. He writes of the “River
Sabatory in Archas,” somewhere in Syria, which “on the Saturday ranneth fast
and all the week after this standeth still and ranneth not or else little.”^86
Mandeville places another such marvelous river in his version of the land of
“Emperor Prester John.” Near the “land of the Great Khan, [this river] ranneth
also three days in the week, bringeth with [it] great stones and the rocks also
therewith and that great plenty. And anon as they be entered into the Gravelly
Sea, they be seen no more but lost for evermore. And those days that [the] river
ranneth no man dares enter into it, but in the other days, men dare enter well
enough.”^87
Mandeville locates the ten tribes somewhere in Central or northern Asia,
beyond the “Mountains of Caspia” where “the Jews of ten lineages be enclosed”
together with Gog/Magog and “twenty-two kings with their people.” While he
does not specifically mention wars between Prester John and the ten tribes, the
implication that they had taken place is clear.^88
Mandeville’s mention of the “Great Khan” betrays the triangle of power
that connects the ten tribes, Prester John, and the Mongols. Benjamin of
Tudela had written of the friendly relationship between the ten tribes and the
Kufar al-Turk, the people with no religion who attacked the Muslim world.
Mandeville, who writes two centuries after Benjamin and one century after the
dramatic appearance of the Mongols on the world’s stage, takes a different tack:
he marries the two warring dynasties to one another. Writing after the initial
scare of the Mongol invasion had abated, Mandeville again reframes the
triangle of power and depicts friendly relationships between Prester John
and the Mongol khan. “This emperor Prester John taketh always to his wife
the daughter of the Great Khan, and Great Khan also in the same wise the
daughter of Prester John.”^89 While the great lords marry each other’s daugh-
ters, the ten tribes are conveniently enclosed beyond the mountains.
The Mongol Messiah
In 1260 , as Matthew of Paris was composing dreadful reports of the Mongols
and arguing that they were the ten tribes, the young Rabbi Abraham Abulafia
( 1240 – 1290 ) left his hometown of Saragossa in Iberia in search of the Sam-
batyon. This youth set off for the land of Israel but discontinued his search
shortly after landing at the city of Acre.^90 War was sweeping the country and on
September 3 , Mongol and Mamluk armies clashed in Palestine, and the
Mongols were famously defeated in the battle of ‘Ain Jalut.^91 Moshe Idel