Between the global Christian vision and the search for the lost homeland: Friar Julian’s mission to Magna Hungaria

This chapter examines the mission of the Hungarian Dominican Friar Julian (Julianus barát) to Magna Hungaria in the 1230s and argues that it should be read not only as a search for the “Eastern Hungarians” but within its religious and political setting. It rests on the two primary accounts of the mission, Friar Riccardus’s De facto Ungarie magne (c. 1236) and Julian’s Epistula de vita Tartarorum (c. 1238), read in Stephen Pow’s edition and translation. It reconstructs Julian’s route via Constantinople, Matrica, Alania and Magna Bulgaria to the Hungarian-speaking pagans near the Volga, and shows how Riccardus presents them as kindred pagans open to conversion while reproducing the medieval equation of paganism with barbarism. It also discusses Riccardus’s account of the Grand Duke of Vladimir deferring the baptism of the Mordvins to the pope. Turning to Julian’s letter, it analyses the Mongol ultimatum to Béla IV: its claim to universal dominion, its demand that the Cumans be expelled, and its contrast between nomadic and sedentary societies. It finally places the mission in the context of mendicant missionary activity, the papal bull Cum hora undecima (1235), eschatological expectations, and Béla IV’s policy of building a Christian eastern frontier through missions among the Cumans. The chapter concludes that the mission stood at the intersection of Dominican missionary work, papal policy and Hungarian frontier strategy, that Julian’s reports should be read as narratives shaped by this context, and that this frontier role anticipates Hungary’s later image as Antemurale Christianitatis.