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I n his lengthy report for Louis IX (r. 1226-1270), composed in the months following his return from the court of the Khan Möngke (Ch. Xianzong; r. 1251-1259) in 1255, William of Rubruck pauses to offer a few observations on the Chinese-or "Cataians"-to the southeast. He notes the use of paper currency and that the people of Cataia write with brushes, "in a single character mak[ing] several letters that comprise one word." 1 He marvels at the quantities of silver daily yielded to the Mongols, and recounts the tale of "a city which has walls of silver and battlements of gold." These people, Rubruck tells his king, are the "Seres" or "silk people" of antiquity, being "excellent craftsmen in whatever skill" and "the source of the finest silk cloth." 2 Chinese gold, silver, and silk were not the only things that caught Rubruck's attention in his two-year mission. A Franciscan friar, he had been dispatched to Karakorum with the explicit aim of soliciting support for Christianity's struggle against Islam, and his observations on religious views and practice in the expanding Mongol empire predictably form the majority of his report. But it is highly significant that material culture is at the heart of this earliest extant European

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