Document 3

… Diplomatic exchanges between Christian Europe and Mongol Asia led to the emergence

of the first Western eye-witness accounts of far-off East Asia. For the first time, Western

Europeans were exposed to the true size and scope of the Eurasian landmass; they were

exposed to different cultures, beliefs, values, attitudes, and institutions; the papacy and

Europe were thus forced out of their narrow religious-geographic perspective; they began to

realize that they had to deal with and relate to the non-Christian world with its many different

peoples, religions, and cultures. The Europeans gradually assigned the Mongols and other

Asians a permanent place in the natural order of things; they no longer tried to force all

peoples into a specific Biblical niche or role as they initially did during Europe’s narrow

Christian view of the world and all people in it. The Westerners realized that they could not

refuse to recognize and deal with the rest of the world simply because it was non-Christian

[and] that they could not ignore and pretend that all non-Christian peoples and cultures did

not exist. Thus the Mongols and Asians were incorporated into the West’s intellectual

framework in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.…

Source: Gregory Guzman, “Christian Europe and Mongol Asia:

First Medieval Intercultural Contact Between East and West,”

Essays in Medieval Studies, Volume 2,

Proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association online

According to Gregory Guzman, what was one effect the Mongols had on the European view of the world?

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