Originally posted by baracuda
Maybe now you're going to enlighten us calling the
Tartars mongol? if so you'll here me laughing from Moscow.. from down
in spain or whereever you are.. |
i don't understand your reply at all. Are you asking me to explain the differences between tatar & mongol?
Firstly I must say that if you are laughing because of the name of the
book... it is not my fault that in middle ages Europe knew so less
about Central Asia. For Europe Tatar, mongol, huns... all those words
were nearly the same since they didn't know too much about those
civilitzacions. Probably they took tatar because of the nearlier that
people were.
And now, maybe you are asking me to show the differences between tatar
& mongol. Well, firstly i must (again) tell you that those words
were not correct used in middle ages, so the meaning of the original
word has changed... Because of the lack of knowledge about those
cultures, some europeans gave to all of the turkish cultures in Asia
the name of "tartars".
But that was false since tartars were those who lived near Volga, Crimea...
And then we have the mongols (who were the real people that Carpini
visited) called in her book tatars. Mongols were those who live
in the zone near to the nowadays called Mongolia (also a part of
China called Inner Mongolia and the zone near Baikal Lake in Rusia) and
as there were a lot of "clans" before Temujin become Genghis Khan.
Although Carpini didn't realise that fact, that type of mistakes are
common in nearly all the world. For example, calling the peninsula
involving "Portugal & Spain" the Iberian peninsula is not correct
since iberia was just a group of people living near the mediterranan
coast. The problem was that romans firstly knew those coastal people
and give to all the peninsula the same name.
EDIT: oh! i've seen the mistake in the description of the book and i've sorted... sorry
Edited by Drunt Ba'adur