He finds a trace in a surviving proverb.
Among more remote and ignorant Franks the cannibalism of the Tartars was a
general belief. Ivo of Narbonne, in his letter written during the great
Tartar invasion of Europe (1242), declares that the Tartar chiefs, with
their dog's head followers and other Lotophagi (!), ate the bodies of
their victims like so much bread; whilst a Venetian chronicler, speaking
of the council of Lyons in 1274, says there was a discussion about making
a general move against the Tartars, "porce qu'il manjuent la char
humaine." These latter writers no doubt rehearsed mere popular beliefs,
but Hayton and Ricold were both intelligent persons well acquainted with
the Tartars, and Hayton at least not prejudiced against them.
The old belief was revived in Prussia during the Seven Years' War, in
regard to the Kalmaks of the Russian army; and Bergmann says the old
Kalmak warriors confessed to him that they had done what they could to
encourage it by cutting up the bodies of the slain in presence of their
prisoners, and roasting them! But Levchine relates an act on the part of
the Kirghiz Kazaks which was no jest. They drank the blood of their victim
if they did not eat his flesh.
There is some reason to believe that cannibalism was in the Middle Ages
generally a less strange and unwonted horror than we should at first blush
imagine, and especially that it was an idea tolerably familiar in China.
M. Bazin, in the second part of Chine Moderne, p. 461, after sketching a
Chinese drama of the Mongol era ("The Devotion of Chao-li"), the plot of
which turns on the acts of a body of cannibals, quotes several other
passages from Chinese authors which indicate this.
