and Mark. He interspersed their report and memories with a narrative about "the occurrences of their time - what happened to them, through them or because of them, relating everything just as it happened". The result was a chronicle titled "History of Mar Yahballaha and Rabban Sauma", of which a single manuscript was discovered in the late nineteenth century in the remote mountains of Hakkari (Eastern Turkey). The "History" is one of the more recent examples of classical Syriac literature, a major Christian literary tradition of the Near East. While the encounter with two Asian "Marco Polos" of sorts constitutes the "History" 's most immediate element of appeal for present-day readers, the work deserves to be read in its entirety, as a rich and lively testimony of a time of unprecedented interconnectedness in the history of Eurasia in the time of the Mongol Empire.