The article is devoted to the analysis of evidence and representations of medieval Europeans about the law and legal realities of the Mongol Empire. The article deals with the overview of the corpus of texts of medieval authors containing information about Mongolian imperial law and identifies the sources of their information. The specifics of medieval authors’ reports on the law of the Mongol Empire are analyzed, and it is concluded that the authors were mainly interested in the legal realities of the Mongol Empire. Finally, an attempt is made to verify the information of medieval European authors as a source of the law-making activity of Genghis Khan and, in particular, of the Great Yasa, which modern researchers often position as a comprehensive code of laws of the Mongol Empire.

The article is an analysis of the accounts of European contemporaries on the law of the Yuan Empire of the second half of 13th – mid of 14th cc. These notes are of great interest because of reflection the Chinese legal realities in terms and categories of European legal tradition. Moreover these accounts could help verify and enhance the one fixed by Oriental contemporaries. The source base of the research is a number of travelers’ notes (diplomats and missionaries) as well as works of contemporary scholars who did not visit Mongol China but used the information of travelers who failed to keep notes. The value of this source is higher as different contemporaries paid attention to the different fields of legal relations in the Yuan Empire, and it allows to form an idea on specific features of different branches of law in the Mongol China.