The premodern is often either excluded from histories of race on grounds of anachronism, or perceived as producing nascent forms of later racial ideologies. Yet the anachronism of medieval race arises from teleological conceptions of history in which modernity is both the result of great ruptures that cut it off from medieval histories and the space into which the medieval past consistently arrives. Rather than thinking backward into the medieval to locate what has already been identified in later periods, this project asks how medieval ideologies of race influenced, and elucidate, the formation of colonialist discourse in early modern England. It will examine Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (1590), loosely based on the Islamic Mongol Timur (1336-1405), in relation to the contemporaneous publication of Hakluyt’s The Texts and Versions of John de Plano Carpini and William de Rubruquis in 1598, a reproduction of thirteenth-century travel narratives into Mongol territory that also promoted the English colonization of North America. By bringing these texts together through the medieval history upon which their discourse relies, this project will reveal a colonialist “afterlife” of medieval race making.