In this chapter, I will use the Great Khan’s dreams of the white knight as the starting point to examine the problematic figurations of idolatry, fetishism, orality and whiteness within late medieval travel writing, especially Mandeville’s Travels and Marco Polo’s Le Devisement dou monde. Seemingly unrelated among themselves or to whiteness, these material and performative manifestations of faith nonetheless intersect in important ways in medieval perceptions and representations of the Tartars. The kind of cultural and textual ‘whitening’ of Genghis Khan’s dreams that Hetoum and the Mandeville-author engage in points to the power of artistic manipulations. Geoffrey of Vinsauf, in his Poetria nova, argues that art ‘plays about almost like a magician, and brings it about that the last becomes first … black white, and vile precious’. Jacqueline de Weever argues that such a belief in art’s capacity to transform black into white (nigra candida) is also a belief in the possibility of erasing alterity through whitening. Whitening, in its attempt to mask anxieties and assimilate differences, ignores the origin of alterity. The act of whitening, in fact, posits a new origin.