Carpini vividly evoked the strange but noble appearance of the people who seemed destined to rule Asia and possibly Europe: “In appearance, the Tartars are quite different from all other men, for they are broader than other people between the eyes and across the cheekbones. Their cheeks also are rather prominent above their jaws; they have a flat and small nose, their eyes are little, and their eyelids raised up to the eyebrows. For the most part, but with a few exceptions, they are slender about the waist; almost all are of medium height. Hardly any of them grow beards, although some have a little hair on the upper lip and chin and this they do not trim.”
He was also alert to the most distinctive feature of Mongol grooming, the tonsure: “On the top of the head they have a tonsure like clerics, and as a general rule all shave from one ear to the other to the breadth of three fingers, and this shaving joins on to the tonsure. Above the forehead also they all likewise shave to two fingers’ breadth, but the hair between this shaving and the tonsure they allow to grow until it reaches their eyebrows, and, cutting more from each side of the forehead than in the middle, they make the hair…long; the rest of the hair they grow like women, and they make it into two braids which they bind, one behind each ear.”
He provided a close-up of Mongol dress: “The married women have a very full tunic, open to the ground in front. On their head, they have a round thing made of twigs or bark…and on the top there is a long and slender cane of gold or silver or wood, or even a feather, and it is sewn into a cap which reaches to the shoulders. The cap as well as the object is covered with buckram, velvet, or brocade, and without this headgear they never go into the presence of men and by it they are distinguished from other women.”
Despite his observation that some Mongol men kept as many as fifty or even a hundred wives, Carpini complimented the women on their chastity, and the Mongols as a whole on their honesty. He seems less secure but equally intrigued when discussing their fervent shamanism. They appeared to lack a concept of damnation and Hell everlasting, but, to his relief, they did believe in an afterlife, although it bore a strong resemblance to their present circumstances—eating, drinking koumiss, and tending their herds.
He warned of the extreme climate conditions awaiting travelers on the Silk Road: “The weather there is astonishingly irregular, for in the middle of the summer, when other places are normally enjoying very great heat, there is fierce thunder and lightning, which cause the death of many men, and at the same time there are very heavy snowfalls.” As if that were not bad enough, “there are also bitterly cold winds, so violent that at times men can ride on horseback only with great effort.” Such was the daunting prospect Marco faced as he made his way slowly to Kublai Khan.
CARPINI’S DATA, gleaned from personal observation, circulated across Europe in manuscript form, and became part of a popular medieval encyclopedia, the Speculum historiale of Vincent of Beauvais.
In its organization, subject matter, and scope, Carpini’s Historia anticipated Marco Polo’s Travels. Although he had not seen Carpini’s account before setting out for China, Marco gave every sign of having become familiar with it by the time he wrote his own, far more elaborate work, and he took significant cues from it. Like Carpini, Marco divided his account into sections discussing aspects of Mongol life, and like Carpini, he wished to humanize this tribe of noble savages. But Marco possessed a far more extravagant and excitable temperament than the dutiful, self-effacing Franciscan friar. He did not just humanize the Mongols, he extolled them. He did not simply describe the Mongol way of life, he lived it.
INSPIRED BY Carpini’s example, other travelers took to the Silk Road and returned to write of the wondrous and appalling things they had seen.
The missionary William of Rubruck, a Franciscan, set out with another Franciscan friar, Bartholomew of Cremona; a slave purchased in Constantinople; an interpreter; and several oxcarts adapted to crossing the Mongolian desert. His unsparing account of their adventures revealed the strangeness and adversity confronting those who dared to travel east. “When we arrived among those barbarians, it seemed to me,” remarked William, “that we were stepping into another world.”
He and his companions learned to bear the constant hunger, thirst, and loneliness of empty stretches of the Silk Road, but not, he wrote, “the wretchedness I endured when we came to inhabited places. I cannot find the words to tell you of the misery we suffered when we came to the encampments.”
To William, the Mongols seemed more interested in drinking and carousing than in wreaking havoc on Christians. They were—and this came as a revelation to Europeans predisposed to regard them as barbarians—thoroughly human. In passages strongly prefiguring Marco Polo’s acute observations, William commented on the makeup worn by the women. “It seemed to me her whole nose had been cut off, so snub-nosed was she,” he wrote of a chieftain’s wife. “She had greased this part of her face with some black unguent, and also her eyebrows, so that she appeared most hideous to us.” He unabashedly conveyed the nature of Mongol domestic arrangements. Men took “as many wives as they would,” and kept female slaves who served as concubines. When a maiden reached the age of marriage, her suitor claimed her by force, often with the help of the young woman’s father.
Accounts such as these fascinated those few scholars, noblemen, and clergy able to read them. William’s descriptions humanized the Mongols. They took care of their own, tolerated strangers, respected other religious beliefs—how different from more “civilized” Europeans they were in that regard—and lived in spiritual harmony with nature, both the seasons and the land. The Mongols, it turned out, were more complicated than even Carpini had reported.
IN SEARCH OF a rumored Christian khan, William of Rubruck endured terrible privations on various branches of the Silk Road. He was reduced, as Carpini had been, to eating cold millet, occasionally supplemented with semifrozen raw meat. William eventually made it to Karakorum, and he described this destination in all-too-realistic terms. It was, he said, a small village, not quite as large as Saint-Denis (the seat of French kings) outside Paris. Rather than a fortress of monolithic Mongol power, Karakorum showcased diversity. “It had two quarters. In that of the Saracens [Muslims] are the markets, and here a great many Tartars gather on account of the court,” he noted. “The other is the quarter of the Cathayans [Chinese], all of whom are artisans…. There are twelve temples of idols of different nations, two mosques,…and one Christian church at the very end of the city.” Karakorum was also a busy diplomatic center, receiving not just emissaries from the pope but delegations from emperors, sultans, and kings across Asia and Eastern Europe, all of them braving the intense cold.
Despite the atmosphere of religious variety and tolerance encouraged by the Mongols, William of Rubruck performed only six baptisms. He seems to have lost his theological bearings in this distant land, where religious beliefs did not conform to the strict categories with which he was familiar. He wrote of coming upon a man with a “cross painted in ink upon his hand,” whom he took to be a Christian, “for he answered like a Christian to questions which I asked him.” Yet the religious symbols that this man and others like him displayed did not strike Friar William as sufficiently orthodox. He concluded that the devotees were Christians who lacked adequate instruction in the practice of their religion.
WANDERING through Karakorum, William of Rubruck chanced on an “idol temple,” where the inhabitants, he noted, “do courteously invite and lovingly entertain all messengers, every man according to his ability and station.” He had located a Buddhist monastery, whose sacred aura seduced him with its parallel religious reality: “Their temples are built east and west; and upon the north side is a chamber, in [the] manner of a vestry. Sometimes, if it is a square temple, the vestry or choir place is built in the center. Within this chamber they place a chest long and broad like a table, and behind this, facing south, stands their principal idol…. They place other idols round about the principal one, all of them finely gilt over with
pure gold; and upon the chest, which is in the manner of a table, they set candles and offerings…. They also have great bells like we have.”
The Buddhist priests beguiled Friar William, as they would later fascinate Marco Polo. “All their priests have their heads and beards shaved quite close and they are clad in orange-coloured garments; and being once shaven, they lead a chaste life, in groups of a hundred or two hundred together in one cloister. On the days when they enter into their temples, they place two long benches inside. Upon these they sit facing the singing men in the choir. They have certain books in their hands, which sometimes they lay down upon the benches, and their heads are bare as long as they remain in the temple,” he observed. “They read softly to themselves, hardly uttering any sound at all. Coming in amongst them, at the time of their devotions, and finding them all sitting mute, I attempted to get them to answer me, but could not by any means possible.”
The Buddhist manuscripts proved more eloquent: “They begin to write at the top of their paper, drawing their lines right down; and so they read and multiply their lines from the left hand to the right. They do use certain papers and characters in their magical practices, and their temples are full of such short scrolls hung round.”
William was sufficiently alert to detect other types of written communication. “The Cathayans write with a brush like painters use, and a single figure comprises several letters [and] signifies a word. The Tibet people write as we do, from left to right, and have characters quite similar to ours. The people of Tangut write from right to left as the Arabs do and multiply the lines going upwards.”
Decades before Marco Polo appeared on the scene, William reported on the existence of currency printed on “paper made of cotton the length and breadth of a palm”—a system of commerce so far in advance of anything in the West that it mystified Europeans.
WILLIAM ENGAGED the Buddhist monks in spirited theological debate, only to have his expectations confounded. When he inquired “what they believed concerning God,” they replied, to the friar’s dismay, “We believe there is only one God.” That was not the anticipated answer; William expected to hear about idol worship and other heathen practices among these non-Christians.
He tried again: “Do you believe that he is a spirit or some bodily substance?”
“We believe that he is a spirit,” came their reply.
Convinced this was an evasion, William demanded to know why, if they believed God to be a spirit, they made so many images to represent him. To this he added: “Since also you believe not that he was made man, why do you make him more like the image of a man than any other creature?”
The monks responded that William was mistaken; the images to which he referred did not represent God; they were tributes to the wealthy dead, whose relatives commissioned each image. “We, in remembrance of the dead, do reverence to it.”
Surely this was a corrupt practice. William said scornfully, “You do these things only for the friendship and flattery of men.”
“No, only for their memory.” With that, the monks turned the tables. “Where is God?” they asked the friar.
“Where is your soul?” William shot back. His hosts replied that their souls resided in their bodies.
William launched into a harangue. “Is it not in every part of your body, ruling and guiding the whole body, and yet it is invisible? Even so God is everywhere and ruleth all things, and yet he is invisible, being understanding and wisdom itself.”
Just as William was warming to his theme, his interpreter “became weary,” and the debate ended abruptly.
A PALPABLE spiritual thaw lessened the grip of the Karakorum winter as the region’s ruler, Möngke Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan, explained to William that as God had given humans five fingers on each hand, so the Supreme Being had passed on various religious beliefs to different peoples. This vision of religious tolerance, deeply ingrained in the Mongol consciousness, challenged everything that William, as a Christian missionary, believed; yet he could not deny the appeal of the khan’s point of view, or the implication that the totality of faith exceeded any single approach.
On the heels of this intriguing dialogue with William, Möngke expressed a guarded wish to establish diplomatic relations, or at least a dialogue, with the Christian West: “If you will obey us, send your ambassadors, that we may know whether you wish for peace or war.”
William of Rubruck never delivered this message, but his mission, which had lasted from 1253 to 1255, achieved partial success. Henceforth, the Mongol Empire would take a greater interest in the West, at least in matters of trade, if not religion.
WITH EACH JOURNEY, and each subsequent written account, the world appeared to Europeans to be getting bigger and more chaotic rather than smaller and more manageable. The travelers emphasized the great distances and unavoidable hardships they endured, and the irreconcilable differences that characterized the innumerable countries, cultures, languages, customs, and religions they encountered. The reports of emissaries as varied as Benjamin of Tudela, Giovanni da Pian del Carpini, and William of Rubruck all told of a world beyond Europe that was complex, tumultuous, and menacing, but nonetheless porous.
One way of appreciating the magnitude of Marco Polo’s accomplishment is to compare his account to those given by his predecessors. For all their fascination, the early observations were one-dimensional and literal. Marco, in contrast, freely mingled fact and fantasy, personal experience and legend, all of it buttressed by straightforward assessments of the people and places he encountered, and all of it energized by his braggadocio.
AS MARCO VENTURED into Afghanistan, he apparently lost himself in a series of idylls until he reached the remote province of Badakhshan in the northeast. Here, in what had been part of the ancient kingdom of Bactria, his characteristic purposefulness returned, as the trade route to the East began in earnest.
Marco Polo’s Afghanistan extended north to Turkistan, northeast to China with its occupying Mongols, south to the Indian subcontinent, and west to Persia. A crossroads of cultures, languages, and religions, Afghanistan had evolved into a center of trade and transportation, its dry plains, lush valleys, and snowy peaks crisscrossed by footpaths, equine trails, and caravan routes suitable for merchants such as the Polos.
This ancient network of trails had caught the attention of invaders, who turned Afghanistan into a sprawling battleground over the centuries. In time, it fell to Seleucids, Ephthalites, and eventually Turks, who ruled from the sixth century until the arrival of the Mongol armies in the service of Genghis Khan.
No other invaders did as much damage to Afghanistan’s delicate infrastructure as the Mongols. Their numbers were immense; an army of sixty or seventy thousand Mongol warriors on horseback would suddenly appear and overwhelm the region of their choice. The warriors could fire as many as six arrows a minute on horseback, facing forward or backward, at a full gallop. Their arrows darkening the sky, they chased down their enemies wherever they hid. (During one campaign in 1220, Genghis Khan himself rode into a mosque, slaughtering those who had fled there for safety. Later, chests intended to hold the Koran were filled with grain to feed the invaders’ horses.) The Mongols’ efficient armies destroyed the region’s irrigation system and turned fertile fields into the arid wastes confronting travelers like the Polos. Despite their small numbers, the Mongols had made themselves into the masters of this realm through sheer force and superior military ability. Their rapid and dramatic expansion into distant territories put all potential enemies on notice that resistance would be met with annihilation. The new Mongol order proved terrifying indeed.
YOUNG MARCO’S descriptions of travel along the Silk Road conveyed the vulnerability of his small family. Letters assuring papal protection for the Polo company were of no use in fending off highwaymen or religious zealots. If Marco or his traveling companions bore arms or other means of self-defense besides guile and cunning, he never mentions them. Nor does he refer to any extraordinary measures the
y may have taken to protect themselves against hunger, disease, or the elements. A drought; a sandstorm; a debilitating disease; a renegade squad of murderous thieves; jealous rivals; predators alerted by the approaching travelers’ scent; poor directions; a poisonous spring; the lethal bite of a snake, insect, or scorpion; a parasite lurking in food or underfoot; a sudden snowstorm or bolt of lightning—any of these common occurrences could have brought the expedition to a sudden end. No rescue party would have come looking for them, and few in Venice would have mourned their passing.
Despite these perils, the Polo company enjoyed several advantages. For one thing, the two elder Polos had come this way before. For another, the three Venetians were rarely alone. Wherever they went on the routes later known as the Silk Road, they passed other merchants, as well as holy men ranging from Nestorian Christians to Buddhists. The Silk Road, in reality, carried so much more than silk. And the Polos encountered an assortment of highly organized tradesmen and innkeepers who—for a price—served the needs of travelers before they departed in the predawn darkness and chill for the immense wasteland.
MARCO AND COMPANY spent three days riding their camels through a wasteland with “no dwelling nor food nor drink for the wayfarer except water; but grass enough for horses.” Finally, with the greatest relief, they reached Badakhshan, a “large province,” Marco writes, populated with Muslims, a “very great and broad realm which for length lasts quite twelve days’ marches.” The kings of Badakhshan, Marco believed, descended directly from Alexander the Great “and from his wife who was the daughter of Darius the Great who was lord of the great realm of Persia.”
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