Laurence Bergreen

by Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu

  With a Venetian flourish, “they handed him the holy oil that they had brought from the lamp of the Sepulcher of our Lord Jesus Christ from Jerusalem, which he had so much desired.” The gift, so difficult to obtain, had its intended effect. Kublai Khan received the magical substance with “great rejoicing and held it very dear and ordered it to be kept with great honor and reverence, and nothing was ever more dear or welcome than that.”

  Next it was young Marco’s turn. His father and uncle formally presented the young man to the Mongol leader. “The Great Khan, when he saw Marco, who was a young bachelor of very great and noble aspect, asked who he was,” the reader is told. “‘Sir,’ said his father, Master Niccolò, ‘he is my son and your man, whom as the dearest thing I had in this world I have brought with great peril and ado from such distant lands to present him to thee for thy servant.’” One can imagine the youth’s cheeks tingling with apprehension at the formality and intimacy of the occasion, as well as its significance, for his father had just committed him to the service of Kublai Khan.

  “May he be welcome,” said the Great Khan, “and it pleases me much.”

  BOOK TWO

  Asia

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Universal Emperor

  I would build that dome in air,

  That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

  WINNING KUBLAI KHAN’S approval marked the decisive moment in young Marco’s life; henceforth he stepped out of his elders’ shadow and emerged in his own right. His exuberant, questing temperament proved the perfect match for the emperor and empire. So it was that the greatest ruler on earth saw promise in a keenly observant young traveler from the mysterious West. Together they freed Marco from his Venetian constraints, and under the khan’s influence Marco began to evolve into the traveler remembered by history. For seventeen years, Marco Polo and Kublai Khan participated in a most unusual partnership as master and servant, teacher and disciple, and even father and son.

  Marco declares that Kublai Khan held him “in great favor,” and enlisted him “among the other honored members of his household, for which reason he was held of great account and value by all those at the court.” The young Venetian, in turn, studied his unusual hosts. “While he stayed at the court of the Great Khan, this youth…, being of very distinguished mind, learned the customs of the Tartars and their language and their letters and their archery so well that it seemed a wonder for all,” he says with characteristic lack of modesty. Before long, he had learned “several languages and four other letters and writings.” Thus armed, he came to know Kublai Khan perhaps better than the khan knew himself, and to etch him in the Western consciousness for all time.

  To Europeans, Kublai Khan, like his ancestors before him, was more of a demonic force than a person, and although Marco plainly stood in awe of the leader of the Mongols, he was also determined to give him a human face—itself an iconoclastic act.

  “The great lord of lords, who is called Kublai Khan, is like this,” Marco begins. “He is of good and fair size, neither too small nor too large, but is of middle size. He is covered with flesh in a beautiful manner; he is more than well formed in all parts. He has his face white and red like a rose; the eyes [are] black and beautiful; the nose well made and well set.” The description was somewhat idealized; portraits of the khan in his maturity depict him as conspicuously fat and jowly, magnanimous-looking yet imposing.

  Overwhelmed by this august personage, Marco portrayed him in exalted terms. “The title Khan means ‘Great Lord of Lords,’ and certainly he has a right to this title; for everyone should know that this Great Khan is the mightiest man, whether in respect of subjects or of territory or of treasure, who is in the world today,” Marco said later, without exaggeration. “You should know that he is descended in the direct imperial line from Genghis Khan…. He is sixth in succession of the Great Khans of all the Tartars.” Although Kublai Khan was in his early sixties by the time he received the Polo company on its second visit to Cambulac, he had, until recent years, lived a life fraught with danger, and had become khan as much by his cunning and courage on the field of battle as by accident of birth.

  KUBLAI KHAN was the child of Genghis Khan’s fourth son, Tolui, and a remarkable woman named Sorghaghtani Beki, who was largely responsible for forming the generous character of the future emperor. She raised the child in her husband’s absence and imbued him with the mystic, all-embracing spirit that would mark his adult life.

  After Tolui drank himself to death, Sorghaghtani showed her spirit of independence. She spurned a marriage proposal from Tolui’s brother Ögödei, among others, and lobbied on behalf of her children’s future. Her flair for politics, combined with her quiet self-determination, won her wide admiration. One of the era’s wise men, the Syrian Gregorius Bar Hebraeus, the son of a Jewish physician who became a bishop and biblical commentator, said of Sorghaghtani, “If I were to see among the race of women another woman like this, I should say the race of women was far superior to men.”

  Sorghaghtani was a Nestorian Christian, and as a result Kublai Khan was far more appreciative of Christianity than the Europeans who reviled him would have suspected. Everyone, including Marco, was aware of her Christian faith, and for this reason, he believed he had some common ground with her son, the most exotic of rulers. But Kublai Khan’s mother maintained a more elaborate spiritual life than her professed religion suggested. She actively encouraged religious toleration, partly out of conviction, and partly for political reasons. She embraced Buddhism and Taoism and Islam, all to gain the support of the populace ruled by her family. Even as she practiced Christianity, she donated generously to mosques and Muslim academies. And as she encouraged Kublai to learn to hunt like a Mongol, she insisted that he learn Uighur, one of several tongues adopted by the Mongols.

  She was similarly enlightened in the administration of the affairs of the northern Chinese province that she ruled benevolently. Among the greatest challenges the Mongols faced in attempting to bring China under their control was the clash of two opposing ways of life: that of Chinese farmers versus that of Mongol nomads. Rather than force her Chinese subjects to adopt a nomadic way of life, based on the assumption of limitless but often useless land, Sorghaghtani permitted them to live according to their agrarian heritage; the result, for the Mongols, was a gratifying increase in tax revenues.

  Kublai inherited the innovative aspects of his mother’s approach to governing their Chinese provinces. He embraced her polytheism, which ensured the cooperation of their subjects, and promised economic accommodation. But as a young man, he had strayed far from home, and Mongol governors administered the provinces with a much heavier hand. They forced Chinese farmers to resettle, destroying fragile family structures; they imposed punitive taxes; and they exploited Chinese labor wherever they could. By the time these Mongol excesses came to Kublai Khan’s attention, the Chinese had departed in droves.

  Kublai tried to right the balance by replacing Mongol tax officials with Chinese equivalents, called “pacification commissioners.” Over time, he welcomed more Chinese into his administration, and by 1250, some of the defectors had returned, conveying their conditional acceptance of Mongol rule.

  RELYING ON FOREIGNERS to administer his empire, Kublai Khan gradually became the least Mongol of Mongol rulers; the Mongols often criticized him for abandoning Mongol ways and embracing Chinese civilization in all its manifestations—language, clothing, religion (that is, Buddhism), and government. There was some truth to the charge, because he enlisted counselors from all backgrounds. A monk named Hai-yün tutored Kublai in Chinese Buddhism. He gave Kublai’s second son a Chinese name, Chinkim, “True Gold.” Other Chinese followed suit, and soon the young Mongol leader was receiving instruction in Confucianism. Turkish Uighurs, Muslims, and Nestorian Christians all began appearing in his court and winning posts for themselves. By one count, Kublai relied on a council of forty advisers from these disparate backgrounds. Years later, when Muslims and Europeans w
ho braved the Silk Road arrived in his court, it was only natural that Kublai Khan invited them to serve the Mongols. In time, he divided his subjects into four major segments. First came the Mongolians, entitled to the highest positions. They were followed by the so-called Colored-Eye People, meaning those from Persia and the Middle East. Then there were Northern Chinese, and finally Southern Chinese—the two most numerous but least influential groups.

  Even as Kublai Khan mastered the intricacies of Chinese court life, he retained the ingrained Mongol tastes for portable housing, for hunting, for horsemanship, and for conquest. At times he feared he had become too reliant on his elite Chinese advisers, and he was heard to wonder if Buddhists and Confucians had hastened the end of other dynasties. His lack of fluency in Chinese prevented him from holding extended conversations with the Confucians all around him; if they wished to instruct him in Confucian doctrine, he relied on a Mongol interpreter. He sought to incorporate the world, but on his terms.

  As a rising young ruler, Kublai oversaw four large separate households, each administered by one of his wives. Chabi, his second wife, outshone the others, both in popularity with their subjects and in her influence over her remarkable husband. They married in 1240, or shortly before, when Kublai Khan was about twenty-five years old. Chabi was devoted to Tibetan Buddhism; she donated her jewelry to Buddhist monasteries and soon inspired Kublai to turn to Buddhism as well.

  BELIEVING HE COULD overcome all differences—religious, linguistic, and more—through the force of his authority, Kublai Khan worked to strengthen his alliances within the Mongol Empire, and slowly proved his mettle as a leader. In 1252, he assisted his brother Möngke in conquering provinces in southwestern China. Within three years, records show, he charged a celebrated Chinese scholar with establishing schools to teach the Chinese language and sciences to Mongol children. In 1256, he assigned another respected Chinese scholar, Liu Ping-chung, to select a propitious site for the capital city of the Mongol Empire. His choice was Xanadu—a name that came to sound endlessly romantic and evocative to Westerners, but which simply meant “the Upper Capital,” because it lay north of the winter capital in Cambulac.

  Möngke’s death in August 1259 cleared the way for Kublai’s ascent. In May 1260, the Mongol barons gathered in a khuriltai, a convocation to select their next leader. Their deliberations led to Kublai’s elevation to the position of “great khan.” He was forty-five years old.

  A MONTH after Kublai’s election, his younger brother Arigh Böke rallied enough support among a coterie of disaffected Mongol barons to have himself declared “great khan” as well. From his stronghold at Karakorum, Arigh Böke vowed to undo Kublai Khan and his divided loyalties. Learning of his rival’s intentions, Kublai suspended the military campaign in central China and conferred with his generals to devise a way to repel this challenge to his authority. They recommended that Kublai preside over a new election, in the interest of Mongol unity. As the designated successor, he was obligated to submit to an election by all the members of the family and the principal barons. The results of the vote were mixed; each rival had his devoted supporters, setting the scene for years of conflict among the competing Mongol barons and their followers.

  To solidify his position, Kublai made a pact with China’s dominant Song dynasty, whose prince pledged to serve Kublai Khan and to pay a generous annual tribute of 200,000 ounces of silver and 200,000 lengths of silk. On the advice of his Chinese advisers, he appealed to the Chinese populace, assuring them that his taxation rates would be lighter than those of his anti-Chinese rival, and he did whatever he could to identify himself with Chinese emperors in dress and custom. The appeals worked, but Arigh Böke continued to harass Kublai Khan in Central Asia, or wherever he detected weakness.

  The endless skirmishing took its toll on Arigh Böke’s army. Disease and desertion and famine claimed many of his soldiers, and by 1264, Arigh Böke decided he had no choice but to surrender to Kublai Khan. Arriving in Xanadu, Arigh Böke appealed to his brother for mercy. The two brothers, until recently mortal enemies, embraced, and it is said that Kublai Khan tenderly wiped the tears from the eyes of his adversary.

  Displaying the compassion for which he was known, Kublai Khan refrained from punishing Arigh Böke or his followers. Instead, Kublai banished his younger brother from his presence for a year, a measure that infuriated many barons, who were insisting on far more drastic measures. To appease his supporters, Kublai Khan conducted an inquiry designed to ferret out those who had inspired Arigh Böke to rebel. At last they settled on a hapless former adviser named Bolghai. Kublai Khan ordered Bolghai, along with nine other unlucky followers of Arigh Böke, to be executed.

  In 1266, Arigh Böke himself died; he had been in robust health until his final illness, and suspicion arose that he had been poisoned to make way for Kublai Khan, but no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing surfaced. Kublai now ruled as the sole “great khan,” although the support he enjoyed from lesser khans was tepid, at best. To foreigners like Marco Polo, he appeared to rule a unified Mongol hierarchy, but in reality his power over the empire was more tentative than outsiders assumed, as much the result of chance and circumstance as of military might or presumed virtue.

  AS EMPEROR, Kublai immediately brought sweeping changes to the realm. In 1260, the first year of his reign, he ordered the Chinese to give up their coins, made of copper, gold, and silver, in favor of paper currency. And he replaced Chinese paper currency, which had been in existence since the ninth century, if not earlier, with its Mongol counterpart. Soon, three kinds of Mongol currency flooded China, one backed by silk, and the two others by silver. Despite Chinese resistance, the experiment worked.

  The Mongol fiscal policies and technology, based on Chinese models and far advanced over Western counterparts, both impressed and baffled Marco, who struggled to comprehend financial concepts so unlike those of Venice. In his Travels, he extols the wonders of Kublai Khan’s mint in Cambulac. “It is appointed in such a way,” he says, “that the great lord has [mastered] the art of alchemy perfectly,” by which Marco means that the mint enjoyed a license to manufacture wealth.

  For the benefit of Europeans unfamiliar with paper currency, Marco clearly illustrates the procedure for printing money in Kublai’s mint: “He makes men take the bark of trees, that is, of the mulberries of which the worms that make silk eat their leaves, and the thin skin that is between the bark and the wood of the tree.” From that skin are made “sheets like those of paper. They are all black.” After being cut into squares worth varying amounts, “all these sheets are sealed with the mark and with the seal of the great lord, for otherwise they could by no means be spent.” In addition, each sheet is printed by hand with the mark of an official, and “if any were to counterfeit it, he would be punished.” The marvel of this form of currency is that “each year [Kublai] has so great a quantity of them made that he could pay for all the treasure in the world, though it costs him nothing.”

  Marco tried to educate his skeptical European audience and persuade himself about the practicality and efficiency of Kublai Khan’s paper money. He writes: “All the people and regions of men who are under his rule gladly take these sheets in payment, because wherever they go they make all their payments with them both for goods and for pearls and for precious stones and for gold and for silver; they can buy everything with them, and they make payment with the sheets of which I have told you.” Equally impressive, the sheets of paper money “are so light that the sheet worth ten bezants of gold weighs not one.”

  IN HIS PASSION to reform, Kublai Khan welcomed craftsmen, artisans, traders, and merchants to his court, in a sharp break with Chinese practice. Muslims from the Middle East brought spices, camels, and carpets with them. Merchants brought luxurious silk and lacquer, not to mention rhinoceros horns, and incense, much of it designed to appeal to Muslim tastes.

  Kublai Khan’s treasury profited tremendously from this commercial activity. The Mongol government lent money at extrem
ely low rates to the Mongol nobility while levying taxes on traders. No matter what type of transaction was involved, Kublai Khan’s administration required that merchants exchange their own currency, usually in the form of valuable coins, and occasionally gems, into Mongol paper currency, as Marco Polo observes: “Many times a year the merchants come together with pearls and with precious stones and with gold and with silver and with other things, cloth of gold and of silk; and these merchants give all of these things to the great lord. The great lord calls twelve wise men…to look at those things that the merchants have brought and to have them paid with what it seems to them they are worth…with those sheets of which I have told you.” If, perchance, “one has kept these sheets so long that they are torn and are spoilt, then he takes them to the mint and they are changed for new and clean ones.”

  Although Marco found it difficult to believe that paper currency could have real value, he saw—with his own eyes, as he was fond of saying—that it served as the basis of a flexible and practical economic system, and extended the Mongol Empire’s economic influence over great distances. Paper money seemed to Marco a more potent invention than rockets or giant slingshots, and more persuasive than religion. It could even be considered Kublai Khan’s hidden weapon of conquest.

  THROUGHOUT HIS REIGN, Kublai benefited from a unique asset: Chabi, his principal wife, who yearned to become the empress of a unified Mongol realm, and who devoted her energies to sustaining her husband when he became ensnared by infighting among the Mongols. It was Chabi who summoned Kublai Khan from his battles with the Song dynasty to defend his throne. And it was she who insisted that Liu Ping-chung persuade Kublai Khan to abandon a plan to turn the Chinese agricultural land surrounding the capital city into pastures for Mongol horses. “You Chinese are intelligent,” she told Liu Ping-chung. “When you speak, the emperor listens. Why have you not remonstrated with him?” Once the adviser interceded, Kublai Khan changed his mind, and left the Chinese farmland intact.