In court, where appearances mattered, Chabi set the fashion. Known for frugality, she collected discarded animal pelts and string, and other women soon followed her example. She took it upon herself to redesign the traditional Mongol headpiece, adding a visor to afford protection from the strong sun in China. She even devised a sleeveless tunic for combat.
Beyond her practical concerns, she shared with her husband a fascination with the Chinese emperor Taizong, who had reigned five centuries earlier, during the Tang dynasty. She encouraged Kublai to identify publicly with this revered figure as way of solidifying his identification with the Chinese people. Thanks in part to Chabi’s advice and example, he managed to retain his position and his popularity with the Chinese, largely by imitation.
Kublai’s manner of governing increasingly reflected Chinese approaches, especially those formulated by the Confucian scholar Jing Hao, who offered guidance concerning the principles of government. Yet Kublai clung to distinctive Mongol customs. Instead of relying on rigorous civil service examinations to select government officials, as the Confucians urged, he reserved the right to appoint his own choices, so that he would not run the risk of becoming overly dependent on the Chinese for the day-to-day operation of his administration. In this way, Kublai sought to blend his dynasty into the Chinese mainstream while maintaining a distinct Mongol heritage.
Kublai Khan became so adept at juggling these competing demands that he believed he could become all things to all people, the universal sovereign. He never quite achieved his aspiration; in Central Asia, various Mongol strongholds such as Persia and Russia claimed autonomy, although they paid lip service to the Great Khan in the east. Worse, as his reign continued, he presided over the disintegration of the Mongol Empire, even as he strengthened his base—and a very large and prosperous base it was—in China, where he continued his successful “pacification” of the Song, and its wealthy cities, especially the great prize of Hangzhou, located in the Lake District, the most sophisticated and scenic region in all of China.
SUCH WAS THE thriving empire in which Marco found himself. His facility with languages commended him to Kublai, who dispatched him “as a messenger on some important royal business.” Marco’s first stop: a city that he called Caragian, a journey of six months from Cambulac.
The young emissary took pains to prepare for the assignment, and to distinguish himself from other messengers. After their travels through the Mongol kingdom, those messengers returned to Kublai Khan “and were not able to tell him other news of the countries where they were gone.” Marco says that Kublai, in frustration, berated his couriers as “fools and ignorant, and said that he would like better to hear the new things and the customs and the usages of those strange countries than he did to hear those matters for which he had sent them; so Marco, who knew all this well, when he went on that mission, would fix his attention, noting and writing all the novelties and all the strange things that he had heard and seen according to the countries, going and coming, so that he might be able to recount them on his return to satisfy his wish.” With that, Marco Polo the traveler and storyteller was born, and so was the self-promoter and braggart whom other Italians would come to label, with admiration and derision in equal measure, Il Milione, “the Million.”
He saw himself, in contrast, as a conscientious emissary and chronicler: “All things that Master Marco saw and did and with whatever he met of good or bad he put in writing and so told all in order to his lord.” None of these field notes have survived, but it is believed that when he was imprisoned in Genoa he sent for them to assist in the composition of his Travels. Their particulars were etched in his memory.
Marco displayed an unexpected facility for conjuring distant, obscure worlds, making them seem both marvelous and comprehensible to his audience. Kublai was his first assignment editor, his first and most important audience, and ultimately his most compelling subject. Marco describes how the back-and-forth between the two of them worked, revealing, incidentally, how impressed Marco was with himself for pulling off this narrative feat: “When Marco returned from his mission he went before the Great Khan and reported to him all the affair for which he had gone. Then he told him all the novelties and all the things that he had seen on the road so well and cleverly beyond the wont of the other ambassadors who had been sent before that the Great Khan and all his barons were much pleased, and all those who heard him had great wonder at it and commended him for great sense and great goodness.”
Aware of his own uncanny powers of perception, Marco lavishes praise on himself: “This noble youth seemed to have divine rather than human understanding.” Throughout the Mongol court, “there was nothing more wonderful told than of the wisdom of the noble youth, and they said among themselves, ‘If this youth lives for long, he cannot fail to be a man of great sense and of great valor.’” He can only sigh with recognition. “From this mission onward, they honored him not as a youth but as a man of very great age, and thenceforward the youth was called Master Marco Polo at court and so will our book call him in the future, though his virtue and wisdom deserve a much more worthy name than Master Marco. And this is really very right, for he was wise and experienced.”
Kublai Khan’s barons often tired of Marco’s preening. To them, he seemed an obsequious stranger who had inexplicably charmed his way into their leader’s affections. Marco recognized the jealousy he engendered at court. The Great Khan, he claims, “kept him so near to himself that many of the other barons had great vexation at it.”
AS HEIR to the throne of Genghis Khan, Kublai pursued his goal of becoming the “universal emperor,” beginning in the spiritual realm. “He does the same thing at the chief feasts of the Saracens, Jews, and idolaters,” Marco explains. “Being asked about the reason, Kublai Khan said, ‘There are four prophets who are worshipped and to whom everybody does reverence. The Christians say their God was Jesus Christ; the Saracens Mohammed; the Jews Moses, and the idolaters Sagamoni Burcan [the Buddha], who was the first to be represented as God in an idol; and I do honor and reverence all four.’”
Of course, there were major differences among the four faiths cited by Kublai Khan, and in some ways their doctrines are not even compatible, let alone comparable. The Saracens’ Islamic faith was resolutely monotheistic, while the Mongols promoted a shamanistic cosmology overflowing with deities and relying on religious tolerance. Beyond those theological differences loomed an unbridgeable cultural gap. The Muslims sweeping across Asia were intensely urban, putting down roots in cities, where they succeeded in commerce. The nomadic Mongols detested cities and destroyed those in their path. Even in the capital, Karakorum, the Mongols lived outside the walls, on the open Steppe, while Chinese, European, and Muslim inhabitants huddled within.
Kublai Khan ruled first by acknowledging differences, and then by leveling them. Although the khan felt most at home with Buddhism, which flourished all around him and was spreading quickly, he deftly persuaded Marco that of all these religions, Christianity took precedence. “The Great Khan showed he holds that Christian faith for the truer and better,” Marco insists, “because he says that it commands nothing that is not full of goodness and holiness.”
In their roles as “ambassadors to the Pope,” Marco’s father and uncle often asked Kublai Khan the obvious question: If he preferred Christianity, why not renounce all other faiths and declare himself a Christian?
“How do you wish me to make myself a Christian?” asked the khan. From his point of view, Christianity was but one more credo, and far from powerful in his realm. Even the sorcerers in his court had more influence. “You see the Christians who are in these parts are ignorant so that they do nothing and have no power,” Kublai said, “and you see that these idolaters do whatever they wish, and when I sit at the table the cups that are in the middle of the hall come to me full of wine or drink…without anyone touching them, and I drink with them. They compel the storm to go in whatever direction they please, and do many wonderful things, an
d as you know their idols speak and foretell them all that they wish.” In contrast to these potent shamanistic practices, Christianity, with its emphasis on redemption and rewards in an afterlife rather than the here-and-now, offered only a slender thread of hope. “If I am converted to the faith of Christ,” Kublai Khan said, “then my barons and other people who are not attached to the faith of Christ would say to me, ‘What reason has moved you to baptism and to hold the faith of Christ? What virtues or miracles have you seen of Him?’” Should sorcerers or shamans decide to cast an evil spell over him, or poison him, he did not believe the faith of Christ would be sufficient to save him.
IF EMBRACING Christianity threatened to weaken his hold on the Mongol Empire, rewarding the warlords, or “barons,” who served him could only bolster it. Kublai Khan kept their loyalty with exceptionally generous rewards for their allegiance. Barons and lords who defended Kublai on the field of battle received “a great gift of gold and fair silver vessels and many fair jewels, and a superior tablet denoting authority.” According to Mongol custom, Kublai Khan conferred the tablets according to a firm hierarchy. Those who commanded a hundred warriors received a silver tablet, those who commanded a thousand received one made of gold, “and he who has command of ten thousand has a tablet of gold with a lion’s head.” These lucky few were also lavishly rewarded with pearls, precious stones, and horses. And those who commanded a hundred thousand received gold tablets engraved with lions, falcons, the sun, and the moon.
Each tablet of authority conferred by Kublai Khan on one of his loyal barons carried the following inscription: “By the power and strength of the great God and of the great grace that he has given to our emperor, blest be the name of the Great Khan, and may all those who shall not obey him be slain and destroyed.” Recipients also received “warrants on paper” explaining in writing their responsibilities and privileges.
The uppermost rank, those commanding 100,000 men, were highly conspicuous. By order of the khan, anyone of that rank who rode in public did so beneath a golden canopy “as a sign of great authority.” Not only that, but during convocations, he was to sit in a silver chair. As an even greater sign of respect, the khan permitted his barons to ride whatever horses they wished; they could take them from commanders serving under them, not to mention from ordinary soldiers, and they could even ride those belonging to Kublai Khan. The honor conferred by the tablet of authority was great, and obedience to its tenets was absolute: “If any dared not to obey in everything according to the will and command of those who have those tablets, he must die as a rebel against the Great Khan.”
DESPITE THEIR advanced warrior culture and astonishing record of conquests, the Mongols lagged behind the Chinese in technology, art, literature, architecture, philosophy, and dress. They even lacked a common language with which to administer their transcontinental empire. The Mongol court conducted business in a Babel of tongues; there were scribes for Mongolian, Arabic, Persian, Uighur, Tangut, Chinese, and Tibetan, among other languages. The scribes became adept at improvising multilingual written equivalents for the names and titles of Hindu deities, Chinese generals, Muslim holy men, and Persian dignitaries. To reach as many constituents as possible, court scribes translated Uighur—perhaps the most widely spoken tongue—into simplified Chinese characters, but this solution failed to resolve the complex communication quandary facing Kublai Khan and his ministers.
As a loyal servant of Kublai Khan, Marco relied on Mongolian, the tongue of the conqueror, or Persian, the lingua franca of foreigners in the Mongol court. For this reason, Marco frequently used Persian place-names in his account, not because he depended on Persian sources, as some skeptics have argued, but because he was following the accepted practice of the Mongol Empire.
In keeping with his aspiration to become the “universal emperor,” Kublai sought to encourage a common written language for all the peoples of his empire. To bring order to the chaos of Mongol communication, he commissioned an influential Tibetan monk named Matidhvaja Sribhadra to devise an entirely new language: an alphabet capable of transcribing all known tongues. Endowed with prodigious intellectual gifts, the monk was said to have taught himself to read and write soon after birth, and could recite a dense Buddhist text known as the Hevajra Tantra from memory by the age of three. As a result of these accomplishments, he was called ’Phags-pa, Tibetan for “Exceptional One.” Having arrived at the Mongol court in 1253 as an eighteen-year-old prodigy, ’Phags-pa later found special favor with Kublai Khan’s principal wife, Chabi, and came to exert a profound influence over the court.
Although Kublai Khan professed to respect four distinct faiths, ’Phags-pa ensured that his Buddhist sect, the Sa-skya-pa, ranked first among equals. To the Chinese purist, the Mongol version of Buddhism was debased, corrupt; it derived from the Tantric Buddhism of Tibet, whose lamas, “Superior Ones,” demonstrated a proficiency in sorcery that alternately delighted and intimidated the deeply superstitious Mongols and impressed the skeptical Marco Polo.
For a time, ’Phags-pa directed all spiritual matters at court, and even Kublai Khan deferred to him. In exchange for spiritual validation, he bestowed on the young monk a golden mandala said to contain pearls “the size of sheep droppings.” When the two met for their mystical séances, ’Phags-pa sat above his pupil, and when conducting secular business, they traded places. The see-saw relationship was intended to demonstrate a harmonious balance between spiritual and temporal matters.
In 1269, ’Phags-pa, in fulfillment of his commission, presented Kublai Khan with a syllabic alphabet—that is, one in which symbols represent consonants and vowels—consisting of forty-one letters, based on traditional Tibetan. The new written language became known as “square script,” owing to the letters’ form. It was written vertically, from top to bottom, and from left to right, using these symbols:
The system transcribed the spoken Mongolian tongue with more accuracy than its improvised predecessors, and even recorded the sounds of other languages, notably Chinese. Kublai Khan proudly designated this linguistic innovation as the language of Mongol officialdom, and he founded academies to promote its use. The Mongolian Language School opened the same year, and two years later, the National University. ’Phags-pa script appeared on paper money, on porcelain, and in official edicts of the Yüan empire, but scholars and scribes, devoted by sentiment and training to Chinese, Persian, or other established languages, resisted adopting it. Nor did Marco demonstrate familiarity with the new Mongol idiom.
In 1274, about the time the Polo company arrived in Mongolia, ’Phags-pa retired to the Sa-skya-pa monastery in Tibet, where he died in 1280. By that time, his version of Buddhism was falling into disfavor with the Mongols, and his clever script had failed to catch on, except among a small number of adherents who employed it on ceremonial occasions. It remained a worthy but failed experiment in artificial or constructed language.
KUBLAI KHAN’S intimate life was as structured, and as extravagant, as other aspects of his empire. Marco’s high position allowed him to become familiar with Kublai’s extended family, which was large enough to make Europeans gasp in disbelief. “He has four women whom he holds always as his true wives, and the eldest son which he has of these four women ought to be lord of the empire by right when the Great Khan should die,” Marco reports. “The [wives] are called empresses, and each is called also by her proper name. And each of those ladies holds a court by herself in her own palace; for there is none who has not three hundred”—in some versions of Marco’s account, the number swells to a thousand, or even ten thousand—“girls [who are] very fair and amiable.” In all, “they have very many valets and eunuchs, and many other men and women, so that each of these ladies has in her court ten thousand persons.”
Drawing on his familiarity with Kublai, Marco dared to follow this august personage into the bedroom to glimpse his extraordinary sexual behavior. “Whenever he wishes to lie with any one of these four women, he makes her come to his room, and sometim
es he goes to the room of his wife.” As if they were not enough to keep him occupied, the khan had “many other concubines” at his disposal. Marco says that many came from the province of Kungurat, in Afghanistan, the home of a “very handsome and fair-skinned people; these women are very beautiful and adorned with excellent manners.” They moved with uncommon suppleness, altogether feline, seductive, and alluring, and they dressed in a strikingly attention-snaring fashion, wearing a head-piece from which dangled long, glimmering strands of pearls, framing the face, and making the eyebrows into a sharp dark horizontal streak. The pearl headpiece focused their gaze until their dark eyes haunted the dreams of an emperor—or an impressionable young Venetian.
Like so much else in the Mongol court, the process of selecting concubines fit to serve the khan was highly ritualized. Every other year, Marco explains, “The Great Khan sends his messengers to…find him the most beautiful girls according to the standard that he gives them, four hundred, five hundred, more or less, as they think right.”
Once assembled, the girls appeared before “judges deputed for this purpose, who, seeing and considering all the parts of each separately—that is, the hair, the face, and the eyebrows, the mouth, the lips, and the other limbs—that they may be harmonious and proportioned to the body, value some at sixteen carats, others at seventeen, eighteen, twenty.” Only those fortunate girls awarded twenty carats or more were selected and ushered into the presence of Kublai Khan himself, where they submitted to the scrutiny of still more judges. The procedure yielded forty maidens valued at the highest number of carats and, as Marco puts it, “chosen for his own room.”
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