Laurence Bergreen

by Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu

  At first the wearing of silk was restricted to the emperor and his family. But over time, people from many classes of Chinese society took to wearing silk tunics, and silk eventually found a variety of industrial applications in fishing lines, strings for musical instruments, and silk-rag paper. By the time of the Han dynasty, 206 BC to AD 220, silk had become so widespread in China, and so deeply embedded in the Chinese economy, that it was a valuable commodity in itself, useful for paying debts. Farmers remitted taxes to the government in the form of silk they produced. The government in turn compensated civil servants in silk, and rewarded subjects for outstanding services in silk. Soon silk supplanted gold as a standard measure; rather than pounds of gold, value was calculated in lengths of silk. Eventually, silk became a form of currency, not only within China but also in settling debts with foreign nations. Silk became so much a part of the Chinese economy, way of life, and culture that 5 percent of Mandarin Chinese characters referred to some aspect of silk.

  The Chinese monopoly on silk was eventually broken by competing countries. By 200 BC, the Koreans had mastered the rudiments of sericulture thanks to Chinese immigrants who brought the specialized knowledge with them. Five hundred years later, sericulture had spread along diverse “silk roads” to India, where it was embraced with the same vigor. Silk reached all the way to Rome, which became fascinated by the alluring textile. In about the fourth century BC, Roman accounts mention Seres, the semimythical Kingdom of Silk.

  It is possible that the Roman legions first encountered actual silk at the Battle of Carrhae, near the Euphrates River, in 53 BC. It was said that the Parthians’ vivid silk banners unfurling in the wind startled the Roman troops, who promptly fled the battlefield. Within only a few decades, nobles in Rome wore Chinese silks as a sign of status, much as Chinese emperors had done for thousands of years. The Roman emperor Heliogabalus, who reigned briefly in the third century AD, insisted on wearing only silk. And near the end of the fourth century, one Roman report noted: “The use of silk which was once confined to the nobility has now spread to all classes without distinction, even to the lowest.”

  Despite the inevitable dispersion of silk, the Chinese remained vigilant, and they succeeded in keeping the secrets of advanced sericulture to themselves until AD 550, when a pair of Nestorian monks appeared in the court of the emperor Justinian I with silkworm eggs concealed in their hollow bamboo walking sticks. In short order, the eggs hatched worms, the worms spun their cocoons, and Bombyx mori had come to the Byzantine Empire, bringing silk with it. Emulating China, the Byzantine Empire attempted to monopolize the production of its silk, and to retain control over the secrets of sericulture. While Byzantine silk soon eroded the market for the ordinary Chinese variety, most luxurious Chinese textiles continued to dominate markets in Central Asia, and were prized wherever they could be found. Soon Persia joined India and the Byzantine Empire in the war for sericultural supremacy. But even as Chinese silk lost ground to lower-grade foreign competitors, it continued to bring in extensive revenues and to impart a sense of economic and cultural unity to the empire.

  At the time of Marco Polo’s stay, silk was just beginning to be produced in Italy, more than four thousand years after sericulture appeared in China. During the Second Crusade (1144–1149), two thousand silk weavers had migrated from Constantinople to Europe, and they disseminated trade secrets the Chinese had guarded for millennia. But for young Marco, silk remained an exotic novelty still identified with China.

  THE JOURNEY continued to be idyllic until Marco came to a “province much wasted and destroyed,” as he bluntly states, “by the scourge of the Tartars”: Tibet. At this point in his travels, Marco had passed beyond the limits of European experience with Asia, and that is why it is occasionally difficult to determine the modern equivalents for the kingdoms and people he says he encountered. His trip to “Tibet” probably took him to the province of Yunnan in southern China, as well as to Burma, Vietnam, and vaguely defined regions to the north.

  “Tibet” both fascinated and repelled Marco. As a merchant, he was intrigued with the spices—ginger and cinnamon, and still others he had never before seen, and failed to name—all growing in abundance. Amber appeared ubiquitous. Silk abounded. Coral, another medium of exchange, caught his attention, too. The locals, he says, “put it on the necks of all their wives and of their idols and hold it for a great jewel.”

  The region’s anarchy and rampant superstition troubled Marco greatly, but he found himself succumbing to the spell cast by the powerful astrologer-magicians. He reports: “They do the most rare enchantments in the world, and the greatest marvels to hear and see, and all by devils’ art, which is not good to tell in our book, because the people would be too much surprised.” Once he has whetted his audience’s appetite, Marco proceeds to tell exactly what these demonic astrologers were capable of doing. “They bring on tempests and lightning and thunderbolts whenever they wish and compel them whenever [they wish them] to cease, and do infinite wonders.”

  Returning to a subject that both fascinated and repelled him, Marco dramatizes in frightening detail the elaborate manner in which the conjurers attempted to exorcise the vulnerable sick: “When the magicians arrive, they ask about the manner of the sickness; then the sick persons tell them their ills, and the magicians begin to sound their instruments and to dance and leap until one of the magicians falls all on his back on the ground or on the pavement and foams at the mouth and seems dead. They say that the devil is inside his body, and he stays in such a manner that he seems dead. When the other magicians, of whom there were many, see that one of them is fallen in such a way as you have heard, they begin to speak to him and ask him what sickness this sick man has, and why he has it. One answers, ‘Such a spirit has smitten him because he did him some displeasure.’

  “The other magicians say to him, ‘We pray thee that thou pardon him and that thou take from him for the restoration of his health those things that thou wishes to have.’”

  Marco fearlessly probes the ecstatic spiritual life of these “Tibetans”: “When these magicians have said many words and have prayed, the spirit who is in the body of the magician who has fallen down answers. If it seems the sick man must die, he…says, ‘This sick man has done so much wrong to such a spirit and is so bad a man that the spirit will not be pacified by any sacrifice or pardon him for anything in the world.’ This is the answer for those who must die.

  “If the sick man must be healed, then the spirit in the body of the magician says, ‘He has offended much, yet it shall be forgiven him. If the sick man wishes to be healed, let him take two or three sheep, and let him also make ten drinks or more, very dear and good.’…They have the sheep cooked in the house of the sick man, and, if the sick man is to live, so many of these magicians and so many of those ladies…come there. When they are come there and the sheep and drinks are made ready, then they begin to play and to dance and to sing.”

  At this point in Marco’s account, one of the magicians collapses, “as if dead, and foams at the mouth.” Those left standing beseech the “idol” to forgive and heal the sick man. At times, the idol responds in the affirmative, at other moments, he replies that the sick man “is not yet fully forgiven.”

  Having exacted still more tribute, “the spirit answers, after the sacrifice and all things commanded are done, that he [the sick man] is pardoned and he will soon be healed. When they have this answer, and have sprinkled broth and drink and have made a great light and great censing, believing that in this way they have given the spirit his share, they say that the spirit is on their side and is appeased, and they all joyfully send the sick man home, and he is made whole.”

  On occasion, the sufferer died after the magicians pronounced him healed. Nor did everyone who fell sick receive attention. A rite of this complexity was reserved for the wealthy, and took place only once or twice a month, according to Marco, who was ever attentive to finances, even where magic was concerned.

  The indivi
duals practicing these black arts, Marco insists, were deeply suspect, “bad men of evil habits.” They looked the part, too, accompanied by the “very largest mastiff dogs in the world, which are as large as asses and are very good at catching all sorts of wild beasts.”

  IN TIBET, Marco confronted the dark side of the Mongol conquest of Asia. To his credit, he describes in unflinching detail the havoc wrought by Kublai’s brother Möngke, who, Marco flatly states, “destroyed [Tibet] by war.” Following the path of Möngke’s devastation, Marco experienced stabs of anxiety and dread the likes of which had not appeared in his account since his poignant description of crossing the Gobi Desert. The experience challenged his assumptions about the nature of the Mongol Empire and his small place in it. Alone in the desolate world, Marco had nothing more than his talismanic paiza to clutch for reassurance, a reminder of the comfort, indulgence, and grandeur of Cambulac and especially Kublai Khan, several thousand miles to the east. Even though the gold paiza conferred a special status on Marco as the khan’s emissary, the object did nothing to dispel his sense of bewilderment at the chaos surrounding him, some of it caused by Möngke, some by the baffling and seemingly perverse nature of the Tibetans. All around him was evidence of the original Mongol culture—nomadic, predatory, its values utterly different from the charitable ethic that Kublai Khan championed.

  Marco passed through a desiccated landscape drained of color and harmony, the somber aftermath of conquest. In disgust, he recounts what he saw in the “dilapidated and ruined” region: “One passes for twenty days’ journey through inhabited places, through which a vast multitude of wild beasts roam, such as lions, lynxes, and other kinds; for which reason the passage is dangerous.” But the dangers would only increase as he ventured ever deeper into Tibet.

  POP! Pop! Pop!

  The explosive reverberation tearing through the curtain of night frightened Marco, as it did everyone else new to the region, and there was no escaping it. Eventually he found the explanation: “There are found in that region, and specially near the rivers, very wonderfully thick and large canes”—three palms around, he estimated, and fifteen paces long. “The merchants and other wayfarers who go through such country, when they wish to rest by night, take some of those canes with them and put them on a cart, and make a fire of them, because when they are in the fire, they make so great crackling and so great report that the lions and the bears and the other fierce beasts have so great a fear of it that when they hear those terrible reports they fly as far as they can, and would not try to come near the fire for anything in the world. And the men make fires like this to protect themselves and their animals from the fierce wild beasts of which there are so many.”

  Marco knew just how to perform this critical task: “One takes some of these canes all green and makes great bundles of them in the evening, and puts them on a fire of logs at some distance from the camp…. And when these canes have stayed awhile in this great fire, then feeling the heat they are twisted this way and that and split in half, popping terribly as they split, and then make so great a report that it is heard well ten miles off by night.”

  Pop!

  The noise was so loud, Marco claims, that anyone unaccustomed to hearing it “becomes all terrified, so horrible a thing is it to hear.” Indulging his taste for whimsy, he claims that the unsuspecting traveler might even “lose his senses and die” from the cacophony. Marco recommends an equally unlikely remedy against this possibility: stuff the ears with cotton, then bind the head, face, and even clothing until the newcomer becomes accustomed to the popping canes.

  The horses’ reaction to the noise presented a serious problem. They became “so violently frightened” that they broke “halters and all other ropes” and fled from it. Neophyte merchants such as Marco learned to take precautions against losing their mounts this way; the proper method to prevent horses from bolting was to fetter their feet. Experienced merchants plying the route brought shackles with them for just this purpose. In time, the horses became conditioned to the racket, and no longer needed to be hobbled every time the canes were set ablaze.

  TO MARCO’S EYES, marriageable young women of Tibet were as blighted as the region, sullied by “an absurd and most detestable abuse” contrary to the laws of nature. He observes: “No man [there] would take a maiden for wife for anything in the world, but every man requires in her whom he wishes to take to wife that she shall first have been known by many men, and they say that they are worth nothing if they are not used and accustomed to lie with many men.” As if obsessed, Marco repeats variations on the theme: virgin brides were displeasing to the gods worshipped by these people; having many lovers was proof that a bride-to-be was, in fact, desirable; and the value of a bride increased according to the number of men who have sampled her delights.

  Merchants such as Marco who strayed into the region fell prey to the villagers’ schemes to secure bedmates for local young women. “When they perceive that some caravan of merchants or the people of other strange lands pass through that country and have stretched their tents for lodging,” Marco says, “then the old men of the villages and of the hamlets bring their daughters to these tents; and these are by twenty, and by forty, and by more and by less according to the number of foreigners so that each one has his own; and give them to the men who will take them, one vying with another in begging the merchants to take his daughter, that they may…lie with them.”

  Marco’s dispassionate account of these bizarre proceedings suggests that the young women of the region failed to suit his fancy and that the commercial nature of the transaction dismayed him. However, that did not deter him from describing the practice in full: “Then the men take them and enjoy themselves with them and keep them as long as they wish there, but cannot take them with them to another place, nor to another district, forward or backward. And then when the men have done their will with them and they wish to go, it is the custom for him to give some jewel, or some other token to that woman with whom he has lain, so that she can show proof and sign when she comes to be married that she has had a paramour. In such a way it is the custom for each girl to have more than twenty tokens on her neck to show that many men have lain with her.” A girl adorned in this manner was “received by her parents with joy and honor,” Marco says. “Happy is she who can show that she has had more presents from more strangers.” Yes, he reluctantly admits, “young gentlemen from sixteen years to twenty-four”—his age group—“will do well to have as many of these girls at their will as they should ask for and should be begged to take without any cost.”

  Marco often demonstrated that he was no prude, but sex Tibetan style offended his sensibilities. Seeking the moral high ground, he reminds his European audience, and himself, that these people were “idolaters and extremely treacherous and cruel and wicked, for they hold it no sin to rob and to do evil, and I believe they are the greatest scoundrels and the greatest thieves in the world.”

  Nevertheless, their women were very eager in bed.

  THE WOMEN of the adjacent province, Gaindu, appeared even more bizarre to Marco than did the daughters of Tibet. The men, Marco relates, did not “regard it as villainy if a foreigner or other man shames him at pleasure with his wife or with his daughter or with his sister or with any woman whom he may have in his house.” More astonishing, he “regards it as a great good when [a foreigner] lies with them.” Indeed, the man of the house “strictly commands” his wives and daughters to make themselves available to travelers such as Marco, and removes himself “to his field or to his vines and does not come back there so long as the stranger stays in his house. And I tell you that many times [the foreigner] stays there three days or four, eight and sometimes ten, and lies in bed enjoying himself with the wife of that wretch or his daughter or sister or whoever he shall wish.” All the while, he hangs his hat in the window or displays it in the courtyard as a sign that he is inside. “And the cuckold wretch, so long as he sees that token at his house, does not dare go back at all,
knowing that the stranger is there, lest he should hinder him in his pleasures.” More surprising still, after the visitor departs, the master of the house returns to find “his family all joyful and happy, and rejoices with them, making them tell all the entertainment they made for the stranger, and all with joy give thanks to the gods.”

  Although he enjoyed titillating his audience with this lurid description, Marco denounced the practice as a “vile custom” outlawed by Kublai Khan—not that anyone in this remote region paid much attention to the remote leader’s edicts.

  Marco hints that the practice caused him keen embarrassment as he left Gaindu. Families inhabiting the “rugged places of the mountains near the roads” extended their peculiar form of hospitality to itinerant merchants, who repaid their kindness with a bit of fabric “or other thing of little cost.” Marco probably did just that, but ran afoul of his hosts. He relates that when such a merchant mounted his horse to depart, the man of the house and his wife mocked him and shouted curses: “See what you have left to us that you have forgotten!” they cried. “Show us what you have taken of ours!”

  And with these words of derision ringing in his ears, the unsettled foreigner galloped away.

  MARCO PAUSED just long enough to take note of an eye-catching bush that he took to be a clove. Not knowing quite what to make of it, he diligently reports that it “has twigs and leaves like a laurel in manner…. The flower it makes is white and small as in the clove, when it is ripe it is dusky black.” M. G. Pauthier, the nineteenth-century French scholar and editor, concluded that Marco meant Assam, or black tea—an especially interesting observation because it had long been assumed that the Venetian, despite all his years in China, never mentioned tea. Other commentators retorted that Marco was actually talking about the aromatic cassia tree, whose bark provides cinnamon. That is a less likely explanation because almost in the same breath Marco mentions cinnamon, implying that it was quite different from this particular flower.