Laurence Bergreen

by Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu

  Most likely, Marco was describing tea without realizing what it was. Unlike the Chinese, the Mongols drank koumiss and rarely sipped tea. No wonder Marco was unfamiliar with it.

  JUDGING FROM HIS familiarity with Mongol commerce, Marco probably served as a tax collector for Kublai Khan, and most likely he collected revenues from salt, a vital commodity in the empire. Kublai frequently gave this task to foreigners who roamed the empire in his employ, and Marco was a good candidate for the assignment: throughout his account, he discusses the uses and economics of salt with ease and authority.

  Earlier in the Travels, he had spoken of paper money, and silk money, about which Europeans would remain deeply skeptical. Now he would take up money in the form of salt, a concept still more baffling to Western sensibilities. Marco explains how this sort of currency was produced in the region: “They take salt water and have it boiled in a pan…for an hour [until] it becomes stiff like paste, and they cast it into a mold, and it is made into shapes…that are flat on the under-side and are round above, and it is of a size that can weigh about half a pound.” The salt cakes were placed on fire-heated stones until they dried. “On this sort of money they put the seal of the lord; nor can money of this kind be made by others than the officers of the lord.”

  Once he became familiar with the intricacies of trading these homemade hard salt cakes for gold, Marco realized they presented an opportunity to acquire a substance whose intrinsic value he fully appreciated. Throughout “Tibet,” he saw merchants “go through mountains” to reach remote hamlets where they traded salt cakes for gold to “make vast gain and profit, because those people use that salt in food, and also buy things that they need. But in the cities they use almost nothing but the broken pieces of the coins in food, and spend the whole coins.” One can sense Marco’s wonder at this odd transaction, in which both sides came away with the item they believed they needed. The government salt monopoly, it seemed to him, was virtually a license to print, or in this case boil and bake, money.

  MARCO next turned his attention to a place he called Karagian, his rendering of the Turkish name for the modern Chinese province of Yunnan.

  Although ruled by Kublai Khan’s son Temür, Karagian offered scant reassurance for the unsuspecting merchant traveler. It was a land where quantities of “very great adders…very hideous things to see and to examine” lurked in the swampy muck. The creatures were ten paces long, and thick as a man. Barely containing his disgust, Marco endeavors to portray these brutes: “They have two short legs in front near the head, which have no feet, except that they have three claws, namely, two small and one larger claw made sharp like a falcon’s or a lion’s.” The creature’s massive head was the stuff of nightmares, with its two shining eyes, each the size of “four dinars.” As for the mouth, Marco would have his audience believe that it was “so large that it would well swallow a man [or] an ox at one time,” tearing its victim to shreds with “very large and sharp teeth.” In sum, says Marco, “it is so very exceedingly hideous and great and fierce that there is no man nor beast that does not fear them.”

  The monsters were, of course, neither adders nor serpents, but crocodiles. Marco resolutely outlines how to catch one of them without getting eaten alive. Hunters, he explains, “put a trap in the road by which they see that the adders are usually gone toward the water, because they know they must pass there again. They fix a very thick and strong wooden stake so deeply in the ground—that is, in the road of those adders, on some sloping bank by which the path descends—that…none of the stake is seen; in which stake is fixed a sword made like a razor or like a lance, and it projects about a palm above the stake, very sharp and cutting and always sloping toward the approach of the serpents. And he covers it with earth or sand so that the adder does not see it at all. And the hunters put very many such stakes there in many places…. When the…serpent comes down the middle of the road where the irons are, it strikes them with such force that the iron enters it by the breast and rends it as far as the navel, so that it dies immediately. When they see them dead, the crows begin to clamor. One knows by the noise of birds that the serpent is dead, and then [the hunters] go there to find it.”

  The hunters risk their lives, Marco explains, for the animals’ medicinal value: “When they have taken it, skinning it immediately, they draw the gall from the belly and sell it very dear. It is much prized because great medicine is made of it, for if a man is bitten by a mad dog, and one gives him a little…to drink in wine,…he is healed immediately. And again, when a lady cannot give birth and has pain and cries aloud, then they give her a little of that serpent’s gall in drink, and then the lady gives birth immediately…. The third virtue is that when one has any eruption like a boil or other worse thing that grows upon the body, then one puts a little of this gall on it, and it is healed in a few days.”

  No matter how grotesque the crocodile’s appearance, its meat was prized as a delicacy. “They sell the flesh of this serpent because it is very good to eat and they eat it very gladly,” Marco reports. And the reptile even helped, in its awful way, to protect humans from other predators by devouring the newborn cubs of wolves, lions, and bears “while their parents cannot defend them.”

  Through arduous study, Marco came to realize that the crocodile, for all its ferocity, could be an unexpected ally in the daily struggle for survival.

  AS AN EMISSARY of Kublai Khan, Marco familiarized himself with the Mongols’ bloody attempts to subdue Karagian. The region was home to various tribes far removed from the refinements of Chinese civilization. Despite their very distinct and insular character, the tribes acknowledged arm’s-length Chinese rule during the Qin (221–206 BC) and Han dynasties, but ultimate power remained in local hands, with tribal chieftains, who lived by their own codes. Chinese inhabitants were few and far between, obvious outsiders in the province.

  By the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907), a kingdom known as Nanzhao had emerged as the dominant political and cultural power in the area, and it unified the disparate warlords, bringing a measure of sophistication to this otherwise primitive area. At its peak, just before Marco’s arrival, Nanzhao sheltered artisans who produced elegant fabrics woven from cotton and silk. The kingdom also provided salt—perhaps Marco’s reason for visiting in his capacity as a tax assessor—as well as gold. For a time, China’s policies encouraged Nanzhao to prosper, in part as a buffer against aggressive tribes in neighboring areas, but during the Song dynasty (960–1279), Chinese power declined. By the time Marco presented himself at the Mongol court, Kublai Khan was determined to bring this distant kingdom into line with a strenuously applied Pax Mongolica, but the tenacity of Nanzhao’s warlords promised to make doing so a very difficult task, with the prospect of only partial success.

  Although Marco says the inevitable combat occurred in 1272, the date is incorrect, the result either of a faulty manuscript or of his own flawed attempt to convert it from the Mongol lunar calendar to the European Julian system. According to reliable Chinese sources, the events occurred in 1277, just before Marco arrived in the region. In any case, when he came on the scene, memories of the spectacular carnage were still fresh, and it seemed as if the neighing of horses and the thrumming of arrows had only just subsided.

  As Marco learned, Kublai Khan’s pacification of the region came at the cost of a series of bloody and spectacular battles. In this varied, often mountainous terrain, the Mongols were out of their element, and they relied on local mercenaries for support. Their forces met with fierce resistance from a local warlord, whom Marco calls the king of Mien—that is, Myanmar, or Burma—and Bengal. This warlord, determined to repel Kublai Khan’s forces, vowed to “put them all to death in such a way that the Great Khan shall never wish to send another army against him.”

  IN PREPARATION for battle, the king of Mien and Bengal assembled a force of two thousand “very large” elephants “well armed and prepared for war.” Each carried a “castle of wood, very strong and very well made a
nd planned for combat.” And each castle, or howdah, contained “at least twelve men well armed to shoot arrows and fight.” In addition, the king’s army deployed “sixty thousand armed men on the ground, between those on horses, and [those] on foot.”

  This tremendous army—its horses, elephants, men, and followers, all of them led by the king himself—pursued the forces of Kublai Khan until it was just three days’ journey away, and there the troops pitched their tents to gather strength for the battle to come. The Mongol general Nescradin led an army of just twelve thousand horsemen, whom he exhorted to do their utmost in battle. He tried to convince them that the soldiers serving the king of Mien and Bengal, though overwhelming in number, were “inexperienced in arms and not practiced in war.” Therefore, he said, the Mongol troops “must not fear the multitude of the enemy but trust in their own skill that had already been tried in many places [and] in so many enterprises that their name was feared and dreaded not only by the enemy but all the world.” If they lived up to their valorous reputation, they would win a “certain and undoubted victory.”

  According to Marco, Nescradin could be as shrewd as he was eloquent. He took care to station his men on a great plain beside a dense jungle—too dense for the king’s elephants to enter. If by chance the beasts approached, Nescradin planned to send his Mongol troops into the jungle “and shoot arrows at them in safety.”

  EUROPEANS habitually dismissed elephants as ineffective and dangerous in battle, even though they were the largest animal on land. But in Asia, tamed elephants had played a role in military conflicts for thousands of years. They carried heavy loads for armies on the march; in battle, they charged at fifteen miles per hour, although they had difficulty coming to a halt. A herd of stampeding elephants could crush enemy forces, who found themselves defenseless before the onslaught. Elephants terrified horses and camels, which turned and ran away. Their size afforded a great advantage to soldiers stationed on top of them; javelin throwers and archers could hurl their weapons from a great height into fleeing enemy forces on the ground. They did have drawbacks—a badly wounded elephant could thrash about wildly and menace its own army—but they were more than a match for the boldest Mongol horsemen.

  THE TWO SIDES took each other’s measure for several days, while Mongol military intelligence went to work. Mongol spies learned the length of the arrows used by the enemy, and made sure that their own warriors’ arrows were shorter, so as to be incompatible with the enemy’s in battle. That way, the enemy would be unable to reuse them in bows designed for a longer weapon.

  The Mongol arrow combined aerodynamic elegance with surgical precision. It was three feet long and perfectly balanced, with three rows of feathers at the butt for stability in flight. On occasion, the Mongols poisoned the tips, or dipped them in salt or another substance designed to inflict maximum pain. The deadly missile symbolized the Mongols’ mastery of military technology, and, coupled with their horsemanship, foretold success in combat.

  With the battle about to begin, both sides approached within a mile on an open plain, where the enemy king “posted his battalions of elephants and all the castles and the men above well armed for the fight.” Behind them were thousands of soldiers on horseback, which he had arranged “very well wisely, like the wise king that he was,…leaving a great space between. And there he began to inspire his men, telling them that they should determine to fight bravely because they were sure of victory, being four to one, and had so many elephants and castles that the enemy would not be able to look at them, having never fought with such animals.”

  The instruments signaling the commencement of battle sounded, and the king himself took off on horseback in the direction of the waiting enemy.

  The Mongol forces observed the king and his troops approaching, but did not move until the two armies were face to face. When there was “nothing wanting but to begin the battle, then the horses of the Tartars, when they saw the elephants, were terrified in such a way that the Tartars could not bring them forward toward the enemy, but they always turned themselves back,” with the king’s forces in pursuit.

  Nescradin ordered his men to dismount and to lead their horses into the surrounding jungle and tie them to trees; then he urged them to take up their bows and arrows “of which they knew well how to make use, better than any people in the world.” They advanced in unison on the elephants and began to shoot their arrows directly at the creatures’ heads. “They shot so many arrows at them with so great vigor and shouting that it seemed a wonderful thing,” Marco says. “Some of the elephants were severely wounded and killed in a short time, and many of the men, also.”

  At the same time, the king’s soldiers perched in their castles “drew arrows also on the Tartars very liberally, and gave them a very vigorous attack. But their arrows did not wound so gravely as did those of the Tartars, which were drawn with greater strength.” And the Mongols, Marco informs his audience, “defended themselves very bravely.” Arrows flew so thick and fast that the elephants received wounds “on every side of the body.”

  The pressure on the king’s elephant-borne forces mounted until the animals “felt the pain of the wounds…that came in such numbers like rain, and were frightened by the great noise of the shouting,” Marco says. “I tell you that they turned themselves in rout and in flight towards the people of the king with so great an uproar that it seemed like the whole world must be rent, putting the army of the king of Mien into the greatest confusion.” The panicked elephants charged this way and that “till at last in terror they hid in a part of the wood where no Tartars were, with such impetuosity that those who guided them could not hold them nor bring them in another direction.” The elephants blindly plunged deep into the jungle, smashing the castles high upon their backs into the trees, “with no small slaughter of those who were in the castles.” The Mongols watched the disoriented elephants wander off, beyond any hope of recovery.

  THEN NESCRADIN turned his attention to the suddenly unprotected king of Mien and Bengal. The Mongol soldiers mounted their horses “with great order and discipline” and advanced on the king, “who was not a little frightened when he saw the line of elephants scattered.”

  The king stood his ground, despite his weakening position, as the warring troops finally engaged in hand-to-hand combat “with such vigor, with such slaying of men, with such spilling of blood, that it was a wonderful thing.” Marco reports that the king’s troops “bravely” defended themselves with their arrows, “and when they had…drawn all the arrows, they laid hands on swords and on clubs of iron and ran upon one another very fiercely.”

  The superbly equipped Mongol forces were destined to prevail in hand-to-hand combat. The warriors rode into battle wearing their version of chain mail: metal squares attached to flexible animal skin. The Mongol suit of armor featured a mirror over the heart, in the belief that mirrors could deflect and even destroy evil forces, such as enemy spears, simply by reflecting them. The warriors also wore a vest made of finely worked mesh, to prevent arrows from piercing the flesh, and carried hooks designed to grab on to an enemy’s chain mail so as to drag that warrior to the ground. Even their boots were adapted to the rigors of the Steppe, with upturned toes to create an air pocket as insulation against frostbite.

  Marco describes the ensuing carnage in an eloquent crescendo: “Now one could see hard and bitter blows given and received with swords and with clubs; now one could see knights killed, and horses; now one could see feet and hands and arms cut off, shoulders and heads; for you may know that many fell to the ground dead and wounded to death. The cry and the noise there were so great that one did not hear God thundering. The fighting and the battle was very great and most evil on all sides; but yet you may know with no mistake that the Tartars had the better of it, for in an evil hour was it begun for the king and for his people, so many of them were killed that day in that battle.

  “At last the king of Mien, seeing that it was impossible to make them stand or to resist the attac
k of the Tartars, the greater part of his army being either wounded or dead, and all the field full of blood and covered with slain horses and men, and that they were beginning to turn the back, he, too, set himself to fly with the remainder of his people.

  “When the Tartars saw those that were turned in flight, they went beating and chasing and killing them so evilly that it was a pity to see, for they were for the most part dead. And the Tartars had the victory.”

  MARCO FAULTS the ill-starred king of Mien and Bengal, who should have “waited for them in a wide plain where they would not have been able to bear the charge of the first armed elephants; and then with the two wings of horse and foot he should have surrounded them and destroyed them.” Such an outcome was not to be. The Mongol army came away from the battle with a great prize, more than two hundred elephants. Those elephants were far from the dumb beasts Marco had once taken them for; he now claimed that “the elephant has greater understanding than any other animal that is.”

  In the end, Marco pays tribute to the victors, his Mongol masters: “This day’s work was the cause of the Great Khan winning all the lands of the king of Mien and Bengal, and making them subject to his rule.”

  Unlike the regions around Cambulac, Karagian was Mongol in name only. Despite the Pax Mongolica imposed on it, the southwestern province remained treacherous, even for the most experienced traveler. Marco had painstakingly mastered his survival skills, but peril awaited him at every turn.