Laurence Bergreen

by Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu

  AGAINST THE ADVICE of his councilors, Kublai Khan prepared for a third invasion of Japan.

  In 1283, two years after the kamikaze demolished the Mongol fleet, the shipyards of southern China sprang to life once more, obeying the Great Khan’s orders to build five hundred new battleships. Two years later, the Khan demanded the same contribution from the Manchurians of northern China. The Chinese protested Kublai’s warlike excesses, as did his own advisers. Opposition to the undertaking became universal, and in 1286 Kublai Khan reluctantly abandoned his visions of conquest.

  AFTER THE ROUT in Japan, Kublai Khan never regained his political power or his diplomatic dexterity, and the entire Yüan empire suffered from diminished prestige. Kublai’s modern biographer Morris Rossabi observes: “The failures shattered the Mongols’ mantle of invincibility in East Asia.” And everyone took note. “One of the principal underpinnings of their power—the psychological edge of terror they held over their opponents—was badly shaken, if not dislodged.”

  In defeat, Kublai Khan retreated from reality. He passed his days and nights feasting on boiled mutton, eggs, raw vegetables in pancakes, koumiss, and beer. He became depressed and obese. Portraits of the Great Khan in old age show him grown as fat as a Buddha, but not nearly so happy. How could he rejoice with his empire collapsing all around him, his favorite wife and son both dead, and his reputation in tatters? He sought relief from his political and physical ills in a variety of miracle cures, everything from drugs to more drinking to the incantations of shamans from as far away as Korea. None of the spells proved efficacious, and his drinking became still more excessive. The expansive yet shrewd monarch who had once greeted Marco Polo and his father and uncle had given way to a sad and self-pitying old man whose weaknesses encouraged his enemies.

  Marco looked on in dismay as the Great Khan, along with the entire Yüan dynasty, nearly succumbed to the subversive designs of a single highly placed individual.

  HIS NAME WAS AHMAD, and he had risen from obscurity to become the most powerful Muslim official during Kublai Khan’s long reign. Ahmad specialized in finance, an area in which the Mongols lacked expertise, and he cunningly turned his influence and high status to tremendous personal profit. He had the arrogance of a minister secure in his sovereign’s trust. He was Kublai Khan’s gatekeeper, feared and secretly despised, who bullied everyone at court and held them at bay, at least for a time. While the khan was devoting his energies to brilliant military conquests, his minister was conducting a reign of terror in the palace.

  Ahmad made himself indispensable to the khan, yet remained an outsider because he was a Muslim. Although Kublai declared the prophet Muhammad to be one of the empire’s four spiritual beacons, he himself preferred to keep Muslims at arm’s length. Skilled in finance and trade, Muslims had their uses, Kublai believed. And they were considered more trustworthy than the Chinese, if only because they were beholden to the Mongols, in the same way that Marco was. Of the many Muslims who energetically served Kublai Khan, none rose higher or posed a greater threat to the Mongol rule of China—and the Polo family’s secure niche within it—than Ahmad. In his hunger for power, he came close to toppling the Yüan dynasty.

  Marco observed Ahmad’s rise and fall firsthand; he knew the principals and was able to describe their bewilderment at the thought of one man—an outsider, no less—nearly toppling Kublai Khan. The entire affair was heavily documented in Mongol and Chinese annals, and was described by the Persian historian Rashid al-Din in 1304, not long after the events transpired, but it was unknown in the West. Marco Polo’s account marked the first time that Europeans heard of the power-hungry Ahmad and the dangerous machinations of the Mongol court.

  TRADITION HOLDS that Ahmad hailed from a region south of Tashkent that the Mongols conquered fifty years before the Polo family traveled to China. The region, largely Muslim, was populated by Iranian and Turkic ethnic groups. Ahmad first appears in historical records as the retainer of a prominent member of the Quonggirat tribe who happened to be the brother-in-law of Genghis Khan. Later, he attracted the attention of Kublai, who came to rely on him for financial administration. In his account, Marco speaks of Ahmad as “a clever and strong man, who had great influence and authority with the Khan, who was so fond of him that he had every liberty.”

  The theme of their collaboration was centralization, an approach that was utterly foreign to the nomadic Mongols, who had devised strategies for controlling sprawling regions with a minimum of bureaucracy. Kublai Khan, in contrast, labored to consolidate his empire by emulating the Chinese. While Kublai sought new worlds to conquer, Ahmad patiently restructured finances from one end of the empire to the other. He won appointment as commissioner of the imperial granary, and in this capacity established the Office for Harmonious Purchase; the idea was to buy grain at a fixed price to hold in reserve against the possibility of war and famine. In practice, the Office for Harmonious Purchase, along with a sister institution, the Office for Regulated Management, simply confiscated goods for the Mongol court. Ahmad made sure that Kublai Khan and his barons had everything they needed to live in their magnificent and self-indulgent style.

  BY 1262, Ahmad had won promotion to the Secretarial Council, another Mongol stronghold, and appointment as commissioner of transportation throughout the empire. He lobbied to increase the salt tax, a potent source of revenue, and to buttress the central government’s grain reserves. Although he managed to consolidate his financial control over the Mongol realm, he bridled at having to answer to the council itself. For twenty years, Ahmad did battle with the council, trying to overrule it, circumvent it, marginalize it—anything that would make him answerable to Kublai Khan alone. His great adversary was the Chinese bureaucrat Chang Wen-ch’ien, who insisted on a strictly observed hierarchy in government. Time and again, Chang Wen-ch’ien persuaded the khan to keep the council’s powers intact.

  Two years later, Ahmad won appointment as a director of political affairs for the Secretarial Council and, even more impressive, controller of the Imperial Treasure. He knew more about the finances of the Mongol Empire than anyone else, and exercised more power over it than anyone, with the exception of the khan. While Kublai Khan was engaging in sexual gymnastics with six concubines at a time, Ahmad was overseeing the administration of the empire’s finances. But Ahmad also maintained a large harem to which he constantly added by tendering lucrative government jobs in exchange for women he fancied. Husbands offered him their wives, and fathers their daughters, in return for coveted appointments.

  Marco sharply observes: “There was no fair lady with whom, if he wanted her, he did not have his will, taking her for his harem if she was not married, or otherwise making her consent. When he knew that someone had a pretty daughter, he had his ruffians who went to the father of the girl, saying to him, ‘…Give her for wife to Ahmad, and we will make him give you a governorship or an office for three years.’ And so he gave Ahmad his daughter.” In these transactions, Ahmad always got his way, both with the khan, who would agree to the appointment, and with the girl in question, who had no other choice.

  AHMAD’S INFLUENCE waned in 1264, when his followers became involved in a violent melee that, from a distance, resembled an insurrection. The resulting scandal shook the Yüan dynasty to its foundations. Ahmad was tried, found guilty of being unable to control his followers, and punished with a severe beating. In the khan’s uproarious court, corporal punishment in the form of canings and beatings was standard procedure for disciplining government officials, the Mongol equivalent of a censure or reprimand.

  The irrepressible Ahmad rebounded from this humiliation to win an appointment as the chief of a new agency, the Office for Regulating State Expenditure. Once again he was in his element, issuing official complaints about the poor quality of linen produced in Manchuria and the inadequacy of the gold and silver foundries of Chen-ting and Shun-t’ien. Having learned of the production of asbestos, as reported by Marco Polo, the agency dispatched officials to
nationalize the asbestos industry. Ahmad’s approach was stark: the Mongol government would take the lion’s share of everything. Indeed, no new source of potential revenue was too small to escape his notice. When he learned that silver was being mined in a remote location in the district of Shang-tu, he recommended that tin, an inexpensive by-product of the smelting process, should be sold, and the revenue paid directly to the government.

  All the while, Ahmad schemed to consolidate his power. In 1270, Kublai appointed him director of political affairs for a new council directing the empire’s finances in the face of intense opposition from a coalition of respected Mongol and Chinese opponents, including Hsü Heng, a revered scholar and bureaucrat. Ahmad had his way again, and once he secured this post, he skillfully played on the divisions among his political enemies. Confronted with the prospect of another inquiry and beating, he deflected the blame to a lesser official, who became the scapegoat.

  Wielding more influence than ever, he now presided over a growing ménage of four wives and forty concubines, not quite enough to overshadow his master’s retinue, but an impressive demonstration of the status he enjoyed. At the same time, he secured a prestigious post for his son Husain, as if laying the groundwork for a rival dynasty.

  WHEN MARCO POLO first arrived at the Mongol court, all the elements of Ahmad’s financial control and Kublai Khan’s military conquests appeared to mesh flawlessly.

  In January of 1275, Mongol forces ranged along the Yangtze River and put the remnants of the Song dynasty’s army to flight. Kublai Khan, his brain trust of Chinese scholars, and Ahmad met regularly to discuss the prospect of harvesting the wealth of the new additions to the empire. At issue was the matter of currency. Ahmad, renowned as a skillful debater, was in favor of replacing Song currency with the paper currency recently disseminated by the Yüan dynasty. Chinese officials argued that the Mongol commander, Bayan, had just promised the conquered region that Song currency would continue to circulate under Mongol control. They insisted that if Kublai Khan ordered otherwise, the Mongols would lose credibility. The Chinese wise men disagreed among themselves about the best course, and Ahmad, exploiting their dissension, prevailed. Yüan currency flooded the conquered Song territories, and to make matters worse, Ahmad imposed a punitive rate of exchange of fifty to one in favor of Yüan notes. At a stroke, the Chinese economy for the region was dismantled.

  Once he had won this victory over Kublai Khan’s Chinese advisers, Ahmad maneuvered to reduce their influence at court. He ended the longstanding Mongol policy of free trade and local taxes in favor of imposing onerous central taxation. He replaced Chinese officials, whom he feared and distrusted, with Muslims. He took his lead from Kublai Khan, who relied on skilled foreigners to help administer the realm. Ahmad, for his part, made it seductively easy for Kublai Khan to rely on him to look after the government bureaucracy and provide the luxurious furnishings calculated to appeal to the khan’s weakness for opulence, while stifling dissent by any means necessary. Nor was Ahmad the only beneficiary of the policy of employing foreigners; the Polo company owed its favored position in the Mongol court to that practice, and Marco in particular owed his entire improbable career in the service of the khan to it.

  AS AHMAD SOLIDIFIED his power, rumors circulated at court that he wanted even more. Everywhere Ahmad looked, he saw enemies, and he dealt with them all. With slight exaggeration, Marco insists that “whenever he [Ahmad] wished to put anyone whom he hated to death, whether justly or unjustly, he went to the khan and said to him, ‘So-and-so deserves death because he has offended your Majesty in this manner.’ Then the khan said, ‘Do what pleases you.’ And immediately he had the man put to death.”

  In reality, Ahmad’s machinations were more subtle. For example, when Bayan, the Mongol commander, arrived home in victory, local officials attempted to give him a jade belt buckle from the Song to commemorate his triumph. In a gracious gesture of modesty, Bayan declined the gift, saying he could take nothing personally from the Song.

  Displaying a talent for subversion, Ahmad falsely accused the honorable general of stealing a jade cup, and ordered an investigation. So deeply was Kublai in Ahmad’s thrall that the emperor blindly ordered an inquisition. Despite Ahmad’s scheming, Bayan escaped conviction, although a cloud of suspicion hung over him because the cup itself could not be located. Ahmad tried again to neutralize his potential rival by claiming that Bayan had needlessly massacred Song soldiers. He was no more successful in this attempt than in his previous campaign of slander, but with each charge leveled against him, Bayan the war hero lost stature at court until he no longer posed a serious threat to Ahmad.

  Ahmad was more ruthless with other critics. Ts’ui Pin, the Chinese leader of an anti-Ahmad group, complained that Ahmad had established unnecessary government agencies to give his many relatives lucrative and influential government jobs, despite his pledge not to engage in nepotism. For a brief time, Ts’ui Pin had his way, and he forced Ahmad’s relatives—even his son Husain—off the government payroll. But Ahmad then arranged for Ts’ui Pin to be investigated. An inquiry concluded that Ts’ui Pin and two other conspirators had stolen grain from the government and cast unauthorized bronze seals to enhance their own power. In 1280, they were found guilty; all three were executed.

  By then, Husain had returned to his former government post, established a new government bureaucracy himself, and doubled taxes in the wealthy Quinsai region. Ostensibly, the taxes financed distant Mongol military campaigns against Burma, Japan, and Java. All the while, he fended off charges of greed and indifference by claiming that local officials engaged in corrupt reporting and outright theft of grain supplies.

  Throughout these controversies, Ahmad enjoyed the naïve trust of Kublai Khan, as always more interested in glorious military conquests and sensual indulgence than in the minutiae of finance and administration.

  AFTER BAYAN’S DEATH the jade cup in question surfaced, proving his innocence. A chastened Kublai Khan realized how close to complete defeat Bayan had come at Ahmad’s hands, with the khan himself an unwitting accomplice. But Kublai Khan did nothing to restrain Ahmad’s reign of political terror.

  IN CONTRAST, Kublai Khan’s son and heir apparent, Chinkim, loathed Ahmad with a passion. Of all his adversaries, Ahmad feared only Chinkim, who was spared the rigged inquisitions that brought down others. He was frequently on record denouncing the Muslim financial mastermind. Chinkim spoke not only for himself but also for the Chinese scholars and courtiers hovering around the khan; indeed, as time passed, he became strikingly sinicized, speaking Chinese and wearing traditional Chinese clothing. One of his closest associates had been Ts’ui Pin, brought down by Ahmad. Chinkim had even dispatched officials at the last minute to prevent the execution, but they had arrived too late. Now he wanted bloody revenge.

  No matter how much Chinese culture he absorbed, Chinkim remained true to his Mongol roots. During one confrontation, he struck Ahmad so hard that the minister could neither open his mouth nor speak for a week. When Kublai asked how Ahmad had come to sustain his injuries, the Muslim was afraid to point the finger at the khan’s son, and pretended that he had fallen from his horse.

  On another occasion, Chinkim attacked Ahmad in the presence of Kublai Khan, who, astonishingly, seemed to take no notice of the fracas.

  By now, Ahmad was afraid for his life. To shield himself from Chinkim’s wrath, he pleaded with Kublai Khan to establish a high court of justice, in the hope that it would intercede. But Kublai refused, viewing the proposed body as a virtual duplicate of one already in existence.

  Ahmad’s reign of bureaucratic terror lasted just a bit longer; he spent much of the next two years raising taxes to the breaking point and plotting to destroy his Chinese critics. If Kublai Khan ever suspected something was awry, he gave no indication; in fact, he promoted the feared Muslim minister again, this time to the position of vice chancellor. Ahmad was now more powerful than ever.

  AHMAD DEFTLY PUNISHED his enemies in th
e Mongol court, but his rapaciousness sowed hatred beyond its confines. During an obscure military campaign in a northern province of the Mongol Empire, a Chinese soldier and ascetic named Wang Chu happened to encounter a Buddhist monk named Kao, who claimed to be skilled in magic. For a time, Kao marched with the Mongol army, but when his spells failed, he was mustered out. If not capable of working magic, he did demonstrate a flair for the macabre. To persuade the world of his death, he spread rumors and even killed a man, whose corpse he dressed as if it were his own. Once Kao and Wang Chu came together, they discovered their shared loathing for Ahmad, and they hatched a wild scheme to assassinate him.

  Whether they acted alone or as instruments of a larger clandestine conspiracy remains an open question. The record suggests they were loners, but Marco insists that the Chinese whom Ahmad had oppressed “planned to assassinate him and to rebel against the rule of the city.” In Polo’s feverish retelling, Wang Chu emerges not as an ascetic but as a man “whose mother, daughter, and wife Ahmad had violated,” a man acting out the will of the Chinese, who despised Ahmad.

  In the early months of 1282, the ascetic soldier and the devious monk conspired to insinuate themselves into Kublai’s court. Wang Chu worked up documents supposedly from Chinkim ordering him to report to the prince’s palace. It was all a deception, because Chinkim himself was nowhere to be found.