Laurence Bergreen

by Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu

  In fact, Kublai Khan had elaborate plans for his favored merchant ambassadors, and he transformed their passage into an international mission of considerable significance. “He entrusted them with many things on his own behalf”—presumably letters and other personal items—“and with an embassy to the pope and to the king of France, and to the king of England, and to the king of Spain and to the other crowned kings of Christendom.”

  Fully assembled, the expedition was magnificent: fourteen large ships, each equipped with four masts and twelve sails. Marco’s enthusiasm at the adventure before him in 1292 fairly bursts from the account. His yearning for blue water and the tang of the open sea is palpable. The prospect engaged his nautical expertise. “I could tell you how they [the ships] were made,” he says, “but because it would be too long a matter I will not mention it to you at this point”—although he does remark that four or five of the ships held 250 men each. A mighty fleet would be making its way to King Argon, bearing him a longed-for princess.

  The actual departure occasioned still more generosity from Kublai Khan and the seemingly inexhaustible Mongol treasury. “When the ships were fitted out and furnished with food and with all things necessary, and the three barons and the lady and these three Latins, the two brothers Master Niccolò and Master Maffeo, and Master Marco, were ready to go to King Argon, they presented themselves to their lord, and took leave of the Great Khan and with great joy came to the ships that were prepared and assemble themselves on the ships with a very great company of ladies and gentlemen. And the Great Khan made men give them many rubies and other very fine jewels of great value, and also expenses for ten years.”

  The ceremony marked the last time they would see Kublai Khan. After twenty years abroad, their long voyage home commenced, and the adventure of a lifetime began to draw to a close.

  THE POLO COMPANY’S mission to deliver Princess Kokachin to her rightful king and kingdom has attained special significance in recent years because it is the only event described by Marco that is confirmed in detail by Chinese and Mongol sources. In 1941 and again in 1945, Yang Chih-chiu, a Chinese scholar, compared Yüan dynasty sources with Marco’s detailed rendition of the circumstances of his departure from China and discovered that they matched almost perfectly, with the significant omission of the names of the three emissaries from Kublai Khan.

  An account written in about 1307 by Rashid al-Din, the authoritative chronicler of the era, told very much the same story, mentioning Princess Kokachin and the three ambassadors who accompanied her, corresponding closely with the details Marco set forth. Like his Chinese counterparts, Rashid al-Din did not mention the three Polos by name, but the existence of an independent informant confirming precise features of Marco’s description amounts to more than coincidence. Taken together, these sources confirm that Marco escorted the princess to King Argon and was in service to Kublai Khan, just as he claimed.

  “THEY SET OUT from that island, and I tell you that they sailed through the great sea of India for eighteen months before they came to the land of King Argon,” Marco reports, “and in this journey they saw strange and different things and they found many great marvels.” In his haste, he never did tell his collaborator, Rustichello, what those things were, but to judge from the scant information about the voyage that he did provide, the 1293 ocean voyage was violent and traumatic.

  “When they entered into the ships in the land of the Great Khan,” Marco reports, “there were between ladies and men six hundred people, without [counting] sailors. And when they reached the land where they were going, they made a count that all had died on the way except only eighteen. And of those three ambassadors there remained but one, who was named Coja; and of all the women and girls none died but one.” Disease, shipwreck, and pirates were the likely culprits, but Marco does not offer an explanation, despite his penchant for depicting dramatic events and circumstances that would show him in a heroic light. Given his fascination with ships, it seems likely that an important and dramatic segment of his account devoted to these matters has been lost. All that remains of the traumatic episode is a collection of tantalizing fragments hinting at extreme suffering and sorrow. Despite all, the Polos and the young Mongol princess survived.

  Marco had endured an ordeal surpassing anything he had previously faced, even as a young man making his way across the Steppe for the first time. In his descriptions, he was now more subdued, less inclined to boasting, not so much disillusioned as disoriented. Marco recovered his former vitality when reliving previous episodes for the sake of entertaining his readers, but as he narrates the latter part of his tale, he no longer gives the impression of leading a charmed existence. Instead, his more reverent tone suggests that he felt fortunate simply to count himself among the living.

  THE SURVIVORS’ unanticipated arrival in Argon’s kingdom generated shock rather than relief. Matters in this distant land had changed drastically since those three ambassadors had left for Kublai Khan’s court several years earlier. Argon was dead—poisoned, perhaps, by his enemies.

  Marco was dismayed. In Argon’s place, the Polos found that “one named Quiacatu held the lordship of Argon, for the boy who was not yet fit to rule, for he was young.” Not knowing what to do with the princess whom they had risked their lives to escort, they eventually decided to present her to “Caçan, the son of Argon, to wife,” and despite his youth, the two were joined in matrimony.

  If Marco and his father and uncle believed that they had discharged their responsibilities and could at last leave the service of Kublai Khan, they were disappointed. Once again, they were nearly undone by their loyalty and their ability to accomplish seemingly impossible long-distance assignments in the service of the Great Khan. The young princess did not wish them to leave her alone in this strange and threatening land, and because she was a princess, her wish was law. They tried to comply with her every request, but in the end, Marco reports, “when Master Niccolò and Master Maffeo and Master Marco had done all the duties about the lady and the missions, with which the Great Khan had charged them, they returned to Quiacatu, because their road must be that way, and there they stayed nine months.”

  Nine months! They could only have wondered, with good reason, if they would ever see the great domes of San Marco, greet their wives, and resume their comfortable lives in Venice. During the endless layover, the Polo company endured a suffocating excess of hospitality and affection from their grateful hosts. Even when the weather cooperated, and political conditions permitted them to leave, the young woman whom they had escorted across China did not wish to see her guardians depart. Once more, the Polos found themselves pleading and making far-fetched promises to return in exchange for permission to leave. At last their wish was granted, but even then, “when these three messengers left her to return to their country, she wept for grief at their departure.” Perhaps she finally came to the realization that she had been the vehicle of their escape from the Mongol Empire. The unfortunate Kokachin, who had risked all to journey to this distant kingdom, died a short time later, in June 1296. Poisoning by a faction opposed to Kublai Khan is the most likely explanation for her untimely death.

  As the Polo company prepared to depart, Quiacatu, in the spirit of Kublai Khan, bestowed a series of gifts, blessings, and burdens in the form of elaborate paizas: “four tablets of gold…two with gerfalcons and one with a lion and the other was plain, each of which was one cubit long and five fingers wide.” The tablets declared “that these three messengers should be honored and served through all his land as his own person, and that horses and all expenses and all escort should be given them in full through any dangerous places for themselves and the whole company.”

  The beneficence of Kublai Khan was endless, even now. “Many times there were given them two hundred horsemen, and more or less according as was necessary for their escort and to go safely from one land to another. And this was very necessary many times, for they found many dangerous places, because Quiacatu had no author
ity and was not natural nor liege lord and therefore the people did not refrain from doing evil as they would have done if they had a true and liege lord.” The farther the Polos strayed from Argon’s kingdom, the less they could count on their paizas to protect them against brigands with no allegiance to Kublai Khan.

  From this point on, they would have to fend for themselves if they were to survive the long voyage home.

  IT WAS NOW 1294, with the Mongol New Year beginning in February. Kublai Khan was so weary and depressed that he shunned those who had traveled to the court to offer their greetings and good wishes for the coming year. His favorite general, Bayan, attempted to remind him of the great military victories they shared, but even he failed to revive the khan.

  On February 18, Kublai Khan died at the age of eighty in the safety and comfort of his palace.

  Two days later, a funeral caravan bearing Kublai Khan’s mortal remains slowly made its way from the palace north toward the Khenti Mountains. In keeping with Mongol custom, his burial place, believed to be near that of his grandfather, Genghis, was concealed amid the setting’s brooding majesty. No records describing it survive, nor has the site itself been located. It was a singularly subdued conclusion for an emperor noted in his lifetime for daring and excess.

  Kublai’s chosen successor, Chinkim, had died years before. In his place, Kublai’s grandson Temür became the next Mongol emperor, inheriting a kingdom in disarray. He commanded that an altar be built in Kublai Khan’s memory, and conferred on him a posthumous Chinese name: Shih-tsu, “Founder of a Dynasty.”

  Early chroniclers of the Yüan dynasty spread Kublai Khan’s fame far and wide. Muslims came to know of this extraordinary man through the writings of Rashid al-Din. Chinese and Korean chroniclers celebrated Kublai Khan’s accomplishments, and Bar Hebraeus wrote warmly of Kublai’s long and momentous reign. For all their scope, none of these chronicles compares with the vivid account left by Kublai’s best-known European chronicler, Marco Polo. He alone had extensive personal experience with his subject, and he still held the paiza, or passport, that the emperor had given him years before, when Marco first left Cambulac. He wrote about the Mongol leader with such passion, tinged with awe, that he single-handedly enlightened the West about one of the most powerful rulers who had ever lived.

  MARCO POLO learned of Kublai Khan’s death during his passage home to Venice with his father and uncle. If he always remembered where he was or what he was doing when he heard the momentous news, he did not confide the details to Rustichello. He simply recalled, “While Masters Niccolò, Maffeo, and Marco were making this journey, they learned how the Great Khan was cut off from this life, and this took away from them all hope of being able to return any more to those parts.”

  Instead of conferring the liberation that Marco anticipated, Kublai Khan’s demise tolled the death of adventure, and even of hope itself. At the time of their leave-taking, the Polos had employed their negotiating skills to free themselves from privileged servitude. Now that they were beyond the reach of this beneficent tyrant who had controlled their destiny, they could only reflect that they would never see Cambulac again. The splendor and immensity of Asia were lost to them forever. The end of Kublai Khan’s long reign terminated a unique partnership between East and West, a powerful ruler and a small merchant family. The Mongol leader had given the Polo company standing, but more than that, he had imparted to his protégé a sense of purpose. He was the personification of magic and might.

  IN THE FINAL CHAPTERS of his chronicle, Marco’s boundless curiosity alights on the largely unexplored land of Russia. In reality, his route home did not take him anywhere near Russia, or any of the other northern lands that suddenly piqued his interest, but his account, a careful summary based on admittedly secondhand information, is memorable for its eloquence and its evocation of a landscape and way of life that other Europeans could scarcely imagine.

  The approach to Russia from the east, to hear Marco tell it, could deter even the hardiest merchant. “No horse can go there,” he advises, “because it is a land where there are many lakes and many springs and streams that make that region very marshy, and because of the exceeding cold of that province there is almost always ice so thick that boats cannot pass by there, and yet there is not so much strength in the ice that it can bear heavy carts or heavy animals.” Nevertheless, merchants or trappers trading in fur managed to traverse this wasteland, turning a “great profit” for their trouble, and these hardy souls were his likely source of information for the region.

  Marco had heard that travel across this difficult territory could be accomplished in stages lasting thirteen days, known as a “journey,” at the end of which the weary, frozen traveler could count on finding a hamlet consisting of “several houses of timber raised above the ground in which can comfortably live men who bring and receive merchandise.” Commerce again surmounted nearly every obstacle; to Marco, this was more a fact of life than a source of wonder.

  “In each of these hamlets,” he continues, “is a house which they call a post where all the messengers of the lord who go through the country lodge.” A cold-weather version of the caravans that served as Marco’s primary means of travel over the years, they struck familiar notes in the way they were organized. “At each of these posts are keepers with forty very large dogs, little smaller than an ass, and these dogs are all accustomed and taught to draw just as oxen do in our country, and they draw sledges, which are called sliozola,…to carry the messengers from the one post to the other, that is, from one journey to the next.”

  The sleds, in particular, intrigued Marco, who may have heard about them in detail from a fellow merchant. “A sled,” he explains for an audience unfamiliar with the idea of travel across frozen wastes, “is a vehicle that has no wheels, but they are made of very light wood and flat and smoothed underneath, and they are raised at the ends in the way of a semicircle, in such a way that they go up over the ice and over the mud and over the mire.”

  Marco familiarized himself with the details of dog handling to an uncanny degree. His account reads as if written by one who held the reins himself: “Those who conduct the sledges harness six dogs of those large ones…with yokes, two and two in proper order, to take those sledges. And these dogs, no one leads them but they go straight to the next post and draw the sledge very well both through the ice and through the mire. And so they go from one post to the other…. He who guards the post mounts on a sledge also, and has himself taken by the dogs, and he takes them by the straightest way and by the best. And when they are come to the next post that is at the end of the journey, they find there are also the dogs and the sledges and another guide ready to carry them forward for the second journey; and this is done because the dogs could not bear such labor as that for all the thirteen days’ journey; and so those that have brought them turn back. And so it goes through all these journeys, changing dogs, sledge, and guide at every stage…till the messengers of the lord are carried…to the mountains, and buy the skins, and return to their own land through the plain.”

  Marco radiates enthusiasm for the trade, especially when he enumerates the skins in which the messengers deal—“little animals of great value,” he marvels, “from which they have great profit and great benefit; these are sables and ermines and squirrels and ercolins and black foxes and many other precious animals from which are made the dear skins.” Nevertheless, when he considers the conditions endured by merchant trappers in this harsh climate, Marco, the restless traveler and sensualist, turns away. “They have all their houses underground because of the great cold that is there, and they always live underground.” Equally damning is the Venetian’s last word on the subject: “They are not a beautiful people.” The prospect of being confined for months in a subterranean dwelling with them ended Marco’s daydreams about growing rich in the skin trade.

  It was time for the lover of open spaces, sunlight, and intrigue to move on.

  NEXT TO THE fur-trapping wastes, Marco locat
ed an even grimmer region, the Valley of Darkness, so called because of the dense mists obscuring the area, which he occasionally calls “the land of shadows.” Although he seems to be describing an allegorical domain, he believed he was depicting an actual place just beyond the Mongol sphere of influence—far indeed from the centers of power to which he has become accustomed during the previous two decades. Men here, he relates, “live like animals.”

  Despite the inhospitable climate, a handful of Mongols ventured into the area, taking unusual precautions to guard their safety. They “come in on mares that have foals, and they leave the foals outside, and have them watched by keepers whom they set at the entry of that region, because the mares when they have made their journey go back to their children and by the perception and scent of the foals know the way better than the men know.” The only reason Marco finds for risking travel to the area is, inevitably, the prospect of trade in sable, ermine, “and many other dear skins.”

  Surprisingly, Marco has kind words for the inhabitants of the land of shadows. “These people are handsome, very large, and well made in all their parts,” he notes with relief, “but they are very pale, and have no color, and this happens because of the want of sunlight.”

  Marco had endured his share of frigid Mongolian weather, but he describes the Russian winters as more brutal than anything he had experienced—“the greatest cold that is in the world, so that with great difficulty one escapes it”—and he evokes the sting of the cold so vividly that it seems as if he had suffered it himself. “If it were not for the many stoves that are there,” he advises, “the people could not escape from perishing by the too great cold. But there are very frequent stoves, which the noble and powerful piously cause to be built just as hospitals are built with us. And to these stoves all the people can always run when there is need. For cold so intense prevails at times that while men go through the land toward home or from one place to another for their business, when they go from one stove they are almost frozen before they reach another, though the stoves are so frequent that one is separated from another by sixty paces.”