by Robin Brown
Marco’s story also seems particularly ‘incredible’ when you realise that he is describing a trek made without maps 700 years ago. The fact that he survived at all is little short of miraculous. Literally nothing in the way of extreme travel equipment existed then, indeed the very concept of travel on the scale undertaken by Marco Polo did not exist. He walked or rode through half a dozen wars, through lands where the plague, leprosy, typhoid, smallpox and malaria (to mention but a few) were endemic. He climbed in areas where there would have been an ever-present danger of falling, frostbite and other accidents, all of which would almost certainly have proved fatal in his time. He spent days, nay weeks, in awful, waterless deserts like the Gobi and the Lot. In virtually all of the countries he traversed a traveller positively expected to be attacked, robbed and murdered and, given his colour, hair type and language, he must have appeared frighteningly alien to all he met.
And yet he survived all this for twenty-five years in a place and in an age when there was only the most primitive of surgery, medicine based on superstition, the odd efficacious plant, and certainly no hospitals. There were times when he was obviously seriously ill – he describes having to go up into the mountains for almost a year to recover his health on his way out to Kublai’s court in China. But these difficulties are always marginalised and it is clear that essentially he was inspired by and loved every minute of his incredible journey.
I am not at all surprised that nobody believed him. He was a traveller from time, someone who had visited the future and, incredibly, come back to tell the tale.
Admittedly, Marco and his family were almost the first Westerners to exploit a very narrow window of opportunity to go East. Europe was awakening from the Dark Ages. Western trade promoted by the Crusades was rapidly expanding. In China an ancient insular civilisation had succumbed to the Tartars whose ruthless chief, Kublai Khan, was in the process of building one of the largest empires ever to exist. When that empire crumbled the doors to China swung closed again, barring Western entrepreneurs like the Polos for centuries to come.
As a trading nation, Venice had benefited enormously from the construction of ships for the Crusades, even agreeing to fund one such endeavour as a smokescreen for the invasion and conquest of Constantinople. Its own empire was not insubstantial, boasting possessions as far away as the Greek mainland.
But up until this time (1250) only fables existed of the faraway land of China, mostly legends dating from the time of the great Greek incursions of Alexander the Great. Between Europe and China stood a singularly unfriendly Muslim Middle East which regarded all Europeans as aggressive infidels practising a heretical religion and bent on the conquest of their most holy sites. And in part they were right. For hundreds of years the holy rule of Allah had been to keep out these apostates at all costs. A virtually identical view existed on the European side.
While a meagre exchange of trade was sustained by a clan of itinerant merchants, this did not entail an exchange of cultures and ideas, or even of much basic information. There had always been a ‘Silk Road’ between Europe and Eastern Asia since the time of the Roman Empire but little accurate information had travelled down it. Europeans thought, for example, that silk was a vegetable product made from a bark, rather than from the cocoons of silkworms.
While Europe was coordinating its financial muscle, and trading states like Venice and Genoa were casting speculative eyes eastwards, China, largely unknown to the West, was beginning to collapse. The culture was decaying of old age and the ‘barbarians’ from the north, as the Tartars were known, had started to make serious inroads into the Chinese lands.
This unlikely dominance of the most advanced and sophisticated race on earth by a rabble of mounted raiders from the northern steppes had been initiated about fifty years earlier by Genghis Khan who was just thirteen when he inherited the chiefdom of a small Mongolian tribe. Genghis lived to see the Mongol ‘horde’ dominate more land than any other race on earth and drive the Europeans back to the banks of the Dnieper.
In 1206 Genghis (or Chinghiz) had been elected leader of the Mongols by a great confederacy of these nomad people, gathered at Karakoran, a plain they regarded as holy, and there, as Marco Polo avows, they made up their minds to conquer the whole world.
Similar forces were rallying in the West. A year before the accession of Genghis, the gateway to the East, Constantinople, had been invaded and conquered by mercenaries led by Baldwin of Flanders, with the direct and moral support of the Pope in Rome and the material support of the merchants of Venice. They were rewarded by the lion’s share of the trade in the Levant, which Marco Polo describes as stretching from eastern Persia to the Mediterranean.
Genghis Khan spent the next twenty-seven years of his life uniting the Mongol tribes, by a combination of savage retribution and shrewd diplomacy. That achieved, he turned his attention to a Tartar invasion of northern China, orchestrated under three huge armies commanded by three of his sons and four of his brothers. He himself commanded the largest army, assisted by his youngest son, Tule, father of Kublai Khan, who would become Marco Polo’s mentor and master.
All three armies were successful and seemingly would have been content to rest in the conquered north had it not been for an unfortunate incident involving the Shah (or Khan) of Persia.
Genghis sent word to Persia offering, according to Marco Polo, ‘Greetings. I know thy power and the vast extent of thy empire; I regard thee as my most cherished son. Thou must know that for my part I have conquered China and all the Turkish nations north of it. Thou knowest that my country is a hall of warriors, a mine of silver, and I have no need of other lands. I take it that we have an equal interest in encouraging trade between out subjects.’
This offer appeared to have been received favourably, but the first Mongol traders were put to death and when, through an ambassador, Genghis demanded the surrender of the governor responsible, the ambassador was summarily beheaded and the rest of the delegation returned to Genghis, ignobly shaved of their beards.
The war that followed earned Genghis Khan a permanent place in history as a barbaric slaughterer; it was a reputation not undeserved. He marched his armies across the continent and over the mountains of Tibet. Tashkent surrendered, Bokhara fell and Shah Mohammed of Persia was harried from two sides by separate Mongol forces. Cities were sacked and burned and their inhabitants slaughtered. After a siege of six months, the city of Herat was taken by a Mongol army said to be eighty thousand strong. The entire population of more than 1.5 million men, women and children was massacred.
Meanwhile the flying columns harrying the Shah were sweeping on into Europe, driving the Turkish resistance before them. In 1222 the Mongols advanced into Georgia and, after yet another set of envoys had been put to death by the Russians, Genghis Khan swung his troops into Greater Bulgaria in an orgy of slaughter, rape and pillage which was to render his name synonymous with unbridled savagery for all time. Europe was only saved from further Mongol incursion by the death of Genghis Khan and of his son, who died suddenly when the Mongol armies were already occupying Hungary, Poland and Kiev and were encamped on the east bank of the Dnieper.
It was into the very heart of this mighty Tartar advance that Marco Polo, his father Nicolo, and his uncle, Maffeo, opportunistic merchant adventurers from Venice, marched when Marco was just seventeen.
In 1255 they had set out for Constantinople to set up a trading post dealing in goods from the Orient, the earlier barriers to trade between Europe and Asia having been broken down by Mongolian expansion. Nicolo left behind his wife, fully expecting to return home within a year or so. But on one of their trading expeditions they found their way home blocked by a war for the Caucasus region between two of Genghis Khan’s grandsons. They were obliged to deviate dramatically to the east, ending up in Bokhara, a city to the north of Afghanistan and one then as now famed for its carpets. There they met an ambassador of Kublai Khan who inferred that the only way they could get home was to obtain a fir
man from the Grand Khan himself, and with this in mind they decided to accompany Kublai Khan’s ambassador to the court in China. Circumstances had caused them unwittingly to travel further east than any traders before them.
It was also the first time Kublai Khan came into extended contact with sophisticated Westerners; he had just begun to settle into the rule of a vast kingdom with all the problems that such a task entailed. Moreover, the Polo brothers were astonished to discover that he did not act like the mass murderer of European legend, but instead apparently wanted his people to convert to Christianity.
Kublai gave the two Venetians an epistle to the Pope requesting that he send him a hundred ‘learned men’, which the Polos took to mean priests (historians have suggested that what Kublai really wanted was more foreign advisers to help him administer his disparate kingdom). One cannot escape the thought that the world would have been a very different place had the Polos been able to deliver this religious manpower.
To confirm his Christian leanings, Kublai Khan also asked the Polos to bring him some of the holy oil from the lamp that was kept burning over the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Kublai Khan had a taste for such curios: later he would send to India for a beggar’s bowl said to have belonged to Buddha and to Madagascar for feathers of the great auk.
The Polos did other favours for the Grand Khan and convinced him of the value of foreign advisers. His uncles, Marco claims, later helped bring the war in southern China to a close by showing Kublai Khan’s generals how to make siege engines and were rewarded with a golden tablet from the Grand Khan guaranteeing their safe passage out of China. This is generally regarded as a rather dubious claim.
Their return journey took four years. Overcoming huge risks at the hands of the various belligerent Tartar tribes and the usual problems with extremes of climate they finally reached the Venetian colony at Acre, where the papal legate informed them that Pope Clement IV had died and that no one had yet been elected to replace him. The brothers decided it was time they went home, where Nicolo discovered that his wife had died but that he was the father of a son, Marco, now aged fifteen.
The papal election hit an impasse and many months passed. The brothers, fearful that their absence might fatally compromise the unique trading links they had managed to forge with the Grand Khan, decided to proceed with their commission as best they could. With Marco, they travelled to Jerusalem and picked up the holy oil. The Papal Legate, Tebaldo, would only commit himself to two priests, but when the Polos ran into a Tartar rebellion in the eastern Mediterranean these friars got cold feet and went home – a momentous decision if you consider the impact even a hundred Catholic priests might have had on Kublai’s world.
Nicolo, Maffeo and the young Marco were struggling on alone when they were called back. News reached them that Tebaldo had been elected Pope, taking the name Gregory X, and that if they could return to Laius, in Southern Albania, they would find letters waiting for them which had been sent by fast ship from the new Pope to be taken to Kublai Khan. They picked up the letters, they were in possession of the holy oil and, in a sense, the young Marco Polo, a devout Catholic in a time of fervour for the Crusades, replaced the hundred learned priests!
Ahead of them stretched another four years of gruelling travel. After almost a year the intrepid trio found themselves in the Persian Gulf where they had planned to board a local ship to sail from Hormuz to China. Expert ship-builders themselves, they were appalled by the apparently flimsy construction of these craft. Marco notes with contempt how the ships ‘were sewn together’, detail which has added the stamp of authenticity to his report. We now know that Arabian and Indian dhows have been constructed in this way since time immemorial, but the Polos were so concerned they elected to take on the even more hazardous overland journey.
Marco contracted a fever (probably malaria) from which he nearly died; he was saved, he says, by ‘the magical quality’ of the high air of the mountains of Afghanistan. (The late, great explorer, Wilfred Thesiger, with whom I made a documentary film, lived among the Marsh Arabs of lower Iraq for seven years, and routinely escaped the clouds of mosquitoes which are the plague of the marshes in summer by going climbing in these same mountains.)
Marco convalesced for a year before tackling the Pamir Plateau between Afghanistan and Tibet, in itself an incredible achievement and one of which a modern climber boasting a supply of oxygen and all the modern climbing gear would be proud. Known now as ‘The Roof of the World’ as a result of Marco’s enthusiastic description, its height inadvertently revealed with Marco’s observation that water took longer to boil.
The Polos stayed to trade among the Tibetan Buddhists in Campichu for about a year, moved into Turkistan, crossing the then unexplored and terrifying Gobi Desert on foot until finally they reached an unknown eastern coast which turned out to be that of China. They had crossed virtually the whole of Asia and had started to despair of ever finding Kublai Khan and his court – when the court came to them!
Cautious and cunning as ever, Kublai had been watching their progress for a long time from afar.
When the Polos’ by now decrepit expedition was still forty days’ march from his capital, Kublai Khan sent escorts to accompany them in style to the city of Shangtu about 180 miles west of Peking. It was 1275 and Marco was now a man of twenty-one years. He was adept in the Tartar languages thanks to lessons from his father and his uncle, and obviously he knew the country well.
The young Marco Polo immediately revealed himself as an observant raconteur with an interest in the unusual and the erotic and, as time went by, it seems that gift for telling tales was exactly what Kublai wanted (no derisory Marco Millione here). For their part Kublai’s own high officials, kow-towing constantly as tradition dictated, and terrified of the Khan’s savage rages which could lead to lethal injunctions, preferred to confine themselves to carefully phrased and censored diplomatic reports.
Kublai Khan seems to have spotted Marco’s latent talents and taken the young man under his wing. While Nicolo and Maffeo were left in peace to trade (and are hardly mentioned in Marco Polo’s book hereafter) Marco was groomed, as he describes it, as the Grand Khan’s roving ambassador. Twenty-seven years now pass, years of extraordinary travel, adventure, political intrigue and military campaigns as Marco Polo matures into the role of ‘ambassador at large’ to his lord and master Kublai Khan.
These stories are told in three ‘Books’ that cover the initial journey out to China and the Kublai Khan’s very mobile court, Marco’s travels and adventures in the employ of the Great Khan, and finally the trials and tribulations of getting home. There are a confusion of Introductions and Prologues, sometimes called the Invocation.
Over the years the story has appeared under various titles such as The Travels of Marco Polo, A Description of the World, Della Navigazioni e Viaggi. It is generally agreed that the lost original was written in bad French. The book is still one of the great works of travel, arguably the greatest because of its vast range. Even now after the lapse of seven centuries it remains the authority for certain parts of Central Asia and of the vast Chinese Empire.
Dates remain slightly vague as we do not know Marco Polo’s exact birth date. His father Nicolo had gone, in 1260, with his brother, Maffeo, on an initial pioneering journey trading in the lands of the Tartars. The generally accepted date for Marco’s birth is 1254 with the brothers returning to Venice with a commission from Kublai in 1269 when Marco was about fifteen. They set out to return to the Great Khan’s court in 1271 when Marco was probably in his seventeenth year, and the three of them remained in Kublai’s court for a further seventeen or so years, returning to Venice in 1295. The journeys back and forth themselves took years. Marco, now a rich Venice merchant in his early forties, becomes embroiled in a war with Genoa, which the Venetians lost, and our hero ends up in jail where, sometime in the next eighteen months, with Rustichello, he writes a book which few believe. Indeed, how little Marco was credited may be judged from the fact that
the map of Asia was not modified by his discoveries until fifty years after his death in 1324.
MANUSCRIPT VERSIONS AND RECENSIONS
Let us return to Marco in prison, possibly stuck there for life. The sea battle he took part in was supposed to have been conclusive, with the richest of the Venetian merchants pooling their funds to build a fleet of sixty fighting craft each rowed by dozens of oarsmen and designed to smash and crush the upstart Genoans.
Genoa had approximately the same number of ships, and the Genoans won. Moreover, they won convincingly, dragging all the Venetian ships back into harbour with their masts and pennants trailing in the water as a mark of disrespect. The humiliated commander of the Venetian fleet was so cast down that he dashed his head on a stone of the jetty and killed himself. All the ‘Gentlemen Captains’ of the Venetian fleet, most of them rich merchants, were gaoled, not too uncomfortably, and within the year most of them had returned home after the payment of substantial ransoms.
Not so Marco Polo. No one knows whether the Genoans wanted to keep him or whether his family failed to put up the money. He was in the second year of his confinement when he met Rustichello, a minor writer of romantic fiction. It is not known whether they fortuitously ended up in the same cell together or whether Marco Polo, bored and thinking he might fill his time by setting down the story of his travels, sent for Rustichello.
Crucially, whether or not Marco Polo could call on notes has never been satisfactorily established. Ramusio, the first editor of a printed version of Marco Polo’s travels, claims that Marco Polo did send to Venice for his notebook and papers, but we have no confirmation of them ever arriving in Genoa.
