Marco Polo

by Robin Brown

  A number of small buildings have been erected in which birds shelter for the night. All in all the Grand Khan is always assured of finding abundant sport here even in winter, although he does not actually live here in winter because of the extreme cold. Camel loads of frozen birds are, however, sent to him wherever his court may be at the time.

  From Changa-nor to Shandu in the north-east is a journey of three days. Shandu was built by Kublai Khan and it boasts a grand palace of marble and other fine stones, beautifully wrought and very elegant. Gilded halls and chambers make it very handsome. The palace grounds are contained within 16 miles of wall!

  Within the bounds of this royal park, beautiful meadows are watered by many little streams providing rich pasture for small deer who, in turn, are good for hawks and other hunting birds nesting here. More than two hundred birds are kept for sport and the Grand Khan goes there at least twice a week to inspect them.

  On his rides around this private forest, Kublai has one or more small leopards carried on horseback in cages behind their keepers. Kublai personally gives orders for them to be released and he loves to see them swiftly take a stag, fallow deer, or a goat. The kills are fed to his hawks.

  Amid a beautiful grove of trees in the middle of the park the Grand Khan has built a royal pavilion. Gilded and burnished columns support a roof of bamboo cane, also varnished and gilded. Around each of the columns a dragon winds its gilded tail and its talons grasp the wood. No rain can penetrate the roof because of the complexity of its construction. Thick bamboos, 40 feet in length, are cut at their joints and split in half. The pavilion is covered with these split bamboos, convex and concave, and tied to the roof frame at their ends to make the roof windproof. The building is held together like a tent by more than two hundred exceptionally strong silken cords and although the structure is very light, it can withstand the strongest winds. It is also so cleverly constructed it can quickly be dismantled and re-erected according to his majesty’s pleasure.

  He has selected this spot for his sporting summer retreat because of the beneficial mountain air and the mild climate and is in residence here for three months, June, July and August. On 28 August it is the custom to proceed to an appointed place to perform traditional rituals.

  You have to understand that Kublai keeps a stud of ten thousand mares and horses, all as white as snow! Nobody who is not a descendant of Genghis Khan may drink the milk from these mares other than the family of an honoured military veteran, Boriat, who fought very bravely at Kublai’s side. You show respect for these horses! Even when they are just grazing in the royal meadows or pasture no one dares get in their way.

  Kublai also employs astrologers exceptionally skilled in diabolical magic. On the 28th day mentioned, Kublai regards it as his traditional duty to scatter mares’ milk to the winds as a libation to all his spirits and idols. This gesture is supposed to calm the spirits and ensure their protection for all the population: men and women, their cattle, chicken, grain, in fact all the fruits of the earth.

  Sometimes the shamans or, if you like, magicians, give wonderful demonstrations of their powers. If, for example, it should cloud over and look like rain, they go up on the roof of the palace where the Grand Khan is living and by the power of incantation, stay the tempest and prevent the rain from falling. It can be blowing a gale over the surrounding countryside but not a drop falls on the royal palace.

  These yogis are of the cults of Tebeth and Kesmir and are more skilled in the black arts than any of the other groups of idolaters. They convince the ordinary people that they draw their powers from performing penances and maintaining the sanctity of their own lives. They actually go around filthy and in an indecent state, indifferent to the respect they should be showing to the people before whom they appear. They do not wash or comb their hair and they live in very squalid circumstances. Moreover, they are addicted to the foul practice of cannibalism. When a criminal is sentenced to death they carry off the body, cook it and eat it! (I should say that this does not happen to the bodies of people who die of natural causes.) These yogis have the name baksi (in Tibet they are called lamas) and I will tell you a story of their powers that you may believe or not.

  The Grand Khan dines at an elevated table some distance away from a large sideboard where the drinking vessels stand. By means of the supernatural, the baksi priests cause a cup of wine, milk or other beverage to fill spontaneously without being touched by the attendant and then transport itself majestically to the Grand Khan, a distance of ten paces! When he has finished it floats back. Kublai usually invites witnesses to watch this performance.

  On their feast days the baksi descend on the palace of the Grand Khan and demand of him: ‘Sire, if a sacrifice is not made to the gods they will be angered and inflict on us bad seasons, blight to our grain, pestilence among our cattle and plagues. Please give us a number of black-headed sheep, several pounds of incense and lignum aloes in order that we may appease him with the customary rites and due ceremony.’ (These words are not put to the Grand Khan directly but via senior officers.)

  The Grand Khan never fails to meet all their requests and on the appointed day they sacrifice the sheep in the presence of their idols (first having poured off the liquid in which they have been steeped) and conduct the rituals of worship.

  There are many great monasteries and abbeys in this country, some of them so extensive as to pass for small cities, housing populations of some two thousand monks. They dress better than the ordinary folk; they shave their heads and beards and carry on their religious services and festivities with choirs, the burning of incense and great solemnity. Some of these monks take wives.

  There is also a much stricter religious sect, the Sensim, who lead austere lives and practise virtual abstinence. They have no other food than a kind of porridge, the grain of which is soaked in warm water until the farinaceous part is separated from the bran and in that state they eat it. This sect worships fire and is considered by others to be a breakaway religion worshipping different idols.

  The Sensim never marry although they still shave their heads and beards. They wear garments of hempen material – sometimes silk – but it is always of a dull colour, mostly black. They sleep on coarse mats and, in my opinion, have a harder life than anyone else on earth.

  But it is time I got on to the subject of the great, indeed, wonderful acts of the supreme lord and emperor of the Tartars, Kublai Khan.

  Book Two

  INTRODUCTION

  Marco was awe-struck by the Great Khan, Kublai, his splendid court and the palaces and cities gracing his vast empire. And as a result he had been judged a subjective and biased witness to the wonders of the East and its mighty ruler.

  In fact, this awe was partly a reflection of the degree to which the Western world was ignorant of this Lord of Lords ruling a world of which their knowledge was all but non-existent. In Pre-Crusades Europe, Kublai was still the dreaded son of Genghis, who had terrorised eastern Europe and terrified the west. And this reputation had been well founded. Tartar conquest was based on a single ultimatum: lay down your arms and accept the rule of a Tartar lord or be exterminated by his army. Men, women and children were ruthlessly killed and their skulls piled in vast mounds to remind the next intransigent city of its inevitable fate.

  When they came the Tartar hordes were widely regarded as unstoppable.

  Marco discovered that this was observably not the case with Kublai. Tartar (Moghul) rule had matured by the time he reached the court of the Lord of Lords. Arguably, in fact, Kublai’s tenuous control of an essentially vast and ungovernable area of land had begun to slip. Most of Book Two is devoted to setting this record straight and it is much the largest part of the manuscript.

  Marco and his family would (they claimed) actively participate in the expansion of Kublai’s empire, Nicolo and Maffeo building huge siege engines of European design which brought about the submission of one of China’s larger, most strongly fortified cities.

  Marco app
ears to have been content with winning a place in the Great Khan’s diplomatic corps and in the old man’s heart. Great Emperor Kublai might have been, but for much of his life he was at war with his many influential sons to whom he had given vast lands to govern. He was also surrounded by a stifling plutocracy, so the stories Marco bought him from remote lands must have been a refreshing relief.

  I believe that we are fortunate that Marco Polo was young and impressionable. The collapse of Kublai’s Empire was still some time in the future and the young Marco toured the mighty kingdom when it was in its fading but still glorious prime. He gave his sense of wonder free rein, uninhibited by much experience or worldly comparisons.

  Most of the time he quite literally could not believe his eyes. He probably kept careful notes, knowing Kublai’s voracious appetite for news and gossip. How extraordinary it all was can be judged by the fact that when he returned home and, with Rustichello’s help, published it in a book, few readers believed him.

  But as I have said previously, the details have in so many cases, including the most extraordinary, proved remarkably accurate. For example his story of twenty thousand innocents being killed en route to serve as companions to the dead when the body of Mangu Khan is conveyed to Mount Attai, was treated with outright derision.

  Chinese annals which have come to light since support this grisly tale, in fact Marco may have understated the numbers by as many as ten thousand souls. As recently as 1661 the Tartar emperor, Shun-chi, ordered a huge human sacrifice upon the death of a favourite mistress. Similarly, seemingly minor details such as his description of ‘a certain small animal not unlike a rabbit called by our people Pharoah’s mice’ was confirmed by several subsequent travel accounts as areas of large marmot populations.

  Even the apparently ridiculous story of drinks floating back and forth to Kublai’s table has been checked out and is now thought to have been a mechanical conjuring trick. The French traveller, Rubruquis, reports that the Tartar princes were fond of such tricks and that one of them had hired a fellow countryman of his to design a curious bit of machinery which conveyed into the dining hall a variety of beverages which issued from the mouths of silver lions.

  Book Two is, in reality, a eulogy to a benign, just and civilised elder statesman, as far a cry as you could get from a man others believed could have been the scourge of Europe, with a taste for blood-letting and savagery. No doubt Marco’s early impressions were naïve (he was after all in his early twenties), but when he was influential at court he found Kublai Khan remarkably even handed on vexing subjects such as religion.

  Quite who this Lord of Lords actually believed in has never been satisfactorily established. He certain wasn’t a Muslim, although much of his empire was, and he seems to have carefully observed most of the important religious festivals of the major religions in the lands he ruled.

  Marco Polo likes to give the impression that Kublai considered becoming a Christian, on one occasion sending Nicolo and Maffeo for oil from the lamp of the Holy Sepulchre and with a request to the Pope to send him one hundred ‘learned men’ who could prove that the Christians worshipped the one true God.

  The history of the world would indubitably have been changed had that request ever been followed up, but Christianity failed to make its greatest leap forward when the Pope’s representatives – admittedly just two of them, but with the power to create priests – lost their nerve when they heard reports of the ever-warring Tartars in their path.

  The truth seems to be that Kublai was an eclectic on the subject of religion and openly fascinated by the magic claimed for the religious artefacts of the various religions. Apart from the holy oil from Jerusalem, he also tried to buy Buddha’s begging bowl. He kept teams of necromancers, sooth-sayers, wizards and astrologers at the court and seems to have had as much faith in their miracles as in the Christian faith. When it comes to religious content and emphasis in the Marco Polo manuscript one also has to take into account the fact that in the first years of its long life it was translated, copied and illuminated exclusively by clerics of the Christian church.

  Marco further suggests that Kublai had huge and very wide interests particularly in nature and natural history, a field of interest to which I have been professionally attached for some years. It is my view, however, that it is Marco who has the real interest in the flora and fauna of the vast empire, rather than Kublai, whose interests were mostly sporting. Admittedly Marco reports that the Emperor once sent a team of ambassadors to the island of Madagascar to get him a giant feather of the mythical great auk, but this again seems more an interest in curios than ornithology.

  Book Two is extraordinarily rich for a manuscript of this vintage in ‘pure’ natural history. It gives the first documented instance of elephants used as fighting machines, detailed descriptions of the training of the Tartar fighting horses and how armies of hundreds of thousands rode, milked and bled their animals for food. The extraordinary mobility of the Tartar armies was dependent entirely on their remarkable horsemanship and the fact that they could live on a rich whey porridge of mares’ milk mixed with blood.

  Rather than a merciless killer, Kublai is revealed as being a collector of exotic trees, the pioneer of large arboretums and of public roads planted with trees two feet apart to provide shelter for travellers.

  Kublai, a Tartar, has a passion for horses and he can afford the very best. At the New Year festivals, the Great Khan is given upwards of one hundred thousand horses – all of them pure white.

  There are descriptions of royal hunts conducted with trained leopards, lynxes and even tigers. These big cats are carried around in special wagons – along with a little dog to keep them company. Buck, bear, boar, wild asses and oxen are the fair game of these royal sporting outings.

  Marco describes with wonder two influential Masters of the Hunt each with a staff of ten thousand huntsmen. They take Kublai hunting in the frozen north of his vast empire (towards Siberia) with a host of gerfalcons, peregrines, sakers and hunting vultures so numerous ten thousand ‘taskoal’ or bird-handlers are required to look after the raptors. Five thousand dogs are also involved in the chase and some of the eagles are so large they can pull down a wolf. The two Masters of the Hunt have a contract to supply Kublai’s court with one thousand pieces of game a day. Quails, Marco adds (with his usual care for the detail which adds such credibility to his accounts), don’t count.

  Kublai’s hunting pavilion is a handsomely carved affair covered with wild cats’ skins mounted on the backs of four elephants. The royal quarters are covered outside with tigers’ skins with an inner lining of ermine and sable. The concept of conservation was, of course, still hundreds of years in the future.

  Marco visits lands where the air is redolent with the smell of musk and he explains in detail how the musk-ox produces it once a month ‘like a boil full of blood’. In many of these lands wild game is the only source of food and clothing. We also learn in Book Two of silk-worms and how they are fed exclusively on mulberry leaves, a trade secret that could have led to silk being produced elsewhere than in India and China.

  There are graphic descriptions of huge serpents with claws like those of the tiger, and glaring eyes ‘larger than a 4-penny loaf’. This is the first recorded description in Western literature of the Asian crocodile. Tigers (which Marco calls lions) are a constant danger to the traveller, some so huge and predatory it is safer to spend your night moored in mid-stream rather than venture to the river bank. Marco also tells of a species of huge dogs, a couple of which can overcome a tiger.

  Plants also attract Marco’s constant attention and he describes cane 90 foot long that can be split and twisted into ropes 900 feet in length. In the wondrous city of Kinsai, the ‘celestial’ city which was then the capital of southern China, surrendered to Kublai’s army by the Song dynasty, he finds bamboos a foot thick. Ever the Venetian merchant at heart he notes the prices of all the medicinal plants like ginger, tea, ganganal and rhubarb. We learn how fine
sugar is made from cane using a process of refining which uses wood ash introduced by experts from ancient Babylon.

  The mundane is dutifully recorded along with the exotic: Marco points out that Kublai gets a huge amount of his revenue from the production of salt. The tightly controlled production of salt, which is cast in moulds, is used as currency in certain parts.

  Marco relates in this book how fine porcelain is made from certain earths laid down for years, but it would be several hundred years before any western manufacturer was able to produce porcelain. It was Marco’s degree of pure revelation which so stunned a sceptical Western world when the first handwritten copies of his book appeared. Almost every page of Book Two has something on it which was new to Europeans.

  The most startling of these is that this mighty empire which then covered three-quarters of a world known to very few people, was run not on gold, stones, or cowrie shells but on scraps of paper. This printed money, Marco revealed, was accepted throughout Kublai’s kingdom ‘on pain of death’.

  We hear also of a similarly unique communication system (an early, infinitely more extensive version of the American Pony Express) serviced by messengers on foot and mounted. This countrywide courier service had its own roads, boats and lavish guest houses. Messengers covered up to 250 miles in one day, running or riding in relays.

  Book Two slips in the first reference in Western literature to coal: ‘a sort of black stone which burns like charcoal and gives out much more heat than wood.’ Coal was completely unknown in Europe at this time. For good measure he confounds his Western readers with the news that, with such an easy source of heat, those who can afford it take a hot bath at least three times a week.