MARCO POLO became so enamored of the Mongols that he described their shamanistic beliefs with genuine appreciation rather than the disdain he reserved for most unfamiliar religious practices. He begins reassuringly: “They say that there is the high, sublime, and heavenly God of whom every day with censer and incense they ask nothing else but good understanding and health.” He concedes that they worshipped idols, but says they devoted special attention to one god in particular, whom they called Natigai, a “god of the land who protects and cares for their wives and their sons and their corn.”
Marco departed from his longstanding skepticism to study this worship of the idols. In his rendition, it bears an uncanny resemblance to Christian rites: “Each has in his house a statue hung on the wall of a room that represents the high and sublime god of heaven, or only a tablet set high on the wall of his room with the name of the god written there. Here every day with the thurible of incense they worship thus and lift up the hands on high, and at the same time gnashing thrice their teeth they ask him to give them long life, happy and cheerful, good understanding and health, and they ask him nothing more. Then also down on the ground they have another statue called Natigai, god of earthly matters…. With this god is his wife and children; and they worship him in the same way with the thurible and gnashing the teeth and lifting the hands, and of this one they ask temperate weather and fruits of the earth, children, and similar things.”
In one important way, Mongol belief differed sharply from Christianity: “They have no consciousness and care of the soul, but are only devoted to nourishing the body and getting pleasure for themselves.” Yet the Mongols did have their version of the soul. Marco writes that “they hold [it] to be immortal in this way. They think that when a man dies he enters immediately into another body, and, according as in life he had borne himself well or ill, going on from good to better or from bad to worse; that is to say, if he shall be a poor man and if he have borne himself well and modestly in life, he will be born again after death of the womb of a gentlewoman and will be a gentleman, and then of the womb of a lady and will be a lord; if he is the son of a knight and in life have borne himself well, at death he is born again of the womb of a countess…, and so always ascending until he is taken into God. On the contrary, if he shall have behaved ill, being the son of a gentleman he will be born again a son of a rustic, from a rustic he is made into a dog, always descending to lower life.” By the end of this careful, respectful, and intimate description of Mongol worship, it is easy to imagine Marco swept along in the spiritual tide.
Although alert to their religious practices, Marco remained oblivious to the larger spiritual world of the Mongols, in which the figure of Natigai intervened between hearth and home and immense cosmic forces. The Mongols viewed their deities arrayed in a floating hierarchy. Over all hovered the supreme divinity, the Eternal Blue Sky, and just below that a pantheon of ninety-nine divinities, one of which was Marco’s Natigai, the protector of women, of cattle, and of harvests.
With his description of Mongol religious beliefs, Marco set out to demolish the tenacious European image of the murderous Mongol savage. All wrong, according to Marco. Instead, he reports, “They speak prettily and ornately, they greet becomingly with cheerful and smiling face, they behave with dignity and cleanliness in eating”—if not in washing. “They bear great reverence to the father and mother. If it is found that any son does anything to displease them, or does not help them in their need, there is a public office that has no other office but to punish severely ungrateful sons whom they know have committed some act of ingratitude toward them.” With such measures, Mongol society enforced its stability. Although Marco stopped short of endorsing the concept of a designated official to discipline ungrateful offspring, he looked on approvingly.
SO MUCH for piety. In reality, nothing excited Marco’s admiration more than the Mongol warrior. Feared throughout the world, his kind specialized in horsemanship, rape, and destruction. The warriors seemed a glamorous and dangerous outlaw tribe, fiercely devoted to one another, consecrating their destiny to the pursuit of power. They lived strenuously and obeyed no one’s laws but their own defiant code. To the genteel Marco, it seemed that they were more in touch with the forces of nature than their refined Chinese subjects. No wonder he fell under their sway.
His adulation overwhelmed the formal literary veneer applied by Rustichello. “The rich men and nobles wear cloth of gold and cloth of silk and under the outer garments rich furs of sable and ermine and vair [that is, variegated fur] and of fox and of all other skins very richly; and all their trappings and fur-lined robes are very beautiful and of great value,” Marco tells his audience. “And their arms are bows and arrows and very good swords studded with iron, and some lances and axes, but they avail themselves of bows more than of any other thing, for they are exceedingly good archers, the best in the world, and depend much from childhood upon arrows. And on their backs they wear armor made of buffalo hide and of other animals very thick, and they are of boiled hides that are very hard and strong. They are good men and victorious in battle and mightily valiant and they are very furious and have little care for their life, which they put to every risk without any regard.” Europeans trembled at the thought of these warriors; Marco Polo came so close to them he could see the glint in their eyes and smell their breath reeking of koumiss, and he became intoxicated.
Vastly outnumbered by those whom they sought to conquer, lacking a common religion or common tongue, the Mongols subjugated the entire Asian continent. It seemed impossible that they had accomplished this task, yet they had, within only a few years. For Marco, the reasons were written in the Mongols’ wholehearted commitment to the warrior’s life. These men, motivated by the single-minded desire to serve their lord at all times, seemed tougher and more resilient than their European counterparts. Their philosophy of conquest was simple and stark: all war, all the time. Everyone participated in the effort. “There was no such thing as a civilian,” notes the historian David Morgan. Mongol forces drew from every stratum of society. In the words of Juvaini, the Mongol military was a “peasantry in the dress of an army, of which, in time of need, all, from small to great, from those of high to those of low estate, are swordsmen, archers or spearmen.”
This concentration of purpose deeply impressed Marco. “When the army goes out for war,” he observes, “more bravely than the rest of the world do they submit to hardships, and often when he has need he will go or will stay a whole month without carrying any common food except that he will live on the milk of a mare and the flesh of the chase, which they take with their bows.” When necessary, “they stay two days and two nights on horseback without dismounting.”
He concludes his description with unabashed hero worship: “They are those people who most in the world bear work and great hardship and are content with little food, and who are for this reason suited best to conquer cities, lands, and kingdoms.” This hard but vital way of life was power incarnate, it was freedom, it was everything the young traveler desired.
As Marco repeatedly states, the size of the Mongol armies was staggering. “When a lord of the Tartars goes to war he takes with him an army of a hundred thousand horsemen”—an unheard-of number in Europe. Despite its size, the Mongol equestrian army followed remarkably simple principles of organization. The lord, or general, “makes a chief to every ten, and to every hundred, and to every thousand, and to every ten thousand, so that the chief lord has to take counsel with only ten men.” So it went up and down the chain of command, each chief reporting on the actions of his ten underlings to the one chief above him. Under this system, the Mongols could launch an attack of an appropriate size on a plain, on a mountain, or in a valley; they even had a sophisticated network of spies who scouted remote roads and valleys before the army passed through, and in that way, “the army cannot be attacked from any side without knowing it.”
And there were still more Mongol survival techniques to which Marco became privy.
“They live at most times on milk,” he reports, “and of horses and mares there are about eighteen for each man, and when any horse is tired by the road another is taken in exchange. They carry no food but one or two bags of leather in which they put the milk that they drink, and carry each a small pignate, that is, an earthen pot, in which they cook their meat.” If they cannot take meat with them, he says, they kill animals as they go, then “take out the belly and empty it and then fill it with water; and then take the flesh which they wish to cook and cut it into pieces and put it inside this belly so filled with water, and then put it over the fire and let it cook, and when it is cooked they eat the flesh, cauldron and all.”
Adhering to this strenuous, frugal lifestyle, Mongol warriors could go for days without eating cooked food or even lighting a fire. For sustenance, “they live on the blood of their horses; for each pricks the vein of his horse and puts his mouth to the vein and drinks of the blood till he is satisfied.” They found other extraordinary uses for the blood of their horses. “They carry the blood with them, and when they wish to eat they…put some of it in water and leave it to dissolve, and then they drink it. And in the same way they have their dried mare’s milk, too, which is solid like paste. It is dried in this way. They boil the milk, and then the cream which floats on top is put in another vessel, and of that, butter is made; because as long as it stays in the milk it could not be dried. Then the milk is put in the sun, and so it is dried. And when they go to war they carry about ten pounds of milk…in a little leather flask.” Mixed with a little water, “this is their breakfast.”
When circumstances permitted, Mongol cuisine featured more variety and subtlety than a warrior’s regime might suggest. Traditional recipes of this period included a medicinal concoction, Borbi Soup (“Reduce thirty or so sheep bones in one bucket of water until it is one-fourth the original amount of water, strain, skim oil from the surface, remove sediment, and eat as much as desired.”); Russian Olive Soup (“Trim and cut up one leg of mutton, add five cardamoms, and shelled chickpeas. Boil, strain, add Russian olives, sliced sheep thorax, and Chinese cabbage or nettle leaf.”); and Butter Skin Yuqba (“Finely cut mutton, sheep’s fat, sheep’s tail, Mandarin orange peel, and sprouting ginger. Add salt, sauce, and spices. Mix everything uniformly. To make skins, blend vegetable oil, rice flour, and white wheat flour.”). Revealing a Turkish influence, noodles had entered the Mongol diet, often in combination with mutton, egg, sprouting ginger, sheep intestines, and mushrooms, the whole served in a clear broth seasoned with pepper, salt, and vinegar. Marco would not have been surprised to encounter noodles in Mongolia; long before his journey, this type of food had spread from Turkey along the Silk Road in both directions. Contrary to myth, Marco Polo did not introduce noodles to Italy; his anonymous predecessors had.
MARCO ACKNOWLEDGED the Mongols as masters of military strategy—on land if not at sea—not because they were brutal, but because they were subtly strategic. It came as a surprise to many Chinese and Europeans to learn that when the Mongols “come to battle with their enemies, in the field they defeat them as much by flight as by pursuit.” The Mongols were not ashamed to be seen fleeing battle, but then they lured their adversaries into a culvert or onto a cliff where they closed in for the kill, felling them with the arrows they had saved for this moment. “When the enemy believe they have discomfited and conquered them [the Mongols] by putting them to flight,” Marco writes, the warriors of the Steppe regroup and let fly arrows tipped with lethal poison, killing the enemy’s horses. At this point the Mongols double back on their befuddled, exhausted adversaries to slaughter them.
Yet even as he wrote, Marco noted with regret that the purity of Mongol warrior life was passing—“now they are much debased”—undermined by the influence of “the customs of the idolaters,” presumably Buddhists, whose influence was spreading rapidly through the region, and by Islam, also spreading quickly.
No matter what the opponents’ faith, Mongol justice was swift, savage, and systematic. “If a man strikes with steel or with a sword, whether he hits or not, or threatens one, he loses his hand,” Marco observes. “He who wounds must receive a like wound from the wounded.” A petty thief received a beating for his transgression, “at least seven blows with a rod, or, if he has stolen two things, seventeen blows, or if three things, twenty-seven blows,” and so on by increments of ten blows. “And many of them die of this beating.” Anyone daring to steal a horse—the Mongols took care to brand them—or, for that matter, an ox, would inevitably die of all the blows he received in punishment, so to shorten the process, the malefactor was cut in two with a sword.
Clemency—what little of it there was—took a mercenary form. If a horse thief could afford to make ninefold restitution for his crime, he escaped with his life, if not his honor.
ONE MONGOL custom in particular astounded Marco: the marriage of dead children. He took pains to explain the elaborate rites to Europeans likely to dismiss them as grotesque fantasy. “When there are two men, the one who has a dead male child inquires for another man who may have had a female child suited to him, and she also may be dead before she is married; these two parents make a marriage of the two dead together. They give the dead girl to the dead boy for wife, and they have documents made about it in corroboration of the dowry and marriage.”
When such a ceremony was complete, a necromancer—a shaman or magician who communicated with the dead—burned the documents, with the smoke announcing to the spirits of the dead the marriage of these two deceased children. A marriage feast ensued. Later, the families fashioned images of the dead newlyweds, placed them on a horse-drawn cart adorned with flowers, and paraded them throughout the land, until, when they were done feasting, they consigned the images to the flames, “with great prayer and supplication to the gods that they make that marriage known in the other world with happiness.”
The two families bound by the marriage of their dead children exchanged gifts, even a dowry, as if bride and groom walked among them, erasing the boundary between life and death. Afterward, “the parents and kinsmen of the dead count themselves as kindred and keep up their relation…as if their dead children were alive.”
But Marco is only warming to his theme, and he has something “really marvelous to put into writing.” How could anything outdo the wonders he has already described? He has his answer ready: “We shall speak of the rule of the Great Khan and of his court, which in my judgment I hold, having searched out and seen many parts of the world, that no other dominion can be compared to.” Not only that, but “I shall bind myself for certain not to say of it more than is according to the truth.”
MARCO SPEAKS breathlessly of the “very wild” Mecrit people, nomads who domesticated and rode deer as large as horses; he enthuses over the kingdom of Ergiuul, with its “three races: there are some Turks and many Nestorian Christians, and idolaters [Buddhists] and some Saracens who worship by the law of Mahomet.” Discussing the province of Sinju, he waxes rhapsodic over the oxen and cows “as large as elephants” that were “very beautiful to see, for they were all hairy except the back, and are white and black.” Their wool, “more fine than silk” so impressed him that, he says, “I, Marco Polo, brought some of it here to Venice as a wonderful thing, and so it was counted such by all.” Not only that, but the region “produced the best musk…in the world.”
He was not alone in his fascination with musk; it was fabled throughout Europe as an ingredient in perfumes, aphrodisiacs, and potions of all kinds. Now Marco learned that the magical substance was actually obtained from an egg-sized abdominal gland of the male musk deer. He speaks of the musk he discovered in a “wild animal” resembling a gazelle. “The animal,” he advises, “has deer’s hair,” but much thicker, feet as large as a gazelle’s, and a tail like a gazelle’s, “but it has four teeth, two below and two above, which are three fingers long and are very thin, and white as ivory, and go two upward and two downward.” The Mongols, he notes, call the animals gudderi.<
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The secretion itself was reddish brown, with the consistency of honey, and a penetrating odor celebrated as a sexual lure. Marco precisely describes the Mongol method for obtaining musk: “The hunters sally forth at the full of the moon to catch the said animals; for when one has taken it he finds on it at the navel in the middle under the belly between the skin and the flesh a pustule of blood”—said to grow under the influence of the full moon—“which one cuts off with the whole skin and takes it out, and they dry in the sun. The blood is the musk from which comes so great an odor.”
The musk gazelle so intrigued Marco that years later he returned to Venice bearing “the head and feet of one of the animals, dried, and some musk in the musk sac, and pairs of little teeth.” The trophy served as a poignant reminder of the rich experiences in his past, but one that he could, with effort, re-create for his listeners from memory in his jail cell in Genoa.
About the region’s people, Marco had decidedly mixed feelings; he seems to change his mind even as he speaks of them. They had small noses and black hair, and the men sported no beards, only a few chin hairs. The women were very fair, “well-made in all respects,” with no hair anywhere, “except on the top of the head.” Although he considered himself a worldly fellow, he was both fascinated and repulsed to discover that the men “delight themselves much in the sensuality and take wives enough, because their religion…does not hinder them, but they take as many as they can.” Moreover, he says, “I tell you that the men seek beautiful wives rather than noble, for if there is a very comely and fair woman, and she is of low descent, yet a great baron or great man takes her to wife for her beauty and gives silver enough to her father and mother as they have agreed.” Marco may have been thinking how such payments resembled Venetian dowries, which also transformed matrimony into a commercial transaction and a political alliance between families.
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