Like so much else in the Mongol court, the process of selecting concubines fit to serve the khan was highly ritualized. Every other year, Marco explains, “The Great Khan sends his messengers to…find him the most beautiful girls according to the standard that he gives them, four hundred, five hundred, more or less, as they think right.”
Once assembled, the girls appeared before “judges deputed for this purpose, who, seeing and considering all the parts of each separately—that is, the hair, the face, and the eyebrows, the mouth, the lips, and the other limbs—that they may be harmonious and proportioned to the body, value some at sixteen carats, others at seventeen, eighteen, twenty.” Only those fortunate girls awarded twenty carats or more were selected and ushered into the presence of Kublai Khan himself, where they submitted to the scrutiny of still more judges. The procedure yielded forty maidens valued at the highest number of carats and, as Marco puts it, “chosen for his own room.”
Even these select girls had to undergo one final intimate inspection before they were deemed fit for Kublai Khan’s bed. Under his direction, the “elder ladies of the palace…make them [the girls] lie with them in one bed to know if she has good breath and sweet, and is clean, and sleeps quietly without snoring, and has no unpleasant scent anywhere, and to know if she is a virgin, and quite sound in all things.”
This description, as explicit as Marco dared to make it, is usually taken to mean that the barons’ wives engaged in sex with the female recruits to break them in and train them in the arts of love. Those who passed this most intimate test of all, who were “good and fair and sound in all their limbs,” were “sent to wait on their lord.”
Every three days, six winners of this Mongol beauty contest were dispatched to Kublai Khan’s quarters, “both in the room and in the bed and for all that he needs; and the Great Khan does with them what he pleases.” When he finished, the exhausted girls departed, only to be replaced by a second shift of six. “And so it goes all the year that every three days and three nights they are changed until the number of those hundred is completed, and they stay for another turn.”
During the orgies, Kublai Khan remained undisturbed by anyone except the young concubines. “If the lord has need of anything extraordinary, as drink or food or other things, the girls who are in the lord’s chamber order those in the other room what they must prepare, and they prepare it immediately. And so the lord is not waited on by other persons, but by the girls.” All the while, girls valued at fewer carats assisted other ladies in waiting, learning to sew and to make gloves, and “other genteel work.”
The khan shared his surplus of women with his barons, earning the goodwill and cementing the loyalty of all his petitioners. “When any gentleman is looking for wives, the Great Khan gives him one with a very great dowry, and in this way he finds them all husbands of good position.” As described by Marco, this intricate system of sharing sexual entitlements satisfied the needs of all the interested parties.
Marco realized that the arrangement required a remarkable degree of acquiescence on the part of Kublai Khan’s subjects, who found a justification for losing their daughters in the irresistible movements of the planets. “Are not the men…annoyed that the Great Khan takes their daughters from them?” Marco asks. “Certainly not.” It was no shame for a woman to be plucked from her town to serve the khan sexually, but a form of royal recognition. “They think it a great favor and honor, and are very glad that they have pretty daughters which he deigns to accept, because, they say, ‘If a daughter is born under a good planet and with good fortune, the lord will be able to satisfy her better and will marry her into a good position, which I should not have been able to do.’”
KUBLAI KHAN believed that he was fulfilling Heaven’s mandate to produce as many heirs as possible. According to Marco’s tally, Kublai Khan sired twenty-two sons by his four wives, and twenty-five additional sons by his concubines. (His many daughters did not merit comment.) To hear the diplomatic Venetian tell it, every one of Kublai Khan’s male heirs possessed the father’s courage and sagacity. And every one wanted to be the next “great khan.” Of them all, Kublai’s oldest surviving son, Chinkim, was expected to inherit the throne. He had distinguished himself on horseback and in scholarship, and he was popular with nearly everyone except for his direct rivals. Placed in charge of the sensitive task of collecting taxes, he firmly opposed corruption, yet he was generous in providing assistance to families afflicted by natural disasters such as drought and floods. In these respects, he proved himself a worthy successor to his father.
According to the Persian historian Vassaf, “When Kublai approached his seventieth year, he desired to raise…Chinkim to the position of representative and declared successor during his own lifetime; so he took counsel with the chiefs.” The other khans, not surprisingly, declared that Kublai’s proposal violated the precepts laid down by Genghis Khan himself—Chinkim was not eligible to become the “great khan” during his father’s lifetime—but they did pledge to support him after Kublai Khan’s death. To the young Marco, it seemed as if that day would never come.
But even Kublai Khan was mortal.
CHAPTER EIGHT
In the Service of the Khan
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
THE SEAT OF Kublai Khan’s power was “the great city called Cambulac,” where he wintered over. This was a recent development in his empire. Ever since 1220, the Mongols, led by Genghis Khan, had considered Karakorum, on the Mongolian Steppe, to be their capital. Kublai Khan later decided to move the center of authority to the south, as if to superimpose Mongol might on Chinese civilization.
Kublai Khan chose a Muslim architect to oversee the construction of Cambulac, even though it was designed to demonstrate to the Chinese that Kublai’s dynasty drew inspiration from them and identified with them. Work commenced in 1267. When it was completed several years later, the city featured eleven gates guarded by imposing three-story towers that served as observation platforms.
In the multilingual Mongol Empire, the new capital was known by several names. The Chinese called it Ta-tu, “Great Capital.” The Turks knew it as Khanbalikh—which Marco spelled “Cambulac”—“City of the Khan.” And the Mongols, adapting the Chinese name, called it Daidu. Today the city is known as Beijing.
BY THE TIME OF Marco’s visit, the new city’s eastern section was devoted to the study of astronomy, which held a special fascination for Kublai Khan, with his capacious vision of the world. Kublai, inspired by a Persian center at Maragheh, Azerbaijan, renowned for its discoveries of celestial objects and for the sophisticated stargazing instruments devised there, had long wanted his own observatory.
To realize his vision, Kublai sent for a Persian astronomer, Jamal al-Din, who brought with him a trove of plans for state-of-the-art devices: the sundial, the astrolabe, celestial and terrestrial globes, and an armillary sphere—a skeletal celestial sphere with a model of Earth or the Sun in the center, often used for instruction. All of these mechanisms were more advanced than their European counterparts.
Modern astronomy in the West owes much to its Chinese and Arab precursors. In the traditional Chinese model, which the West eventually came to adopt, the equator is conceived as a circle around the globe, and the north pole as the uppermost point—a model that seems natural and obvious these days. European astronomers of Marco’s time employed a different configuration, one based on the horizon and the Sun’s motion through the heavens (the “ecliptic”). They gave the equator short shrift until Tycho Brahe, the Danish astronomer active in the late sixteenth century, adopted the Chinese approach, which had been in use at least since 2400 BC.
In the Chinese system, the heavens radiated from a central stem in twenty-eight distinct segments known as xiu, or lunar mansions. Each xiu had its complement of stars and constellations. For the Chinese, the
heavens were orderly rather than random. As early as the seventh century—nearly a thousand years before their European counterparts—they observed that comet tails always point away from the sun; thus they anticipated the discovery of the solar wind. And they discovered craters on the moon long before Europeans, who, until the Copernican revolution, considered the moon, along with all other heavenly bodies, to be a perfect sphere.
In 1271, the year before Marco’s arrival, Kublai Khan, recognizing the achievements of Persian astronomers, established the Institute of Muslim Astronomy. With the cross-cultural fertilization that would become typical of the Yüan dynasty, he enlisted the efforts of an esteemed Chinese engineer and astronomer, Guo Shoujing, who in turn employed Persian diagrams to build instruments and develop formulas to calculate a new Mongol calendar, similar to the Chinese lunar calendar. In the Mongol calendar, based on a twelve-year cycle, each year is named for a particular animal meant to characterize it: mouse, cow, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, cock, dog, or pig. In this scheme, the year of the monkey exhibits simian traits; it is rambunctious and high-strung, a difficult year indeed.
The subtleties of Mongol and Chinese astronomy were lost on Marco, concerned as he was with earthly matters. Like other Europeans, the young man considered astronomy and astrology synonymous, and the refinements of Kublai Khan’s astronomers failed to engage his curiosity. He was far more intrigued by the ubiquitous wizards and soothsayers. In Cambulac alone, he estimated, no fewer than five thousand “astrologers and diviners” plied their trade, according to their religious beliefs and cultural background—Muslim, Christian, or Chinese.
MARCO FAMILIARIZED himself with the various lunar calendars in use throughout the Mongol Empire. He reported that every year Christian, Muslim, and Chinese astrologers searched the heavens to watch “the course and arrangement of the whole year in this astrology according to the course of each moon. For they see and find what sort of weather each moon of that year will produce according to the natural course and arrangement of the planets and signs and their properties. Namely, in such a moon there will be thunders and tempests; in such, an earthquake; in such, thunderbolts, lightning, and many rains; in such, sicknesses and plagues and wars and infinite quarrels, and so on with each moon.”
The astrologers gathered their celestial predictions into “little pamphlets into which they write everything that shall happen in each month that year”—the Asian version of Poor Richard’s Almanack, the compendium of weather forecasts and other practical information assembled and published by Benjamin Franklin during the eighteenth century.
According to Marco, anyone planning “some great work”—a trip, a business venture—“will go to find one of these astrologers and say to him, ‘See in your books how the sky stands just now, because I wish to go do such business or trade,’ telling him the year, month, day, hour, and minute of his birth; because everyone as soon as he is born is taught about his nativity.” After finding the planet under which his supplicant was born, the astrologer proceeds to “foretell him everything that will happen to him on that journey in order, and how his proposal will prosper in his doings, whether well or ill.” A merchant such as Marco Polo might be cautioned to postpone his travels until a planet opposing trade moved out of range, or, to avoid its harmful influence, might be advised to leave the city by a gate facing away from the invisible planetary threat.
Marco’s descriptions of “pamphlets” and “books”—although not found in all early manuscripts—confound skeptics of his presence in China who claim he never mentioned them. He was, in fact, aware of printing, but he overlooked the significance of this potent technology. His lapse is understandable because the invention of movable type lay almost two centuries in the future for Europe, and he could not have foreseen its role in disseminating the Bible and other important works. As a merchant, he immediately grasped the significance of paper currency, but books devoted to astrology remained a mere curiosity. For Marco, location was paramount, and no place on earth fascinated him more than Cambulac, the sudden center of Mongol civilization.
“THE PALACE IS square in every way,” says Marco. “First, there is a square circuit of wall, and each face is eight miles long, round which there is a deep moat; and in the middle of each side is a gate by which all the people enter who gather here from every side. Then there is a space of a mile all around; there the soldiers are stationed. After that space is found another circuit of wall, of six miles for a side.” The scale of this city, and its walls, was enough to make Marco’s European audience gasp with astonishment. Instead of the quaint capital they may have imagined, a giant fortress rose as testimony to the strength of the Mongol Empire.
With this centralized capital, Kublai Khan attempted to alter the Mongol tradition, and the course of Mongol history, from nomadic to pastoral. The marvel of Cambulac and Kublai Khan’s great experiment was that it worked. Marco witnessed this metropolis at its zenith, and he recorded a vivid description of Kublai’s palace of the Mongols, a forerunner of the Chinese royal residence that came to be known as the Forbidden City, later built on the same site and incorporating some of the buildings and outdoor spaces that Marco had scrupulously chronicled. “At each angle of this wall, and in the middle of each of the faces, is a beautiful and spacious palace,” Marco continues, “so that all around about the wall are eight palaces, in which are kept the munitions of the Great Khan, that is, one kind of trappings in each; as bridles, saddles, stirrups, and other things which belong to the equipment of horses. And in another bows, strings, quivers, arrows, and other things belonging to archery. In another cuirasses”—armor, especially breastplates—“corselets, and similar things of boiled leather.”
A wall surrounded the entire complex, with “a great gate which is never opened except when the Great Khan comes out of it to make war.” Kublai’s palace, concealed within these walls, “is the greatest and most wonderful ever seen,” a dwelling of unsurpassed luxury, shimmering and dreamlike in Marco’s soaring description. “The walls of the halls and of the rooms are all covered with gold and with silver, and there are portrayed dragons and beasts and birds and fair stories of ladies and knights and other beautiful things and stories of wars, which are on the walls; and the roof is also made so that nothing else is seen there but gold and silver and paintings. The hall is so great and broad that it is a great marvel, and more than six thousand men would well feed there at once, sitting at table together. In that palace there are four hundred rooms, so many that it is a marvel to see them. It is so beautiful and large and rich and so well made and arranged that there is not a man in the world who would know how to plan it better nor make it.” Although Marco seems to overstate yet again, he is accurately describing the size of the Mongol palace.
When he raised his eyes to the sky, he saw more wonders, which presaged the grandeur of the Forbidden City. “The roofs above are all red and green and azure and peacock blue and yellow and of all colors, and are glazed so well and so cleverly that they are bright like crystal, so that they shine very far round the palace. And you may know that the roof is so strong and so firmly put together that it lasts many years.” He displays a thorough knowledge of the interior as well, writing, “In the part behind the palace there are large houses, rooms, and halls, in which are the private things of the lord, that is, all his treasure, gold, silver, precious stones, and pearls, and his vessels of gold and of silver; where his ladies and concubines stay, and where he has his affairs done conveniently and when he pleases; into which other people do not enter.”
The grounds of this precursor to the Forbidden City offered a spectacular complement to the buildings. Where Venice consisted of treacherous canals and narrow, refuse-filled streets, the Mongol capital offered broad, clean, safe avenues; a sophisticated drainage system to channel rainwater for irrigation; and lakes and rivers generously stocked with fish—all combined with pleasing prospects at every turn. No wonder that Marco raves about “very beautiful larg
e lawns and gardens and beautiful and good trees of different sorts of fruits in which are many kinds of strange beasts.” To these creatures he gives special attention: “These are white stags, the animals that make the musk, roe-deer, fallow deer, and squirrels, and ermines, and many kinds of other strange beautiful animals in great abundance.”
The landscape within the city walls also receives his praise: “The meadows have grass in abundance, because all the streets are paved and raised two cubits above the ground, so that no mud ever collects on them nor is the rain water caught there, but running through the meadows it fattens the land and makes the grass grow abundantly. At one corner…is a very large lake (of the earth from which was made the hill mentioned below), in which are many kinds of fish…and every time the great lord [Kublai Khan] wishes some of those fish he has them at his will.”
There seemed no end to Cambulac’s marvels. “Moreover,” he writes, “I tell you that a great river flows in there and makes a kind of fish pond; and there the animals go to drink; and flows out of the lake afterwards, passing through a conduit near the said hill…. It is so planned that no fish can escape, and this is done and is closed with nets of iron wire and of brass both at the entry of the river into the lake and also at the exit…. There are also swans and other waterfowl.”
The sights were marvelous, and Marco insisted that his audience believe his account down to the smallest detail.
THE SCIENCE OF urban planning, Marco hastens to inform his readers, was far advanced in China. He points out how the city of Cambulac consisted of broad main streets “drawn out straight as a thread,” running from one gate to the next, and bordered by “stalls and shops of every kind.” Wherever he looked, he saw beautiful inns, houses, and palaces. Behind it all, a rigorous logic ruled. “The city is laid out by squares, as a chessboard is, and is so beautiful and so skillfully planned that in no way would it be possible to tell of it.” The plan was not merely esthetically pleasing; it was also intended to discourage criminal activity. Gates could be swung shut to isolate a street or square, and hiding places were scarce.
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