The principal function of the post was to stable fresh horses; each had no less than four hundred mounts at the ready, “that they may be able to dismount there, leaving the tired horses, and take fresh ones.”
To Marco’s eye, the complex system, with its many interdependent parts, worked flawlessly, transmitting vital information across great distances, as well as disparate cultures and languages. “In this way it goes through all the principal provinces and realms, cities and places of the great lord up to the borders of the neighboring provinces.” Even off the main road, Kublai Khan had established smaller posts, thirty-five or even forty miles apart in remote areas. Marco claims that ten thousand of these posts, built at the khan’s expense, dotted the landscape, each of them luxuriously furnished and capable of stabling twenty or so horses. These way stations provided safety and shelter for the footmen engaged in the essential task of directing messages to the proper recipients. The occupation called for a distinctive costume. “They wear a great and broad girdle all full round about of great balls, that is, of sounding bells, so that when they go, they may be heard from quite far.”
Marco made a close study of these wonderful little outposts. He reports: “When the king wishes to send a letter by courier, the letter is given to one of the runners, and these go always running at great speed, and they go not more than three miles…. The other who is at the end of the three miles who hears him clearly by the bells coming from afar, stays all ready; and as soon as that one is come he takes the thing that he carries and takes a little ticket that the writer gives him and sets himself running and goes as far as the second three miles, and does just as the other had done. And so I tell you that in this way from these footmen the great lord has news from ten days’ journeys in one day and in one night, for they go running by night as well as by day.”
To cover longer distances, footmen yielded to horses trained for the task. “Messengers on horseback go expressly to tell the great lord news from any land which may be in rebellion against him.” Each of these messengers carried special identification in the form of a tablet bearing the image of a falcon, as a sign that he wished to go “at express speed.” The messengers “never have any but good animals and fresh for their needs. They take horses from the post, where they are ready for them, and if they are two, they set out from the place where they are on two good horses strong and swift; they bind up their belly and wrap up their heads, and set themselves to ride at full gallop to the utmost of their power, and gallop until they come to the next post at twenty-five miles, and then they find two other horses ready, fresh, and rested and swift.”
Marco praised the system as a model of efficiency. “They mount so quickly that they do not rest themselves, and when they are mounted they set themselves immediately at full gallop, and do not cease to gallop till they are come to the next post; and there they find the other horses and men ready to change for the others, and they mount themselves as quickly and set themselves on the road. And so they do till the evening. And in this way,” Marco concludes with vicarious pride and satisfaction, “messengers like these go two hundred and fifty miles in one day to carry news to the great lord speedily from distant parts, and also when there is need they go three hundred. And if it is a very grave case they ride at night; and if the moon does not shine, the men of the post go running before them with torches to the next post.”
THERE WAS STILL more that Marco wished his readers to appreciate about Kublai Khan’s splendid realm. Rows of towering trees marked the straight roads traveled by Kublai’s messengers. Marco himself studied the sight as he followed in their tracks at a more leisurely pace. “The [trees] are so large that they can well be seen from very far,” he reports. “The Great Khan has this done so that each may see the roads, and that merchants may rest in the shade, and that they may not lose their way either by day or by night when they go through desert places.” And there was one other surprising benefit, according to Marco. “The Great Khan has [the trees] planted all the more gladly because his diviners and astrologers say that he who has trees planted lives a long time.”
In the midst of surveying the Mongols’ practical accomplishments, Marco pauses to praise the local rice wine, boiled and mixed with potent spices. He says it has “such a flavor that it is better than any other wine. It is clear and beautiful. It makes a man become drunken sooner than other wine because it is very hot.” It is easy to imagine the young Venetian in an alcoholic daze gleefully admiring Kublai Khan’s messengers, his trees, and all the other wonders of his realm—the perpetually burning stones, for instance.
Wherever he traveled in China, Marco came across “large black stones that are dug from the mountains as veins, which burn like logs.” Everywhere, people put them to use. “They keep up the fire better than wood does,” he notes. “If you put them on the fire in the evening and make them catch well, I tell you they keep fire all the night so that one finds some in the morning.” These black stones gave off long-lasting, intense heat. They were so useful that Kublai Khan’s subjects rarely resorted to burning wood, which was in short supply. “So great is the multitude of people, and stoves, and baths, which are continually heated, that the wood could not be enough” in a country where everyone bathed “at least three times a week, and in the winter every day if they can do so,” in stark contrast to Mongols and Venetians.
The plentiful black stones making possible all this cooking, heating, and bathing were lumps of coal, a source of energy that had been used throughout China for at least a thousand years. Yet in Marco’s day, the notion of burning coal rather than wood for heat was practically unheard of in Europe. The existence of this black, dusty, carbon-rich substance had been noted at infrequent intervals throughout Western history, beginning with the Roman occupation of Britain and continuing to Marco’s time, but not until the eighteenth century did coal become a common source of energy in European countries.
WITH TOUCHES LIKE THESE, Marco revealed Kublai Khan’s splendid realm not as a static, remote fantasyland populated by savages, but as a vital state constantly on the alert for danger—an empire that never slept, where swift messengers moved by night if necessary, their way marked by reassuring rows of trees and lit by flickering torchlight. What could Venice do to equal such vigilance? So ran Marco’s unspoken question. Could Venetians muster the same ingenuity, even if their lives depended on it?
The network of posts and messengers and fast horses reaching far and wide throughout the Mongol realm struck Marco as a grand achievement. “The greatest pride and greatest grandeur that any emperor has or might ever have,” he exclaims. “A thing so wonderful and of so great cost that it could hardly be told or written.” So wonderful, in fact, that it inspired Marco to deliver a stinging attack on Christianity.
WITH BLASPHEMOUS GUSTO, Marco explains to his readers that the key to maintaining this network of posts—and, by extension, the Mongol Empire—was the wonderful custom of polygamy. “If anyone were to doubt how there are so many people to do so many duties,” he writes, “it is answered that all the idolaters and Saracens take six, eight, and ten wives each, provided that they can pay the expense, and beget infinite”—infinite!—“sons; and there will be many men of whom each will have more than thirty sons, and all follow him armed; and this is because of the many wives.”
Nor did they starve, even with so many mouths to feed. Marco reports that they freely indulged their appetite for “plenty of victuals”—usually abundant grain combined with “milk or flesh.” They also devoured “macaroni,” a food that, contrary to Polo mythology, was already known in Italy. Their endless need for sustenance kept them busy. “With them, no land that can be ploughed lies fallow; and their animals increase and multiply without end, and when they go to the field, there is not one who does not take with him six, eight, and more horses for himself.”
Christians could only envy the satisfying and fertile ways of these heathens. “With us,” Marco laments, “one has but one wife, and if she is
barren, the man will end his life with her and beget no son; therefore we have not so many people as they.” It was now apparent where Marco’s sympathies lay. He had become the most enthusiastic of converts.
Yet he saw the Mongols from a European perspective. Outwardly conventional, Marco subscribed to the medieval assumption that one’s identity in life was determined by religion, place of birth, gender, social station, and birth order. In much the same way, he regarded the Mongol Empire as a fixed hierarchy with Kublai Khan at the top, and the khan’s barons arrayed beneath him in predictable descending ranks. Marco and his collaborator stuck to their familiar categories even when experience strongly suggested otherwise. As nomads, the Mongols were less hierarchical than Marco suggested; their authority derived from their adaptability and their ability to take on the characteristics of the host culture in which they embedded themselves. Even though Marco was observant enough to describe their doing so, he remained at least partially oblivious to some aspects of their way of life. They were not simply the Asian equivalent of European nobility, but a drastically different type of society, living off the land, perpetually on the hoof, disconcertingly egalitarian and heterogeneous.
ON THE STEPPE, where the climate was harsh, and sustenance limited, Kublai Khan’s ministers managed the food supply with a sensitivity unknown in Europe. When grain was abundant, they bought large quantities, which they stored for as many as four years. “When it happens that some grain fails and that the dearth is great,” Marco reports, “then the great lord makes them take out some of his grain of which he has so much.” Kublai sold grain to the needy at low prices for as long as the shortage lasted. And if famine threatened the populace, Marco says, Kublai Khan “does great charity and provision and alms to the poor people of Cambulac.” Marco was referring to those families of six, eight, ten, or more crammed into one small dwelling, all with nothing to eat. In these dire cases, Kublai provided sufficient grain to feed them all for an entire year, if necessary.
Like other aspects of their government, the Mongols’ welfare state was remarkably well organized. The afflicted families reported to officials appointed for this purpose. “Each shows a note of how much was given them in the past year for living, and according to that they [the officials] provide them [for] that year,” Marco explains. “They provide them also with their clothes, because the Great Khan has the tenth of all the wool and silk and hemp of which clothes can be made.” Drawing on a practice whereby all craftsmen were bound to give the khan the fruits of one day’s labor every week, he was able to distribute clothing to the needy in winter and summer.
Marco recognized that among Europeans the Mongols carried a reputation for avoiding charity in any form. “The Tartars,” he admits, “according to their customs, before they knew idol law, did no alms. When some poor man went to them they drove him away with abuse, saying to him, ‘Go with the bad year that God gave thee, for if he had loved thee as he loves me, he would have done some good.’” According to Western beliefs, the Mongols let their hungry, sick, and elderly die—at least until Kublai Khan made public assistance part of his ruling style.
Wherever Marco looked, he found striking instances of Kublai Khan’s innovative charity: “Those who wish to go to the court for the lord’s bread daily can have a hot loaf; it is refused to none, but some is given to all who go, and it is sold to none.” He estimates that twenty or thirty thousand people received their bread, as well as bowls of grain, every single day of the year. Based on this description, one can picture the Mongol indigent lining up at the distribution stations, their faces drawn with hunger, expectation, and anxiety, knowing that the loaf provided by Kublai Khan was all that stood between them and extinction. One can imagine the reverence these people felt for the beneficent ruler on whom their lives depended.
Kublai Khan reaped great loyalty for his good works. Marco asserts: “All the people are so fond of him that they worship him as God.”
DURING MARCO’S TIME in the Mongol Empire, Kublai Khan extended his charity throughout his realm. Each year, he dispatched inspectors to check the grain supply. If an inspector should discover that rain, wind, caterpillars, locusts, or some other calamity has ravaged the crop, “he does not take the tax from them…for that season or that year, but he gives them his own corn from his granaries—as much as they need, that they may have it to sow and eat that year.” In the winter, Kublai Khan “has inquiry made, and if he finds in some province a man whose animals are dead…, he has some of his own animals, which he has from the tithe of other provinces, given to him and sold to him cheaply and has him helped, and has no tax taken from him that year.”
Nor did Kublai Khan’s beneficence end with this gesture. On the largely treeless Steppe inhabited by Mongols and Chinese alike, lightning posed a constant hazard against which there was little defense. “If by accident lightning strikes some flock of ewes or sheep or other animals of whatever kind,” Marco says, “be the flock as large as you like, the Great Khan would not exact tithe for three years. And equally if it happens that lightning strikes some ship full of merchandise, he does not wish any share of rent of it, because he thinks it a bad omen when lightning strikes anyone’s goods.” The reason for this leniency had more to do with superstition and fear of the unknown than with charity. “The Great Khan says, ‘God hated him, therefore he has struck him with lightning,’ and so he does not wish such goods struck by the divine to enter the treasury.”
Fully in Kublai Khan’s thrall, Marco emphasizes selfless motives on the part of the leader of the Mongols: “All his thought and chief anxiety is to help the people who are under him, that they may be able to live, work, and multiply their goods.” At the same time, the Venetian never loses sight of the strict social order and rituals underlying Mongol family structure, agriculture, and military life.
NOWHERE WAS THE Mongol love of orderliness and opulence more evident than in their calendar. The Mongol New Year, which began in February, “by the Tartar computation,” was called simply “White.” In honor of the occasion, “Kublai Khan and his subjects dress themselves in white robes, both men and women.” They did so, Marco explains, “because white dress seems to them lucky and good, and therefore they wear it at the beginning of their year so that they may take their good and have joy all year.”
In their festive attire, Mongol barons bestowed still more presents upon the khan, “of gold and of silver and of pearls and of precious stones and of many rich white cloths,” in addition to a hundred thousand (five to twelve thousand in some manuscript versions) camels and horses, all of them white. “And if they are not altogether white, they are at least white for the greater part.”
Everyone embraced and kissed, exclaiming, “Good luck to you this year and may everything that you do turn out well.” Kublai Khan then displayed his elephants, which were “quite five thousand, all covered with beautiful clothes worked richly in gold and in silk with many other beasts and with birds and lions embroidered.” Each animal bore a coffer filled with items required for feasting, gold and silver utensils, and other trappings. His camels came next, draped in “very beautiful cloth of white silk.” The glittering spectacle moved Marco to exclaim, “It is the most wonderful and beautiful sight that was ever seen in this world.”
On the day of the White festival, all the prominent people of the realm appeared—kings, princes, dukes, marquesses, counts, barons, astrologers, philosophers, physicians, and falconers, along with other officials—to fill the “great hall before the great lord.” Kublai Khan sat on a throne situated so that he could see them all. The overflow crowds arrayed themselves around the walls and prepared to worship there. Marco relates: “When they are all seated each in his proper place a great wise ancient man, as one might say a prelate, stands up in the middle and says in a very loud voice, ‘Now all bow down and worship at once your lord.’ And as soon as he has so said they all rise up and bow themselves immediately and bend the knee and put their foreheads on the ground and make their p
rayer towards the lord and worship him just as if he were their God. Then the prelate says, ‘God save and keep our lord long with joy and gladness.’…And in such a way they worship him four times. And then, this done, they stand up and go all in their order to an altar which is there very well adorned, and on that altar is a red table on which is written with letters of gold and of precious stones of great value the proper name of the Great Khan.”
Marco specifies that Kublai Khan presided over twelve thousand barons upon whom he bequeathed thirteen robes apiece, each robe of a different color and decorated with precious stones, as well as a belt “of crimson cunningly worked with threads of gold and of silver, very rich and very beautiful and of great value,” and boots of similar luxury.
These statistics were simply too large for Europeans to credit, but Mongol and Chinese annals confirm their accuracy. The barons wore a different robe to each of thirteen great feasts throughout the lunar year. In all, Marco estimates that the Mongol court possessed “156,000 robes so dear and of great value.”
They served as a backdrop for the singular spectacle of Kublai Khan presiding over his court. At feasts, “a great lion is brought before the great lord. As soon as he sees him, the lion throws himself down lying before him and makes signs of great humility, and seems to know him for lord. He is so tame that he stays thus before him, with no chain, lying quietly at the king’s feet like a dog”—a sight that, Marco concedes, “makes one wonder.”
THE PRONE LION before the khan reminded Marco of Kublai’s immense appetite for hunting game in Cambulac during the clear, cold, dry winter months. According to custom, Marco notes, any game caught during this period, “wild-boar and stags and bucks and roe-deer and bears, lions, and other sorts of large wild beasts [must] be brought to him.” These came in the form of entrails displayed on carts, as if to whet Kublai’s appetite for the hunt, for he preferred to conduct his own hunting, employing leopards and lynxes “all trained to beast catching and…very good at the chase.” Marco explains that the Great Khan relied on a “little dog for companion” during these exercises. For safety’s sake, the lions were caged “because they would be too ferocious and ravening in the case of the beasts, nor could they be held. And it is necessary that they should be carried against the wind, because if the animals should perceive the scent, they would flee at once.”
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