Marco Polo

by Laurence Bergreen

  A Chinese banknote

  (Bridgeman)

  Kublai Khan employed Westerners as tax collectors to administer his empire, and Marco Polo likely found himself in this role.

  (AKG)

  Kublai Khan hunting atop elephants

  (AKG)

  Kublai Khan’s generosity to the poor, as recounted by Marco Polo and portrayed in this illuminated manuscript, impressed Western minds.

  (Art Archive)

  Silkworms, one of the principal sources of Chinese wealth

  (Imageworks)

  Haunting representations of the Buddha outside Quinsai (Hangzhou) deeply impressed Marco, who had initially dismissed them as idols.

  (Courtesy of the author)

  Their entire lives were arranged to protect them from any disturbance or violation; otherwise, the girl in question would not be able to marry, or, as Marco puts it, “if the opposite [of virginity] is found, the marriage would not hold.” Since this was a serious legal matter, the interested parties—the father of the bride and the bridegroom—took extreme measures to confirm the girl’s virginity.

  “When the bonds and agreements have been duly made,” reports Marco, “the girl is taken for the test of her virtue to the baths, where there will be the mothers and relations of herself and of the spouse, and on behalf of either party certain matrons specially deputed for this duty who will first examine the girl’s virginity with a pigeon’s egg. And if the women on behalf of the bridegroom are not satisfied with such a test, since a woman’s natural parts can well be contracted by medicinal means, one matron will cunningly insert a finger wrapped in fine white linen into the natural parts and will break a little of the virginal vein so that the linen may be a little stained with virginal blood. That blood is of such a nature and strength that it can be removed by no washing from cloth where it is fixed. And if it be removed, it is a sign that she has been defiled, nor is that blood of her proper nature. When the test has been made, if she is found a virgin, the marriage is valid; but if not, not. And the father of the girl will be punished by the government according to the agreement that he has made.

  “You ought to know that for the keeping of this virginity, maidens always step so gently as they walk that one foot never goes before the other by more than a finger, because the privy parts of a virgin are very often opened if she take herself along too wantonly.”

  Marco notes parenthetically that Mongols “do not care about this sort of convention; for their daughters ride with them, and their wives, whence it may be believed that to some extent they suffer harm”—with none the worse for the disturbance. Clearly, this was a more realistic approach to the issue of virginity.

  WHILE IN TUNDINFU, Marco lost a cherished ring, and his attempts to recover it opened his eyes wider than ever before to the possibilities of Buddhism. Here he found “eighty-four idols, each with its own name,” but this time he did not dismiss this form of worship. He faithfully reports that “the idolaters say that an appropriate power has been given to each idol by the supreme God, namely to one for the finding of things lost; to one for the provision of fertility of lands and seasonable weather; to one for the helping of flocks; and with regard to everything.”

  Marco naturally felt drawn to the idols capable of locating lost items. Resembling twelve-year-old boys, they were decorated with “beautiful ornaments” and were tended around the clock by an old woman. Anyone seeking to retrieve a lost item, he notes, appealed to this woman, whereupon she advised burning incense. Only then would she speak on behalf of her inanimate charges, saying, “Look in such a place and you shall find it.” If the item was stolen, she would answer, “So-and-so has it. Tell him to give it to you. And if he shall deny, come back to me, for I will make him certainly restore it to you.” And this is what Marco did and heard in pursuit of the lost ring.

  He reports that the old woman’s charms, in combination with the idols’ powers, worked wonders beyond the mere retrieval of lost or stolen goods. A woman who refused to return a stolen kitchen knife, for instance, might find that it “cuts off her hand, or [she] falls into the fire, or another misfortune happens to her.” A man might wind up accidentally cutting off his foot with a stolen knife while chopping wood, or breaking his arms and legs. “Because men know by experience that this happens to them because of denials of thefts, they give back what they have stolen immediately.”

  To hear Marco tell it, the old woman frequently communicated with the mischievous spirits. They “produce whispering in a sort of thin and low voice like a hissing. Then the old woman [gives] them many thanks in this way: she raises her hands before them, she will gnash her teeth three times, saying something like, ‘Oh, how worthy a thing, how holy, and how virtuous.’ And she will say to him who has lost horses, ‘You may go to such a place and you will find them’ or, ‘Robbers found them in such a place and are leading them away with them in such a direction, run, and you shall find them.’ And it is found exactly as she has said.”

  There was a catch: a bounty had to be paid. “When the lost things are found, then men reverently and devoutly offer to the idols perhaps an ell of some fine cloth,” such as silk. This was exactly Marco’s case, and proudly he reports, “I, Marco, found in this way a certain ring of mine that was lost,” and he hastens to add, “not that I made them any offering or homage.”

  WHEN MARCO RESUMED his travels throughout southwestern China, adventures awaited him at every turn, more than he could stuff into his comprehensive account. “Do not believe we have treated the whole province of China in order,” he warns his audience at this point in his account, “not indeed a twentieth part; but only as I, Marco, used to cross the province, so the cities that are on the way across are described, passing by those that are at the sides and through the middle, to tell of which would be too long.”

  “THIS PROVINCE OF MANZI,™ says Marco, picking up where he left off, “is a very exceedingly strong place. All the cities of the kingdom are surrounded with ditches full of water broad”—the length of a crossbow shot, he estimates—“and deep.” By Manzi, Marco meant the realm of the wealthy and sophisticated Song dynasty, which even Kublai Khan had long avoided, preferring to conquer other, more vulnerable regions of China. But the men of Manzi were not the courageous warriors that Marco, or the Mongols, supposed them to be. In 1268, they scattered before Kublai’s forces, or quietly surrendered “because they were not valiant nor used to arms.”

  After the defeat, Marco made it his business to find out exactly how the khan’s men had come to defeat the local king, a supposed tyrant named Facfur, “who took delight in nothing but war and conquest and making himself a great lord.”

  In reality, Facfur had little stomach for fighting, preferring peaceful commercial pursuits; he was precisely the kind of enlightened, semi-divine monarch Kublai Khan aspired to be. And for that reason, Facfur was vulnerable to the rapacious Mongol forces. By coincidence, King Facfur’s astrologers had informed him that under no circumstances would he lose his kingdom unless he were attacked by a man “with one hundred eyes.” This prediction had comforted the king, “because he could not think that any natural man could have a hundred eyes.” He was destined to be proven wrong. As it happened, Kublai Khan’s forces included an exceptional officer by the name of Bayan Hundred Eyes, who would prove to be Facfur’s nemesis.

  Born in 1236, Bayan was a young man at the time of the campaign. He had joined Kublai Khan’s household as a retainer, and in this capacity he exhibited formidable administrative skills, impressive bearing, and dynamic communication. Bayan was married, but Kublai terminated his marriage and gave him a new, highly placed wife named Besüjin. Profiting from his elevated social status, Bayan quickly rose through the allied Mongol-Chinese ranks, forming alliances with the Confucian faction; in 1260, he joined the military, serving first as an administrator, and then as a commander whose leadership ability favorably impressed his superiors and disarmed potential rivals. A statesman and soldier, Bayan mastered Chin
ese literary forms, and he dutifully wrote military poetry in honor of the Mongol forces. Kublai Khan bestowed the highest praise on him, confiding to one of his sons, “Bayan combines in his person the talents of a general and of a minister. He is trustworthy in everything.” He concluded, “You must not treat him as an ordinary person.” Bayan had become the indispensable man of the Yüan dynasty.

  When Kublai Khan determined that the time was right to attack the Song, he placed Bayan in charge of 200,000 cavalry supplemented by the Chinese infantry, as well as a navy of 5,000 vessels manned by 70,000 sailors. Leading his massive force, Bayan circled one city in southern China after another—five in all—demanding that the people lay down their arms and surrender to the Great Khan, but everywhere he went, he met with stubborn, silent resistance from the resolute Chinese. When he came to the sixth disobedient city, Bayan lost all patience and “took it by force and skill, causing all who were found in it to be killed.” Energized by victory, he led his troops on a campaign of burning and pillaging, taking twelve cities in quick succession. “Then the hearts of the men of Manzi trembled when they heard this news.”

  With military control of the entire province, Bayan readied himself for the ultimate conquest, Hangzhou, the richest prize in all of China, or, for that matter, anywhere in the world, and the home of a million and a half people. No other city rivaled Hangzhou for opulence, beauty, or sophistication, or for progressive and generous government.

  WITH HIS celebrated concern for the poor and dispossessed and his abundant charity, King Facfur embodied the wealthy city’s altruistic spirit. Exhibiting a newfound appreciation for Facfur, Marco insisted that the good king’s deeds merited a memorial, and that the king’s subjects loved him more than they had loved any previous king of the city, “because of the great mercy and justice of which he was master.”

  Facfur championed the cause of children abandoned by their mothers, and he devised an efficient system of welfare and adoption on their behalf. “In that province,” says Marco, “they cast out the child as soon as he is born. The poor women who cannot feed them nor bring them up for poverty do this. The king had them all taken, and caused to be written for each one in what constellation and in what planet he was born. Then he had them brought up in many directions and in many places, for he had nurses in great abundance. When a rich man had no child, he went to the king and had himself given as many as he wished and those who pleased him most.” If an adopted child’s biological parents underwent a change of heart, and wished to have it back, they could, so long as they documented that the child was theirs. Otherwise, the infant remained under the king’s protection until marriage. When the adoptees reached marriageable age, the king performed mass marriages, and generously “gave them [the newlyweds] so much that they could live in comfort.”

  Facfur was similarly generous with housing, ensuring that every dwelling, whether it sheltered rich or poor, “was both beautiful and great.” In this beneficent environment, petty crime was unknown, or so Marco claims: “The city was so safe that the doors of the houses and shops and stores full of all the very dear merchandise often stayed open at night as by day and nothing at all was found missing there.” And here, in contrast to so much of the Mongol Empire visited by Marco, “one could go freely through the whole kingdom safe and unmolested by night also by day.”

  At the moment, the king and queen of Hangzhou were in residence amid their lavish court, “and there he [Bayan Hundred Eyes] drew up his army in order before it.” Overwhelmed by the might of the Mongol army, Facfur summoned his astrologers to inquire how he could have suffered this overwhelming defeat, and they explained that his adversary bore the name Bayan Hundred Eyes. The prediction had come true.

  King Facfur “feared greatly, and he left that city with many people and entered into…a thousand ships loaded with all his goods and wealth and fled into the Ocean Sea, among the impregnable islands of India, leaving the city of Quinsai [Hangzhou] to the care of the queen, with orders to defend herself as well as she could, for, being a woman, she would have no fear of death if she fell into the hands of the enemy.” At that point, to the surprise of everyone, the queen, “who was left in the city with a great people,” displayed her mettle in the face of the Mongol onslaught. She “bestirred herself with her military leaders to defend it as well as she could like the valiant lady she was.”

  The queen held her ground until she received a simple but unnerving piece of intelligence from her astrologers: a commander named Hundred Eyes was destined to prevail. When she learned that the general laying siege to the city was known by this name, “her strength failed altogether, for it immediately caused her to remember the aforesaid astrology that said that none but a man with a hundred eyes would take the kingdom from them.” With that revelation, “the queen gave herself up immediately to Bayan. And after the queen surrendered to the Great Khan, and the chief city of the kingdom, all the other cities and villages and all the remainder of the kingdom gave themselves up without mounting any defense.”

  She and her husband met with sharply differing fates. “The queen who surrendered to Bayan was taken to the court of Kublai the Great Khan. And when the great lord saw her, he had her honored and waited upon in costly fashion like the great lady she was.” All the while, King Facfur languished in exile on an island off the coast of India until his death, far from the bountiful kingdom he had once ruled with such enlightened generosity.

  UNTIL HE encountered Facfur’s example, Marco had embraced Kublai Khan as the ideal ruler. True, Kublai Khan displayed impressive generosity toward the poor late in his life, but Facfur’s passion for social and economic justice far exceeded the Mongol leader’s. A careful reading of Marco’s flattering description of Facfur suggests that Marco flirted with the idea that he, rather than Kublai, was the greater of the two—a judgment based on generosity of spirit rather than military might.

  The change in Marco’s thinking reflected his shifting vantage point. When Marco was in Cambulac, Kublai Khan seemed a brilliant sun outshining all other sources of light, but the farther the Venetian ventured to the fringes of the Mongol Empire in performance of his duties as a tax collector, and the more instances of Mongol violence—including the slaughter of women and children—he witnessed or heard about, the more disillusioned he became. At one time, the Mongols had appeared more sympathetic to Marco than their enemies, but as he observed them brutally enforcing their empire’s rule, having himself sampled the refinement of China, a long, slow disillusionment with the Mongols quietly set in. That disillusionment informed his narrative, even as he struggled to maintain his allegiance to the warriors of the Steppe.

  IF MARCO’S habitual tendency to gild his experiences appears suspect, he goes beyond the limits of plausibility when he describes how he played a heroic, pivotal role in the siege of the Siang-yang-fu, a “large and splendid city.” At least, that is the way he tells the story. Chinese annals contradict his version. The siege actually occurred in 1273, while Marco was languishing in Afghanistan, recovering from an unspecified illness, two years before he reached the court of Kublai Khan. In the case of the siege of Siang-yang-fu, Marco’s imprecision in converting dates from the Chinese to the European calendar does not account for the discrepancy, nor does the possibility of omitted text, because he emphatically places himself, his father, and his uncle at the center of the action.

  According to Marco, Siang-yang-fu held out against the forces of Kublai Khan while much of China surrendered. Protected by a large, deep lake, the city was vulnerable to attack on only one side, the north. While resisting the Mongols, the inhabitants of Siang-yang-fu arranged to have ample provisions smuggled in over the lake; as a result, the Mongols were unable to starve them out. After three years of trying and failing to take the city, the Mongol army was “greatly enraged” and wished to leave.

  Marco launches into a series of astonishing assertions, beginning with an offer that he, his father, and his uncle made to assist in the siege. Sinc
e describing his departure from Cambulac in the service of the khan, Marco had ceased to mention his father and uncle, creating the impression that he ventured forth alone while they remained close to Cambulac to pursue their trading business. More suspect, the offer to help with the siege violates the underlying premise of the narrative. Previously, Marco observed history in the making but scrupulously avoided portraying himself as affecting the course of events. Now, in contrast, he was presenting the Polos as heroes of the siege. “We will find you a way by which the town will surrender immediately,” they supposedly proclaimed.

  Marco claims that the Mongol army accepted the offer and relayed it to Kublai Khan, who endorsed the plan. And he proceeds to show his family out of character, as combat-hardened warriors familiar with the latest Mongol military technology. He depicts the Polo company going to see Kublai Khan—highly unlikely, since the Great Khan was thousands of miles distant—and offering to “find a device and engine that the city would be taken and that it would surrender.” He explains parenthetically that the device was a mangonel, essentially a large and powerful catapult “that would throw into the town stones so great and heavy and from so far that they would confound all they would reach, killing the people and ruining the houses.” In the medieval fashion, Marco refers to the mangonel as an engine, meaning artillery that did not rely on gunpowder. Indeed, the mangonel derived its force from a torsion bundle—a length of rope wrapped around a rotating beam, or epizygis.

  At first, Marco says, the Polos’ offer to employ a European-style mangonel baffled the Mongol leaders. “They all wondered greatly because…in all those parts they do not know what mangonels are, nor engines, nor trebuchets [a smaller device relying on a counter-weight rather than a torsion bundle], for they did not use them, nor were accustomed to use them in their armies.” Nevertheless, the Mongols were “very glad and astonished” by the audacious plan.