Marco Polo

by Laurence Bergreen

  The girls of the harem, Marco says, entertained both king and queen with elaborate erotic games involving the animals and lake within the walls of the enclosure: “Sometimes he [the king] went with the queen and some of the girls for recreation about the lake on barges all covered with silk, and also to visit the temples of the idols.”

  Later, the frolicking commenced: “The other two parts of the enclosure were laid out with woods, lakes, and most beautiful gardens planted with fruit trees, where were enclosed all sorts of animals, that is, roe-deer, fallow-deer, red-deer, hares, rabbits; and there the king went to enjoy himself with his damsels, some in carriages and some on horseback, and no man went in there. And he made the damsels run with dogs and give chase to these kinds of animals; and after they were tired, they went into the woods that faced one another above the lakes, and leaving the clothes there they came out of them naked and entered the water and set themselves to swim some on one side and some on the other, and the king stayed to watch them with the greatest delight.”

  Amid his tale of sensual abandon, Marco conveys a strict warning: “Sometimes he [the king] had food carried into those woods that were thick and dense with very lofty trees, waited on by the damsels. And with this continual dalliance with women he grew up without knowing what arms might be—which in the end brought it about that through his cowardice and incompetence the Great Khan took all the state from him with the greatest shame and disgrace.”

  The powerful moral was not lost on Marco, who took it as a cautionary tale for the people of Quinsai, whom he perceived as dangerously prone to self-indulgence. One day, he relates, “a fish was found lying on the dry land across the bed of the river that was something wonderful to see, for it was a hundred paces long, but the bulk by no means corresponded to its length. It was indeed all hairy, and many ate of it, and many of them died.” Marco claims to have seen the head of this giant, poisonous fish on display in a “certain temple of idols”—that is, a Buddhist temple. And the annals confirm the event, recording that a hundred-foot-long whale was indeed stranded in shallows of the Fu-ch’un River near Quinsai in 1282, followed soon after by another cetacean. The annals also show that foragers placed ladders against one of the stranded creatures, climbed onto its back, and butchered it for food—a daring act that, as Marco tells his listeners, turned out to be a lethal mistake, for they all died from eating the flesh.

  FINALLY, Marco gets down to business: the city’s lucrative salt monopoly. He calculates the revenue of “the salt of this town” and moves on to sugar, claiming that the value of the province’s sugar was “more than double that which is made in all the rest of the world.” That was not all: the “spicery…is without measure.” And they all contributed to the khan. “All the spiceries pay three and a third percent; and of all goods they pay also three and a third percent. And from the wine that they make of rice and of spices they have a very great revenue also, and from charcoal. And from all the twelve crafts…they have, each craft, twelve thousand stations; from these crafts they have very great revenues, for they pay duty on everything.”

  He reveals how trade worked in Quinsai: “All the merchants who carry goods to this city by land and carry them away from it to other parts, and those also who carry them away to sea, pay in the same way—a thirtieth of the goods…, which takes three and a third percent; but those who carry merchandise to it by sea and from far countries and regions, as far as from the Indies, give ten percent. Moreover, of all the things that grow in the country, produce coming both from animals and from the land, and silk, a tenth part is applied to the lord’s government.” Not surprisingly, this revenue “amounts to untold money.”

  Marco assures his readers that the khan had one object when he collected these tremendous revenues, the well-being and safety of the people of his empire: “For the great profit that the great lord has from this country he loves it much and does much to guard it carefully and to keep those who dwell there in great peace.” In practice, that meant he used the revenues to pay for the mercenaries to occupy the cities and towns of the province, especially Quinsai. Marco puts this exploitation in the most favorable light: “The Great Khan has all those revenues spent on arms that guard the cities and countries, and to alleviate the poverty of the cities.”

  MARCO’S SOJOURN in the City of Heaven ended abruptly, inexplicably. He gives no reason for his departure, not even a date for this watershed event. Perhaps his tenure as an official of the Mongol government terminated with an embarrassment, a charge of corruption, or a jealous rival getting the better of him. In any event, he found himself expelled from Quinsai and its myriad pleasures, no longer a tax assessor, and once more a wayfarer.

  He took comfort in reuniting with his father and uncle, and in resuming his former identity as a private merchant. Trekking with them through “mountains and valleys,” he arrived in South China, where the people, although idolaters—that is, Buddhists—were “subject to the rule of the Great Khan” and so posed no obvious threat to the traveler in their midst. But to his disgust, Marco realized that “they eat all coarse things and they also eat human flesh very willingly, provided that he [the deceased] did not die a natural death.” Their preferred meat came from those who died by the sword, rather than from disease, and, Marco says, they considered this “very good and savory flesh.”

  The warriors’ battle costumes were as fearsome as their eating habits: “They have their hair cut off as far as the ears, and in the middle of the face they have themselves painted with azure like the blade of a sword.” In keeping with their wrathful visage, they were “the most cruel men in the world,” for, Marco notes, “I tell you they go all day killing men and drink the blood, and then they all eat them.” Worse, “they are always eager about this.” Their presence was sufficient to distract Marco from the lions roaming the mountain escarpments. From time to time the animals leapt upon wayfarers like Marco and made a meal of them. He found a semblance of safety from these dangers by joining a caravan of merchants, predominantly Buddhists and silk traders. No matter what their religion, they guided Marco through the region unharmed, if not untroubled.

  LION TRAPPING was common in the area, and Marco set about learning the technique as a matter of survival. The requirements were simple enough: parallel trenches and, as bait, an unlucky dog. When deployed correctly, they produced dramatic results.

  “Two very deep pits are made one beside the other,” he writes. “It is true that between some ground is left perhaps for the width of one ell; and on the other side of the pits a high hedge is made, but nothing at the ends. At night, the owner of the pits will tie a little dog on the ground in the middle, and leaving him there will go away. Then the dog tied like this, when left by the master, will not cease to bark; and the dog shall be white. The lion, hearing from whatever distance thence the voice of the dog, will run to him with much fury, and when he shall see him gleaming white, wishing to leap hastily to catch him, will fall into the pit. In the morning, the master of the pits will come and will kill the lion in the pit. Then the flesh will be eaten up because it is good, and the skin will be sold, for they are very dear.”

  Marco also recorded a way to capture a type of fox that he called a papione, which gnawed on sugarcane, damaging that valuable crop. Here is his recommended method for catching these four-legged pilferers: “They have great gourds that they cut in the knob at the top, making a mouth for the entry of a width calculated so that one of the papiones may put his head in with force.” To make certain that the papione would not damage the neck, the hunters drilled holes around it and threaded twine through the openings to strengthen it. To entice papiones to the gourd, the hunters placed a wad of tempting fat at the bottom, and distributed the traps around the perimeter of the caravan. “When the papiones come to the caravan to take something away, they perceive the smell of the fat in the gourds and go up to them, and, wishing to put their heads in, cannot. But pressing violently from greed for the food inside they force the head to en
ter. Then, being unable to draw it out, they lift and carry with them the gourds because they are light; and then they do not know where to go.”

  The poor creatures wandered blindly until the merchants caught them.

  IN THE CITY that Marco called Fugiu, his uncle Maffeo struck up a friendship with a “certain wise Saracen”—that is, a Muslim—and remarked to him about a “certain manner of people whose religion no one understands.” These were not Buddhists, from the looks of things, because there were no Buddhas, or idols, in evidence. Nor did they appear to be Muslims. Neither were they Zoroastrians, for they did not worship fire. One can see Maffeo suggesting to the wise Saracen, “May it please you that we go to them and speak with them; perhaps we will learn something about their life.” So they went, solely from curiosity, but their questions unsettled the objects of their inquiry, who feared that the three curious merchants were plotting to “take away their religion from them.”

  “Do not be afraid,” Maffeo and Marco urged, “for we did not come here for your harm at all but only for good and the improvement of your condition.”

  They returned the next day, slowly ingratiating themselves with the locals, “asking them about their business,” until they came upon the answer to the riddle. These secretive and suspicious people were, after all, Christians, “for they had books, and these Masters Maffeo and Marco reading in them began to interpret the writing and to translate from word to word and from tongue to tongue, so that they found it to be the words of the Psalter”—the Book of Psalms.

  Astonished by this discovery of lost Christians in China, they asked how they came by their faith. “From our ancestors,” the locals replied.

  Inspecting one of their temples, the merchants saw “three painted figures, who had been three apostles of the seventy who had gone preaching through the world; and they said that they were those who had taught their ancestors in that religion long ago, and that that faith had already been preserved among them for seven hundred years”—that is, since the sixth century—“but for a long time they had been without preaching and so were ignorant of the chief things.” Their curious allusion to three apostles refers, perhaps, to Peter, James, and John, who accompanied Jesus on particularly exalted and disturbing occasions, such as the Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. The origins of this isolated sect’s faith were lost in time, yet Marco acknowledged their connection.

  “You are Christians and we are likewise Christians,” Maffeo and Marco declared. “We advise you to send to the Great Khan and explain to him your state, that he may come to know you and you may be able freely to keep your religion and rule.” The mysterious Christians, although accustomed to living among hostile “idolaters,” followed this bold suggestion and dispatched a delegation of two men to Kublai Khan.

  Marco and Maffeo told the men to present themselves to a “certain man who was head of the Christians at the court of the Great Khan.” But the request, rather than smoothing the petitioners’ way to recognition as Christians, inspired masses of Buddhists to claim them as their own. There followed a “great argument in the presence of the lord. Finally, the lord being angry, making all go away, ordered the messengers to come to him, asking them whether they wished to be Christians or idolaters.” The petitioners timidly replied that if the Great Khan would not take offense, they wished to be considered Christians, like their ancestors. Kublai Khan approved, insisting that they all “must be addressed as Christians.”

  With that assurance, they made their full strength known. The sect, far from being a small band of spiritual nonconformists, included “more than seven hundred thousand families,” says Marco, all of them now safely assigned to the Christian camp, their identity officially confirmed, and their right to worship guaranteed by Kublai Khan and the might of the Mongol Empire.

  Having helped to usher these lost Christians into the Mongol fold, Marco was again left to his own devices, doomed to wander the Silk Road to the end of his days in the service of Kublai Khan—or so it seemed. He could not have imagined what lay in store for him, as events occurring thousands of miles away began to shape his destiny.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Divine Wind

  And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

  Ancestral voices prophesying war!

  OF ALL THE descriptions of places Marco Polo included in his Travels, none prompted more disbelief among Europeans than his fantastic account of “an island that is called Çipingu.”

  Reverberating with improbable battles, storms, and sudden reversals of fortune, his portrayal of this remote kingdom appeared to be an elaborate flight of fancy. For all his far-fetched tales about China, the place at least existed in the European consciousness, even if it was largely a blank. But Çipingu, surely, was wholly fictitious; it did not even appear on Western maps. Biblical lands such as Gog and Magog had more credibility in Europe than the strange islands that made up Çipingu—later known as Japan.

  The skeptics were not entirely to blame. Although Marco’s words provided his incredulous readers with their first account of the island nation, his rendering was beset by imprecision, for he never visited it. He wrote about the world of the Japanese with such vigor and confidence that it seemed as if he were recounting his firsthand impressions, yet nowhere in his account of Japan did he claim, “I, Marco, saw these things,” as was his custom with China and the Mongols. Instead, he offered intelligence and hearsay of a high order, the authorized Mongol view of its enigmatic, tantalizing, and intimidating rival to the east.

  JAPAN SEIZED Marco’s imagination because Kublai Khan, always keen for fresh territories to bring into his realm, proposed to conquer the island nation across the sea. It seemed the unlikeliest of goals. The Mongols, for all their ferocity, were not sailors; they were warriors on horseback, and overextended warriors at that, barely able to manage their land-based empire. Not even Kublai Khan could rule the entire world, yet his goal was to do exactly that, to become the “universal emperor” mediating between Heaven and all the peoples below. During Marco’s years in Quinsai, Kublai Khan became consumed with the idea of conquering Japan. But that grand ambition proved to be the Mongol leader’s undoing.

  The fall came about quickly. In 1279, when Marco was still in Quinsai, Kublai Khan was at the zenith of his power, his career capped by his conquest of the realm of the Song dynasty, China’s former stronghold. Only two years later, the arc of his reign suddenly altered. His wife Chabi died. Along with Kublai’s mother, Chabi had served as an architect of his career, especially in the early years when he struggled for power. Now that she was gone, Kublai was no longer restrained by her shrewd judgment, and he embarked on one destructive action after another, as if determined to tear his empire apart.

  In his grief, Kublai Khan became an alcoholic (not an uncommon affliction among the Mongols), gained an unhealthy amount of weight, and suffered from gout and other, less specific ailments. Entering his dotage, he slowly lost his grip over the empire. In attempting to demonstrate that he remained the Great Khan, he decided to pursue his most reckless scheme, the conquest of Japan. He had become so addicted to empire building that he believed that if the Mongol Empire could not grow, it would die. Marco was the witness and, for centuries, the sole Western source of information about this mysterious conflict with an obscure but mighty island nation.

  Kublai failed to consider the immense difficulties posed by attempting to conquer this distant country, so different from the peaceful and often disorganized tribes the Mongols had terrorized and subdued. The Japanese, Marco recognized, were as fierce and as cruel as the Mongols, yet they were a more sophisticated society. Most important of all, they were protected by the sea, with which the Mongols had little expertise, luck, or confidence. Kublai Khan would slowly and painfully learn that the Mongols might be masters of the Steppe, but on the water, they were as vulnerable as their feeblest prey.

  “ÇIPINGU is an island to the sunrising that is on the high seas,” Marco begins. “It is an ex
ceedingly great island. The people of it are white, fair-fashioned, and beautiful, and of good manners. They are idolaters”—that is, Buddhists. “They are ruled by their own king and pay tribute to no other, and they have no lordship of any other men but themselves. Moreover, I tell you that they have gold in very great abundance, because gold is found there beyond measure”—so much gold, according to Marco, that “they do not know what to do with it.” Furthermore, “ships are rarely brought there from other regions, for it abounds in all things.”

  Marco discusses Japan, the island nation he had never visited, in respectful tones. “According to what the men who know the country say,” he explains, the island’s ruler “has a very great palace that is all covered with sheets of fine gold. Just as we cover houses and churches with lead, so this palace is covered with fine gold,” worth so much that “no one in the world…could redeem it.” He reports that its many rooms are covered with tiles, all of them “two fingers” thick, and made from pure gold. “Large white pearls” reportedly could be found in abundance in Çipingu, and even red ones that had great value and beauty. And they were ubiquitous; it was said that “the mouth of everyone who is buried” contained a large shimmering pearl. No wonder Marco found it difficult to convince listeners that he was reporting the truth.

  He was not far off. Japan was immensely wealthy, with abundant pearls and silver (but not gold). If not literally true, Marco’s conviction that Japan possessed more gold than any other place in the world can be understood as an allegory of the island’s cultural, intellectual, and spiritual wealth—the riches of a highly developed civilization. In distant Çipingu, Marco implied, even the heavens obeyed the emperor’s will.