Marco Polo

by Laurence Bergreen

  Nayan’s troops, nearly equal to the khan’s in number, straggled into their battle formations, to the accompaniment of drums, songs, and martial music produced by a two-stringed instrument. The two sides rode into battle, Kublai Khan’s banners with his sun-and-moon insignia flying, and Nayan’s standard displaying the “Cross of Christ.”

  After lengthy delays, “the two armies fell upon each other with bow and sword and club, and a few with lances.” They clashed in a “bloody and bitter battle,” complete with “arrows flying like pelting rain.” Beneath them, “horsemen and horses tumbled dead upon the ground.”

  Marco pays tribute to Nayan’s troops, claiming that the men stood ready to die for their leader, “but in the end victory fell to the Great Khan.” Seeing that he had lost the battle and his fiefdom along with it, Nayan tried to flee, but he and his generals were all captured, and they eventually surrendered. Kublai condemned Nayan to death according to Mongol custom. “He was wrapped up tightly in a carpet and then dragged about so violently, this way and that, that he died,” Marco reports. “Their object in choosing this mode of death was so that the blood of the imperial lineage might not be spilt upon the earth, and the sun and the air might not witness it, nor the limbs of Nayan be touched by any animal.”

  KUBLAI KHAN received the show of loyalty that was his due. Barons from four provinces arrived to swear obeisance. But instead of submission and unity, Marco relates, ugliness quickly ensued. “Saracens, idolaters, Jews, and many people who do not believe in God made fun of the Christian faith and of the sign of the Holy Cross that Nayan had carried on his banner.”

  When word of this blasphemy reached Kublai Khan, “he called to him the chief Saracens and Jews and Christians and spoke evil to those who made fun of it before him and before the Christians, and rebuked them severely, saying to them, ‘If the Cross of Christ has not helped Nayan, it has done reasonably and justly, because he was disloyal and a rebel against his lord.’” For this reason, Kublai Khan said, he deserved to die.

  With that, Kublai Khan “called many Christians who were there and began to comfort them, saying that they had no reason or occasion for shame…, for Nayan who came against his lord was both disloyal and treacherous, and so there is great right in that which happened to him.” Although the Christian followers of Nayan remained suspicious of Kublai Khan, they were relieved, and perhaps surprised as well, that he did not “tempt them from their faith, but they stayed quiet and in peace.”

  HAVING SECURED his power in China, Kublai Khan stumbled anew when he undertook a series of military skirmishes in Southeast Asia, provoking war where there had been stability and amity. He then repeated the Japanese disaster by attempting to conquer another island stronghold, Java.

  Marco relates the Mongol invasion of Java with confidence, once again giving his European readers their first account of political struggle in a land they never knew existed. His account represents a remarkable feat of intelligence gathering on his part; even though his comprehension of events was partial and inevitably colored by the Mongol perspective, he remains generally accurate throughout.

  Located south of Malaysia and Sumatra, in the Indian Ocean, Java is so distant from China that Marco probably never reached its shores, but he gathered stories to transmit to the West—the first accounts of this distant kingdom to reach Europe. “According to what the good sailors say who know it well,” he states, “this is the largest island in the world, for it is indeed more than three thousand miles around.” And it abounded in the most valuable commodity in the medieval world: spices. “They have pepper and nutmeg and spikenard and galingale and cubebs and cloves and all dear spicery that one could find in the world.” From the sound of things, trade was brisk—“Unto this island come great numbers of ships and merchants who buy many goods there and make great profit,” Marco says—but it excluded the emissaries of Kublai Khan, who “can never have it subjected to his rule because of the long way and for the danger that it was to sail there.”

  Despite the hazards, Kublai did send envoys, led by his personal ambassador, Meng Ch’i, to visit Java’s ruler, King Kertanagara. The emissaries survived the voyage—at least, Marco tells of no shipwrecks or other losses en route—and upon reaching the Javanese court, they made the same outrageous demands that had once been made of the Japanese, insisting that the king submit unequivocally to the unseen khan across the sea. Kertanagara responded with a shocking insult: he branded the ambassador’s face.

  To a Mongol ruler, there could be no greater insult than the disfigurement or murder of an ambassador. Seizing on this new incitement to war, Kublai Khan made ready for the invasion of Java with the zeal he had once brought to preparations for the invasion of Japan. Failing to heed the lessons of past failures, he appointed three commanders to carry out the task. One was a Mongol, Shih-pi, the commander in chief; the second a Chinese, Kao Hsing, appointed field general; and the third a Uighur, I-k’o-mu-ssu, charged with providing ships.

  In 1292, the new Mongol invasion force departed. It was as grand as its predecessors: a thousand ships, twenty thousand men, a year’s supply of grain, and forty thousand ounces of silver to buy supplies en route—all of it ruinously expensive.

  Kertanagara’s intelligence gave him ample warning of the assault, but he made the fatal mistake of committing all of his troops to the distant Malay Peninsula, where he believed the Mongols would land. Suddenly vulnerable in his homeland, Kertanagara found himself embroiled in a local rebellion. His clever rival, Jayakatwang, took advantage of the king’s weakness, sent in troops, and slaughtered Kertanagara.

  That was not quite the end of Kertanagara’s influence. His wily son-in-law, Prince Vijaya, assumed the vacant throne and offered to submit to Kublai Khan if the Mongols would assist in putting down the Javanese uprising. To this end, Vijaya promised detailed maps describing the rivers and ports of Java. The Mongol leaders accepted the offer and pursued the upstart Jayakatwang, whom they captured and executed, much to Vijaya’s satisfaction.

  Just when it seemed that the Mongols had carried off a great strategic success, Vijaya made an apparently simple request: two hundred unarmed men to accompany him to the kingdom of Madjapahit, where, he declared, he would formally submit to Kublai Khan’s envoys. Eager for this prize, the Mongols gave Vijaya his wish. But during the march to Madjapahit, Vijaya revealed his true purpose. His soldiers mounted a surprise attack against the unarmed Mongol escorts, and pursued Mongol forces in the region. They boldly attacked the Mongol general, Shih-pi, who barely escaped with his life. Shih-pi ordered a humiliating retreat to his ships that cost three thousand lives.

  Safely on board his command ship, Shih-pi debated with the other Mongol leaders about the best means to punish Vijaya for his treachery, but they were unable to reach an agreement. Instead they sailed home to China and disgrace. Although the expedition returned with interesting Javanese artifacts—the horn of a rhinoceros, a reliable map and census of Java, and a letter from Bali written in gold characters—they were, unmistakably, a vanquished fleet.

  The repercussions would be felt all the way back to Kublai Khan’s court.

  BOOK THREE

  India

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Seeker

  And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

  His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

  AS THE YÜAN DYNASTY TREMBLED, Marco carefully distanced himself from his one-time mentor, Kublai Khan. To hear the Venetian tell it, his primary motive for leaving the court and all its intrigues was his insatiable desire to see more of the world than anyone before him. He presented this new phase of his travels as a case of urgent wanderlust. He had fallen under the spell of India, and had arranged for Kublai Khan’s permission to visit.

  Marco, like other Western wayfarers of the era, remained vague about what he meant by “India.” Europeans often referred to “the Three Indias” or to a “Greater” and a “Lesser” India—all rather flexible terms. Each writer or traveler reco
nfigured “India” to suit his purpose or preconceptions, and Marco was no exception. In any case, India was for him a byword for escape more than an actual place on the map.

  En route to India, Marco the overland explorer metamorphosed into Marco the navigator, as might be expected of a gentleman of Venice, the empire by the sea. As a remedy for his malaise, he discovered, nothing surpassed the ocean. Marco reveled in blue water’s therapeutic buoyancy, expansiveness, and sense of freedom.

  “WE SHALL BEGIN first of all to tell about the great ships in which the merchants go and come into Indie,” Marco announces. These were sophisticated vessels of Arab and Chinese design, constructed of fir and pine, and fitted with a broad deck. For his European readers, accustomed to primitive sailing vessels, the surprise was their sheer size. The ship on which he sailed featured sixty cabins, each sufficient for a merchant to “stay comfortably.” It was equipped with a rudder, four masts, and four sails. “They often add…two masts more, which are raised and put away whenever they wish,” Marco reports. The larger ships boasted as many as thirteen holds, “so that if it happens by accident that the ship is staved in any place”—by a rock, for instance, or an aggressive whale “in search of food”—the injured craft would stay afloat.

  Six centuries before Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Marco described how an Arab ship survived a deadly encounter with a cetacean. “If the ship sailing by night [and] making the water ripple passes near a whale, the whale, seeing the water glisten as it moves, thinks there will be food for it, and, moving quickly forward, strikes against the ship and often staves the ship in some part. And then the water entering through the hole runs to the bilge, which never remains filled with anything.” Here Marco mentions a piece of nautical technology unknown to Europeans: a watertight hold. It was nothing short of an engineering marvel. “And then the sailors find out where the ship is staved, and then the hold that answers to the break is emptied into the others, for the water cannot pass from one hold to another, so strongly are they shut in; then they repair the ship and replace the goods that have been removed. They are nailed in such a way; for they are all lined, that is, two boards, one above the other,…[and] they are, in the common speech of our sailors, caulked both outside and inside, and they are nailed with iron pins.”

  Relying on his study of Arab shipbuilding methods, Marco describes a technique for making craft watertight, one that would have been of great interest to the shipbuilders of Venice’s Arsenal. “They are not pitched with pitch, because they have none of it,” he says. “I tell you that they take lime and hemp chopped fine, and they pound it all together, mixed with an oil from a tree…. And with this thing, they smear their ships, and this is worth quite as much as pitch.”

  Not only were the Arab ships better engineered and safer than their Western counterparts, they were so large that Marco could not resist another opportunity to dazzle his audience with statistics. The vessels were operated by between 150 and 300 sailors, and they carried far more cargo than anything afloat in Venice. Ships of bygone days had been larger still, before a series of storms, or what he termed “the violence of the sea,” made harbors and coastlines too shallow to accommodate “those great ships, and so they are now made smaller; but they are [still] so large that they carry five thousand baskets of pepper, and some six thousand.”

  The great vessels also had “tenders” large enough to carry a thousand baskets of pepper. Flourishing his nautical expertise, Marco explains precisely how the tenders were deployed in this distant land: “They help to tow the great ship with ropes, that is, hawsers, when they are moved with oars, and also when they are moved with sails if the wind prevails rather from the beam, because the smaller go in front of the larger and tow it tied with ropes; but not if the wind blows straight, for the sails of the larger ship would prevent the wind from catching the sails of the smaller.”

  Such maneuvers were undertaken to bring the larger vessels in for refurbishing. “When the great ship…has sailed a year or more and needs repair, they…nail yet another board over the two all round the ship, and then there are three of them and they also caulk and oil it.” This arduous procedure was repeated as necessary until there were six layers of boards, at which point “the ship is condemned and they sail no more in her on too high seas but [only] in near journeys and good weather.” In the end, Marco says, “they dismantle and break them up.”

  DESPITE THEIR superior technology, the sailors of India slavishly followed bizarre nautical superstitions. Marco was startled to learn how they predicted the outcome of a voyage. A ship, a strong wind, and a hapless drunk were required.

  “The men of the ship will have a hurdle, that is, a grating made of wickerwork, and at each corner and side of the hurdle will be tied a cord, so that there will be eight cords, and they will all be tied at the other end with a long rope,” he explains. “They will find some stupid or drunken [man] and will bind him on the hurdle; for no wise or sane man would expose himself to that danger. When a strong wind prevails, they set up the hurdle opposite the wind, and the wind lifts the hurdle and carries it into the sky and the men hold it by a long rope…. If the hurdle makes for the sky, they say that the ship for which that proof has been made will make a quick and profitable voyage, and all the merchants flock to her for the sake of sailing and going with her. And if the hurdle has not been able to go up, no merchant will be willing to enter the ship for which the proof was made, because they say that she could not finish her voyage and many disasters would afflict her. So that ship stays in port that year.” Marco notes this behavior as dispassionately as an ethnologist observing an unusual tribal custom.

  Having seen and experienced so much more of the world than other Europeans, he brought a mature sense of judgment, tolerance, and skepticism to bear on his experiences in India, etched in bulletins from the farthest reaches of the globe.

  INDONESIA

  At the outset, Marco describes Indonesia as having eight kingdoms, six of which he visited, “namely,…the kingdoms of Ferlec, Basman, Sumatra, Dagroian, Lambri, and Fansur.” Perhaps the most primitive was Basman, whose inhabitants had “no law except like beasts.” He remarks, “They are claimed by the Great Khan, but they make him no tribute because they are so far off that the people of the Great Khan will not go there.”

  It was an enchanted kingdom, stocked with a varied bestiary including elephants, unicorns, “and specially of a kind of black goshawk.” Once again, Marco’s “unicorn” was the Asian rhinoceros, as his gruesome description makes clear: “It has the hair of the buffalo; it has the feet made like an elephant. It has one horn in the middle of its forehead very thick and black. And I tell you that it does no harm to men and beasts with its horn, but only with its tongue and knees, for on its tongue it has very long spines and sharp; so that when it wishes to hurt anyone it tramples and presses him down with the knees, afterward inflicting the harm with its tongue.”

  The “monkeys” of Basman were even more disturbing. “In this isle there is a kind of monkey which is very small and has a face that is altogether like the face of men, and they have other parts of the body resembling them. So they say these monkeys are men and deceive others.” The monkeys provided cruel sport, according to Marco. “Now the men who are hunters take such monkeys as those and boil them and strip them all bare of all hair with a certain ointment, and fix and leave them the long hairs in the chin in place of beard and on the chest, and paint the skin with some color to make it like human skin. And when the skin is dry, the holes where the hairs are fixed are shrunken [so] that it seems as if they grew there naturally. And the feet and hands and the other limbs which are not quite like human limbs they stretch and reduce and fashion them by hand to the human likeness. Then they have them dried and put them in wooden molds with salt and smear them with saffron and with camphor and with other things that they may not decay, in such a way that they seem to have been men. And they sell them to merchants who carry them through the world for profit and give men
to believe that there are men so small.”

  Marco was talking not about monkeys but about pygmies—“men so small”—generally defined as humans less than sixty inches tall. Although frequently associated with Africa, pygmy communities or their remains have been found in Indonesia and throughout Southeast Asia. Asian pygmies have been labeled Negritos, in contrast to the name given to the pygmies of Africa, Negrillos, but both names have lately fallen into disfavor. Even today, the origins of pygmies are not fully understood. It is believed, but has not been proven, that all pygmies share a common ancestry, and common DNA, and in general, pygmy communities remain apart from the dominant community in which they live.

  Sumatra.

  The monsoon season arrived with him, to his dismay: “I myself, Marco Polo, stayed with my companions for about five months because of the unfavorable weather which we had, which forced me to stay there, and contrary winds which did not let us go our way.”

  During his layover, Marco remained confined with two thousand other stranded travelers, who took up residence in five temporary wooden structures—“there is much timber here,” he explains. He asserts that he assumed a leadership role in defending the travelers against rising floodwaters during those five rain-sodden months. But Marco had assigned phantom heroic roles to himself in the past, and may have done so in this case. “Toward the island I caused great ditches to be dug round us,” he says, “of which the ends finished on either side upon the shore of the sea, for fear of beasts and of those bad beast-like men”—ravenous cannibals, it seems—“who gladly catch and kill and eat men.”