Marco Polo
Page 46
The controversy surrounding the number of bridges in Quinsai is taken up by Moule in Quinsai, pages 23–29. By coincidence, Marco also says there are twelve thousand houses in Quinsai, when there were, in fact, many times that number. “Twelve thousand” was a conventional term indicating countless houses. Despite Moule’s statement to the contrary, it seems likely that Marco was simply employing the same figure of speech concerning the number of bridges.
Wu Tzu-mu, about whom little is known, left a poignant description of Quinsai at the peak of its prosperity, in a work known as the “Account of the Gruel Dream” (1274) wherein a peasant dreams of luxury while a modest innkeeper prepares a simple meal—in other words, the poor man dreams of the abundance that Quinsai symbolizes. “In no matter what district, in the streets, on the bridges, at the gates, and in every odd corner, there are everywhere to be found barrows, shops, and emporiums where business is done,” he writes. “The reason for this is that people are in daily need of the necessities of life, such as firewood, rice, oil, salt, soya sauce, vinegar, and tea, and to a certain extent even of luxury articles, while rice and soup are absolute essentials, for even the poorest cannot do without them. To tell the truth, the inhabitants of Quinsai are spoiled and difficult to please.”
He evoked the city’s splendid teahouses catering to this demanding clientele: “They make arrangements of the flowers of the four seasons, hang paintings by celebrated artists, decorate the walls of the establishment, and all the year round sell unusual teas and curious soups. During the winter months, they sell in addition a very fine powdered tea, pancakes, onion tea, and sometimes soup of salted beans. During the hot season they add as extras plum-flower wine with a mousse of snow, a beverage for contracting the gall bladder, and herbs against the heat.” And, like Marco, he reveled in the city’s brothels: “Let us visit one of the chic establishments, with such promising signs as ‘The Happy Meeting,’ or ‘The Seduction,’ or ‘The Pleasures of Novelty.’…A dozen prostitutes, luxuriously dressed and heavily made up, gather at the entrance to the main arcade to await the command of the customers, and have an airy gracefulness.”
For reminiscences of the City of Heaven by Odoric of Pordenone and Ibn Battuta, see Pauthier’s edition of Marco Polo’s Travels, Le Livre de Marco Polo, page 502, note. Jacques Gernet’s splendid Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250–1276 discusses precautions against fire on pages 36–37 and 52.
Sexual mores in China receive extended treatment in R. H. van Gulick’s Sexual Life in Ancient China (see especially pages 138–260). For another scholarly discussion of Chinese sexual attitudes and practices, see Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China, volume 2, pages 146–150. Needham emphasizes the philosophical underpinnings of Chinese sexual customs, especially Taoism, and stresses the customs’ social and psychological benefits.
T’ao Tsung-i, a scholar and writer of the late Yüan dynasty, wrote about eunuchs in a traditional dialogue between the Yellow Emperor and one of his subjects, known as Ch’i Po, a legendary figure credited with discovering the art of healing the body, as follows. “The Yellow Emperor said: ‘There are men who because of injury to their genitalia have lost their sexual urge, their member will not rise and has become useless. Yet their beard and mustache do not disappear. Why is it that only eunuchs have no beard and mustache? I want to hear the reason for this.’ Ch’i Po replied: ‘In the case of eunuchs their genitalia are amputated, thereby their seminal duct is cut off and they can not emit semen…. Consequently their lips and mouth become arid, and no beardor mustache develop.’ The Yellow Emperor asked: ‘But there are some natural eunuchs who although they have not undergone that mutilation yet do not have beard or mustache. Why is this so?’ Ch’i Po answered: ‘That is because Heaven did not give them a sufficient sexual urge. Hence their seminal duct is not developed, and neither is their genitalia. They have ch’i [essence] but not semen.’”
Examples of Chinese public poetry can be found in Gernet, Daily Life in China, page 237, and the same work describes other customs in the City of Heaven on pages 184, 189–191, and 214–215.
Marco’s “lost Christians” may have belonged to a little-known sect of Armenian Christians, who differed from the Nestorians. The Armenian Christians were monophysites, asserting that Jesus had only one nature, which was divine, and incorporated his human nature. If they were Armenian Christians, they may have been reluctant to reveal their identity, fearing that the Nestorians outnumbered them.
CHAPTER TWELVE / The Divine Wind
In Le Livre de Marco Polo, his edition of Marco Polo’s Travels, Pauthier offers details about the Mongol fleet (pages 540–543). See also Yule and Cordier, volume 2, page 263, note 3.
Marco generated centuries of controversy by giving the date of the treaty of surrender by the Mongols to the Japanese as 1269 (see Polo, The Description of the World, edited by Moule and Pelliott, page 362). This is another miscalculation on the part of Marco, or his translators, who did not accurately convert the Mongol or Chinese lunar calendar date to the Western equivalent. Yule and Cordier correct the date to 1279, but since Kublai Khan attacked Japan repeatedly between 1274 and 1283, it is difficult to know exactly when the treaty, or the siege preceding it, occurred. There is also a question as to whether the story of the thirty thousand castaways occupying the Japanese capital by resorting to disguise was based on fact, or was simply a yarn that Marco found irresistable. Unlike virtually all of the other facts he relates concerning Kublai Khan’s failed siege of Japan, this element finds no corroboration in other sources. Yet Marco’s account is so detailed and plausible, and fits so neatly with what is known of the failed effort, that it is likely based on historical fact, and lost sources, perhaps embellished with Marco’s storytelling flare.
For Morris Rossabi’s useful analysis of the exercise of Mongol power, see his Khubilai Khan, page 212. And for a thorough assessment of the role of Muslims in the Yüan dynasty, see the same author’s “The Muslims in the Early Yüan Dynasty,” in China Under Mongol Rule, edited by J. D. Langlois Jr., pages 256–295. Rossabi writes, “By serving as intermediaries between the Mongol rulers and their Chinese subjects, the Muslims performed valuable services but simultaneously provoked the wrath of the conquerors and the conquered.” He also suggests that “the Mongols, consciously or not, used the Muslims as scapegoats, thereby diverting Chinese animosity from themselves.”
The Ahmad affair occasioned oft-repeated misunderstandings in Marco Polo scholarship. Some accounts speak of a minister named Po-lo who became involved late in the scandal. For example, Yule and Cordier (volume 1, page 442, note 5) write, “It is a pleasant fact that Messer Marco’s presence, and his upright conduct on this occasion, have not been forgotten in the Chinese Annals: ‘The Emperor…desired Polo, Assessor of the Privy Council, to explain the reasons which had led Wangchu to commit this murder. Polo spoke with boldness of the crimes and oppressions of Ahmad, which rendered him an object of detestation throughout the Empire. The Emperor’s eyes were opened, and he praised the courage of Wangchu.’” But Moule (Quinsai, page 84) has shown that the official in question, “Po-lo,” was not our Marco, but rather a Chinese. It is not known by what name Marco Polo was called in the Mongol court, or in the Chinese or Mongol annals. There is no record that he warned Kublai Khan of Ahmad’s treachery, or played an active part in the minister’s downfall, even though he recorded events accurately.
In the Service of the Khan, edited by Igor de Rachewiltz et al., has the best account in English of Ahmad’s rise and fall (pages 539–557); in this article, H. Franke draws heavily on Chinese sources as well as on Rashid al-Din, the Persian historian. And for another account of Ahmad’s rise and fall, see R. P. Lister’s Marco Polo’s Travels in Xanadu with Kublai Khan, page 138. In The Mongols, said to be a favorite of Theodore Roosevelt, Jeremiah Curtin recounts the Ahmad and Sanga episode (pages 372–373).
Marco gives the year of Nayan and Kaidu’s plot as 1286, but once again he see
ms to have become confused while converting a date from the Chinese or Mongol lunar calendar to the Julian calendar. Aspects of the rebellion appear in Pauthier’s edition, Le Livre de Marco Polo, page 237, note 4. The fate of the Mongol invasion force is recounted by Rossabi, Khubilai Khan, on pages 220 and following.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN / The Seeker
For a discussion of what was meant by “India,” see Yule and Cordier, volume 2, pages 426–427. Additional commentary on the final leg of Marco’s journey can be found in Hart’s Marco Polo, pages 145–167. And for a thorough and provocative discussion of Marco Polo’s spiritual experiences and the evolution of his beliefs, see Mario Bussagli’s “La Grande Asia di Marco Polo,” in Zorzi’s Marco Polo, Venezia e l’Oriente.
Marco associated Saint Thomas with a “race of men who are called gavi,” who make a practice of sitting on carpets. “When one asked them why they do this,” Marco reports, they replied, “because…we are sprung from the earth and to earth we must return.” Despite the men’s passivity, Marco insisted that ancestors of the gavi “killed Master Saint Thomas the Apostle long ago.” As a result of this deed, “none could go into the place where the body of Master Saint Thomas is, which is in the province of Maabar, in a little town.” Marco comments: “Twenty or more [men] could not put one of these gavi into the place where the body of Master Saint Thomas is buried, because the place does not receive them by virtue of the holy body.” Realizing that this requires elucidation, Marco explains, “They say they tried the experiment, and that one of the said gavi, dragged by force by many men to make him enter where the body of Saint Thomas is buried, could by no amount of force be moved…. And this very special miracle our Lord God showed for reverence of the most holy apostle.”
Those wishing to learn about differing interpretations of Thomas from a modern perspective would do well to consult Elaine Pagels’s Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (New York: Random House, 2003). The Buddhist influence on the Mongols is explained in Gianroberto Scarcia’s “I Mongoli e l’Iran: la situazione religiosa,” in Zorzi, Venezia e l’Oriente. And commentary on Marco’s distinctive name for the Buddha can be found in Pauthier’s edition of the Travels, Le Livre de Marco Polo, page 588, note, and in Olschki, Marco Polo’s Asia, pages 254–255.
I wish to acknowledge the assistance of Patrick Ryan, S.J., for his enlightening comments about Zanzibar’s religious history and traditions.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN / The Mongol Princess
Hart’s Marco Polo, page 142, note, offers the conventional account of the meaning of Kokachin’s name. My version relies on the convincing analysis of Professor S. Tsolmon in Ulaanbaatar on June 15, 2005, as it is better grounded in Mongol custom and language.
Francis Woodman Cleaves offers an exhaustive record of the sources of Kokachin’s travels in “A Chinese Source Bearing on Marco Polo’s Departure from China and a Persian Source on His Arrival in Persia.” The last leg of Marco’s journey receives colorful treatment by Mike Edwards in National Geographic, July 2001.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN / The Prodigal Son
The best, if not entirely reliable, source of information about Marco Polo’s life after his return from China can be found in the works of Giambattista Ramusio, a prominent Venetian official and an accomplished scholar of geography. Ramusio called his three-volume compilation of accounts by celebrated explorers Navigazioni e viaggi, and he led off with Marco’s chronicle, thus canonizing it. The well-connected Ramusio wrote that he believed the very first copy of Marco’s manuscript was in Latin; Ramusio based his translation on that manuscript and several others.
Although Ramusio sounds scholarly enough, he breathlessly reported and reinforced traditions concerning Marco Polo instead of relying on facts alone. Ramusio explained, “Because in the continual repetitions of the story that he gave more and more often when speaking of the magnificence of the Great Khan, he stated that his revenue was from ten to fifteen millions in gold, and in the way in speaking of many other riches of those countries, he spoke always in term of millions, they gave him as a nickname, Messer Marco Milioni, and thus I have seen it noted in public books of the Republic where mention is made of him, and the court of his house from that time to the present is commonly called the Corte del Milioni”—as it is to this day.
The story of the Polos’ return has been recounted by Hart (Marco Polo, page 171), among others. Ramusio’s comment about the “charming and gracious” Marco Polo can be found in Hart’s book, pages 175–177.
The best English-language account of the Republic’s travails is contained in John Julius Norwich’s A History of Venice. “For the past twenty years nothing seemed to have gone right for them,” he writes on page 173. “Militarily they had suffered defeats on land and sea, with serious losses, both in ships and human lives. They had been forced to watch, powerless, while the enemy penetrated to the very confines of the lagoon. Their neighbors, on many of whom they depended for trade, were in a greater or lesser degree unfriendly. Their chief colony, Crete, was once again in revolt. They had suffered the chilly joylessness—to say nothing of the spiritual dangers—of an interdict, the terrors of an earthquake, the misery of flood.”
Giorgio del Guerra’s Rustichello da Pisa has the fullest record of its subject’s life. For more on Rustichello’s efforts in the Arthurian romance genre, see Fabrizio Cigni’s Il romanzo arturiano di Rustichello da Pisa. John Larner, in Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World, pages 47–49, presents a precise analysis of Rustichello’s abilities and limitations.
It has long been assumed that Rustichello and Marco wrote their original manuscript in Latin, or perhaps an Italian dialect, but scholars have converged on French as the language in which they composed. As evidence, they cite a remark circulated by a Benedictine known as John the Long of Ypres; in 1350, he wrote that Marco’s book was originally composed “in the French vernacular”—for better or worse. Yule and Cordier (Travels, volume 1, page 83) offer a pithy assessment of Rustichello’s linguistic skills. “The author is at war with all the practices of French grammar; subject and object, numbers, moods, and tenses, are in consummate confusion,” they complain. “Italian words are constantly introduced, either quite in the crude or rudely Gallicized.” These grammatical and linguistic idiosyncrasies are consistent with the idea that the Venetian traveler dictated his account to the Tuscan romance writer, who wrote in French, “a language foreign to them both.”
By way of illustrating the similarity to Marco’s account, it is worth quoting the opening of Rustichello’s earlier work, Meliadus: “Lords, emperors and princes, dukes and counts, barons and knights and vavasours [feudal tenants who ranked just below barons] and townsfolk and all the worldly men of this world who are accustomed to taking pleasure in romances, if you take this book and have it read from end to end, you will hear all the great adventures that befell the knight errants of the time of King Uther Pendragon….”
For another summary of Marco’s long and lively posthumous reputation, see Yule and Cordier, volume 1, page 116 and following. Harry Hart, in his Marco Polo, page 212, traces Ramusio’s account of Marco’s father’s second family, but remains skeptical. Ramusio was prone to error, and may have mistaken other relatives for supposed offspring of Niccolò Polo. It is possible that Niccolò did not actually remarry.
Details of Marco’s return come from Hart’s Marco Polo, page 209, and Marco’s new home is described by Larner in Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World, page 44.
Throughout his account, Marco evinces little curiosity about his father’s earlier experiences among the Mongols, and loses track of him for years on end. Marco never appears to worry about his father’s whereabouts or well-being, or, for that matter, his uncle’s. Nor does he offer details about their trading activities. Marco concerns himself with his own experiences; it is as though his father and uncle exist for the sole purpose of transporting him to China and bringing him to Kublai Khan; thereafter, they cease to play an active role in his life.
Regarding the presentation copy given to Monseigneur Thiebault, Hart (page 219) suggests that the flattery of Charles of Valois contained in the inscription casts doubt on the document’s authenticity. Nevertheless, the inscription demonstrates that Marco’s work was held in high regard by important people.
Giuseppi Castellani notes that Marco’s will referred to two kinds of coins, lire consisting of Venetian dinars and lire of Venetian dinar grossi. For further discussion of Venetian coins in the will, see “I valori delle monete espresse nel testamento di Marco Polo,” Rivista mensile della Città di Venezia 3, no. 9 (September 1924): 257–258. It is generally considered to be futile to try to estimate the value of these coins in today’s money.
The original Latin text of the will can be found in The Travels of Marco Polo: The Complete Yule-Cordier Edition, volume 1, beginning on page 70. Concerning the feminine headdress found among Marco’s possessions, see Olschki, Marco Polo’s Asia, pages 104–108. And Hart discusses Marco’s death in Marco Polo, page 230, note.