The Polos sailed to the Mongol-controlled Crimea – where there existed a small Venetian colony, one of whose members was the Polos’ brother, Marco the Elder – then proceeded via the Volga to Bukhara. Here they spent three years before hitching a ride with a diplomatic mission on its way from the Ilkhanate to the Empire of the Great Khan. It was not a chance encounter. News of their presence had already aroused the curiosity of the Great Khan – by this time Kubilai, grandson of Genghis – and he had sent emissaries to his cousin in Persia to offer the strangers safe conduct to the east, because he ‘had never seen any Latin and very much wanted to meet one’. Thus, the two Venetians found themselves in the Mongol capital of Khanbalig, near modern Beijing. It was an impressive city, whose walls were 30 feet high, 60 feet wide, and had a circumference of 24 miles. They were greeted with affability by the Khan, who grilled them for a full year on the political and religious state of Europe. When it came to Christianity he was curious but sceptical. ‘Why should I become a Christian?’ he asked. ‘You can see for yourselves that the Christians who live in these parts are so ignorant that they cannot do anything, while these idolaters can do what they like. When I sit at table they can send cups out in the middle of the hall, full of wine or anything else, straight to my hand without anyone touching them, when I wish to drink. They can send bad weather packing in any direction they choose. And as you know, their idols talk and tell them whatever they want to know.’
The Mongols were essentially shamanistic, but Kubilai was a broad-minded man, tolerant of the religions that flourished in his empire and willing to accept whichever proved the most effective. But he worried that Christianity might not work. As he told the Venetians: ‘My barons and others who do not believe in Christ would ask me, “Whatever are you thinking of, getting baptised and adopting the faith of Christ? Have you seen any virtues or miracles to his credit?”’ He therefore ordered the Polos to lead an ambassador to the Pope. What the Great Khan would appreciate was ‘up to one hundred men learned in the Christian religion, well versed in the seven arts and skilled to argue and demonstrate plainly to idolaters and those of other religions that their religion is utterly mistaken’. He asked, too, for some oil from the lamp in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The passports he gave them indicated the wealth and power at his disposal: they instructed all citizens to give the bearers free passage on pain of death, they measured 12 inches by 3 and they were made of solid gold.
The Polos reached Rome without the emissary, who had fallen ill on the way, and by 1271 were once again on their way to China. They had no trouble obtaining holy oil from Jerusalem, but the hundred learned men were beyond the Pope’s means – there were barely that many in the whole of Europe – so they accepted instead two friars, Brother William and Brother Nicholas. They also took Niccolo’s 16-year-old son Marco. Travelling through Palestine, Syria and Turkey, the party reached Armenia, where the friars turned back, appalled by the rigours of the journey and the hazards that lay ahead. With now only the holy oil to show for their efforts, the Polos struck south into Persia.
Although the Pax Mongolica had largely eliminated the wars and border squabbles which hampered trade with China, it was still a considerable feat to cross from one side of Asia to the other. The continent was so vast, its terrain on occasion so inhospitable and its facilities so rudimentary that few people braved the whole traverse. Marco Polo, who was to become the expedition’s chronicler, described vividly the conditions they met: ‘Here merchants travelling from one country to another have to cope with extensive deserts: dry, barren sandy regions where no grass or fodder suitable for horses is to be found. Freshwater wells and springs lie so far apart that travellers must make long marches if their beasts are to get anything to drink.’ The Polo family eschewed horses in favour of asses – ‘fast, steady and cheaper to keep’ – on which they reached the Gulf port of Hormuz. The place was hot, unhealthy and decrepit, and the ships so ramshackle that they refused to sail in them, catching instead a caravan through central Asia. Again they plodded through deserts, spending seven days at a time without meeting a well, until they reached the foothills of the Pamirs.
Marco Polo was impressed: ‘These mountains are so high that it takes a man a full day, from dawn to dusk, to climb them from the bottom to the top.’ He had fallen ill and, like 19th-century consumptives who flocked to the Alps, he too found relief in the highlands. ‘The air on the high tops is so pure and healthy that if any town-dweller falls ill with even the most severe kind of fever, all he has to do is go up into the mountains and a few days’ rest there will restore him to complete health. I, Messer Marco, can vouch for this from personal experience.’ At the top of the Pamir plateau Marco Polo was frightened by a strange phenomenon: fires burned less brightly than before, their flames had an unnatural colour and they took longer to cook a meal. At 15,600 feet Polo was experiencing the effects of altitude. Five centuries later, this would become an accepted fact of Alpine exploration, scientists measuring the height of mountains by how long it took to boil a kettle. At the time, Polo put it down to the severe cold.
He did not like the journey into Afghanistan, describing the inhabitants as ‘utter savages, living entirely by the chase and dressed in the skins of beasts. They are thoroughly bad.’ Nor did he relish his passage through the Lop Nor, or Gobi Desert: ‘This desert is reported to be so long that it would take a year to go from end to end; and at the narrowest point it takes a month to cross it. It consists entirely of mountains and sand and valleys. There is nothing at all to eat . . . When a man is riding through this desert by night and for some reason – falling asleep, or anything else – he gets separated from his companions and wants to rejoin them, he hears spirit voices talking to him as if they were his companions, sometimes even calling him by name. Often these voices lure him away from the path and he never finds it again, and many travellers have got lost and died because of this . . . Because of all this, groups of travellers make a point of sticking close together. Before they go to sleep they put up a sign pointing in the direction in which they want to travel.’ From the Gobi, however, it was not far to the Great Wall of China, and from there it was a straightforward passage to Kubilai’s summer residence, Shang-tu.
Kubilai accepted their gift of holy oil, along with various letters they had brought from the Pope, and if he was disappointed not to receive the hundred Christian savants he did not let it show. Indeed, according to Marco Polo, he was so pleased to see the Venetians that he gave them royal treatment and promoted them to ‘a place of honour above the other barons’. And later, in a remarkable twist, he made them his personal roving ambassadors, charged with the task of reporting on his domains. At one point they led an expedition to Sri Lanka and the spice islands of Indonesia. Or so, at least, Marco Polo claimed. In the account he later published of their stay in China he would exaggerate, dissemble and occasionally lie: his statement that he became governor of Hang-chow province, for example, is almost certainly untrue; in all likelihood he did not visit personally many of the places he said he had; nor are his tales corroborated by any existing Mongol or Chinese source. But whatever the exact truth, it seems that the Polos came in close contact with the Khan and that under his aegis they travelled widely throughout the Far East. It was a job that occupied them for the next 17 years. Marco Polo, who professed to speak four languages, recorded it all.
He was amazed by the marvels he encountered. One was a strange ore, found on the fringes of the Gobi, that was battered and washed until it produced little fibres that were then woven into cloth. It was a seemingly indestructible material, and to clean it all one had to do was throw it in the fire. Marco Polo called it ‘salamander’ – nowadays it is better known as asbestos. Another wonder was a black, combustible stone. ‘These stones keep a fire going better than wood,’ he wrote. ‘If you put them on the fire in the evening and see that they are well alight, they will continue to burn all night, so that you will find them still glowing in the morning.
’ He was referring to coal, a substance familiar to northern Europeans – Londoners had been generating a heavy smog for many decades – but completely new to the Polos. He was struck, too, by the plethora of bath-houses these stones were used to heat: ‘there is no one who does not visit a bath-house at least three times a week – in winter, every day if he can manage it’. No less surprising was the use of paper currency, made from mulberry bark. ‘With these pieces of paper they can buy anything and pay for anything,’ wrote Polo. ‘You might as well say [the Khan] has mastered the art of alchemy.’ He described, too, porcelain bowls ‘of incomparable beauty’, and the protracted manner in which they were made: ‘These dishes are made of a crumbly earth or clay which is dug as though from a mine. Stacked in huge mounds, it is then left for thirty or forty years exposed to the wind, rain and sun. By this time the earth is so refined that dishes made from it are of a pale blue tint with a very brilliant sheen. You must understand that when a man makes a mound of this earth he does so for his heirs; it takes so long to mature that he cannot hope to draw any profit from it himself or to put it to use, but the son who succeeds him will reap the benefit.’ And then there was the postal system, by which messages could be delivered across the empire with an efficiency simply unknown in Europe. The very slowest class of letter, carried by runners between relay posts three miles apart, took 24 hours to cover a distance that would normally take ten days. Second-class post went on horseback, switching hands every 25 miles. And first-class was carried non-stop by a single rider who sounded a horn when he was approaching a relay stage, giving the occupants just time to bring out a new mount. In this manner, according to Polo, a man could cover 250–300 miles a day. To emphasize the sheer scale and wealth of the Great Khan’s empire he recorded that more than 1,000 cartloads of silk arrived at Khanbalig every day.
As for the Khan himself, Polo could barely find the superlatives to describe his lifestyle. The palace at Khanbalig had four gates, guarded by 1,000 men apiece. The royal quarters blazed with gold, silver and lacquer, and held a dining hall capable of seating 6,000 people. At state banquets, such as Kubilai’s birthday (28 September), a further 40,000 guests spilled out into the surrounding courtyards. ‘The number of chambers is quite bewildering. The whole palace is at once so immense and so well constructed that no one in the world, granted that he had the resources, could imagine any improvement in design or execution.’ Its landscaped grounds contained an arboretum of evergreen trees, selected by Kubilai himself, that had been uprooted from around the empire and carried there by elephant. To give them extra lustre he covered the man-made hills on which they were planted with lumps of lapis lazuli. In June Kubilai took his court en masse to Shang-tu, their departure in August being marked by a ceremony involving the entire imperial stud – the mares, all of them white, numbered more than 10,000. The royal hunt – in fact, a form of military exercise – comprised two groups of 10,000 riders, each accompanied by 5,000 hounds, who manoeuvred in formations across the countryside. When hawking – a sport that he loved – the Khan travelled in a gold-lined portable hunting-lodge, carried by four elephants and equipped with a trapdoor so that he could loose his birds without rising from his bed. In his private parks he released trained tigers to chase deer to feed the falcons. His harem was selected by talent scouts from an initial group of ‘some four or five hundred, more or less’, who were then whittled down in a series of beauty contests, the finalists being handed to court officials’ wives ‘to observe them carefully at night in their chambers to make sure that they are virgins and not blemished or defective in any member, that they sleep sweetly without snoring, and that their breath is sweet and they give out no unpleasant odour’. The chosen few were then sent to the Khan’s chambers in groups of six, to be replaced after three days with a new quota.
On and on Polo went. He clearly admired Kubilai and, equally clearly, he inflated statistics to support the Great Khan’s magnificence. He also tried to link him to the mythical Christian kingdom ruled by Prester John. But his account was not a complete fabrication. Even allowing for distortions, there emerges a picture of a ruler so powerful, and a civilization so advanced, that 13th-century Europe seemed barbaric by comparison. At one point Polo remarked that ‘all the world’s great potentates put together do not have such riches as belong to the Great Khan alone’. In this he was probably correct.
Between the hero-worship and the legend-spinning, Polo’s narrative included acute descriptions of people and places. There was Kubilai Khan himself: a plump man of moderate height whose complexion was ‘fair and ruddy like a rose, the eyes black and handsome, the nose shapely and set squarely in place’. In the south he reported the explosive sounds that bamboos made when they were burned. He told how the inhabitants of Hang-chow loved lakes and boating, and how the Burmese built magnificent pagodas and were addicted to tattooing. He described a battle between Mongol horsemen and a rebel army equipped with elephants. He tried valiantly to interpret the Buddhist philosophy of reincarnation. He recorded how the people of the north drank kumiss (fermented mare’s milk), how the Chinese preferred rice wine and how the people of Sumatra collected wine straight from the toddy-palm. And, in mercantile fashion, he listed the goods produced by each region and how much they sold for.
To what extent the elder Polos accompanied Marco in his wanderings is unknown. Probably they went about their own commercial business, with or without the precocious youngster. And probably, too, at the end of 17 years, it was their pressure that persuaded Marco finally to abandon China. Kubilai was reluctant to let them go, ‘But when the Great Khan saw that Messer Niccolo and Messer Maffeo and Messer Marco were ready to leave, he ordered all three to be brought into his presence. He then gave them two gold tablets proclaiming that they might travel freely through his realm, and that wherever they went they should receive provisions for themselves and their attendants. He entrusted them with a message for the Pope and the kings of France and Spain, and the other kings of Christendom.’ In the end, they had no need of the passports: the Ilkhan of Persia had requested a wife from the Great Khan’s court, and Kubilai allowed her to join the party.
The overland route being blocked by internecine wars, they travelled by sea. In true style, Kubilai gave them a fleet of 14 ships grander than anything they had seen in their lives. The Venetian ships to which the Polos were accustomed were sturdy but small, designed for the Mediterranean and Black Seas. These, however, were huge ocean-going junks, whose holds were capacious enough to contain not only provisions for a two-year journey but every item of value the Polos had accumulated during their stay. The importance of this last could not be exaggerated. If they had had to travel overland the Polos would have lost most of their goods to regional taxes, extortion and robbery. Now they were being offered a ticket to Persia that allowed them to avoid the usual duties and that was, above all, free.
Packed with profitable cargo, and carrying not just the Polos and the Ilkhan’s future wife but a reserve princess in case the first one died, the fleet left for Persia. As was universal seafaring practice, it sailed close to the shore, which allowed Polo to add further exotic touches to his journal. He described the coasts of Sri Lanka, India and Arabia, and pretended also that he had been to Zanzibar and Madagascar, which he said was the end of the world, the winds being so strong that once a ship sailed south it could never return. He reported, too, on a pair of strange islands in the Indian Ocean, one inhabited by men, the other by women, whose populations conjoined between March and May to procreate, then separated again, the children being brought up on Female Island until they were 14, whereupon they were separated according to their sex.
For some reason – either disease, piracy, local wars or shipwreck – the Great Khan’s fleet lost 540 men and several vessels during the journey. The Polos, however, were among the survivors and eventually docked at Hormuz, which they found as vile as the last time they had been there. They had expected to deliver the princesses and then withdraw swiftly to Ve
nice. But it was not to be. The Ilkhan had died during their voyage, and his successor did not want the Chinese princesses. He told the Polos to take the women to the Ilkhan’s son, who was currently on the northern border. They did so, Marco Polo adding another extravagant chapter to his journal, including a brief description of the Arctic Circle (‘a region where there is perpetual darkness’), then travelled overland to the Black Sea, from where they caught a ship to Constantinople, finally reaching home in 1295.
Clad in unfamiliar clothes, accompanied by Mongol slaves, and bearing the goods they had acquired in the Far East, the Polos must have caused a stir, even in a cosmopolitan trading city such as Venice. Legends would later arise, telling how they were at first mistaken for tramps until they opened the seams of their robes to reveal strings of precious stones. Little is known for certain, however, about either their arrival or their subsequent fates. The only ascertainable facts concerning Marco Polo are that he was captured a year or two later at sea, in a battle between the Genoese and Venetian fleets, and was not released until May 1299. During his time in prison he met a professional writer, Rusticiano of Pisa, with whom he collaborated to produce an account of his stay in the Empire of the Great Khan. It was called, immodestly but not inaccurately, A Description of the World. The book was mocked for its exaggerations – by 1305 Polo’s inflated figures had already earned him the nickname II Milione (‘The Million’) – but when its author died in 1324, at the age of 70, he refused to retract anything. On the contrary, he insisted that ‘I never told the half of what I saw’.
Marco Polo’s Description became the most influential work of its age. By the time of his death the Pax Mongolica had expired, Cathay (as Europeans called China) was once again an unreachable country, and for several centuries his book was the most comprehensive source of information on the Far East. Merchants, adventurers and mapmakers drew upon it, accepting fact and fiction indiscriminately. It was the bedrock upon which European exploration was built. As Polo explained in his last sentence, ‘I believe it was God’s will that we should return, so that men might know the things that are in the world, since . . . there was never man yet, Christian or Saracen, Tartar or Pagan, who explored so much of the world as Messer Marco, son of Messer Niccolo, great and noble citizen of the city of Venice.’
Off the Map Page 3
