Marco Polo Read online

  The Incredible Journey

  ROBIN BROWN

  Foreword by Jeremy Catto

  First published in 2005

  The History Press

  The Mill, Brimscombe Port

  Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

  www.thehistorypress.co.uk

  This ebook edition first published in 2011

  All rights reserved

  © Robin Brown, 2005, 2011

  The right of Robin Brown, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 7230 0

  MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 7229 4

  Original typesetting by The History Press

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Map showing Marco Polo’s Journeys

  General Introduction: Marco Millione

  The Prologue

  BOOK ONE

  The Journey Out

  BOOK TWO

  Introduction

  Lord of Lords

  BOOK THREE

  Introduction

  The Journey Home

  Postscript

  FOREWORD

  After two centuries of strenuous exploration and a landing on the moon, we are all familiar with incredible journeys. Even in the remote past, the capacity of humans to accomplish immense distances by land or sea never fails to surprise. In the century of Marco Polo the Mongols, nomads of the northern steppes, exemplified this in a dramatic though not unprecedented manner by sweeping through the settled lands to the south of them in large numbers, and demonstrating that they could reach from China at one end of the Eurasian landmass to Central Europe almost at the other in the course of a single season. In comparison the snail-like progress of the Polo family from Venice to the Mongol capital of Khan-Balik (Beijing), taking years to get there, seems much less impressive. But in another sense their journeys (for taken together there were several) can properly be described as incredible. For one thing, not everybody believed them. They were written up by an author of romances, Rustichello of Pisa, who claimed to have been told the story in a Genoese prison, and they circulated as an item in the well-known genre of the prose romance, like the entirely fictional Travels of Sir John Mandeville. Rustichello certainly gave the book its entrancing quality as a story, and it may owe some of the literally unbelievable details to his literary invention. Contemporaries treated it as a story, at best suspending their disbelief. Many later and more literal-minded critics have dismissed the whole of it as a literary forgery on much less substantial grounds, for instance for such negative reasons as the lack of any reference to the Great Wall of China; they have forgotten that in the Mongol Empire of Kublai Khan the Wall was a meaningless internal border and was probably ruinous for long stretches. The Travels of Marco Polo were not a guidebook to China, but a literary confection, an artful story. They can only be appreciated as a master-piece of Rustichello’s marvellous story-telling genius.

  Nevertheless, there is overwhelming evidence from independent Chinese and other sources that (and this is the other, more popular sense in which the journeys are incredible) both the main structure of Marco Polo’s travels and a surprising amount of the detail are authentic. The court of the Khan, the organisation of the Mongol Empire, the important role within it of indigenous Christian priests of the Nestorian church and many other features of the Central Asian world as he described them are confirmed by the reports of the Christian missionaries and envoys (Marco himself, in a sense, among them) sent by the Roman curia to the terrifying but hope-engendering new rulers of the East. He was neither the first nor the last of the series of travellers, from Giovanni di Piano Carpini between 1245 and 1248 to Guillaume du Pré in 1365, who sought to use the Mongol power to defend and enhance Latin Christendom. But the confirmatory evidence from China is even more impressive. Marco’s description of the Imperial Palace at Khan-Balik is authenticated by the lineaments of the surviving Forbidden City. His account of the cities of Kinsai (Hangzhou) and Zaiton (perhaps Quanzhou) with its abundant commerce on the China Sea accord with contemporary Chinese descriptions. There is so much detail of trading and manufacturing activity, both in China and in Central Asia, that we must suspect Rustichello of using some lost relazione or commercial report written by Marco for the use of Venetian merchants – in which case the statement that he heard the story from Marco’s own lips in a Genoese prison must be a literary device.

  One of the notable features of the Travels is its account of exotic animals and plants unknown in Europe. Marco Polo was careful to record them both as sources of wealth and objects of trade, and as dangerous beasts of prey – the horses, falcons and sheep of Central Asia, the white horses of Mongolia, the Mongols’ sables and other furs, the musk deer of Tibet, the snakes of Kara-jang, the featherless and furry hens of Kien-ning-fu, the rhinoceros (or ‘unicorns’) of Sumatra, the tarantulas of south India, the elephants and unique birds of Madagascar and many others. Previous accounts of the travels have not given them much attention; now, at last, Robin Brown, a noted naturalist and maker of nature films, has taken proper account of Marco’s observations. This is a very welcome addition to the considerable but patchy literature devoted to the Travels of Marco Polo.

  Jeremy Catto

  Oriel College, Oxford

  General Introduction

  MARCO MILLIONE

  The truly incredible story of Marco Polo’s journey to the ends of the earth, the book that earned him the title ‘the Father of Geography’, has for the last seven hundred years been bedevilled by doubts as to its authenticity. How much of his tale is a factual record, how much hearsay, and how much the best that Marco, bored with incarceration in a Genoan gaol, could recollect or indeed imagine? Did this intrepid Venetian actually trek across Asia Minor, explore the length and breadth of China as the roving ambassador of Kublai Khan, the most ruthless dictator in history? Did he really make his escape from almost certain death at the hands of Kublai’s successors by directing the construction of fourteen huge wooden ships in which he delivered Kublai’s relative, a beautiful princess, as bride to the Caliph of Baghdad after a voyage halfway round the world and so fraught with danger that it resulted in the death of 600 members of his crew?

  Marco claims to have survived Mongol wars, hostile Tartar tribes, insurrections, blizzards, floods, the freezing cold of the world’s highest mountain plateaux and the scorching heat of its most arid deserts. Indubitably it was he who wrote the very first descriptions of real ‘dragons’ (Indian crocodiles) and huge, striped ‘lions’ (tigers) that swam into rivers to prey on men in boats, horned, armoured ‘monsters’ (rhinoceros), armies of elephants with castles of archers on their backs, of a bird with feathers nine feet long (the great auk); of the salamander; and of cloth that would not burn (asbestos) and black rocks that burned like wood (coal). For good measure he claimed that the currency used in this mysterious Orient – where the cities were larger than any in the West and a rich trade was to be had in glorious silks, cloth of gold, pearls, silver, gold, Arabian horses, ceramics, spices and exotic woods – was paper! And in passing he introduced his native Italians to ice cream (frozen creams) and, yes, pasta (noodles) from his observations of Chinese cuisine.

  Such wonders are supported by a wealt
h of minor detail: regional histories, descriptions of cities, inhabitants, races, languages and government, people’s different lifestyles, diets, styles of dress, marriage customs, rituals and religions. There are accounts of trading practices, crafts, manufactured products, plants, animals, minerals and terrain. And all this from a teenager who went to China aged seventeen!

  Understandably for a red-blooded young Italian, he waxes lyrical about the beautiful Arabian and oriental girls, especially those who are obliged to sleep with travellers before they can expect to marry!

  It is Marco Polo who furnishes Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s fevered brain with the images that produced the immortal lines ‘in Xanadu did Kublai Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree . . .’, and it is Marco who supplies the erotic detail about what went on in such domes and of the damsels, practised in the art of ‘dalliance and seduction’, ensconced in love-pavilions admin-istering what we now call recreational drugs to an early cult of Middle Eastern suicide-bombers.

  His adventures read like a medieval soap opera and indeed they turn out to have been written, or at least ghosted, by a writer of them, the romance-writer Rustichello of Pisa, who shared Marco’s prison. Small wonder that initially these seemingly tall tales were greeted with open incredulity and derision. Who was there to confirm one word of it? No one! And that was to hold true for almost five hundred years. Ethnocentric Europeans simply refused to entertain the notion that a civilisation larger and more advanced than their own existed in the East. Europe was undoubtedly the centre of civilisation, as everyone knew. Europeans had visited the fringes of the Orient and ventured into North Africa, and the people they had seen were observably backward and primitive. Marco Polo’s accounts of a massive empire employing advanced financial systems, such as the use of paper currency, were staunchly and universally rejected as romantic fiction.

  He became known by the derisory title ‘Marco Millione’ (‘Marco of the Millions’), the teller of a million tall tales. After his death he was lampooned at Venetian carnivals by a comic figure dressed as a ruffian clown whose act consisted of outlandish and exaggerated gestures and expressions.

  Sadly this reputation prevailed throughout his lifetime. Indeed, right up until the twenty-first century, to tell ‘a Marco Polo’ was to be guilty of exaggeration verging on the untrue. The priest who attended Marco Polo on his deathbed in 1324 felt impelled to ask him whether he wished to recant any of his story. Marco replied curtly: ‘I have not written down the half of the things I saw.’

  Now, the passage of time and the travels, mostly in the twentieth century, of others have largely vindicated Marco Polo. His route map is somewhat eccentric and he is not always very objective about hearsay information (if it is spicy he, or Rustichello, prefers to keep it that way), but he usually warns the reader when he is quoting questionable sources. It should also be remembered that the account was written down from memory supported (it is thought) by notes brought from Venice to his prison cell.

  Admittedly, contemporary doubters of Marco Polo have emerged in recent times, their work based largely on what are seen as significant omissions from his description of China, in particular his failure to describe the Great Wall or to note that Chinese women bound their feet. Indeed, a case for his never having visited China has been built on his missing structures as large (or feet as small) as this.

  But again Marco Polo’s account has won through. The academic consensus is that the Great Wall of China did not reach its current all-embracing form until the Ming dynasty, in about 1500. If the story had mentioned the wall it would certainly be fictional.

  Marco Polo is now confirmed as the first traveller to describe a journey across the entire continent of Asia and to name the countries and provinces in the proper consecutive order. A growing awareness that the man could be relied upon also encouraged further exploration of the world: a well-thumbed copy of Marco Polo’s book was taken by Christopher Columbus on his voyages to the New World.

  Even his erotic ‘gossip’ has been shown to have an essential veracity, a good example of which is the story of the ‘Old Man of the Mountains’. Admitting that the story is hearsay and probably ancient history he nonetheless includes it, and with all the titillating detail he can bring to it.

  The Old Man of the Mountains lived in a beautiful mountain between two lofty peaks and there built a luxurious garden boasting every fragrant shrub and delicious fruit from far afield. Streams (conduits) flowed with milk, honey and wine, and damsels skilled in the arts of singing, the playing of musical instruments and love (to which Marco Polo refers delicately) lived in a series of luxurious pavilions; the whole guarded by an impenetrable fortress through which the only access was via a secret tunnel.

  At first glance this has all the hallmarks of a licentious fairy story, good tabloid stuff, at which Rustichello, remember, was an expert.

  The Old Man of the Mountains made a selection from among the young men of the mountains who were renowned for their daring and bravery and were well versed in the martial arts. Every day he described to these young acolytes the ‘Paradise’ which the Prophet Mohammed had promised the Faithful and eventually he revealed to them that he too possessed the key to Paradise. They were then drugged with opium and hashish, carried unconscious through the secret tunnel and handed over to the obliging damsels in whose company they spent four or five days enjoying the singing, playing, delicate food, wines or milk and honey, and, says Marco Polo, ‘exquisite caresses’.

  Drugged back into unconsciousness at the end of this experience they were carried out with happy smiles on their faces and awoke to a promise from the Old Man of the Mountains that they could return any time to Paradise if they swore fealty to him. Moreover, this would almost certainly be their fate as he was recruiting them to a cult of political assassins who would wreak suicidal mayhem across the Levant. Marco Polo records: ‘They had absolutely no regard for their own lives in the execution of their master’s will and their tyranny became the subject of dread in all the surrounding countries.’

  Many of Marco Polo’s debunkers say this type of reporting is driven either by Rustichello’s imagination or the licentious thoughts of a young man in his early twenties. His book is certainly illuminated by his obvious attraction to Oriental women; for instance, he describes the Northern Persians as ‘a handsome race especially the women, who, in my opinion, are the most beautiful in the world’. Of a region further east, he says that its women ‘are in truth, very handsome, very sensual’. And everywhere there is a fascination for sexual mores, as in his description of the women who are not allowed to marry if they are virgins and whose parents get round this problem by leaving them beside busy roads for the enjoyment of travellers.

  But contemporary research, including a very descriptive work by the war correspondent and travel-writer Martha Gellhorn, has confirmed the truth of Marco Polo’s seemingly fantastical tale.

  The Old Man of the Mountains was in fact Alo-eddin (Aladin?), a dissident Sunni rebel of the early Muslim faith who, after falling out with the Caliph of Cairo, fled east where, with his fanatical followers, he captured the mountain fortress of Alamut and established a sect which must surely be regarded as the prototype of today’s suicide squads. Hassan lived at Alamut for four decades, reportedly never leaving the place other than occasionally to walk the battlements, and came to be known as Sheik-al-Jabal, the ‘Old Man of the Mountains’. He did indeed raise an elite corps of assassins, in fact the word owes its origins to the ‘hassashin’, as these killers were said to be ‘crazed’ by hashish when they carried out their murders. They almost invariably gave their own lives in these attacks (mostly carried out for maximum terror effect, in public view and in broad daylight) in the belief that they would go directly to Paradise.

  Nor was the sect just a passing phenomenon. The Old Man of the Mountains and his successors held sway for more than two centuries over vast areas of the Middle East and Asia Minor, from Kurdistan to Egypt, where they eventually kept formal emba
ssies and occupied dozens of castles. Elements of the sect still exist today (thoroughly peacefully) as part of the Aga Khan’s Sunni Muslim following.

  Marco travels through mountains one of which, he claims, has Noah’s Ark on its summit. As he was in the location of Mount Ararat this represents the first actual identification of the site. He also describes a substance which has all the characteristics of crude oil and, given that today this region is a major oil producer, here we have another first. In what is now modern Iran he describes the tomb of the Three Wise Men and recounts the ‘Christmas’ tales associated with them.

  He also gives the first potted history of the legendary Prester John credited at this time by the West with ruling over a ‘lost faith’ of Christians (Nestorians) deep inside Asia who, if only they could be contacted, might mount an attack on Islam’s flank to assist the Crusaders. Marco admits, however, that his information on Prester John is hearsay and historically questionable. Nowadays the consensus is that Prester John was probably a powerful Tartar prince, a khan in his own right, but the possibility of a Christian kingdom lost in the soft underbelly of Asia obviously fascinated Marco Polo and he refers to Prester John (calling him George in one reference) on several occasions.

  Similarly, serious doubts as to Marco’s veracity were aroused by the many ‘magical’ objects which Marco Polo saw and described. His reports of black rocks that burned and a mineral wool that when roasted in fire ‘echoed the Salamander’ in becoming fire resistant were greeted with disdain by his original readership. Of course, we now know that he was describing coal and asbestos, both then unknown in Europe.

  When he lectured on how he had climbed to the ‘Roof of the World’ and described the wonder of water being slow to boil, people shouted ‘Marco Millione’ at him. Hundreds of years later, in the high latitudes of Afghanistan, more or less where Marco said it was, the Pamir Plateau was discovered and named, and we all know now that a lack of oxygen makes it difficult for climbers to boil their tea there. Indeed, parts of the ‘Roof of the World’ have not been explored to this day. It is also an exceptionally tough climb even for those dressed in the latest weatherproofs, using modern mountaineering equipment and assisted by oxygen cylinders.