Marco Polo

The Journey that Changed the World

John Man

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780062375070
• eBook ISBN: 9780062375087
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Art
• Index: History

"I have read everything written on Marco Polo, and John Man's book is, by far, my favorite work on the subject. It's not only an over-due and important historical study, it's an entertaining ride every step of the way." — John Fusco, Creator of the Netflix original series Marco Polo

The true history behind the Netflix original series Marco Polo, here is the remarkable story of the world's most famous traveler, retracing his legendary journey from Venice to China, the moment East first met West.

In 1271, a young Italian merchant named Marco Polo embarked on a groundbreaking expedition from Venice, through the Middle East and Central Asia to China. His extraordinary reports of his experiences introduced medieval Europe to an exotic new world of emperors and concubines, amazing cities, huge armies, unusual spices and cuisine, and imperial riches. Marco Polo also revealed the wonders of Xanadu, the summer capital of Mongol emperor Kublai Khan.

Almost 750 years later, acclaimed author John Man traveled in Marco Polo's footsteps to Xanadu then on to Beijing and through modern China in search of the history behind the legend. In this enthralling chronicle, Man draws on his own journey, new archaeological findings, and deep archival study to paint a vivid picture of Marco Polo and the great court of Kublai Khan.

1

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE

ONCE UPON A TIME, I WORKED WITH THE GREAT HISTORIAN A. J. P. Taylor. Part of his skill lay in selecting the telling details that explained events and brought them alive. He also liked quirky footnotes. I was surprised by one stating that a certain king – Edward VII or VIII, I think – liked to have his trousers creased horizontally, naval fashion, rather than vertically. When I asked Taylor why he had included this odd and inconsequential detail, he said, ‘You never know.’ I was young, he was eminent, I dared not ask him what on earth he meant; but it made me wonder at the role of chance in history. What if Cleopatra’s nose had been a little smaller, or if the shrapnel that wounded Hitler on the Somme in 1916 had struck him in the head and not the thigh? The stuff of history is made by powerful forces and astonishing characters, but also by pure luck, without which no one would ever have heard of Marco Polo, and countless writers would be short of a subject.

In 1253 two ambitious young Venetians, Niccolò Polo and his brother Maffeo, set off to make their fortunes.¹ Niccolò left his wife pregnant with Marco, her first and only child. Marco, whose book is the only record of these events, does not even give us her name – an omission typical of a narrator interested in travel, but not in personal details. We must be prepared to tolerate such gaps, or fill them in ourselves. So let us imagine the young Signora Polo, in the summer of 1253, still unaware of her condition, consoling herself with her mansion (on the corner of two small canals, two minutes’ walk from the Rialto Bridge), her servants and Niccolò’s reassurance that he would be away only a few years and would surely return with riches enough to repay the family’s investment many times over.

The Polo brothers’ idea was to base themselves in Constantinople, seat of Catholic Rome’s rival sect, eastern Orthodoxy, and for a thousand years capital of what had been the eastern section of the Roman empire, now known as Byzantium. Their wealth was not in golden ducats, but in ‘merchants’ wares’, which they proposed to trade for jewels. Perhaps, the following year, a letter arrived from the family in Venice telling of Marco’s birth. It’s possible, because they had with them Venetian servants who could have acted as messengers. But the news, if it came, must have been good: mother and child doing well, nothing to draw Niccolò home. He focused on business, to the exclusion of domestic matters.

Why Constantinople? Because Venice, once a village in a bog, was now a place of canals and palaces and 150,000 people, with an empire, and Constantinople was virtually a Venetian colony. Fifty years previously, Venice’s doge, the fanatical Enrico Dandolo – astonishingly energetic despite being in his eighties and blind – had led his city-state into the Fourth Crusade, and into an adventure of duplicity and pillage directed almost exclusively against his own allies and fellow Christians. For Rome, the aim was inspirational: to create a Christian version of the Roman empire, first by seizing Constantinople, thus unifying divided Christendom, and then – of course – by retaking the so-called Holy Land from its Muslim rulers. Venice would supply a navy – at a price. But Dandolo had a secret agenda of his own: to cut the ground from under rival city-states, in particular Genoa and Pisa, and extend Venice’s own reach in the eastern Mediterranean – all funded by loot from Christendom’s richest city. So much for Christian unity. On 17 July 1204 the old, blind Dandolo somehow led the assault, leaping from his beached galley to plant the banner of St Mark on the sand. The city fell, the emperor fled and, after a nine-month interregnum, hell broke loose. In the words of Venice’s eminent historian John Julius Norwich: ‘Never in history had so much beauty, so much superb craftsmanship, been wantonly destroyed in so short a space of time.’ French and Flemings broke into the cathedral of St Sophia and used horses to carry off bits of the altar, throne, pulpit and doors. Venetians, more discerning, sent home works of art by the hundred. Among them were four great bronze horses which Constantine, the city’s founder, had placed on the starting gate of the Hippodrome almost nine hundred years before; for centuries they would stand on the loggia above the main door of St Mark’s Cathedral as a symbol of Venetian power (those you see today are replicas; the real ones are in a museum inside). From the spoils, Dandolo repaid himself the 50,000 silver marks still outstanding for supplying the navy in the first place. He also won for Venice three-eighths of the whole of Byzantium and the same fraction of Constantinople, the right to trade in imperial dominions, and the total exclusion in the Mediterranean of Venice’s great rivals, Genoa and Pisa. This was an empire within an empire – ports and islands by the dozen down the Adriatic coast and around Greece, all of Crete, and access at last to the Black Sea and its northern peninsula, Crimea, the gateway to the great trans-Russian rivers of the Don and Volga.

Crimea: that was where the two Polo brothers turned their gaze next. Six years of profitable trade in Constantinople had turned their wares into jewels, which they now planned to use to purchase trade goods in the Venetian base across the Black Sea, where they would have contact with another empire that had apparently sprung from nowhere, out of the unknown depths of Central Asia. This imperium, and the explosion of mounted warriors on which it was based, had nothing to do with luck, for it had been created by one of the most astonishing and influential characters of all time: Genghis Khan. For the previous 50 years, ever since Genghis’s rise to power in 1206, the peoples around the edge of his expanding empire – Chinese, Muslims, Indians, Europeans – had watched and suffered aghast. It was as if, in the late nineteenth century, Geronimo at the head of his Apaches had united the many Indian tribes, seized Washington, made an empire of all North America and claimed the world. A Mongol in the heart of Beijing, which fell in 1215, or at the gates of Vienna (1241) was as unlikely as an Apache in the White House in 1880.

By 1260 Genghis had been in his secret grave for over 30 years, but his heirs ruled from China to southern Russia, and were still intent on expansion, in accordance, as they believed, with the will of Heaven. Four grandsons ruled their own mini-empires, in Russia, Persia, Central Asia and north China, though the boundaries were vague and other grandsons were trying to stake out their own estates in shadowy border lands. It is one of history’s more remarkable facts that in the second half of the thirteenth century a traveller could ride from the mouth of the Danube to the Yellow River on Mongol territory, a distance of 6,000 kilometres, and with the right connections pass from camp to camp all the way, with the certainty that every host would owe allegiance to the golden clan of Genghis, by direct descent or appointment. It was not an easy journey, across oceanic steppes and deserts and through mountain passes with thin air and icy winds, but it was said that a virgin carrying gold would be helped on her way in safety, if she had imperial blessing.

Crimea, to which the Polos now turned, had been taken by the Mongols in 1238. Ever practical, Genghis’s successors had seen the advantages of preserving the two trading bases, Soldaia (today’s Sudak) and Caffa (Feodosiya), dominated by Venetians since the disgraceful sack of Constantinople in 1204, and left the Venetians to get on with trading, as long as they paid their dues to their Mongol overlords. Here, the brothers planned to exchange their jewels for raw produce much in demand further west – wheat, wax, salted fish, Baltic amber, Siberian furs, slaves. But it was not as easy as they hoped. Many other merchants were in the same line of business; and the Genoese, though much reduced, still competed for trade. Practice was sharp, competition cut-throat, brawling frequent. Seeking some easier way to turn a profit, the Polo brothers looked east, 1,000 kilometres away across the gently rolling grasslands of southern Russia, to the new Mongol capital of Sarai.

After a brief stay in Soldaia, they set off for Sarai with all the confidence of youth, travelling in style and safety, with their Venetian servants to guard their store of jewels, and unaware of the maelstrom of trouble ahead.

Sarai, a steppe city of tents and wagons and horses, was on a tributary of the lower Volga, 50 kilometres from where the great river breaks up into the delta that feeds into the Caspian. Old Sarai, as it is known, was where Genghis’s grandson Berke ruled his inheritance, which stretched from north of the Black Sea across present-day Kazakhstan – an area about the size of the USA, almost 10 million square kilometres. Later the Mongol rulers here would be known as the Golden Horde – ‘golden’ because Genghis’s ‘golden clan’ hung gold on their royal ‘palace-tents’, called in Mongolian the orda (from which English speakers get ‘horde’, meaning an unruly mass of marauders, as in ‘the Mongol hordes’). The Horde would dominate Russia for 200 years, a time that Russians still call ‘The Tartar Yoke’. But at the time, Berke’s future was not certain. Having turned Muslim, the better to manage the local population, he had fallen out with his cousin Hulegu, conqueror of present-day Iraq, because in 1258 Hulegu had devastated Baghdad and executed the caliph, supreme head of Islam. Civil war was looming, even as the Polo brothers arrived in Sarai, hoping to start up business with a powerful monarch who had links across all Eurasia.

It worked. In a deal of which we have no details, they were welcomed, and a year later the jewels had been turned into goods that doubled their value. It was time to return, via Constantinople. Back home in Venice, Marco would have been seven.

At this moment chance intervened, twice.

First, the Greeks and Genoese together retook Constantinople from the Venetians, killing some, mutilating others, and barring the Greek islands and the Bosphorus to all Venetians. Unable to use the sea route back to Venice, the Polos were stranded. There was another way: overland, through the Caucasus and western Persia. But just when the first door closed, so did the second one. Berke used his new Muslim faith as an excuse to turn his army loose on his non-Muslim cousin. For the Venetians in Sarai, there was only one escape route left: an even longer way round, eastward, through the heart of Central Asia.

So in the summer of 1262, well able to afford a caravan of horses, camels and wagons, off they went across steppe and desert for two months and another 1,000 kilometres, until at last they reached Bukhara, the great entrepôt on what would later be called the Silk Road. From here they planned to swing south and finally west, skirting Afghanistan, travelling through Persia and Syria, until, perhaps, with luck, they would reach the Mediterranean. It would have been a stupendous, 2,500-kilometre journey, and might well have been the end of them. As it happened, war between Mongol cousins prevented them going anywhere, and they were trapped in Bukhara for the next three years.

Doing what exactly? We have no idea. For sure they would have become familiar with its recent history – a Muslim boom, followed by a Mongol bust, and now another boom thanks to Muslims and Mongols together. Four decades earlier, this city of 300,000 people had had many glories, notable among them a royal library of 45,000 volumes and the 50-metre Kalyan Minaret, built on earthquake-proof foundations in the shape of an inverted pyramid. Its sages and scholars made it ‘the dome of Islam in the east’. Then the Mongols had come, with catapults and flaming naphtha bombs. The city had experienced many assaults – by armies, fire and the restless earth – and many reconstructions, and it survived again. The Kalyan Minaret stood firm, as it does today. Under a surprisingly humane governor, Bukhara recovered – ‘nay,’ wrote the Persian historian Juvaini, in his flowery style, ‘it reached its highest pitch and . . . today no town in the countries of Islam will bear comparison with Bukhara in the thronging of its creatures, the multitude of moveable and immoveable wealth, the concourse of savants, and the establishment of pious endowments.’ The canals bringing water from the Oxus (today’s Amudarya), the restored palaces, the bazaars, the eleven gates, the stone-paved streets – all these the Polo brothers would have known. After three years, making the most of the city’s revived fortunes, they had turned yet another profit.

Now what? The quarrels between Genghis’s heirs showed no signs of ending. Travel in any direction seemed risky. At this point, 1265, luck once again directed them.

Five years before, Kublai, another of Genghis’s grandsons, had established himself as Khagan – khan of khans – in his capital, Xanadu. But his position too was shaky, because he was fighting off a rival claimant to the throne, his youngest brother Ariq. He had sought help from the third of the surviving brothers, Hulegu, in Persia, sending off an embassy to Baghdad. Now, with affairs in China sorted out in Kublai’s favour, the ambassador was returning, passing through Bukhara on his way, secure in the knowledge that his status assured his safety. The unnamed envoy was astonished to learn of the presence of two wealthy Europeans, arranged a meeting, and was even more astonished to discover that they spoke good Mongolian (as they should have done, after four years of exposure to the Mongol world). He invited them to join him.

‘Sirs,’ he says, in the Moule and Pelliot translation of the Travels, ‘if you will trust me, you will have great profit from it and great honour.’

In what way, exactly?

‘Sirs, I tell you that the great lord of the Tartars never saw any Latins and has great desire and wish to see some of them; and so if you will come with me all the way to him, I tell you that . . . he will see you very gladly and do you great honour and great good . . . and you will be able to come safely with me without any hindrance.’

This they did, in a year-long journey made possible by the fact that the whole of Eurasia was under Mongol rule. Marco gives no details of this trek, because his information was second-hand, and anyway this is a mere prologue to his own journey.

The Polo brothers were indeed well received by Kublai in his working capital Xanadu. The khan at once saw the potential importance of his new guests. They were not the first westerners to make contact with the Mongols – several diplomatic missions had already gone back and forth – but those had gone to Mongolia, not China. For Kublai, this visit was something new, with huge potential. First, he was intrigued by Europe, which 40 years before had lain at his family’s feet and which one day, as Heaven had decreed, would like all lands acknowledge Mongol overlordship. Second, he was attempting to juggle the conflicting demands of Buddhist and Daoist sects, and was eager to find some other religion or ideology that might act as a counterweight to both. Kublai was no stranger to Christianity, which, being the religion of all Europe, had to be a powerful force. For a couple of centuries, the heretical Christian sect of Nestorians had been active in his realm. Indeed, his mother Sorkaktani had been a Nestorian; and there had been no better example, for she was one of the most influential people, let alone women, of her time. A non-Mongol, a member of the Turkic-speaking Kerait tribe, Sorkaktani was the wife of Genghis’s son Tolui and the mother of two emperors (Kublai and his predecessor Mönkhe) and the ruler of Persia, Hulegu. From her Kublai had learned an important lesson: never let one religion dominate, or you will alienate the others. She had even funded one of Bukhara’s ‘pious endowments’. A Christian giving money for a Muslim madrassa! There’s a lesson in tolerance and generosity. Now fate had brought him two Catholic Christians who might help balance the demands of Nestorians, Buddhists and Daoists.

So Kublai charged his visitors with two requests for the Pope: first, 100 priests, educated men well able to argue the truth of their religion and ‘rebuke the Idolaters’. Then – so Ramusio’s edition of the book claims – he, Kublai, and his followers would all convert to Christianity, ‘and their followers shall do the like, and thus in the end there will be more Christians here than exist in your part of the world’. (What a crazy, impractical idea. But from a Christian perspective: what a noble challenge! What a world-changing prospect!) Second, Kublai asked for some holy oil from the sepulchre of Jesus Christ in Jerusalem. Why? Perhaps to confer the power to quell unruly subjects. A contingent of 100 priests coming all the way from Europe bringing their most powerful and revered potion would be no end of a boost to his reputation.

The two brothers, having been blown eastward by chance, headed for home overland with promises to fulfil. With them was a Mongol guardian, who fell ill and let them continue without him – not that it mattered, because they had an official safe-conduct pass made of gold allowing them to use the post-roads and horses which carried people and messages across the empire.² Nevertheless, according to Marco, it took them three years to get to the Mediterranean, which he says was because of bad weather. More delay occurred in Acre, the crusader stronghold that is now Akko in northern Israel, where the travellers discovered that the pope had died and, the church being engaged in a long wrangle over the succession, a new one had not been appointed, leaving no one to receive Kublai’s requests. The papal ambassador in Acre, an eminent churchman named Teobaldo Visconti, at once saw the significance of the brothers’ mission and persuaded them to wait, just in case the cardinals in Italy could come to a conclusion. After a few weeks they gave up, and in 1269, after an absence of sixteen years, they arrived back in Venice.

What a homecoming it must have been, though Marco records no meetings, c...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• A Note on Sourcing and Spelling
• Contents
• Maps
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Of Truth, Told and Hidden
• 1 When Worlds Collide
• 2 Across the Heart of Asia
• 3 Into China
• 4 Approaching the Khan
• 5 Arrival in Xanadu
• 6 The Pleasure Dome
• 7 From Xanadu to Beijing
• 8 Kublai’s New ‘Great Capital’
• 9 The Display of Power, the Power of Display
• 10 A Rough Guide to Manzi
• 11 Marco and the Women
• 12 Leaving a Tattered Empire
• 13 Homeward Bound
• 14 The Making of the Book
• 15 Marco and the New World
• Epilogue: The Last Word
• Bibliography
• Photographic Inserts
• Picture Acknowledgements
• Index
• About the Author
• Also by John Man
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher