The trope of the voyager who goes to hell to speak to the dead was, by Dante’s time, already very old. Virgil’s Aeneas had been there to question his father, Anchises; his version owes something to Homer’s, in which Odysseus, spurning his own mother, offers the cup of blood to Tiresias so that the blind seer might tell him what he needs to know to get home; while The Odyssey in turn derives some of its imagining of hell from ancient Mesopotamian poems, including Enkidu’s visions of the underworld in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Dante’s version, while it is at the service of Christian allegory, nevertheless has the chill and strangeness of its pagan prequels; and it is fascinating to find Ulysses, who had harrowed his own hell, there among the dead.
Some of Dante’s other sources are more surprising. Among them are the writings of Islam, particularly the stories of Mohammad’s visits beyond this world:
Six hundred years at least before Dante Alighieri conceived his marvellous poem, there existed in Islam a religious legend narrating the journey of Mahomet to the abodes of the after-life. In the course of time from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries of our era – Muslim traditionalists, theologians, interpreters of the Scriptures, mystics, philosophers and poets – all united in weaving around the original legend a fabric of religious narrative; at times their stories were amplifications, at others, allegorical adaptations or literary imitations. A comparison with the Divine Comedy of all these versions combined bewrays many points of resemblance, and even of absolute coincidence, in the general architecture and ethical structure of hell and paradise; in the description of the tortures and rewards; in the general lines of the dramatic action; in the episodes and incidents of the journey; in the allegorical signification; in the roles assigned to the protagonist and to the minor personages; and, finally, in intrinsic literary value.
There are three cycles of Muslim traditions concerning the Prophet’s journeys – the journey by night on earth, the isrâ’; the ascension to heaven, the mi’râj; and a third that is a combination of the two others, giving a complete model of the Divine Comedy’s tripartite structure.
This thesis, while not uncontroversial, is persuasive. It is in Spain that the synthesis occurred: These traditions were amplified and given metaphysical interpretations by philosophers, especially the pseudo-Empedoclean and neo-Platonic school founded by Ibn Masarra of Cordova (883–931). The best representative of that school was Ibn ’Arabî (1165–1240) of Murcia, the greatest Sufi not only of Spain but of the whole Arabic world … Ibn ’Arabî was born into the Moorish culture of Andalusian Spain, the centre of an extraordinary flourishing and mingling of Jewish, Christian and Islamic thought through which major scientific and philosophical works of antiquity were transmitted to Northern Europe. Dante’s mentor, Brunetto Latini, author (in French) of the first vernacular encyclopaedia, Li Livres dou Trésor, knew Muslim literature and customs well; he was sent, in 1260, as Florentine ambassador to the court of Alfonso the Wise in Toledo and Seville. In the Inferno, Dante puts him in the third circle among the sodomites; even so, when they meet each other there they are full of mutual affection and respect.
The Divine Comedy was not only influenced by Muslim eschatology and by other religious, philosophical and historical elements found in Islam; it is also constructed around the love of Dante and Beatrice which is foreign to the very spirit of medieval Christianity and unprecedented in Christian legend, but … has striking parallel in Muslim tradition … what we curiously call Platonic love is not Platonic but neo-Platonic and Muslim; the troubadours of Provence and the Italian poets of the dolce stil nuovo were influenced, whether they knew it or not, by Arabic models … which led to that new poetry and to that new conception of love.
Dante’s cosmology was also derived, in part, from Muslim sources, particularly Alfraganus of Baghdad’s Elements of Astronomy on the Celestial Motions (c. 840), a simplified version of Ptolemy’s Almagest. He gives the order of the eight heavens as in Ptolemy and adds out of Aristotle another, the ninth, the Primum Mobile, also called the crystalline, the diaphanous or completely transparent heaven. And on the authority of the Catholic Church there is a tenth, the empyrean or heaven of flame or light, the abode of the blessed spirits and of God himself. This tenth sphere was thought to be immovable, like the earth; whereas the others moved and were transparent, composed of ether, questo etera tondo.
Dante seems not to have known the Geographia and even if he had he might not have used it; or only, as in the version of the Almagest he did know, in symbolic rather than descriptive terms. His Mount Purgatory in the midst of a great ocean, the as yet undiscovered Pacific, is as much an abstract and allegorical construction as it is a real geographical entity; this point is emphasised by the fact that, after he and Virgil have ascended the levels of Purgatory and he has farewelled his pagan guide, at its top is found the earthly paradise which his beloved, Beatrice, will show him. Paradise in the South Seas will form a persuasive ideal for later travellers; in the meantime, contemporary with Dante, other travellers, mental and physical, were setting out for the antipodes to bring back news of the heterotopia to be found there.
THE MAN WE KNOW as Marco Polo was born in Venice in 1254, eleven years before Dante’s birth in Florence in 1265; the Venetian traveller outlived the Florentine poet, dying in his home city in 1324 just three years after Dante himself had died, perhaps from malaria, on his way back from Venice to Ravenna, where he lived out the last years of his exile. The Polo family were merchants who traded in the east, by galley, to the entrepôt of Constantinople and beyond. When Marco was six his father, Niccolò, and his uncle, Maffeo, set out for Constantinople where another brother, also Marco, was living and trading into the Crimea. Carrying jewels, the brothers travelled to the Black Sea port of Soldaia (Sudak), went north on horseback along the course of the Volga as far as Sara and Bolgara, the twin capitals of Barka Khan, whom the Polos knew as the lord of the Western Tartars, and there presented their gemstones to him.
The disposition of the Tartar, properly Mongol, empire was complex. There were then four separate khanates, only two of which were ruled, one nominally, by an overlord in the east, the Great Khan. The Golden Horde or Western Tartars amongst whom the Polos had come, along with the Chagatai Khanate, which covered most of the area of today’s five central Asian republics, were already independent of the Great Khan; while the so-called Eastern Tartars or the Ilkhanate, centred on Persia, continued to acknowledge the overlordship of the Great Khan, who had his own vast domain in the east. Kublai Khan and Hülegü, khan of the Ilkhanate, were brothers, while Barka Khan of the Golden Horde was their cousin.
Barka was at this time in dispute with Hülegü over the ownership of northwest Persia and the Caucasus; the war between the cousins, in which Barka was defeated, delayed the Polos and, when it was safe to continue, they were advised to return to Constantinople by a roundabout route, travelling further east before turning south so as to avoid crossing the still-troubled territories of Barka Khan. They went by Bactrian camel to the holy city of Bukhara, now in Uzbekistan, where they spent three years; and there met an ambassador of the victorious Hülegü on his way to the court of Kublai Khan at the summer capital in Karakorum and were invited to go along with him.
Kublai Khan received the Venetians with honour, then sent them back to Europe as ambassadors to the Pope, with a request for some of the oil from the lamp in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, as well as a hundred wise men to be sent into the east to instruct the Mongol hordes on the principles of Western knowledge and Christian belief. If such a request was made, and there is no reason to doubt it, it is hardly likely that it was offered in a spirit of guileless innocence. Kublai Khan was probably more interested in the strategic and commercial advantages he would gain from the knowledge the wise men might bring than he was in the Christian religion.
The Pope and the Christian West were also motivated as much by worldly as religious sentiments. Since 1122, when a priest came out of the east to Rome with news o
f the mysterious Prester John, the Western powers had been looking to make an ally of this alleged Christian kingdom in the east, the better to arm themselves against the perceived threat posed, not simply by Islam, but by the Mongol hordes themselves. Or could they, by converting them to Christianity, make allies of the Mongols? The arrival in 1165 of a letter from Prester John addressed to Manuel of Constantinople appeared to confirm the eastern priest’s report and moreover promised support for the latest crusade in the Holy Land, the third, then in the planning stages.
The letter described Prester John’s domain: Our land is the home of elephants, dromedaries, camels, crocodiles … wild asses, white and red lions, white bears, white merules, crickets, griffins, tigers, lamias, hyenas, wild horses, wild oxen, and wild men – men with horns, one-eyed men, men with eyes before and behind, centaurs, fauns, satyrs, pygmies, forty-ell high giants, cyclopses, and similar women. It is the home, too, of the phoenix and of nearly all living animals. Here were the Gates of Alexander beyond which the biblical giants Gog and Magog were imprisoned; the Fountain of Youth; and the Prester’s kingdom bordered upon the earthly paradise itself. He was said to be descended from one of the Magi and among his many treasures was a mirror in which every province in his kingdom could at any time be seen.
The letter of Prester John was a forgery by an unknown hand; a wildly successful one. Over the next hundred years a series of papal envoys were sent into the east in an attempt to find the fabulous kingdom. It was considered likely that Prester John would help, not only in Christendom’s battles with Islam, and perhaps with the conversion of the Mongols, but also in combating the pervasive influence in the east of the heretical Nestorian Christians. A schism of the Eastern, or Orthodox, Church, the Nestorians abhorred the crucifixion and would not hang images of it in their churches because they believed the humanity of the Christ who suffered was separate from his divinity. It is possible that it was the persistence of Nestorian Christian communities in the east that first gave rise to rumours of Prester John.
The first of these papal missions into the east was that of John of Plano Carpini and his companion Benedict the Pole, who were despatched by Innocent IV to the court of the Great Khan in 1245. John was a man of 65 years, so fat he could not ride a horse and had to be strapped on to his mule. After many travails the two men reached Karakorum, the summer capital, in time to witness the proclamation of a new khan, Güyük. They delivered their letters and survived the arduous return long enough for John to write an account of his journey and of the country, climate, manners, religion, character, history, policy and tactics of the Mongols, and advice on the best way of opposing them; but they did not make any converts.
Other attempts to convert the Mongol hordes to the east also failed, although churches were established and persisted. The khanate was remarkably tolerant of religions and Mongols could be Animists, Shamanists, Buddhists, Taoists, Muslims and Christians of one sort or another, including Manichean and Nestorian; but those who are already tolerant are unlikely to be easily converted. In 1253 the papal ambassador, French friar William of Rubruk, was told: Fools say there is one god but wise men know there are many. Nevertheless, the Polos’ second expedition east has to be understood in this missionary context.
WHEN THE POLO brothers returned to Venice Marco was fifteen years old and his mother, wife of Niccolò, was dead. So was the Pope, Clement IV, and as yet no successor had been elected. This was still the case two years later when the brothers, this time accompanied by Marco, set out once more for the east to bring the Great Khan his holy oil and to tell him why the hundred savants he wanted had not yet been despatched. This reasoning was clearly disingenuous as well: the Polos must have sensed that there were vast profits to be made in the China trade and wanted to take advantage of them.
At Acre they obtained letters from the archdeacon of Liège explaining the failure to bring the wise men; he was there with the soon-to-be-crowned Edward I of England as part of the latest crusade. After visiting Jerusalem and there collecting oil from the lamp of the Holy Sepulchre, the Polos travelled onwards but in Armenia were summoned back to Acre: the archdeacon was now Pope Gregory X and wanted to upgrade the letterhead on the correspondence to the Great Khan. He also sent on with them, in lieu of the wise men, two Franciscans who happened to be on the spot; but these men proved unequal to the task and deserted long before the east was reached. In this case at least the worship of Mammon seems to have provided better motivation than the worship of God.
The Polos arrived at Shangdu, Coleridge’s Xanadu, the summer palace of Kublai Khan, before moving south in autumn to the winter capital near present-day Beijing. They are said to have spent seventeen years at the court of the Great Khan, during which period Marco probably married and had children; was for a time an official, perhaps responsible for the salt trade, at the city of Yangzhou; and may have commanded a section of, or at least fought with, the khan’s troops in the wars against the Chinese Sung Dynasty armies. He said he started his public service as an ambassador for the khan, travelling on missions to distant parts of the empire. He said, too, that his book began in the tales he noted down to be brought back to entertain the emperor after these diplomatic missions. There were military expeditions during Kublai Khan’s reign to Japan, Burma, Vietnam and Java, though it is not alleged that Marco Polo went on any or all of these.
The Polos left the khan’s court when they sensed that he was nearing the end of his long life. They did not want to be engulfed in the dynastic chaos that would probably ensue. They exchanged their assets and properties for cloth and for jewels that they sewed into the seams of their clothing; and persuaded the khan to allow them to go with the ships that were to take a new wife to the khan of Persia, Kublai’s great-nephew. The khan of Persia had lost his favourite wife and wanted to replace her with a woman from the same Mongol tribe. The voyage, via Java, Sumatra, Ceylon and the coasts of India, took two years; Marco’s account of the lands he saw or heard rumour of along the way – Sondur, Khondur, Locach; Pentan, Maletur and Samara – would reverberate in the imagination of the West for the next 500 years. By the time the Venetians arrived in Persia, the khan had died: the new wife was given to his son. Upon their return to Venice in 1295 the Polos learned that Kublai Khan had, the previous year, also died.
They had been away a quarter of a century. An oral tradition recorded in 1553 by Marco Polo’s first biographer and editor, John Baptist Ramusio, said that they had almost forgotten their native language and could only with difficulty find their house in a changed city. There, the distant branch of the family who now lived in it did not recognise these tanned, ragged men with their Tartar manners and bundles of eastern cloth: they had been believed dead for many years. They had to force their way inside and subsequently convince a larger family gathering of their identity. At a banquet some days later the three travellers appeared in crimson robes of, successively, satin, damask and velvet; these robes were cut up according to the fashion of the khan’s court and the pieces distributed among the servants. After the meal the table was cleared, the servants were asked to leave; then the Polos opened the seams and pleats of their travelling garments and let fall on to the table rubies, carbuncles, sapphires, diamonds, emeralds, pearls and other jewels. By now no one doubted they were who they said they were.
OR SO THE STORY GOES. Marco Polo’s book, properly called Le Divisament dou Monde or The Description of the World, was written in Genoa in 1298, not by Polo himself but by a fellow prisoner of the Genoese, Rustichello of Pisa. Rustichello had been captured in 1284 during the sea battle of La Meloria between Pisa and Genoa, so he had been a long time jailed. Tradition has it that Marco Polo captained a Venetian galley and was himself taken in an engagement with the Genoese before the island of Korcula in the Adriatic Sea on 7 September 1298. (There is a persistent tradition that the Polos were Dalmatian, and Korcula Marco’s actual birthplace.) The prison in which Polo and Rustichello were kept may not have been a dungeon: it’s possible
that they were held, like gentlemen, in a comfortable villa from which, the following year, both would be released. It was even said (by Ramusio) that Polo sent back to Venice for his notes and diaries to aid Rustichello in the composition of their book.
Rustichello was a writer of romances as well as a mercenary. His other known work is a vast compendium of Arthurian tales, the Roman de Roi Artus, more usually known as the Compilation. Some say that Rustichello was the favourite writer of Edward I of England; it is alleged that he was at Acre with Edward and the archdeacon of Liège – and perhaps the Polos too – during the crusades of 1270–73. A more realistic view might be that he had sought the patronage of Edward, who was not a bookish man, without success. The language in which he wrote his chivalric romances was a kind of Italianate French and it is assumed that the lost original of The Description of the World was also in this language. Most modern translations of Polo and Rustichello’s book work hard to conceal or elide the flourishes and repetitions of Rustichello’s style, more appropriate for the tale of a knight errant than for a plain commercial traveller such as Marco Polo was or is imagined to have been.
Recently it has been suggested, first by German scholars, later by sinologist and author Frances Wood, that Marco Polo never went to China at all. In this version the original trek across Asia to Karakorum by Niccolò and Maffeo did happen; but the subsequent much longer sojourn by the two men and their nephew is a fiction concocted by Marco Polo and his ghost writer, Rustichello, in the jail in Genoa. Evidence for this startling theory is complex but may be reduced to four main strands: the book is not an itinerary but a geography; its place names are overwhelmingly Persian, not Chinese nor even Mongol; there are significant omissions in the detail of China – no Great Wall, no mention of tea drinking or foot-binding, no description of Chinese writing – and there is no record of any Polo in the voluminous bureaucratic records of the Chinese empire. Wood suggests that Marco Polo’s time in the east was spent mostly at or around a trading station, perhaps on the Crimea, and that his book utilises travellers’ tales and various other written sources for its account of China: a presumed but unknown Persian or Arabic guide of a kind that was certainly current at the time; maybe a Chinese Buddhist source as well.
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