Laurence Bergreen

by Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu

  The triumvirate of leaders adopted a sophisticated strategy for the assault, relying on two separate forces, which would eventually merge into one army of conquest. At the same time, the Chinese became preoccupied with premonitions that the heavens opposed the expedition. Omens proliferated; there were reports of a sea serpent, and of seawater reeking of sulphur. Amid the insecurity, the commanders disagreed with one another, and the Chinese fleet failed to appear as scheduled. Unwilling to wait any longer, the Mongol invasion force began its attack on June 10, 1281.

  TWO WEEKS LATER, the fleet approached Kyushu and made landfall close to the wall built by the Japanese to repel invaders. The Chinese arrived late, planning to join forces with the Mongols and Koreans. During the ensuing weeks, the Japanese confidently fought the invaders to a standstill. The wall frustrated the Mongol armies, as intended, and Japanese troops killed as many members of the disorganized invading force as they could before retreating to safety. The Mongol and Chinese military leaders became embroiled in distracting disputes; by some accounts, the Chinese, who had little sympathy for the Mongol invasion of Japan, failed to muster a properly warlike attitude.

  All of these events were known to Marco, at least in their rough outlines, and he narrates them molto agitato.

  Kublai Khan dispatched “two of his most famous barons with a very great number of ships and men on horses and on foot” on a naval expedition that quickly came to grief, as Marco explains. The barons sailed from Hangzhou, and after “many days” at sea, their fleet reached the island nation. Disembarking, the barons and their men explored the plain stretching before them, and then ravaged defenseless hamlets in the name of Kublai Khan. “They took many men in a castle that they took by storm on that island, and because they [the Japanese forces] had not been willing to give themselves up, the two barons commanded that they all be killed and that the heads of all should be cut off…except those of eight men…who, being in the hands of the Tartars and being struck with many blows of the sword, there was no way that they could kill them.”

  The Mongols paused in amazement at their captives’ defiant behavior. Only on very close examination did the sword-wielding Mongols learn of the protective mechanism that enabled the Japanese to cling to life despite repeated blows of the blade to the neck and extremities. “This happened by virtue of precious stones that they had. For, this being a marvel to all the Tartar host, those eight were stripped naked and searched and they had each of them a stone sewn into his right arm, between the flesh and skin, so that it was not seen outside. And this stone was so charmed and of such virtue that as long as one might have it, he could not die by iron.” Once the barons discovered the impediment, they immediately executed the soldiers by other means: “They have them clubbed with thick wooden clubs, and they died immediately. When they were dead, they have those stones taken from the arms of each, as I have told you, and hold them very dear.” The practice of inserting subcutaneous stones or even precious metals such as gold to afford protection in battle, while new to the Mongol barons, was actually widespread in Asia.

  The swift Mongol victory proved deceptive. Despite their august reputations, Kublai Khan’s barons fell victim to petty disputes and jealousy, “and the one did nothing for the other.”

  After two months of conflict, the invasion, which Kublai Khan had once expected to unfold with the efficiency for which the Mongols were famed, had reached a standstill.

  IN MID-AUGUST, nature intervened in a manner that the Japanese would come to regard as predestined. As the bickering continued among the Mongol leaders, a typhoon was building. Marco observes that such storms could do “great harm to that island.” For once, he is far from exaggerating: the storm altered the course of Asian history. The Japanese called it kamikaze, “Divine Wind.”

  A typhoon, or tropical cyclone, is a violent, low-pressure storm occurring in late summer and early fall in the western reaches of the Pacific. For the storm to develop, the topmost layer of water must exceed 80 degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature, seawater evaporates, only to be absorbed by the atmosphere. As the warm, moist air rises in a giant column, the air pressure beneath it falls. Air moves from high-pressure regions to low-pressure regions, creating downward gusts of wind—the genesis of a storm.

  Storms vary around the globe. In the Northern Hemisphere, Earth’s rotation causes wind to swirl counterclockwise. In the Southern Hemisphere, winds move clockwise. The influence of Earth as it rotates on wind flow is known as the Coriolis effect, and that is what made all the difference to Kublai Khan’s proud fleet. The intensity of the Coriolis effect grows steadily greater the farther from the equator the storm-to-be happens to be located. To produce even a modest hurricane or cyclone, a low-pressure area must be more than 5 degrees of latitude north or south of the equator. For this reason, cyclones rarely form closer to the equator.

  A cyclone in formation can be fragile as well as powerful. Wind shear—a difference in speed and in direction between the winds circulating at the upper and lower elevations—can make it or break it. Winds of just one speed enable the warm inner core of the nascent storm to stay intact, but wind shear can topple the storm or blow its top in one direction and its bottom in another. However, if conditions are just right, the cyclone takes on a churning life of its own. In the seas surrounding Japan, conditions frequently are right to breed such tempests; in fact, the typhoon is the most common natural disaster to afflict Japan.

  THIS MID-AUGUST typhoon arrived nearly unheralded. At first, observant mariners in Kublai Khan’s fleet may have noticed a distinctive swell, about three feet high, on the ocean’s surface, coming along frequently, every ten seconds or so. A day later, the swells were a menacing six feet high, and they were traveling rapidly across the surface of the water. But there was still no storm in sight; the skies remained clear, the wind calm. Only the swells, relentlessly increasing in size and in speed, foretold disaster.

  Another day passed, and the swells reached nine feet in height.

  Three days after the telltale swells began to appear on the ocean’s surface, the first obvious signs of an approaching storm could be seen. As the swells increased in size and velocity, cirrus clouds gradually filled the sky. The wind, thus far calm and unremarkable, picked up slightly. An experienced sailor would have known that a typhoon was approaching and taken evasive measures, but the Mongols had no plan for responding to the warning signs, if they even noticed them. Within hours, the wind was driving the swells at an even greater rate, and the sky had darkened perceptibly. Whitecaps proliferated, as did streaks of foam on the water’s churning surface. The wind was now thirty or forty knots strong; merely standing in the open was difficult. The clouds sank lower and darkened as the wind surpassed sixty knots, sending branches and loose objects flying and signaling the arrival of a full-blown typhoon. Every wave that crashed into the shore carried unusual force and destroyed all barriers to its progress. Low-lying land began to flood. Despite the dire conditions, the storm had yet to reach the peak of its violence.

  Nearly four days after the first swells appeared, the wind speed approached a hundred miles an hour—more than eighty knots—and relentless rain formed stinging horizontal needles. Surging seas submerged high-tide marks on land. Not a soul could stand outdoors unassisted. Wind uprooted trees and bushes and hurled them through the air. At sea, the wind sliced off the tops of waves, and a white spray covered the water’s boiling surface. As the eye of the storm approached, the horizontal sheets of rain became even heavier. Flooding increased, and the wind exceeded ninety knots. Along the shore, fifteen-foot-high waves crashed against the rocks. When the eye arrived, the winds slackened, at first imperceptibly, later markedly. The sky brightened, and it seemed that the storm, impossibly strong only minutes before, had played itself out. The air turned warm and humid, and unnaturally calm. The sun was visible, and glistening white clouds formed a circular wall around the storm’s eye: a sinister impersonation of tranquility. And then, ever so slightly, the
wind picked up, and walls of clouds swept into view, heralding the return of the storm, as awful as before.

  Those caught in the storm barely noticed when it began a slow retreat. A half day after the eye passed overhead, the wind, still over sixty knots, slowly abated, and the ocean, once ready to overflow the land entirely, returned to its customary levels.

  A full day after the eye had passed, the clouds began to break up, and the high waters, retreating from land, exposed the damage they had wrought. Small whitecaps and massive waves still dappled the water’s surface as the sea began to give up its dead. Within hours, the cirrus clouds dissipated, the sky cleared for real, and the sun shone with unaccustomed brilliance. But the air remained unsettled, imbued with pungent brine, the stink of rotting vegetation torn from the sea floor, and bloated floating carcasses.

  The typhoon cycle had ended, while somewhere in the western Pacific, new typhoons were breeding.

  THE WINDS BLEW so long and hard, says Marco, that “a great part of those of the army of the Great Khan could not bear it.” The Mongols soon decided to flee the typhoon for their lives. “If they did not leave,” Marco explains, “all their ships would be broken up.” They quickly gave up any idea of conquest, even of hamlets. “Then they all went into their ships and left the island and put out to sea so that not one of their men remained on land.”

  Four miles off Çipingu, “the force of the wind began to increase, and the multitude of the ships was so great that a large quantity of them was broken up with one another; but the ships that were not crushed by others but were scattered about the sea escaped shipwreck.” Some ships sought refuge on “another island, not too large and uninhabited,” only to be “driven thither by the wind and wrecked on that island, to which many of those who were shipwrecked escaped with pieces of planks and swimming.” Meanwhile, “others who could not reach the island perished.”

  The kamikaze had done its work, destroying the Mongol fleet, and Kublai Khan’s bold plan ended in humiliation and defeat.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, “when the violence of the wind and the fury of the stormy sea was stilled,” the Mongol leaders launched a large-scale operation to rescue “all the men who were of position, namely, captains of hundreds, thousands, and ten thousands.” Not everyone was saved, “there being so many,” and “afterward they departed and set their sails toward home.”

  Those survivors who found safety on the island—Marco claims there were thirty thousand souls, but the actual number was but a fraction of that figure—realized they had been abandoned by their own army and they faced a gruesome ordeal. “When they saw themselves on that island in such danger, and they were so near to Çipingu, these all held themselves for dead, having no victuals, or little, saved from the ships, nor arms, nor any good plan, and had great vexation because although they escaped from the storm they were in no less peril, for they see they cannot escape [the island] and come to a safe port because their ships were all wrecked and broken up.” To drive home their desperation, “the ships that escaped the storms of the sea were going off without helping them, with great speed and as fast as they could toward their country, without making any show of turning back to the companions to save and help them.”

  The survivors “all held themselves for dead because they did not see in any way how they could escape.”

  Japan celebrated as the emperor and his subjects realized that the Divine Wind had destroyed their enemies. They regarded the event as Heaven’s assurance that their nation would remain inviolate, and the emperor’s reign intact.

  AS THE STRANDED MONGOLS faced the prospect of a slow death by starvation, their immediate situation worsened. Patrolling the waters off Çipingu, Japanese sailors rescued several Mongols, who revealed that the remainder of their forces had taken refuge on the uninhabited island four miles from Japan’s coast. The Japanese proceeded “straight to the island with a vast number of ships well armed, and with a great multitude of men, and with little order and less wisdom all climb down immediately onto the land to take those remaining on the island. And when the thirty thousand saw their enemies come upon them, they went into a wood near the harbor.” From their hiding places, the Mongols watched the Japanese wander about the island “like those who feared nothing and knew little of such work.” Believing the Mongols were too weak to move or pose a threat, they did not even trouble to leave watchmen on their waiting ships.

  There was a hill in the middle of the island, “and when their enemies came hastily to take them,” the Mongol warriors made a pretence of flight. They zigzagged their way across the island until “they came to the ships of their enemies and, not finding them occupied by any of the army, they climbed up there immediately.” To their astonishment, the ships were “empty and unguarded.” Once in possession of the ships, the Mongols “immediately hoisted the sails and left the island and like very valiant men went to the other great island of the enemies.” The desperate Mongols, once given up for dead, effected a stunning reversal of fortune.

  ARRIVING AT ÇIPINGU, the Mongols quickly disembarked, as if they were Japanese soldiers; they carried with them “the standards and ensigns of the lord of the island.” In disguise, they marched directly for “the capital city,” where they were taken to be returning soldiers. “So they [the inhabitants] opened the gates and let them enter into the town.”

  Once within the city gates, the disguised Mongols “found no men there but [only] old ones and women,” whom they “drove out.” Then they “took the fort as soon as they were in it and chase all people out…except only some fair young women who were there, whom they kept to serve them.”

  Marco brings his story to an eloquent climax: “When the lord and the people of the island saw that they had lost their city and their fleet, and…when they had learned of the taking of the city and the fathers or sons driven out and the women kept, to their extreme disgrace, and especially the king, they wished to die of grief, knowing that so great a mistake with their extreme disgrace of the fatherland came about not through the power of the enemy but only through lack of prudence.”

  AFTER THIS DISPLAY of ritual self-castigation, the Japanese, drawing on inexhaustible reserves of strength, mounted another defense against the invaders. Marco relates that “brave citizens encouraged the king, saying that this was not a time to lament, but to put themselves all of one mind to avenge themselves of so great an injury.”

  The Mongols executed their plan with renewed vigor. “They came back to their island with other ships, having found many of them about those harbors, because owing to the vast multitude of ships, the Tartars, who were only thirty thousand, and also like men who flee, had not been able to remove them all. So having gone on board as best they could, they carried themselves over to the island.” Although the Japanese surrounded the Mongols, the trapped invaders held the women of the island hostage, “so that none would be able to go there nor to come out without their consent and will.”

  The standoff between the Mongols occupying the city and the Japanese trying to retake it lasted seven months. Throughout, the Mongols “took pains day and night to find out how they could make this affair known to the Great Khan that he might send them help,” but the Japanese captured all their messengers, no matter how great their stealth and daring.

  All the while, Kublai Khan remained ignorant of the protracted contest taking place in his name. “The Tartars day and night did not cease to attack the people of the island with very great damage and loss. And when they saw that they could not do this that they proposed by any device, and seeing that they lacked food and that they could hold out no longer, then finally they made agreement and truce with those outside, and gave themselves up, saving their persons in such a way that they must stay there all the days of their lives.”

  IT FELL TO the combatants to negotiate a peace, as Marco carefully explains: “The islanders who for very many years had not had war and bore it very ill, and especially the loss of their women who were in the hands and power
of their enemies, believing that they would never have them again, when they saw that the Tartars were willing to give them back the place and the women, joyful and satisfied with so great an offer all with one voice constrained the king to make peace on the terms offered. And so it was observed and the peace was made and the place returned to the king.”

  Marco told a remarkable tale, but it is impossible to verify. Unlike other aspects of Kublai Khan’s failed siege of Japan, this suspiciously sweet denouement lacks corroboration in other sources. Yet his account fits so neatly with what is known of the failed effort that it is likely based on historical fact, and lost sources, all related con brio.

  ALTHOUGH A significant portion of Kublai Khan’s forces survived, his campaign to bring Japan into the Mongol fold ended in the worst disgrace of his reign, threatening his prestige and throne. To the deeply superstitious Mongols, the entire episode, and especially the intervention of the Divine Wind, suggested that the heavens had turned against the emperor’s designs.

  Kublai looked for scapegoats, and they seemed to be everywhere. Learning of the bickering and resentment among his generals, Kublai “immediately made them [the Mongols] cut off the head of one of the barons who was captain of that army who had fled so evilly, and the other he sent to the desert island named Ciocia, where he had many people destroyed for grave offenses.” The dishonored leader, never named by Marco, died the death of a traitor to the Mongols. “When he [Kublai] sends anyone to the aforesaid island to be killed,” Marco says, “he causes his hands to be very well wrapped round with skin of a buffalo lately flayed, and to be tightly sewn; and when the skin is dried it is shrunken round the hands so that by no means can it be moved from them, and so he is left there to end with a death of agony because he cannot help himself and has nothing to eat, and if he wishes to eat grass he must crawl on the ground. And in this way he made the baron perish.”