Laurence Bergreen

by Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu

  His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

  Weave a circle round him thrice,

  And close your eyes with holy dread,

  For he on honey-dew hath fed,

  And drunk the milk of Paradise.

  Coleridge’s harmonious vision of power and space extended so far ahead of its time that almost twenty years passed before he felt ready to publish his poem about “Kubla Khan,” the work that gave the Mongol leader a permanent place in the Western imagination.

  Despite the difference in temperament between Marco, the peripatetic merchant, and Coleridge, the neurasthenic poet, the grandeur of the Mongol Empire spoke to them both. Coleridge was no stranger to hallucinations; they served as the source of his poetic visions. Without realizing the true source of his inspiration, he fell under the spell of the Venetian’s hypnotic descriptions, as paraphrased by Samuel Purchas. Marco, for his part, may have become familiar with opium while in Afghanistan, and the drug might have been connected with his illness there. Perhaps both men employed drugs, which would have heightened their perceptions and imparted unnatural vividness to their literary works. As Marco learned to tolerate opium, it may well have altered and sharpened his perceptions—and the Travels. In this case, it would be more accurate to say that he was an amplifier rather than exaggerator, that he was unnaturally prone to suggestion. That would explain why extensive parts of his account display a high degree of acuity and detail, while other parts are so fanciful. If Marco stopped using drugs such as opium when he returned to Venice, his withdrawal could have contributed to his transformation from the exuberant emissary who traveled from one kingdom to another to the vindictive merchant who pursued one lawsuit after another.

  ALTHOUGH MARCO POLO was nearly forgotten, his book—considered an unclassifiable amalgam of fact and fiction, a gazetteer gone wild—lived on. That state of affairs began to change in the nineteenth century, when researchers tried to bring order to the chaotic state of Polo scholarship and to produce an authoritative version of his account. Drawn to Marco’s book as an expression of orientalisme, the vogue for Asian art and thought, the French were in the vanguard. In 1824, the Société de Géographie, based in Paris, issued a carefully annotated edition of the Travels. No longer did scholarship dwell on what was false; it was now concerned with documenting how much of Marco’s account was true. Despite his rhetorical excess, most of what he described withstood scrutiny. The Travels came to be seen as a storehouse of generally reliable information about an inaccessible continent, and it attracted cadres of new admirers. What once sounded like fantasy came to be seen increasingly as history.

  Four decades later, M. G. Pauthier, a French linguist, compared Polo’s account, as expressed in the 1824 edition, against Mongol and Chinese annals and realized that it was not some fable, drug-induced or otherwise, but a strikingly accurate report. The annals confirmed that Marco diligently recorded commercial activity, court rituals, and exotic religious and burial and marital customs.

  Pauthier’s scholarly labors were enhanced and embellished by two subsequent commentators, Henry Yule and Henri Cordier, who burnished Marco’s reputation for English-speaking audiences everywhere. For these two scholars, the chief “fascination” of Polo’s account resided not in its content, or the unique way it came into being, but in its “difficult questions.” In ringing tones, Yule and Cordier declared, “It is a great book of puzzles, whilst our confidence in the man’s veracity is such that we feel certain every puzzle has a solution.” With the vigor and certainty of the era to which they belonged, they proposed to find the answers. Drawing on a global network of correspondents, they tirelessly pinned down Marco’s references to people and places across Asia, and demonstrated that he could have written his account only from direct observation. Yule and Cordier considered this evidence sufficient vindication for their peripatetic hero, but their prodigious fact-checking partly obscured Marco’s imaginative essence. If he had simply written an encyclopedia of Asia, it is unlikely that his work would have been as popular and influential as it became.

  Yule and Cordier’s heavily annotated edition, four times longer than Marco’s original, portrayed him as a harbinger of the Age of Discovery and the most ambitious and accomplished of all explorers—more successful even than Ferdinand Magellan and Christopher Columbus, who were inspired in part by Marco’s travels. Unlike them, Marco did not wield a sword; he launched no wars, took no slaves, killed no enemies. Alone among the journeys of European explorers, his served as the basis for works of literature whose impact continues to be felt. “He was the first traveller to trace a route across the whole longitude of Asia,” Yule and Cordier observed with a flourish,

  naming and describing kingdom and after kingdom which he had seen with his own eyes: the Deserts of Persia, the flowering plateaux and wild gorges of Badakhshan, the jade-bearing rivers of Khotan, the Mongolian Steppes, cradle of the power which had so lately threatened to swallow up Christendom, the new and brilliant court that had been established at Cambulac. The first traveller to reveal China in all its wealth and vastness, its mighty rivers, its huge cities, its rich manufactures, its swarming population; the inconceivably vast fleets that quickened its seas and its inland waters; to tell us of the nations on its borders, with all their eccentricities of manners and worship; of Tibet with its sordid devotees; of Burma with its golden pagodas and their tinkling crowns….

  Even with its excessive eloquence, this was an accurate assessment of Marco’s accomplishment. Like Alexis de Tocqueville, Marco Polo was one of those rare strangers who saw a land for what it was more clearly than those who lived there.

  ITALIAN SCHOLARSHIP concerning the Travels reached its zenith with the appearance of an ambitious edition compiled by Luigi Foscolo Benedetto. Published in Florence in 1928, this work attempted to collate all the various manuscript versions. Benedetto appeared to have the last word in Marco Polo studies, but in 1932, a remarkable manuscript surfaced, containing both more detailed episodes and new material. Sir Percival David, who was responsible for the discovery, was a collector and scholar based in London, and an expert in Chinese ceramics. His interest in Marco Polo’s travels in China led him to Toledo, Spain, and the library of Cardinal Francisco Xavier de Zelada (1717–1801), whose holdings included a Latin translation of Marco Polo’s manuscript, 50 percent longer than other versions. Scholars concluded that it was written, or translated, in Italy sometime during the fifteenth century, at a time when other Marco Polo accounts were making the transition from handwritten manuscripts to printed books. It became known as the Zelada text, or sometimes the Toledo manuscript.

  To bring the most complete version of Polo’s book to a wider audience, two scholars, Professor A. C. Moule, of Cambridge, and Paul Pelliot, based in France, compiled an ambitious “composite translation” that would “attempt to weave together all, or nearly all, the extant words which have ever claimed to be Marco Polo’s and to indicate the source from which each word comes.” The result, incorporating the Zelada text, was published, in English and in French, in 1938, and two volumes of notes followed. The result was not just the most complete manuscript, it was also the freshest, for Moule and Pelliot’s rendering captured some of the fire and spontaneity of Marco’s original voice. Mixing colloquial speech and scholarship, it evoked Marco’s volatile spirit with more clarity than its reserved and stately predecessors.

  MARCO POLO was not merely a traveler; he was a participant in the history of his times. He had grown from a naïve seventeen-year-old in the shadow of his father and uncle into a skillful and assured minister of the most powerful ruler in the world. His book is an account of, among other things, history that he witnessed, and, to a limited extent, helped to fashion. Perhaps no single individual would have been able to fulfill all the literary and historical tasks that he set for himself; the range of knowledge and the distances he covered were just too immense for one gentleman of the late thirteenth century and early fourteenth to discuss with complete accuracy.
But in his ambitious attempt, he extended the bounds of human knowledge and experience and imagination.

  The ultimate meaning of the Travels continues to elude, tantalize, and exasperate those who read it closely. Does it offer a guide to the natural world, as when Marco relayed his observations to Kublai Khan after various missions, or something more internalized and provocative? Is it a dreamscape, or perhaps the residue of an opium-fueled fantasy?

  Marco’s peculiar sensibility stemmed from the decades he spent among the Mongols. Having come of age among them, he thought of himself as one of them; he could think like a Mongol, and see the world as they saw it. As a result, his account offers a view of Asia that is part Western, descriptive and factual, and part Mongol, with a sweeping vision of an animistic universe, and a sense of supernatural forces guiding human endeavors. Although Marco takes pains to present himself as a good Christian, that impression was an overlay created by the conventionally pious Rustichello and enhanced by translators such as Pipino and Ramusio, all of whom sought to bring him back into the embrace of the Church, when, in fact, he was as eclectic as his mentor Kublai Khan in matters of faith, and his belief system was as inclusive and porous as that of the Mongols.

  With his habit of incorporating Mongol ways of thought to the point where they were second nature to him, Marco seems, to Western skeptics, to blend fantasy and reality with abandon. This odd mixture, extending beyond the limits of history, both intrigued Europeans and aroused their suspicions. For those willing to accept his vision, Marco’s account offers a kaleidoscopic rendering of Eastern and Western cultures, revealing hidden facets to the reader willing to indulge his occasional foibles.

  Yet Marco was a not an explorer in the modern, goal-oriented, scientific sense. He went wherever the winds of fortune carried him. He remained open to the vagaries of experience, constantly adjusting his attitudes to the people, places, and events before him. His lack of a mission made him the most amiable and peaceful of travelers. Although he identified himself as a Christian at the beginning and end of his life, he moved among Muslims, Buddhists, and other religious groups. By example he taught that there is no limit to the possibility of self-invention. In his worldview, the real and the marvelous mingle freely—sometimes harmonizing, sometimes colliding.

  With his malleable beliefs and lack of fixed purpose, he was utterly unlike later explorers. His world is enchanted, a place where lands teem with amazons and dragons, spirits and demons. It is a world in which the forces of Christianity have strangely circumscribed powers and merely to survive must constantly do battle against ubiquitous darkness in the form of other gods and other peoples. And it is a world in which magic and logic coexist, although they rarely coincide.

  The world Marco Polo explored is in many ways lost to history, but important aspects of his portrayal are strikingly contemporary. As a merchant, he understood that commerce was the essence of international relations, and that it transcended political systems and religious beliefs, all of which, in Marco’s descriptions, are self-limiting. Throughout Marco’s world, people lived according to absolutes, both political and spiritual, but he recognized that in a tumultuous, ever-changing time the only absolute was the power of belief itself.

  MARCO’S BOOK found a surprising application: in cartography. There is no evidence that he intended his Travels to serve as a practical field guide to Asia; it was a compendium of information and anecdote, history and myth. In any case, no map of his has survived, if any ever existed. Even if he had drawn maps, or incorporated those made by others, his view of the world was too conventional—Jerusalem at the top, three continents, no knowledge of what later became known as the New World—to be useful to those trying to follow in his footsteps. His basic unit of distance was the rather elastic “day’s journey,” and his concept of direction was subjective rather than scientific. Nevertheless, the Catalonian Jews who worked in Majorca and produced the influential portolan charts and atlases for navigators in the latter part of the fourteenth century scrutinized Marco’s book for features of the world not referred to by other writers and historians, and they incorporated them into their maps. Other European mapmakers followed suit, and considered his references completely reliable—and they were, compared with the often fantastic references in the works of Greek and Roman authors. Perhaps the highest accolade accorded to Marco’s skills in geography came from Fra Mauro, whose celebrated map of the world, dating from 1459 and still displayed in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice, includes features gleaned from Marco’s Travels.

  Two other maps dating from roughly the same era, those of Giovanni Contarini, published in Venice, and Johann Ruysch, issued in Rome, also incorporated data gleaned from the pages of the Travels. Ruysch remarked that his map contained the features of the interior of East Asia “no longer based on…Marinus of Tyre and Ptolemy…but on more modern reports, especially those of Marco Polo.”

  THE MAPMAKERS of the Renaissance expected that legions of other merchants would use their maps to follow in Marco’s footsteps along the Silk Road to Cambulac, but after the death of Kublai Khan, the Mongol Empire rapidly disintegrated. The lesser khans of the domains west of China no longer proclaimed their fealty to the Yüan dynasty and instead embraced Islam. By 1368, Kublai Khan’s descendants were forced to abandon their capital, Cambulac. The end of the Mongol dynasty, and with it the Pax Mongolica, meant that the Silk Road was no longer safe, as it had been in the days when the Polo company had traveled it. The nascent Ming dynasty in China did not share Kublai Khan’s interest in promoting trade with European merchants, nor did the Islamic khans. Trade with the West diminished, and once more China sealed itself off from the rest of the world. The Mongol Empire described by Marco no longer existed; Kublai Khan was gone, and with him the merchants, scientists, and intellectuals he had attracted.

  The Mongol population, always sparse, retreated to their original homeland on the arid northern Steppe. Their violent, glorious empire was only a memory set down in Chinese and Mongol annals, and celebrated in The Secret History of the Mongols. Marco had been there at its zenith, and in his Travels he had preserved its fierce leaders, alluring women, military campaigns, and exotic customs like flies in amber.

  KUBLAI’S CHOSEN SUCCESSOR, his grandson Temür, died young, in 1307. After his death the Yüan dynasty stumbled to a chaotic conclusion.

  Over the next five decades, the Chinese rose, as they always believed they would. Beginning in 1368, the first Ming emperor, Chu Yüan-chang, pushed the Mongol presence back to its original borders in the north. At the same time, the loose federation of Mongol-controlled states stretching across Asia disintegrated, allowing Islam to spread throughout Persia. Without Mongol forces to guarantee safety, the northern branch of the Silk Road fell into disuse. Had Marco returned to Asia in his later years, he would have been bewildered to learn that the protective paiza given to him by Kublai Khan had become an artifact of a bygone era. And he would have been amazed that his Travels outlasted the seemingly invincible Mongol Empire by centuries. Even today, the world is still catching up to Marco Polo.

  LONG AFTER the authenticity of Marco Polo’s account seemed settled, questions—some of them quite understandable, others stubbornly perverse—arose to bedevil his reputation. In 1995, Frances Wood teasingly insisted in Did Marco Polo Go to China? that Marco never went farther than Constantinople and that he compiled his Travels from the accounts of more adventurous travelers. Or perhaps he relied on Persian guidebooks for his information.

  That hypothesis had been considered years earlier by Herbert Franke, a German scholar, more as a jest than as a statement of fact. By the time Wood, affiliated with the British Library, revived the issue of Marco’s veracity, indignant scholars were ready for the challenge. They pointed out that no “Persian guidebooks” existed. And when Wood wondered why no Chinese sources mention Marco Polo, they recalled that the modern Chinese scholar Yang Chih-chiu had located a reference to the Polos’ mission to Persia to escort th
e Mongol princess Kokachin.

  Still more provocatively, Wood argued that if Marco had reached China, he surely would have discussed the Great Wall, yet the Travels fails to mention it. So, for that matter, do other written accounts of Marco’s time. There is a very good reason for the omission: the Great Wall had yet to be built.

  Arthur N. Waldron, writing in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, demonstrated that the Great Wall was constructed during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), long after Marco Polo’s day. “Let us beware the myth of the Great Wall,” he concluded. “That myth…blossomed in the West almost four centuries ago. While it is a promising subject for students of folklore and myth, it can only mislead the historian.” And Igor de Rachewiltz of the Australian National University noted that Chinese cartographers made no mention of the Great Wall until 1579. “This means that until 1579 the Chinese geographers themselves had ignored the existence of the Wall. No wonder that Marco Polo failed to notice it!”

  De Rachewiltz painstakingly showed that nearly all the misunderstanding about the Travels arose not from fabrications but from corruptions of the text and mistranslations. Nor did Marco borrow from other sources to piece together his account. De Rachewiltz wrote: “The sheer fact of having been able to gather so much varied and detailed intelligence about most of thirteenth-century Asia without actually going there is, in my view, an even greater feat than that of compiling a genuine eyewitness account of the magnitude of the Description of the World.”

  Even Herbert Franke, who had raised the idea that Marco may have stayed home, rejected it after seeing what Wood tried to make of it. Although Marco—and his collaborator Rustichello—occasionally distorted or omitted elements that some wished had been included, the Venetian delivered a generally truthful account, especially according to the elastic standards of his day.

  The most interesting question raised by the global controversy is not whether Marco Polo actually went to China—the evidence overwhelmingly shows that he did—but why the suspicion persists that he did not. The reason could have to do with his particular way of looking at the world. He went east at the age of seventeen, and he came of age in the Mongol Empire, speaking languages he acquired en route, and living in a vibrant ethos combining Mongol, Chinese, Buddhist, Nestorian Christian, and Indian influences—all of which amplified his vocabulary and his thinking. His account reflects his Mongolian coming of age and sensibility, and that may be why it seems so strange and wonderful to many, and so suspect to a few.