LESS THAN two hundred years after the arrival of Saint Mark’s body consecrated Venice, the Republic was well on its way to conquering the Adriatic and surrounding regions.
Venetian fleets became adept at engaging would-be invaders, such as the Normans, led by Robert Guiscard, whose armada threatened to obstruct Venetian access to the Mediterranean. In a fierce engagement with Guiscard’s vessels in the Adriatic, off the west Albanian city of Durazzo, Venetian ships, prevented from entering the harbor, were grappled together to form a floating island blocking the entrance. When enemy craft approached, the Venetian sailors, poised in boats suspended from their floating “island,” thrust primitive torpedoes in the form of logs at the oncoming ships, sinking or badly damaging them. Nevertheless, the Normans eventually claimed Durazzo, even as Venetian merchants and battleships roamed the Mediterranean in search of profit. In perhaps no other city-state did the exercise of commerce approach the practice of war as it did in Venice, where the two became virtually synonymous. The Republic existed amid an almost continual state of warfare, sometimes in the form of a distant guerrilla struggle, sometimes in a cold war designed to rebuff rivals, and sometimes in furious battles against determined enemies. Venice did not always win, but the city’s soldiers and sailors were expected to fight for their commercial enterprises.
No other city-state equaled Venice’s skill and daring on the sea. If the Republic was celebrated for its merchants, it was equally feared for its ruthless naval warriors. In time, Marco Polo would have a chance to play both roles, a trader in peacetime and as a commander in battle.
IN 1204, Venice celebrated a major victory: the capture of Constantinople, by combined European forces, at the height of the Fourth Crusade.
The triumph of Christianity was not a sure thing in Marco Polo’s day. The Church of Rome was fighting for its place in the world against an array of enemies—Islam, the Mongols, the Greek Orthodox Church, even itself. The Age of Faith was also an age of peril, turmoil, and war.
The Crusades began with a simple goal: to permit Christians to continue to make pilgrimages to the Holy Sepulcher, the tomb in Jerusalem in which the body of the crucified Jesus was believed to be laid to rest. Pilgrims had been visiting this holiest of Christian shrines since at least the eighth century AD. Matters changed dramatically in 1009 when Hakim, the Fatimid caliph—that is, Muslim ruler—of Cairo, called for the Holy Sepulcher’s destruction. Afterward, unlucky Christians and Jews who found themselves in Jerusalem were likely to be persecuted, and the city’s Christian quarter was surrounded by a forbidding wall that controlled access. Within five years, thousands of churches had been burned or ransacked.
The violence only increased the desire of Christians to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and the Church undertook a series of Crusades, eventually eight in all, with the avowed goal of delivering places sacred to Christians from the Muslim oppressors. Conceived as religious wars against a suddenly ascendant Islam, the Crusades quickly deteriorated into a series of battles for political and military spoils. By the time of the brief Fourth Crusade (1202–1204), the Papacy was losing its grip on the endeavor, as secular leaders across Europe acquired ever more power and influence. Eventually, individual monarchs launched their own Crusades.
The original plan for the Fourth Crusade was simple enough: Pope Innocent III and the preacher Foulques of Neuilly-sur-Marne proposed to conquer the Muslim warriors. The Crusaders planned ultimately to take Jerusalem by way of Egypt, and they wanted the support of Venice.
VENETIANS, true to their commercial agenda, had maintained an arm’s-length relationship with the Crusades. But in this case, Venetian authorities realized there might be some money to be made out of a religious war. From their point of view, it was actually a military campaign with a political and financial agenda, and that was something Venetians could understand and endorse. After a careful negotiation lasting eight days, the Republic agreed to furnish 35,000 knights, squires, and foot soldiers; 4,500 horses; ships specially built for the occasion; and supplies—all for a steep price. The idea of harnessing Venetian naval prowess to their cause proved irresistible to the French leaders of the Crusade, no matter what the cost, but they proved slow to pay, and as a result, thousands of would-be Crusaders congregated on the outskirts of Venice, on what is now the Lido, awaiting orders and diverting themselves with gambling and whoring.
Realizing that France would not be able to honor its obligation, Venetian representatives proposed a new deal; they would forgive the debt if the unemployed Crusaders would assist them in achieving a slightly different goal: subduing Zara, a rebellious city across the Adriatic Sea. The French agreed. Zara fell, and the two sides shared the plunder equally. The arrangement completed the transformation of the Crusade from a religious campaign into a commercial enterprise.
The emboldened Crusaders then sailed to Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, which was the successor to the Eastern portion of the Roman Empire. Named after the Roman emperor Constantine the Great, who ruled in the fourth century AD, Constantinople was a city of many faiths, but Orthodox Christianity predominated. In the mental calculus of the Crusaders, the Orthodox Church had come to seem almost as nefarious as Islam, and therefore deserving of vengeance. Any justification, no matter how far-fetched, would do, because Constantinople was an extremely rich and vulnerable prize.
Constantinople boasted not of its military prowess but of its libraries, works of art, and public monuments on a scale far greater than those in Western Europe. The architectural style of much of the city drew on Roman principles; Roman arches, columns, and adornments—along with Eastern elements—became the basis of Byzantine architecture. The population was immense, as many as a million people, more than ten times greater than that of Venice. And the city was ripe for conquest.
The sack of Constantinople in April 1204 lasted for three days of destruction and death. Laymen and clergymen, women, children—everyone fell beneath the Crusaders’ swords. When the worst of the violence was over, mobs rushed into churches, broke up altars, and carried off sacred vessels. Drunken soldiers snatched priestly vestments, which they used to cover their horses. A drunken prostitute danced on the patriarch’s throne as she sang out obscene ditties. Tombs and statuary dating back to antiquity were shattered—or carried off. Afterward, many of the city’s artworks, manuscripts, and religious items were spirited away to relative safety in outlying villages, towns, and monasteries. Even after the Crusaders left, the looting continued for years.
Venetians excelled in plundering; they knew all the best religious artifacts, the most precious gems, the most important statuary to carry away. As a visible symbol of conquest, four bronze horses were taken out of Constantinople to adorn the façade of the Basilica di San Marco; they represented the choicest booty of empire, another stolen treasure that came to reside in Venice.
The best craftsmen from Constantinople also found their way to Venice. Legions of glassblowers, silversmiths and goldsmiths, iconographers, artists, and sculptors were brought to Venice, where they practiced trades that in time came to seem synonymous with their adoptive city rather than their homeland.
POPE INNOCENT III professed himself horrified when news of the sack of Constantinople and the atrocities undertaken in the name of Christendom reached his ears. He excommunicated multitudes of Crusaders before realizing that they had been absolved of their crimes in advance, and that his stance might weaken the Papacy in the face of determined adversaries. At that, he fell silent, and stood by as the wealth of Constantinople found its way into Roman churches and cathedrals.
The Orthodox Church never forgave Venice for its role in the sack, and Constantinople never fully recovered its former glory. The conquest reversed the balance of power and brought major parts of the empire under Venetian control. Constantinople eventually resumed its role as an important commercial center, a gateway to the East for Marco Polo and other merchants, but it had lost its coherence and luster, and, with a pop
ulation consisting of Greeks, Venetians, Egyptians, and Turks, among others, was more notable for disarray than for splendor.
VENICE, BY COMPARISON, presented a unified front to the world, a society dominated by a handful of powerful families. Marco Polo’s ancestors, although reasonably prominent, were hardly the wealthiest or grandest clan in Venice. That honor resided with the Zenos, Querinis, and Dandolos, who all produced doges to rule the city-state and admirals to defend it. In this highly stratified society, the Polos came in several notches below those civic leaders. They were a respected family of substance, but beholden to Venice’s rulers for their continued prosperity.
Although complete agreement on the origins of the family is lacking, one tradition suggests that the Polos migrated from the Dalmatian town of Sebenico to the Venetian lagoon in 1033. At various times, Sebenico was ruled by Hungarians and Croatians, and it would later join the Venetian empire. Another tradition holds that Marco Polo was born on Curzola, the island where he would later be captured by the Genoese, while a third asserts that Polos had been entrenched in the Venetian lagoon prior to all these events. No matter what his origins, Marco had a foot in both the fading civilizations of antiquity and the bold Renaissance that was beginning to appear throughout Europe.
The name Polo—Venetian vernacular derived from the Latin Paulus—appears with frequency in civic records beginning in 971, when a Venetian named Domenico Polo signed a petition forbidding commerce with Arabs, and later entries show that various Polos owned land and salt mines, and served as judges throughout the realm. This activity suggests that Marco Polo’s ancestors shuttled between Venice and her embattled satellite, Dalmatia.
The Polo family’s trading ambitions took one branch to Constantinople. In 1168, with the Byzantine Empire still at its height, records show Marco Polo’s great-uncle, bearing the same name, borrowing money and commanding a ship in Constantinople, much as the younger Marco would later do in the Battle of Curzola.
Other members of the Polo family continued the pursuit of wealth and honors in Venice. Marco Polo’s grandfather, Andrea Polo of the parish of San Felice, had three sons, Maffeo, yet another Marco, and Niccolò, the traveler’s father, and they likely were counted among the nobility of Venice, even if they did not belong to the upper echelons. Venetian archival records refer to young Marco as a nobilis vir, or nobleman. The title mattered greatly to Marco Polo, who thought of himself as nobility, the holder of a rank that gave him status wherever he went. In his mind, the title of Venetian nobleman constituted his passport to the world. He always acted on the assumption that being of noble birth would protect him from the depredations of thieves and scoundrels who preyed on lesser mortals. No matter how far he ventured from home, he made sure that his hosts, no matter how strange or august, understood that he was a Venetian nobleman and expected to be treated accordingly.
MARCO POLO’S FATHER, Niccolò, and uncle Maffeo operated a prosperous, tightly knit family trading business in Venice. In 1253, the two brothers left home for an extended trading journey to the East. Niccolò may not have known that the wife he left behind was pregnant; the following year, 1254, Marco Polo was born.
By that time, the infant’s father and uncle were in Constantinople, long past its glorious prime, but still under Venetian control imposed after the sack of 1204. Their apparently routine excursion from one trading center to another was, by the standard of the day, exceedingly adventurous. Ships were outfitted and operated by the Republic of Venice. Passengers brought their own trunks, bedding, water, and biscuits. And they had to be prepared to endure the rigors of combat. The ships were capable of doing battle against any enemy that might attack them, and passengers were expected to join in the conflict.
Even a peaceful voyage was remarkably distasteful, uncomfortable, and dangerous. The dank, crowded ships stank of rotting food and human waste. Vermin ran riot, and passengers like the Polos had to coexist with cockroaches, lice, and rats. After a month or more of enduring all these conditions, with sleeplessness and seasickness thrown in to complete their misery, the two Polo brothers arrived safely in Constantinople. In no hurry to risk another grueling voyage, they remained for six years, managing an outpost of their little empire, and trading with merchants from across the globe, especially those from the East.
During their stay, Constantinople sank ever deeper into debt. Baldwin II, the last in a line of Latin emperors, was forced to sell off priceless relics to Venice to liquidate debts and retain his slender grasp on power. Matters became so dire that he pledged a relic supposed to be Jesus’s crown of thorns to Venetian bankers willing to accept it as collateral for their loans. He even pawned his son to the Venetians. Eventually Louis IX of France came to Baldwin’s aid, while a rival, Michael VIII Paleologus, descended from the city’s former Greek emperor, entered into a pact with Genoa to rip Constantinople from the arms of Venice. The unsettled political climate led to rioting in the streets among the Venetians, Genoese, Greeks, and other groups who had coexisted uneasily there after the city’s fall.
NICCOLÒ AND MAFFEO POLO decided to flee the unstable city for Soldaia (now known as Sudak), where the Polo family also maintained an outpost. This was a rugged fortress of a town on the Crimean Peninsula with a spectacular view of the Black Sea. (The name Black Sea, by the way, was something new in the Polos’ era. Before then, this immense inland waterway was known to all who plied its waters simply as “the Sea.”) What little is known of the Polo brothers’ time in Soldaia suggests that they did not prosper.
Early accounts show that the brothers wanted nothing more than to return home to Venice, but travel was too unsafe to permit the journey. On land, murderous thieves patrolled the paths; on water, pirates laid waste to any ship they spied. Given these forbidding conditions, the brothers Polo would not soon be returning to Venice.
TRAVEL AND TRADING conditions to the east were better, thanks to the most unlikely of causes: the Mongols, who had violently conquered most of Asia and a significant part of Europe, all the way to the eastern shore of the Danube. (Mongols were sometimes called “Tartars,” but the Tartars were, in reality, just one of the tribes belonging to the Mongol Empire. Russians originally used the name to describe Mongols, as well as other invaders from the east, and Europeans followed suit.)
By any name, the Mongols were considered Satan’s spawn, among the most lawless, violent, and sinful people on the face of the earth. In 1260, Pope Alexander IV issued a papal bull, Clamat in auribus (the Latin title taken from the opening words), to warn Christendom of the Mongol threat: “There rings in the ears of all, and rouses to a vigilant alertness those who are not befuddled by mental torpor, a terrible trumpet of dire forewarning, which, corroborated by the evidence of events, proclaims with unmistakable sound the wars of universal destruction wherewith the scourge of Heaven’s wrath in the hands of the inhuman Tartars, erupting as it were from the secret confines of Hell, oppresses and crushes the earth.” The pope went on to condemn the Mongol Empire as a “peril impending and palpably approaching.”
While the pope was busy denouncing the Mongol threat, the object of his fury had been transformed. Genghis Khan’s quest for an endlessly expanding Mongol Empire had given way to a relatively stable regime under his enlightened grandson Kublai Khan. “Kublai was not a barbarian,” Venetian historian Alvise Zorzi observes. Rather, he was “a monarch pursuing high standards of governance, dedicated to learning and implementing the most efficient means to that end,” which meant that “he was constantly seeking better ways to govern and apply spiritual pressure points that would serve his aim of authority better than force.”
Kublai’s most potent weapon was not the sword or spear, fire or poison, but commerce with the world beyond the borders of his empire. Indeed, the Mongols needed European, Persian, and Arab goods and technology to survive in the new world order they had created. To this end, they reopened a series of trade routes that much later—in the nineteenth century—came to be known as the Silk Road. The ro
utes carried all manner of goods—gems, fabrics, spices, precious metals, weapons—as well as ideas and religions. Buddhist monks and Christian missionaries made use of it, as did Venetian, Genoese, Arab, and Jewish merchants.
To make this exchange of ideas and commerce possible, Kublai Khan imposed on his unruly realm a Pax Mongolica, achieved at the cost of harsh oppression. To Zorzi, the Pax Mongolica was a “peace of smoking ruins.” Yet, as a direct consequence of Mongol tyranny, the Silk Road became safe for commerce, so safe that one traveler claimed “a young woman would have been able to travel with a golden tray on her head with no fear.” And it was safe enough for merchants like the Polos to travel its great length into the heart of Asia and the Mongol Empire.
The Mongols and Venetians had both made the world “flat,” the Venetians traveling over water with their ships, and the Mongols over land by reviving the Silk Road. And in a flat, interactive world, goods and ideas mingled in surprising ways, and empires flourished.
NICCOLÒ AND MAFFEO POLO traveled east along a northern branch of the Silk Road, venturing ever deeper into the Mongol Empire. In his book, Marco offers only scant details of the trek his father and uncle took, but it is likely that they traveled on horseback and by cart.
While traversing what is now Iraq, Marco relates, his father and uncle entered the realm of Barka Khan—another of Genghis’s many grandsons—“who had the reputation of being one of the most liberal and civilized princes among the tribes of the Mongol Empire.” Sometimes known as the Western Khan, Barka received them with “great honor,” which was reciprocated. “The two brothers gave him freely, seeing that they pleased him, all the jewels which they had brought with them from Constantinople,” Marco says. Not wanting to be out-done by his visitors’ generosity, Barka “directed double the value of the jewels to be paid to them,” along with “generous presents.” The merchants of Venice had found a safe haven in the Mongol Empire.
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