MOVING EAST, Marco Polo came to “the province of Tenduc,” which he erroneously considered to be the former domain of the mythical Prester John. Relying on legends rather than facts, he explains that while the “greater part [of the inhabitants] are Christians,” there are also people of mixed race (by which he means the offspring of parents of different faiths, or cultures). These people, known as argon, are “idolaters,” presumably Buddhists and Muslims. Despite their mixed lineage, they, too, earn Marco’s admiration: “They are the whitest men of the country and fine men more than the others of the country who are infidels, and more clever and better traders than can be found elsewhere in any province.”
Marco stretches still further when he identifies the seat of Prester John as the “place which we call on this side in our country Gog and Magog”—a far-fetched but, to Marco, credible reference to the biblical despot Gog, who ruled the land of Magog.
At this point in his narrative, Marco became hopelessly entangled in legends and fragments of ancient history. The usually reliable narrator of personal experience relied all too heavily on half-remembered histories and legends.
WHEN HE TURNED from history to hawking, Marco resumed his characteristic vigor and accuracy as an enthusiastic witness to his times. Hawking served as the sport of choice for both European and Mongol nobility, and Marco grasped its grandeur and status. Kublai Khan, he wanted his audience to know, visited this region each year to hunt. “He hawks with gerfalcons, and with falcons,” Marco writes, “and takes birds enough with great joy and great festivity.”
The Great Khan established himself during hunting season in a settlement of “several little houses made of wood and stone, where they stay the night, in which he has a very great number of cators, which in our language we call partridges, and quail kept.” Moreover, “for their food, the Great Khan always has millet…and other seeds that such birds like sown over those hillsides in summer, commanding that none shall be reaped so that they may be able to feed themselves abundantly.”
Kublai Khan’s hunting camp, for all its rustic pleasures, served merely as a summer retreat. Three days’ journey over the Steppe brought the Mongol ruler to his celebrated summer palace, Shang-tu—or Xanadu, as it became known in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s phantasmagoric poem “Kubla Khan.”
DESPITE THE fantastic attributes for which it is known in the West, Xanadu was a real place, as solid as the ground underfoot, and Marco Polo came to know it well. “In this city,” he tells his readers, “Kublai Khan made a vast palace of marble cunningly worked and of other fair stone.” Here Marco beheld the sights whose mere description would inflame Coleridge’s opium-besotted cortex.
Marco writes: “The halls and rooms and passages are all gilded and wonderfully painted within with pictures and images of beasts and birds and trees and flowers and many kinds of things, so well and so cunningly that it is a delight and wonder to see. From this palace is built a second wall which in the direction opposite to the palace, closing one end in the wall of the city on one side and the other on the other side, encloses sixteen miles of land. It is fortified like a castle in which are fountains and rivers of running water and very beautiful lawns and groves.”
These elysian fields contained the splendid royal zoo. “The Great Khan keeps all sorts of beasts there, that is, harts and bucks and roe-deer, and has them given to the falcons and gerfalcons, which he keeps in a mew. He does that often for his pleasure and amusement. In the middle of the park where there is a most beautiful grove, the Great Khan”—still envisioned only at a distance, not yet seen directly, but his presence becoming more deeply felt with every passing mile—“has made for his dwelling a great palace or loggia that is all of canes [that is, bamboo]…and on top of each pillar is a great dragon all gilded that winds the tail round the pillar and holds up the ceiling with the head, and stretches out the arms, one to the right for the support of the ceiling with the head, and the other in the same way to the left…. The roof of this palace is also all of canes gilded and varnished so well and so thickly that no water can hurt it, and the paintings can never be washed out; and it is the most wonderful thing in the world to be understood by one who has not seen it.”
His powers of observation sharpening, Marco describes this marvel of Mongol engineering, the edifice that Coleridge memorialized about five hundred years later as Kublai Khan’s “stately pleasure dome.” “The canes from which these dwellings are made are more than three or four palms thick and are from ten to fifteen paces long. One cuts them across in half at the knot, from one knot to the other, and splits them through the middle lengthwise, and then a tile is made. Of these canes that are so thick and large are made pillars, beams, and partitions, [so] that one can roof a whole house with them and do all from the beginning. This palace of the Great Khan, of which I have spoken, was made entirely from canes. Each tile of cane is fixed with nails for protection from the winds, and they make those canes so well set together and joined that they protect the house from rain and send the water downward.”
Still more amazing, the entire elaborate structure was collapsible and portable, just like the modest gers in which the nomadic Mongols dwelled. This was, after all, a nomadic culture, on all levels. Marco goes on: “The Great Khan has made it so arranged that he might have it easily taken away and easily set up, put together and taken to pieces, without any harm whenever he wished, for when it is raised and put together more than two hundred very strong ropes of silk held it up in the manner of tents all round about, because, owing to the lightness of the canes, it would be thrown to the ground by the wind.
“And I tell you the Great Khan stays there in that park three months of the year, this is June and July and August, sometimes in the marble palace, and sometimes in the one of cane. The reason he stays there is that he may escape the burning heat, for the air is very temperate and good, and it is not very hot, but very fresh.” Although Marco’s language sounds wonderfully imaginative, and European audiences read it as a beguiling fantasy, his description derived from observation.
KUBLAI KHAN seemed to be a law unto himself, feared and omnipotent, capable of dazzling everyone in his realm, but he depended on soothsayers for important decisions. Marco reports: “When the Great Khan was staying in this palace, and there was rain or fog or bad weather, he had wise astrologers with him and wise charmers who go up on the roof of the palace where the Great Khan dwells when any storm cloud or rain or mist rose in the air, and by their knowledge and incantation dispose of all the clouds and rain and all the bad weather, while everywhere else the bad weather went on.”
On second glance, Marco noticed there were actually two types of astrologers in the court, those from “Tebet” and others from “Chescemir” (presumably in present-day Pakistan), who were practitioners of black magic, and, it appeared, cunning manipulators of Kublai Khan. “They know devilish arts and enchantments more than all other men and control the devils,” Marco says, “so that I do not believe there are greater charmers in the world…. They do it all by devil’s art and make the others believe that they do it by their goodness and great holiness and by God’s work.” As if to announce their base character, “they go filthy and unclean, not caring for their own honor, nor for the persons who see them; they keep mud on their faces, nor ever wash nor comb themselves, but always go dirtily.”
The astrologers from Chescimir—“this most evil race of necromancers and charmers”—were, in short, repugnant.
To demonstrate their malevolence, Marco relates a story certain to horrify his listeners: “When they know that a man is condemned to death for ill that he has done and is killed by the government of the land, that condemned man is given to them and they take him and eat him; but if he were to die of his own natural death, they [would] never eat him for anything in the world.”
Photo Insert 1
Marco Polo: a traditional portrait
(Corbis)
The entrance to the Venetian Arsenale, by Canaletto (1732).
Here the Republic mass-produced warships.
(Art Resource)
Marco Polo commanded a Venetian galley similar to this in the Battle of Curzola.
(Granger)
Pope Gregory X gives a diplomatic letter to Niccolò and Maffeo Polo.
(AKG)
The departure of Marco Polo from Venice in 1271 depicted in a fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript.
(Imageworks)
The Psalter map of the world from Marco Polo’s era
(Bridgeman)
A detail from the influential Catalan Atlas (1375) depicts the Polo company on their travels.
(Corbis)
In our own time as well as in Marco Polo’s, travel on the Silk Road entailed months of hardship and grueling conditions.
(Yamashita)
The Pamir, also known as the “Roof of the World.” Marco said the air was so thin that no birds flew.
(Corbis)
Marco Polo arrives in Hormuz, near the beginning of his journey.
(Art Resource)
The rugged Taklimakan Desert, which contained the most challenging routes of the Silk Road. The name is said to mean “Those who enter do not return.”
(Corbis)
A Buddhist retreat along a remote stretch of the Silk Road in the Gobi Desert. After repeated exposure to Buddhism, Marco gradually came to appreciate its philosophy.
(National Geographic Society)
On bended knee, Niccolò and Maffeo Polo offer a papal letter to Kublai Khan.
(Imageworks)
Kublai Khan bestows the paiza, a passport permitting travel throughout the Mongol empire, on the Polos.
(AKG)
To demonstrate the full extent of their devilish powers, Marco spins a yarn that has transfixed listeners over the centuries: “When the Great Khan sits at dinner or at supper in his chief hall, at his great table, which is more than eight cubits high, and the golden drinking cups are on a table in the middle of the pavement on the other side of the hall ten paces away from the table and are full of wine and milk and other good drinks, then these wise charmers…do so much by their enchantments and by their arts that those full cups are lifted of themselves from the pavement where they were and go away by themselves alone through the air to be presented before the Great Khan, without anyone touching them.
“And when he has drunk, the cups go back to the place they set out.” In case his listeners doubt this report, Marco insists that the exhibition took place in full view of the court: “They do this sometimes while ten thousand men look on, and in the presence of whomsoever the lord wishes to see it; and this is most true and trustworthy with no lie, for it is done at the table of the lord every day.”
Marco reported the occurrence as if he had observed it himself. Perhaps his enthusiasm overwhelmed his common sense in this instance, or perhaps the charmers had temporarily managed to bewitch his senses, along with everyone else’s.
AMONG ALL THE sights at the summer palace, nothing matched Kublai Khan’s huge albino herds. “This lord has a breed of white horses and of mares white as snow without any other color, and they are a vast number”—more than ten thousand in the herd, according to Marco—as well as an equally impressive number of “very white cows.” The milk supplied by these ethereal white mares and cows was considered so precious that “no one in the world dares drink of it except the Great Khan and his descendants,” with the exception of “another race of that people of that region that are called Horiat.” Long ago, says Marco, Genghis Khan accorded the Horiat that privilege “as a reward for a very great victory that they won with him to his honor.” As a result, “he wished that they and all their descendants should love and should be fed on the same food on which the Great Khan and those of his blood were fed. And so only those two families live on the aforementioned white animals, and on the milk obtained from them.”
Everyone else accorded special respect to the noble white beasts. Marco continues: “When these white animals go grazing through the meadows and forests and pass by some road where a man wishes to pass, one does them so great a reverence that if, I do not mean only the ordinary people but a great lord and baron were to see them passing there he would not dare for anything in the world to pass through the middle of these animals, but would wait till they were all passed, or would go so far forward in another direction, half a day’s journey, that he would have passed them.”
For the Mongols, the beasts had magical properties: “The astrologers have told the Great Khan that he must sprinkle some of this milk of these white mares through the air and on the land on the twenty-eighth day of the moon of August each year so that all the spirits that go by air and by land may have some of it to drink as they please.” Once they do, “all his [the khan’s] things may prosper, both men and women, and beasts and birds, and corn, and all other things that grow.”
The worship of the white mares and their milk was commemorated in an annual festival, which took place on the day of the khan’s departure from the summer palace, August 28. “On the day of the festival,” Marco reports, “milk is prepared in great quantity in honorable vessels, and the king with his own hands pours much of the milk here and there to honor the gods. The astrologers drink the milk thus poured out.” Having drunk deeply of the koumiss, king and court would fall into a drunken stupor.
FOLLOWING the feast came the sober departure from Xanadu and the disassembly of the summer palace. Marco says that Kublai Khan “has so planned it that he can make it and take it to pieces at his will very quickly; and it is all packed by pieces and is carried very easily where the lord commands.” With that, the nomads took their leave.
The notion of a collapsible, portable summer palace made of bamboo or any another light, durable material that could be quickly dismantled and packed up and moved like so much furniture struck Europeans as improbable, yet it was just as Marco described. He only seemed to be living among primitive heathen warriors; in reality, he had found his way into a confluence of civilizations several centuries advanced over Western Europe. How to explain them all to his skeptical audience? Making the future credible exceeded even Marco’s patience and powers of persuasion.
TRAVELING all this distance had proved extremely difficult, dangerous, and time-consuming for the Polos, and they felt secure in the khan’s all-encompassing embrace. In time, they would realize that they had wandered unintentionally into a trap as large as Asia, but a trap nonetheless. Kublai Khan presented himself as an invulnerable emperor, practically a deity, but he was, in fact, a vain and vulnerable despot, and the Polo company’s position within his empire was correspondingly precarious. Depending on his goodwill for their personal safety, they could neither renounce him nor flee him, not if they ever wanted to see Venice again. And if anything happened to him, they would be at the mercy of his enemies.
For the moment, Marco was too dazzled by his proximity to the most powerful ruler in the world to be concerned, for he had reached the heart of his story. “I will now tell you,” he promises, “the truly amazing facts about the greatest lord of the lords of all the Tartars, the right noble khan whose name is Kublai.”
FROM HIS privileged standpoint, Marco Polo urged his audience, Venetians especially, to study Kublai Khan’s example of empire-building. His lengthy account can be read as a consideration of the question of how best to rule an empire, and in this way, it is the medieval equivalent of another Italian analysis of statecraft, The Prince, by Machiavelli. Marco found in Kublai Khan a master practitioner of the art—part warrior, part despot, and part sage. To the Venetian, Kublai Khan was a flesh-and-blood person, but also a towering figure on the order of Alexander the Great, a ruler capable of transforming the world and history itself. Kublai Khan was power personified—military, sexual, and spiritual.
“The people remain humble, quiet, and calm for half a mile round the place where the Great Khan may be, out of respect for his Excellency, so that no sound or noise nor voice of anyone who shouts or talks loudly is hea
rd,” Marco says of life in the Mongol palace. “Every baron or noble always carries a vase small and beautiful, into which he spits while he is in the hall, for none would have the courage to spit upon the floor of the hall.”
In keeping with the refined atmosphere of the palace, visitors wore special footwear, “beautiful slippers of white leather that they carry with them.” Marco explains that “when they are arrived at the court, if they wish to go into the hall, supposing that the lord asks for them, they put on these beautiful white slippers and give the others to the servants; and this, so as not to soil the beautiful and cunningly made carpets of silk, both of gold and of other colors.”
And now it was time for the Polo company, clad in this splendid attire, to encounter the embodiment of opulence and authority, the leader of the Mongols, Kublai Khan.
“WHEN THE noble brothers Master Niccolò and Master Maffeo and Marco were come into that great city [Cambulac] in which the khan was, they go off immediately to the chief palace, where they found the Great Khan with a very great company of all his barons. And they knelt before him with great reverence and humbled themselves [until] they were stretching themselves out on the earth.”
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