Marco Polo

by Laurence Bergreen

  With the crisis behind him, Marco reveals that experienced merchants traded at a safe distance with the cannibals for food and other necessities for survival, especially rice and fish, for which he exhibited a fondness born of the fear of starvation, declaring it “the best fish in the world.” He passed the time drinking the local wine to ease the boredom and fear. “They have a kind of tree of which they cut off the branches,” he notes, “and from the branches flows water…which is wine. One puts a trough or very large jar at the stump that is left on the tree where the branch is cut off, just as they catch the sap of the vines…. Those branches drop [wine] very quickly, and in a day and night it is filled, and it is very good wine to drink, like our local wine.”

  Dagroian.

  When the rainy season ended, Marco groggily exchanged the shelter of wine-producing trees for the road leading to the next kingdom. There he came across appalling rituals for dealing with the sick, who were examined by “magicians”—seers who predicted whether the afflicted “must recover or die.”

  The lucky ones were spared any further attention, and left to recover, but those pronounced doomed were subjected to a primitive form of euthanasia, followed by a banquet of cannibalism: “Some of these men who know how to kill sick persons most easily and gently come and press down the sick man who will soon be dead and…suffocate him immediately, and kill him before the time of his death. And when he is dead they cut him up and have him skillfully cooked. All the relations of the dead come and have a friendly feast together and eat him up stump and rump after he is cooked and roasted.”

  Marco recorded these customs in horrifying detail, conveying the cannibals’ reverence, and perhaps fear, of the souls of the dead. “They eat and suck out also the marrow inside the bones, leaving no moisture or fat in them at all,” he goes on. “They do this because they do not wish any atom of him to remain, so that it may not decay. For they say that if there were to remain any substance in the bones, that it would make worms, and the worms would die at last for want of food…. After they have eaten him, they take the bones and put them in a casket of stone, and then they carry them and hang them in great caves of the mountains in such a place that no beast or other evil thing could touch them.”

  Marco proclaims his revulsion: “This is a very evil way and bad custom, and so it is a very cruel and evil people.”

  Fansur.

  As he recounts his travels through Indonesia, Marco ceases to extol the grandeur of the Mongol Empire and concentrates on his preoccupation with food. By the time he arrived in the kingdom of Fansur—the word means “camphor”—he was so ravenous that he ignored the region’s celebrated natural resource in favor of bread made from the sago palm. Preparing it was simple enough: the locals opened the trunk of a mature sago and ground the pulp into a starchy substance that they washed, sieved, pulverized, and then baked into dense, nearly tasteless loaves that he claims were “very good to eat.” In fact, he says, “the bread of that flour is like barley bread and of that taste.”

  He invites his readers to visualize him feasting at last: “I, Master Marco Polo who saw all this, tell you that we ourselves tried it sufficiently, for we often ate them [the loaves].” He became so enamored of sago flour that he gathered a supply to take with him on his travels. “I took some of this flour to Venice with me,” he confides, but it is difficult to imagine Venetians sharing his enthusiasm for it.

  CEYLON

  “Noble and good rubies are produced in this island,” Marco has heard. Even more enticing, “the king of this province has the most beautiful ruby in all the world.” Marco describes it with authority, because, he says, “I, Marco Polo, was one of the ambassadors and saw the said ruby with my eyes; and when that lord was holding it in his closed hand, it projected below and above the fist, which the lord put to his eyes and to his mouth.” Marco makes the ruby sound larger still: “It is about a large palm long and quite as thick as the arm of a man. And it is the most splendid thing in the world to see. It has no flaw in it. It is red like fire.”

  Kublai Khan had declared that he must have it, and so, Marco reports, “the Great Khan sent his messengers to this king,…saying that he wished to buy this ruby, and that if he would give it to him, he would have the value of a city given him for it.” It would not be easy to obtain the ruby, for “the king of Seilan said that he would not give it for anything in the world, because he said that it belonged to his ancestors, and for this reason he couldn’t have it”—words that Kublai Khan could not tolerate or understand.

  With stories such as these, Marco acknowledges that even Kublai Khan, the mightiest ruler in the world, was mortal, and, even more painful, was rapidly losing his powers.

  INDIA AND THE GULF OF ADEN

  Maabar.

  Here, in “the noblest and most rich [province] in the world,” Marco felt that he was in his element, for once. He found himself among wealthy merchants trading for pearls, which could be found in the shallow waters just off the mainland. “In all this gulf there is no water more than ten or twelve paces deep, and in some places there is some that is not more than two paces. In this gulf the best pearls are taken,” he reports. Drawing on his experience with the precious commodity, Marco explains the process of harvesting and selling pearls, all of it little changed from the earliest accounts two thousand years before. “There will be several merchants who will form a company and agreement together and will take a large ship specially fitted out for this on which each by himself will have a room fitted and furnished for him, and in it a tub full of water and other necessary things.”

  During the short harvesting season, April to May, the ships sailed to a “place where the scallops are found in greater number, which is called Bettala, which is on firm land. And from there they go into the sea…, sixty miles straight toward midday, where they cast their anchors, and then from their large ships enter into those small barques…. There will be many ships like this”—as many as eight thousand, according to other contemporaneous accounts—“because it is true that there are many merchants who pay attention to this fishing; and they make many companies. All the merchants who are associated on one ship will have several boats that will tow the ship through the gulf. The small boats carry the anchors of the large boats to land. They [employ] many men who can swim well, clever pearl-fishers for hire, with whom they make agreement by the month; that is, they give them so much for the whole month of April till mid-May or so long as the fishery lasts in the gulf.”

  Harvesting posed hazards, especially “great fishes” ready to strike and kill the fishermen. The merchants protected themselves with “magicians” known as “braaman, who with their enchantments and diabolical art control and stupefy those fishes so they can hurt no one. Because this fishing is done by day and not by night, those magicians make spells by day that they break for the following night.”

  At last “the ship is anchored and the men who are in the small barques…leave the barques and go under the water some four paces and some five, up to twelve, and stay under water as long as ever they can; and when they are at the bottom of the sea, they find on it scallops that men call sea oysters, and bring them up in a little bag of net tied to the body.”

  Marco proceeds to describe the timeless process of extracting pearls: “These scallops are indeed split and are put in the aforesaid tubs full of water that are on the ships, for the pearls are found in the flesh of those scallops. And while they stay in the water of the tub, those bodies decompose and rot and are made like the white of an egg, and then they float at the top and the pearls stay on the bottom clean.” When Marco avers that “the pearls that are found in this sea are distributed through all the world,” he does not exaggerate.

  The inhabitants of Maabar adorned themselves lavishly with the pearls they acquired. At times, that was all they wore. “There is no need of a tailor or stitcher to cut and sew cloth because they go naked at all times of the year,” Marco notes, with the exception that “they cover their na
tural parts with a little cloth.” The king of the realm was distinguished by a broad gold collar studded with “large and beautiful pearls and…precious stones,” including rubies, sapphires, and emeralds. From his collar hung a long “cord of thin silk” strung with exactly 104 choice pearls and rubies, the number of precious stones determined by the 104 prayers the wearer uttered each day. The king also wore pearl-studded golden bracelets—“a marvel to see”—covering his arms and legs, and even his fingers and toes. Marco estimated these gems to be “worth more than a good city.” The king jealously guarded his treasures, “commanding that all those who have beautiful pearls and good stones must bring them to the court; and that he will have twice as much as the cost.” The offer enticed merchants like Marco, as well as the king’s subjects, to “take them gladly to the court because they are well paid.”

  As always, sexual excess preoccupied the Venetian, who revealed that the king had five hundred wives. “As soon as he sees a beautiful lady or girl then he wishes her for himself and takes her to wife,” Marco states. “In this kingdom are women very beautiful of themselves; and besides this they make themselves beautiful in the face and in the whole body.”

  Despite the ease with which he acquired wives, this privileged king had resorted to an “unfitting” deed to win a “very beautiful woman” who happened to be his brother’s wife. Undaunted, the king “took her from him [his brother] by force and kept her many days for himself. His brother, who was a prudent man and wise, showed no sign but suffered him in peace and made no quarrel with him.” There was an extraordinary reason for his reticence: “He was many times on the point of stirring up war against him because he [the king] had taken his wife from him, but their mother used to show them her breasts and say, ‘If you stir up a quarrel between you, I shall cut off my breasts that nourished you.’ And so the trouble was stayed.”

  The king had much else to occupy his thoughts—countless children, for one thing, and a large, fanatically devoted retinue of servants. Coming of age when the legacy of feudalism still retained its power, Marco understood the bond between lords and servants—after all, he had been the vassal of Kublai Khan for nearly two decades—but the ties between this king and his servants were another thing entirely, as Marco relates. “When the king dies and his body is burnt in a great fire, then…many of the company and also of all these barons who were his faithful ones…throw themselves into the fire together with the king of their free will, and are burnt with the king to bear him company in the other world; for they say that since they have been his companions in this world, they ought to be so and to serve their lord in the other, also.” This startling custom afforded Marco his first exposure to suttee, widely practiced through the world he now explored. “When a man is dead and his body is being burnt, his wife throws herself on the fire herself and lets herself burn with her lord,” he marvels, adding that the “ladies who do this are much praised,” while those who refrained from self-immolation invited scorn.

  The kingdom’s approach to criminal behavior diverged sharply from Western conventions as well. “When a man has done a crime such that he must die and that the lord wishes to have him killed, then he who must be killed says that he wishes to kill himself for the honor and for the love of such an idol. The king tells him he is quite willing for this.”

  Marco depicted the ritual punishment that followed with macabre flourishes: “All the relations and the friends of this one who must kill himself take him and put him on a chair and give him twelve swords or knives well ground and sharp, and tie them round his neck, and carry him through all the city, and go saying and crying, ‘This very valiant man is going to kill himself for the love, honor, and reverence of such an idol.’” When the procession comes to a halt at the appointed place,

  “then he who must die takes a knife and cries with a loud voice, ‘I kill myself for the love of such an idol.’ After he has said these words, he strikes himself with the knife in the middle of the belly…. He gives himself so many blows with these knives that he kills himself.” In another version, perhaps even more gruesome, he places the knife “at the back of his head and drawing it violently to him cuts through his own neck, for that knife is very well sharpened, and dies in the very act.”

  Having shocked his audience, Marco offhandedly comments, “When he is killed, his relations burn the body with great joy and with great festivity, thinking that he is fortunate.”

  Madness, he implied with a stern Venetian squint, resided in the eye of the beholder.

  MARCO ALSO ACQUAINTED his audience with the curious ciugi, or yogis, devout Indians distinguished by their “great abstinence” and the “strong and hard life” they led for “love of their idols.”

  Their appearance was arresting: “They go naked without wearing anything above so that their natural parts are not covered, nor any member.” Marco says that they worshipped the ox and most of them carried “a little ox of copper or of bronze gilded in the middle of their foreheads.” They burned ox dung, then anointed themselves with the ashes “with great reverence…as Christians do with holy water.” They ate nothing green, believing that all living things, including plants and leaves, have souls, and they slept naked on the ground “without keeping anything whatever in the world neither below nor above.” It was a “great wonder” they did not all die from the practice. To complete the harshness of their lives, “they fast all the years and drink water and nothing else.”

  The yogis confronted sexuality in their “churches” or “abbeys,” where they enacted bizarre rites that Marco describes with lascivious relish. When one of their number who served their “idols” died, the candidates for successor entered the abbey and tested their steely self-control against the warm, sweet caresses of various maidens. “They [the maidens] touch them both here and there in many parts of the body,” Marco says, and “they embrace and kiss them and put them in the greatest pleasure in the world…. If his member is not moved at all except as it was before the maidens touch him, this one is counted good and pure and they keep him with them, and he serves the idols.” As for a candidate unable to resist the maidens’ touch, “if his member is moved and rises, this one they do not keep at all but drive him away immediately from the fellowship of the monks for ever and say they refuse to keep a man of self-indulgence with them.”

  OBSERVING THESE outlandish customs, Marco neither judged them nor recoiled in horror. He remained objective, if baffled, always absorbed by the astonishing variety of behavior on display in the provinces through which he traveled. Beneath the welter of observations he offered his audience, he moved ever farther from the touch-stone of his youth, Christianity, into the realm of Buddhism.

  He fastened on Saint Thomas, one of the twelve apostles, as the chief point of comparison between Christianity and Buddhism. In both Aramaic and Greek, the saint’s name means “twin,” and John 11:16 identifies him as “Thomas who was called the Twin.” Alone among the disciples, Thomas doubted news of the Resurrection—this is the origin of the phrase “doubting Thomas.” (Only when Thomas touched Jesus’s wounds did he become a fervent believer.) The subject of a large body of apocryphal literature, including the Acts of Thomas, he was said to have been martyred in AD 53 in Madras, India, on what later came to be known as Mount Thomas.

  As Marco traveled through India, his thoughts turned occasionally to this martyr as to no other figure in Christianity. “The body of Master Saint Thomas the Apostle, who endured martyrdom for Christ in the province, is buried in…Maabar…in a little town, for there are no men at all, and few merchants, nor do merchants come there because there is no merchandise that they could well take away from it, and also because the place is much out of the way.” So Marco heard, and he could not resist going there. Years before, in Armenia, he had missed what he believed was his chance to confirm the presence of Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat; now he had an opportunity to confirm the existence of an apostle, and this time he was determined to pursue it.

  He
made the pilgrimage in the company of both Christians and Muslims. “I tell you the Saracens of that country have great faith in him and say that he was a Saracen”—an affecting but illogical assertion, because Thomas’s life and works predated Islam by several centuries. Nevertheless, those Saracens “say that he was a very great prophet and call him aviarun in their tongue, which means ‘holy man.’” Marco’s confusion about Thomas’s identity may reflect a blending of religious traditions in the region, or it may reveal his own misunderstanding of what he had been told.

  No matter who the “holy man” had been in life, his burial place was rife with mystery and miracles. Trees produced nuts—Marco calls them “Pharaoh’s Nuts”—that furnished both food and drink. “They have an outside shell on which there are as it were threads that are used in many things and avail for many purposes. Under that first shell is a food on which a man feeds sufficiently. It is indeed very savory and sweet as sugar, white as milk, and is made cup shaped like the outer shell. And in the middle of that food is so much water that a phial would be filled, which water is clear and cold and of a very perfect taste,” says Marco, plainly amazed. The mysterious nuts were, of course, coconuts.

  The very earth, rich and red, contained magical healing properties. “The Christians who go there on pilgrimage take of the earth of the place where the holy body of Saint Thomas was killed and reverently carry that earth into their country and give a little of this earth, mixed with water or other liquid, to the sick to drink when he might have quartan fever or tertian fever”—that is, malaria—“and as soon as the sick man drinks it he is healed by the power of God and of the saint.”