Marco Polo: Journey to the End of the Earth

General Introduction

MARCO MILLIONE

The truly incredible story of Marco Polo’s journey to the ends of the earth, the book that earned him the title ‘the Father of Geography’, has for the last seven hundred years been bedevilled by doubts as to its authenticity. How much of his tale is a factual record, how much hearsay, and how much the best that Marco, bored with incarceration in a Genoan gaol, could recollect or indeed imagine? Did this intrepid Venetian actually trek across Asia Minor, explore the length and breadth of China as the roving ambassador of Kublai Khan, the most ruthless dictator in history? Did he really make his escape from almost certain death at the hands of Kublai’s successors by directing the construction of fourteen huge wooden ships in which he delivered Kublai’s relative, a beautiful princess, as bride to the Caliph of Baghdad after a voyage halfway round the world and so fraught with danger that it resulted in the death of 600 members of his crew?

Marco claims to have survived Mongol wars, hostile Tartar tribes, insurrections, blizzards, floods, the freezing cold of the world’s highest mountain plateaux and the scorching heat of its most arid deserts. Indubitably it was he who wrote the very first descriptions of real ‘dragons’ (Indian crocodiles) and huge, striped ‘lions’ (tigers) that swam into rivers to prey on men in boats, horned, armoured ‘monsters’ (rhinoceros), armies of elephants with castles of archers on their backs, of a bird with feathers nine feet long (the great auk); of the salamander; and of cloth that would not burn (asbestos) and black rocks that burned like wood (coal). For good measure he claimed that the currency used in this mysterious Orient – where the cities were larger than any in the West and a rich trade was to be had in glorious silks, cloth of gold, pearls, silver, gold, Arabian horses, ceramics, spices and exotic woods – was paper! And in passing he introduced his native Italians to ice cream (frozen creams) and, yes, pasta (noodles) from his observations of Chinese cuisine.

Such wonders are supported by a wealth of minor detail: regional histories, descriptions of cities, inhabitants, races, languages and government, people’s different lifestyles, diets, styles of dress, marriage customs, rituals and religions. There are accounts of trading practices, crafts, manufactured products, plants, animals, minerals and terrain. And all this from a teenager who went to China aged seventeen!

Understandably for a red-blooded young Italian, he waxes lyrical about the beautiful Arabian and oriental girls, especially those who are obliged to sleep with travellers before they can expect to marry!

It is Marco Polo who furnishes Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s fevered brain with the images that produced the immortal lines ‘in Xanadu did Kublai Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree . . .’, and it is Marco who supplies the erotic detail about what went on in such domes and of the damsels, practised in the art of ‘dalliance and seduction’, ensconced in love-pavilions admin-istering what we now call recreational drugs to an early cult of Middle Eastern suicide-bombers.

His adventures read like a medieval soap opera and indeed they turn out to have been written, or at least ghosted, by a writer of them, the romance-writer Rustichello of Pisa, who shared Marco’s prison. Small wonder that initially these seemingly tall tales were greeted with open incredulity and derision. Who was there to confirm one word of it? No one! And that was to hold true for almost five hundred years. Ethnocentric Europeans simply refused to entertain the notion that a civilisation larger and more advanced than their own existed in the East. Europe was undoubtedly the centre of civilisation, as everyone knew. Europeans had visited the fringes of the Orient and ventured into North Africa, and the people they had seen were observably backward and primitive. Marco Polo’s accounts of a massive empire employing advanced financial systems, such as the use of paper currency, were staunchly and universally rejected as romantic fiction.

He became known by the derisory title ‘Marco Millione’ (‘Marco of the Millions’), the teller of a million tall tales. After his death he was lampooned at Venetian carnivals by a comic figure dressed as a ruffian clown whose act consisted of outlandish and exaggerated gestures and expressions.

Sadly this reputation prevailed throughout his lifetime. Indeed, right up until the twenty-first century, to tell ‘a Marco Polo’ was to be guilty of exaggeration verging on the untrue. The priest who attended Marco Polo on his deathbed in 1324 felt impelled to ask him whether he wished to recant any of his story. Marco replied curtly: ‘I have not written down the half of the things I saw.’

Now, the passage of time and the travels, mostly in the twentieth century, of others have largely vindicated Marco Polo. His route map is somewhat eccentric and he is not always very objective about hearsay information (if it is spicy he, or Rustichello, prefers to keep it that way), but he usually warns the reader when he is quoting questionable sources. It should also be remembered that the account was written down from memory supported (it is thought) by notes brought from Venice to his prison cell.

Admittedly, contemporary doubters of Marco Polo have emerged in recent times, their work based largely on what are seen as significant omissions from his description of China, in particular his failure to describe the Great Wall or to note that Chinese women bound their feet. Indeed, a case for his never having visited China has been built on his missing structures as large (or feet as small) as this.

But again Marco Polo’s account has won through. The academic consensus is that the Great Wall of China did not reach its current all-embracing form until the Ming dynasty, in about 1500. If the story had mentioned the wall it would certainly be fictional.

Marco Polo is now confirmed as the first traveller to describe a journey across the entire continent of Asia and to name the countries and provinces in the proper consecutive order. A growing awareness that the man could be relied upon also encouraged further exploration of the world: a well-thumbed copy of Marco Polo’s book was taken by Christopher Columbus on his voyages to the New World.

Even his erotic ‘gossip’ has been shown to have an essential veracity, a good example of which is the story of the ‘Old Man of the Mountains’. Admitting that the story is hearsay and probably ancient history he nonetheless includes it, and with all the titillating detail he can bring to it.

The Old Man of the Mountains lived in a beautiful mountain between two lofty peaks and there built a luxurious garden boasting every fragrant shrub and delicious fruit from far afield. Streams (conduits) flowed with milk, honey and wine, and damsels skilled in the arts of singing, the playing of musical instruments and love (to which Marco Polo refers delicately) lived in a series of luxurious pavilions; the whole guarded by an impenetrable fortress through which the only access was via a secret tunnel.

At first glance this has all the hallmarks of a licentious fairy story, good tabloid stuff, at which Rustichello, remember, was an expert.

The Old Man of the Mountains made a selection from among the young men of the mountains who were renowned for their daring and bravery and were well versed in the martial arts. Every day he described to these young acolytes the ‘Paradise’ which the Prophet Mohammed had promised the Faithful and eventually he revealed to them that he too possessed the key to Paradise. They were then drugged with opium and hashish, carried unconscious through the secret tunnel and handed over to the obliging damsels in whose company they spent four or five days enjoying the singing, playing, delicate food, wines or milk and honey, and, says Marco Polo, ‘exquisite caresses’.

Drugged back into unconsciousness at the end of this experience they were carried out with happy smiles on their faces and awoke to a promise from the Old Man of the Mountains that they could return any time to Paradise if they swore fealty to him. Moreover, this would almost certainly be their fate as he was recruiting them to a cult of political assassins who would wreak suicidal mayhem across the Levant. Marco Polo records: ‘They had absolutely no regard for their own lives in the execution of their master’s will and their tyranny became the subject of dread in all the surrounding countries.’

Many of Marco Polo’s debunkers say this type of reporting is driven either by Rustichello’s imagination or the licentious thoughts of a young man in his early twenties. His book is certainly illuminated by his obvious attraction to Oriental women; for instance, he describes the Northern Persians as ‘a handsome race especially the women, who, in my opinion, are the most beautiful in the world’. Of a region further east, he says that its women ‘are in truth, very handsome, very sensual’. And everywhere there is a fascination for sexual mores, as in his description of the women who are not allowed to marry if they are virgins and whose parents get round this problem by leaving them beside busy roads for the enjoyment of travellers.

But contemporary research, including a very descriptive work by the war correspondent and travel-writer Martha Gellhorn, has confirmed the truth of Marco Polo’s seemingly fantastical tale.

The Old Man of the Mountains was in fact Alo-eddin (Aladin?), a dissident Sunni rebel of the early Muslim faith who, after falling out with the Caliph of Cairo, fled east where, with his fanatical followers, he captured the mountain fortress of Alamut and established a sect which must surely be regarded as the prototype of today’s suicide squads. Hassan lived at Alamut for four decades, reportedly never leaving the place other than occasionally to walk the battlements, and came to be known as Sheik-al-Jabal, the ‘Old Man of the Mountains’. He did indeed raise an elite corps of assassins, in fact the word owes its origins to the ‘hassashin’, as these killers were said to be ‘crazed’ by hashish when they carried out their murders. They almost invariably gave their own lives in these attacks (mostly carried out for maximum terror effect, in public view and in broad daylight) in the belief that they would go directly to Paradise.

Nor was the sect just a passing phenomenon. The Old Man of the Mountains and his successors held sway for more than two centuries over vast areas of the Middle East and Asia Minor, from Kurdistan to Egypt, where they eventually kept formal embassies and occupied dozens of castles. Elements of the sect still exist today (thoroughly peacefully) as part of the Aga Khan’s Sunni Muslim following.

Marco travels through mountains one of which, he claims, has Noah’s Ark on its summit. As he was in the location of Mount Ararat this represents the first actual identification of the site. He also describes a substance which has all the characteristics of crude oil and, given that today this region is a major oil producer, here we have another first. In what is now modern Iran he describes the tomb of the Three Wise Men and recounts the ‘Christmas’ tales associated with them.

He also gives the first potted history of the legendary Prester John credited at this time by the West with ruling over a ‘lost faith’ of Christians (Nestorians) deep inside Asia who, if only they could be contacted, might mount an attack on Islam’s flank to assist the Crusaders. Marco admits, however, that his information on Prester John is hearsay and historically questionable. Nowadays the consensus is that Prester John was probably a powerful Tartar prince, a khan in his own right, but the possibility of a Christian kingdom lost in the soft underbelly of Asia obviously fascinated Marco Polo and he refers to Prester John (calling him George in one reference) on several occasions.

Similarly, serious doubts as to Marco’s veracity were aroused by the many ‘magical’ objects which Marco Polo saw and described. His reports of black rocks that burned and a mineral wool that when roasted in fire ‘echoed the Salamander’ in becoming fire resistant were greeted with disdain by his original readership. Of course, we now know that he was describing coal and asbestos, both then unknown in Europe.

When he lectured on how he had climbed to the ‘Roof of the World’ and described the wonder of water being slow to boil, people shouted ‘Marco Millione’ at him. Hundreds of years later, in the high latitudes of Afghanistan, more or less where Marco said it was, the Pamir Plateau was discovered and named, and we all know now that a lack of oxygen makes it difficult for climbers to boil their tea there. Indeed, parts of the ‘Roof of the World’ have not been explored to this day. It is also an exceptionally tough climb even for those dressed in the latest weatherproofs, using modern mountaineering equipment and assisted by oxygen cylinders.

Marco’s story also seems particularly ‘incredible’ when you realise that he is describing a trek made without maps 700 years ago. The fact that he survived at all is little short of miraculous. Literally nothing in the way of extreme travel equipment existed then, indeed the very concept of travel on the scale undertaken by Marco Polo did not exist. He walked or rode through half a dozen wars, through lands where the plague, leprosy, typhoid, smallpox and malaria (to mention but a few) were endemic. He climbed in areas where there would have been an ever-present danger of falling, frostbite and other accidents, all of which would almost certainly have proved fatal in his time. He spent days, nay weeks, in awful, waterless deserts like the Gobi and the Lot. In virtually all of the countries he traversed a traveller positively expected to be attacked, robbed and murdered and, given his colour, hair type and language, he must have appeared frighteningly alien to all he met.

And yet he survived all this for twenty-five years in a place and in an age when there was only the most primitive of surgery, medicine based on superstition, the odd efficacious plant, and certainly no hospitals. There were times when he was obviously seriously ill – he describes having to go up into the mountains for almost a year to recover his health on his way out to Kublai’s court in China. But these difficulties are always marginalised and it is clear that essentially he was inspired by and loved every minute of his incredible journey.

I am not at all surprised that nobody believed him. He was a traveller from time, someone who had visited the future and, incredibly, come back to tell the tale.

Admittedly, Marco and his family were almost the first Westerners to exploit a very narrow window of opportunity to go East. Europe was awakening from the Dark Ages. Western trade promoted by the Crusades was rapidly expanding. In China an ancient insular civilisation had succumbed to the Tartars whose ruthless chief, Kublai Khan, was in the process of building one of the largest empires ever to exist. When that empire crumbled the doors to China swung closed again, barring Western entrepreneurs like the Polos for centuries to come.

As a trading nation, Venice had benefited enormously from the construction of ships for the Crusades, even agreeing to fund one such endeavour as a smokescreen for the invasion and conquest of Constantinople. Its own empire was not insubstantial, boasting possessions as far away as the Greek mainland.

But up until this time (1250) only fables existed of the faraway land of China, mostly legends dating from the time of the great Greek incursions of Alexander the Great. Between Europe and China stood a singularly unfriendly Muslim Middle East which regarded all Europeans as aggressive infidels practising a heretical religion and bent on the conquest of their most holy sites. And in part they were right. For hundreds of years the holy rule of Allah had been to keep out these apostates at all costs. A virtually identical view existed on the European side.

While a meagre exchange of trade was sustained by a clan of itinerant merchants, this did not entail an exchange of cultures and ideas, or even of much basic information. There had always been a ‘Silk Road’ between Europe and Eastern Asia since the time of the Roman Empire but little accurate information had travelled down it. Europeans thought, for example, that silk was a vegetable product made from a bark, rather than from the cocoons of silkworms.

While Europe was coordinating its financial muscle, and trading states like Venice and Genoa were casting speculative eyes eastwards, China, largely unknown to the West, was beginning to collapse. The culture was decaying of old age and the ‘barbarians’ from the north, as the Tartars were known, had started to make serious inroads into the Chinese lands.

This unlikely dominance of the most advanced and sophisticated race on earth by a rabble of mounted raiders from the northern steppes had been initiated about fifty years earlier by Genghis Khan who was just thirteen when he inherited the chiefdom of a small Mongolian tribe. Genghis lived to see the Mongol ‘horde’ dominate more land than any other race on earth and drive the Europeans back to the banks of the Dnieper.

In 1206 Genghis (or Chinghiz) had been elected leader of the Mongols by a great confederacy of these nomad people, gathered at Karakoran, a plain they regarded as holy, and there, as Marco Polo avows, they made up their minds to conquer the whole world.

Similar forces were rallying in the West. A year before the accession of Genghis, the gateway to the East, Constantinople, had been invaded and conquered by mercenaries led by Baldwin of Flanders, with the direct and moral support of the Pope in Rome and the material support of the merchants of Venice. They were rewarded by the lion’s share of the trade in the Levant, which Marco Polo describes as stretching from eastern Persia to the Mediterranean.

Genghis Khan spent the next twenty-seven years of his life uniting the Mongol tribes, by a combination of savage retribution and shrewd diplomacy. That achieved, he turned his attention to a Tartar invasion of northern China, orchestrated under three huge armies commanded by three of his sons and four of his brothers. He himself commanded the largest army, assisted by his youngest son, Tule, father of Kublai Khan, who would become Marco Polo’s mentor and master.

All three armies were successful and seemingly would have been content to rest in the conquered north had it not been for an unfortunate incident involving the Shah (or Khan) of Persia.

Genghis sent word to Persia offering, according to Marco Polo, ‘Greetings. I know thy power and the vast extent of thy empire; I regard thee as my most cherished son. Thou must know that for my part I have conquered China and all the Turkish nations north of it. Thou knowest that my country is a hall of warriors, a mine of silver, and I have no need of other lands. I take it that we have an equal interest in encouraging trade between out subjects.’

This offer appeared to have been received favourably, but the first Mongol traders were put to death and when, through an ambassador, Genghis demanded the surrender of the governor responsible, the ambassador was summarily beheaded and the rest of the delegation returned to Genghis, ignobly shaved of their beards.

The war that followed earned Genghis Khan a permanent place in history as a barbaric slaughterer; it was a reputation not undeserved. He marched his armies across the continent and over the mountains of Tibet. Tashkent surrendered, Bokhara fell and Shah Mohammed of Persia was harried from two sides by separate Mongol forces. Cities were sacked and burned and their inhabitants slaughtered. After a siege of six months, the city of Herat was taken by a Mongol army said to be eighty thousand strong. The entire population of more than 1.5 million men, women and children was massacred.

Meanwhile the flying columns harrying the Shah were sweeping on into Europe, driving the Turkish resistance before them. In 1222 the Mongols advanced into Georgia and, after yet another set of envoys had been put to death by the Russians, Genghis Khan swung his troops into Greater Bulgaria in an orgy of slaughter, rape and pillage which was to render his name synonymous with unbridled savagery for all time. Europe was only saved from further Mongol incursion by the death of Genghis Khan and of his son, who died suddenly when the Mongol armies were already occupying Hungary, Poland and Kiev and were encamped on the east bank of the Dnieper.

It was into the very heart of this mighty Tartar advance that Marco Polo, his father Nicolo, and his uncle, Maffeo, opportunistic merchant adventurers from Venice, marched when Marco was just seventeen.

In 1255 they had set out for Constantinople to set up a trading post dealing in goods from the Orient, the earlier barriers to trade between Europe and Asia having been broken down by Mongolian expansion. Nicolo left behind his wife, fully expecting to return home within a year or so. But on one of their trading expeditions they found their way home blocked by a war for the Caucasus region between two of Genghis Khan’s grandsons. They were obliged to deviate dramatically to the east, ending up in Bokhara, a city to the north of Afghanistan and one then as now famed for its carpets. There they met an ambassador of Kublai Khan who inferred that the only way they could get home was to obtain a firman from the Grand Khan himself, and with this in mind they decided to accompany Kublai Khan’s ambassador to the court in China. Circumstances had caused them unwittingly to travel further east than any traders before them.

It was also the first time Kublai Khan came into extended contact with sophisticated Westerners; he had just begun to settle into the rule of a vast kingdom with all the problems that such a task entailed. Moreover, the Polo brothers were astonished to discover that he did not act like the mass murderer of European legend, but instead apparently wanted his people to convert to Christianity.

Kublai gave the two Venetians an epistle to the Pope requesting that he send him a hundred ‘learned men’, which the Polos took to mean priests (historians have suggested that what Kublai really wanted was more foreign advisers to help him administer his disparate kingdom). One cannot escape the thought that the world would have been a very different place had the Polos been able to deliver this religious manpower.

To confirm his Christian leanings, Kublai Khan also asked the Polos to bring him some of the holy oil from the lamp that was kept burning over the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Kublai Khan had a taste for such curios: later he would send to India for a beggar’s bowl said to have belonged to Buddha and to Madagascar for feathers of the great auk.

The Polos did other favours for the Grand Khan and convinced him of the value of foreign advisers. His uncles, Marco claims, later helped bring the war in southern China to a close by showing Kublai Khan’s generals how to make siege engines and were rewarded with a golden tablet from the Grand Khan guaranteeing their safe passage out of China. This is generally regarded as a rather dubious claim.

Their return journey took four years. Overcoming huge risks at the hands of the various belligerent Tartar tribes and the usual problems with extremes of climate they finally reached the Venetian colony at Acre, where the papal legate informed them that Pope Clement IV had died and that no one had yet been elected to replace him. The brothers decided it was time they went home, where Nicolo discovered that his wife had died but that he was the father of a son, Marco, now aged fifteen.

The papal election hit an impasse and many months passed. The brothers, fearful that their absence might fatally compromise the unique trading links they had managed to forge with the Grand Khan, decided to proceed with their commission as best they could. With Marco, they travelled to Jerusalem and picked up the holy oil. The Papal Legate, Tebaldo, would only commit himself to two priests, but when the Polos ran into a Tartar rebellion in the eastern Mediterranean these friars got cold feet and went home – a momentous decision if you consider the impact even a hundred Catholic priests might have had on Kublai’s world.

Nicolo, Maffeo and the young Marco were struggling on alone when they were called back. News reached them that Tebaldo had been elected Pope, taking the name Gregory X, and that if they could return to Laius, in Southern Albania, they would find letters waiting for them which had been sent by fast ship from the new Pope to be