CHAPTER TWELVE
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
OF ALL THE descriptions of places Marco Polo included in his Travels, none prompted more disbelief among Europeans than his fantastic account of “an island that is called Çipingu.”
Reverberating with improbable battles, storms, and sudden reversals of fortune, his portrayal of this remote kingdom appeared to be an elaborate flight of fancy. For all his far-fetched tales about China, the place at least existed in the European consciousness, even if it was largely a blank. But Çipingu, surely, was wholly fictitious; it did not even appear on Western maps. Biblical lands such as Gog and Magog had more credibility in Europe than the strange islands that made up Çipingu—later known as Japan.
The skeptics were not entirely to blame. Although Marco’s words provided his incredulous readers with their first account of the island nation, his rendering was beset by imprecision, for he never visited it. He wrote about the world of the Japanese with such vigor and confidence that it seemed as if he were recounting his firsthand impressions, yet nowhere in his account of Japan did he claim, “I, Marco, saw these things,” as was his custom with China and the Mongols. Instead, he offered intelligence and hearsay of a high order, the authorized Mongol view of its enigmatic, tantalizing, and intimidating rival to the east.
JAPAN SEIZED Marco’s imagination because Kublai Khan, always keen for fresh territories to bring into his realm, proposed to conquer the island nation across the sea. It seemed the unlikeliest of goals. The Mongols, for all their ferocity, were not sailors; they were warriors on horseback, and overextended warriors at that, barely able to manage their land-based empire. Not even Kublai Khan could rule the entire world, yet his goal was to do exactly that, to become the “universal emperor” mediating between Heaven and all the peoples below. During Marco’s years in Quinsai, Kublai Khan became consumed with the idea of conquering Japan. But that grand ambition proved to be the Mongol leader’s undoing.
The fall came about quickly. In 1279, when Marco was still in Quinsai, Kublai Khan was at the zenith of his power, his career capped by his conquest of the realm of the Song dynasty, China’s former stronghold. Only two years later, the arc of his reign suddenly altered. His wife Chabi died. Along with Kublai’s mother, Chabi had served as an architect of his career, especially in the early years when he struggled for power. Now that she was gone, Kublai was no longer restrained by her shrewd judgment, and he embarked on one destructive action after another, as if determined to tear his empire apart.
In his grief, Kublai Khan became an alcoholic (not an uncommon affliction among the Mongols), gained an unhealthy amount of weight, and suffered from gout and other, less specific ailments. Entering his dotage, he slowly lost his grip over the empire. In attempting to demonstrate that he remained the Great Khan, he decided to pursue his most reckless scheme, the conquest of Japan. He had become so addicted to empire building that he believed that if the Mongol Empire could not grow, it would die. Marco was the witness and, for centuries, the sole Western source of information about this mysterious conflict with an obscure but mighty island nation.
Kublai failed to consider the immense difficulties posed by attempting to conquer this distant country, so different from the peaceful and often disorganized tribes the Mongols had terrorized and subdued. The Japanese, Marco recognized, were as fierce and as cruel as the Mongols, yet they were a more sophisticated society. Most important of all, they were protected by the sea, with which the Mongols had little expertise, luck, or confidence. Kublai Khan would slowly and painfully learn that the Mongols might be masters of the Steppe, but on the water, they were as vulnerable as their feeblest prey.
“ÇIPINGU is an island to the sunrising that is on the high seas,” Marco begins. “It is an exceedingly great island. The people of it are white, fair-fashioned, and beautiful, and of good manners. They are idolaters”—that is, Buddhists. “They are ruled by their own king and pay tribute to no other, and they have no lordship of any other men but themselves. Moreover, I tell you that they have gold in very great abundance, because gold is found there beyond measure”—so much gold, according to Marco, that “they do not know what to do with it.” Furthermore, “ships are rarely brought there from other regions, for it abounds in all things.”
Marco discusses Japan, the island nation he had never visited, in respectful tones. “According to what the men who know the country say,” he explains, the island’s ruler “has a very great palace that is all covered with sheets of fine gold. Just as we cover houses and churches with lead, so this palace is covered with fine gold,” worth so much that “no one in the world…could redeem it.” He reports that its many rooms are covered with tiles, all of them “two fingers” thick, and made from pure gold. “Large white pearls” reportedly could be found in abundance in Çipingu, and even red ones that had great value and beauty. And they were ubiquitous; it was said that “the mouth of everyone who is buried” contained a large shimmering pearl. No wonder Marco found it difficult to convince listeners that he was reporting the truth.
He was not far off. Japan was immensely wealthy, with abundant pearls and silver (but not gold). If not literally true, Marco’s conviction that Japan possessed more gold than any other place in the world can be understood as an allegory of the island’s cultural, intellectual, and spiritual wealth—the riches of a highly developed civilization. In distant Çipingu, Marco implied, even the heavens obeyed the emperor’s will.
Coveting Çipingu’s treasure, Kublai Khan “wished to have it taken and subjected to his rule,” no matter how difficult that would be to accomplish. At first he tested the resolve of the Japanese by dispatching emissaries to the shogun regent, Hojo Tokimune, to demand that the Japanese pay taxes to the distant, unseen Kublai Khan. Not surprisingly, the incredulous Japanese court spurned them. Redoubling his efforts, Kublai Khan launched an invasion—in 1274, but the sea posed hazards for which the Mongols were not equipped. The fleet made landfall on Kyushu Island; the warriors disembarked and set about destroying villages and a holy shrine. After the Mongol forces returned to their ships, a devastating storm assaulted the fleet, claiming thirteen thousand lives.
Kublai Khan responded to the loss by stubbornly sending another delegation, demanding peaceful surrender. This time, the Japanese executed the entire delegation. Expecting the worst, they then dispatched an army of samurai to Kyushu. The samurai spent five years building a stone wall to repel the next Mongol invasion, should it ever come.
DESPITE ALL THE SETBACKS, Kublai remained determined to conquer Çipingu. In keeping with his practice of sharing authority with various ethnic groups in his empire, he relied on three military leaders, one Mongol, Hsin-tu; one Chinese, Fan Wen-hu; and one Korean, Hong Tagu, the commander in chief. He committed 100,000 warriors representing a coalition of Mongol, Chinese, and Korean forces, as well as paper money and armor. He amplified these resources with still more arms and with ships in such quantities that his demands drew complaints from suppliers, who strained to fill his orders for weaponry.
The triumvirate of leaders adopted a sophisticated strategy for the assault, relying on two separate forces, which would eventually merge into one army of conquest. At the same time, the Chinese became preoccupied with premonitions that the heavens opposed the expedition. Omens proliferated; there were reports of a sea serpent, and of seawater reeking of sulphur. Amid the insecurity, the commanders disagreed with one another, and the Chinese fleet failed to appear as scheduled. Unwilling to wait any longer, the Mongol invasion force began its attack on June 10, 1281.
TWO WEEKS LATER, the fleet approached Kyushu and made landfall close to the wall built by the Japanese to repel invaders. The Chinese arrived late, planning to join forces with the Mongols and Koreans. During the ensuing weeks, the Japanese confidently fought the invaders to a standstill. The wall frustrated the Mongol armies, as intended, and Japanese troops killed as many members of the disorganized invading force as they could before retreating to safety. The Mongol and Chinese military leaders became embroiled in distracting disputes; by some accounts, the Chinese, who had little sympathy for the Mongol invasion of Japan, failed to muster a properly warlike attitude.
All of these events were known to Marco, at least in their rough outlines, and he narrates them molto agitato.
Kublai Khan dispatched “two of his most famous barons with a very great number of ships and men on horses and on foot” on a naval expedition that quickly came to grief, as Marco explains. The barons sailed from Hangzhou, and after “many days” at sea, their fleet reached the island nation. Disembarking, the barons and their men explored the plain stretching before them, and then ravaged defenseless hamlets in the name of Kublai Khan. “They took many men in a castle that they took by storm on that island, and because they [the Japanese forces] had not been willing to give themselves up, the two barons commanded that they all be killed and that the heads of all should be cut off…except those of eight men…who, being in the hands of the Tartars and being struck with many blows of the sword, there was no way that they could kill them.”
The Mongols paused in amazement at their captives’ defiant behavior. Only on very close examination did the sword-wielding Mongols learn of the protective mechanism that enabled the Japanese to cling to life despite repeated blows of the blade to the neck and extremities. “This happened by virtue of precious stones that they had. For, this being a marvel to all the Tartar host, those eight were stripped naked and searched and they had each of them a stone sewn into his right arm, between the flesh and skin, so that it was not seen outside. And this stone was so charmed and of such virtue that as long as one might have it, he could not die by iron.” Once the barons discovered the impediment, they immediately executed the soldiers by other means: “They have them clubbed with thick wooden clubs, and they died immediately. When they were dead, they have those stones taken from the arms of each, as I have told you, and hold them very dear.” The practice of inserting subcutaneous stones or even precious metals such as gold to afford protection in battle, while new to the Mongol barons, was actually widespread in Asia.
The swift Mongol victory proved deceptive. Despite their august reputations, Kublai Khan’s barons fell victim to petty disputes and jealousy, “and the one did nothing for the other.”
After two months of conflict, the invasion, which Kublai Khan had once expected to unfold with the efficiency for which the Mongols were famed, had reached a standstill.
IN MID-AUGUST, nature intervened in a manner that the Japanese would come to regard as predestined. As the bickering continued among the Mongol leaders, a typhoon was building. Marco observes that such storms could do “great harm to that island.” For once, he is far from exaggerating: the storm altered the course of Asian history. The Japanese called it kamikaze, “Divine Wind.”
A typhoon, or tropical cyclone, is a violent, low-pressure storm occurring in late summer and early fall in the western reaches of the Pacific. For the storm to develop, the topmost layer of water must exceed 80 degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature, seawater evaporates, only to be absorbed by the atmosphere. As the warm, moist air rises in a giant column, the air pressure beneath it falls. Air moves from high-pressure regions to low-pressure regions, creating downward gusts of wind—the genesis of a storm.
Storms vary around the globe. In the Northern Hemisphere, Earth’s rotation causes wind to swirl counterclockwise. In the Southern Hemisphere, winds move clockwise. The influence of Earth as it rotates on wind flow is known as the Coriolis effect, and that is what made all the difference to Kublai Khan’s proud fleet. The intensity of the Coriolis effect grows steadily greater the farther from the equator the storm-to-be happens to be located. To produce even a modest hurricane or cyclone, a low-pressure area must be more than 5 degrees of latitude north or south of the equator. For this reason, cyclones rarely form closer to the equator.
A cyclone in formation can be fragile as well as powerful. Wind shear—a difference in speed and in direction between the winds circulating at the upper and lower elevations—can make it or break it. Winds of just one speed enable the warm inner core of the nascent storm to stay intact, but wind shear can topple the storm or blow its top in one direction and its bottom in another. However, if conditions are just right, the cyclone takes on a churning life of its own. In the seas surrounding Japan, conditions frequently are right to breed such tempests; in fact, the typhoon is the most common natural disaster to afflict Japan.
THIS MID-AUGUST typhoon arrived nearly unheralded. At first, observant mariners in Kublai Khan’s fleet may have noticed a distinctive swell, about three feet high, on the ocean’s surface, coming along frequently, every ten seconds or so. A day later, the swells were a menacing six feet high, and they were traveling rapidly across the surface of the water. But there was still no storm in sight; the skies remained clear, the wind calm. Only the swells, relentlessly increasing in size and in speed, foretold disaster.
Another day passed, and the swells reached nine feet in height.
Three days after the telltale swells began to appear on the ocean’s surface, the first obvious signs of an approaching storm could be seen. As the swells increased in size and velocity, cirrus clouds gradually filled the sky. The wind, thus far calm and unremarkable, picked up slightly. An experienced sailor would have known that a typhoon was approaching and taken evasive measures, but the Mongols had no plan for responding to the warning signs, if they even noticed them. Within hours, the wind was driving the swells at an even greater rate, and the sky had darkened perceptibly. Whitecaps proliferated, as did streaks of foam on the water’s churning surface. The wind was now thirty or forty knots strong; merely standing in the open was difficult. The clouds sank lower and darkened as the wind surpassed sixty knots, sending branches and loose objects flying and signaling the arrival of a full-blown typhoon. Every wave that crashed into the shore carried unusual force and destroyed all barriers to its progress. Low-lying land began to flood. Despite the dire conditions, the storm had yet to reach the peak of its violence.
Nearly four days after the first swells appeared, the wind speed approached a hundred miles an hour—more than eighty knots—and relentless rain formed stinging horizontal needles. Surging seas submerged high-tide marks on land. Not a soul could stand outdoors unassisted. Wind uprooted trees and bushes and hurled them through the air. At sea, the wind sliced off the tops of waves, and a white spray covered the water’s boiling surface. As the eye of the storm approached, the horizontal sheets of rain became even heavier. Flooding increased, and the wind exceeded ninety knots. Along the shore, fifteen-foot-high waves crashed against the rocks. When the eye arrived, the winds slackened, at first imperceptibly, later markedly. The sky brightened, and it seemed that the storm, impossibly strong only minutes before, had played itself out. The air turned warm and humid, and unnaturally calm. The sun was visible, and glistening white clouds formed a circular wall around the storm’s eye: a sinister impersonation of tranquility. And then, ever so slightly, the wind picked up, and walls of clouds swept into view, heralding the return of the storm, as awful as before.
Those caught in the storm barely noticed when it began a slow retreat. A half day after the eye passed overhead, the wind, still over sixty knots, slowly abated, and the ocean, once ready to overflow the land entirely, returned to its customary levels.
A full day after the eye had passed, the clouds began to break up, and the high waters, retreating from land, exposed the damage they had wrought. Small whitecaps and massive waves still dappled the water’s surface as the sea began to give up its dead. Within hours, the cirrus clouds dissipated, the sky cleared for real, and the sun shone with unaccustomed brilliance. But the air remained unsettled, imbued with pungent brine, the stink of rotting vegetation torn from the sea floor, and bloated floating carcasses.
The typhoon cycle had ended, while somewhere in the western Pacific, new typhoons were breeding.
THE WINDS BLEW so long and hard, says Marco, that “a great part of those of the army of the Great Khan could not bear it.” The Mongols soon decided to flee the typhoon for their lives. “If they did not leave,” Marco explains, “all their ships would be broken up.” They quickly gave up any idea of conquest, even of hamlets. “Then they all went into their ships and left the island and put out to sea so that not one of their men remained on land.”
Four miles off Çipingu, “the force of the wind began to increase, and the multitude of the ships was so great that a large quantity of them was broken up with one another; but the ships that were not crushed by others but were scattered about the sea escaped shipwreck.” Some ships sought refuge on “another island, not too large and uninhabited,” only to be “driven thither by the wind and wrecked on that island, to which many of those who were shipwrecked escaped with pieces of planks and swimming.” Meanwhile, “others who could not reach the island perished.”
The kamikaze had done its work, destroying the Mongol fleet, and Kublai Khan’s bold plan ended in humiliation and defeat.
A FEW DAYS LATER, “when the violence of the wind and the fury of the stormy sea was stilled,” the Mongol leaders launched a large-scale operation to rescue “all the men who were of position, namely, captains of hundreds, thousands, and ten thousands.” Not everyone was saved, “there being so many,” and “afterward they departed and set their sails toward home.”
Those survivors who found safety on the island—Marco claims there were thirty thousand souls, but the actual number was but a fraction of that figure—realized they had been abandoned by their own army and they faced a gruesome ordeal. “When they saw themselves on that island in such danger, and they were so near to Çipingu, these all held themselves for dead, having no victuals, or little, saved from the ships, nor arms, nor any good plan, and had great vexation because although they escaped from the storm they were in no less peril, for they see they cannot escape [the island] and come to a safe port because their ships were all wrecked and broken up.” To drive home their desperation, “the ships that escaped the storms of the sea were going off without helping them, with great speed and as fast as they could toward their country, without making any show of turning back to the companions to save and help them.”
The survivors “all held themselves for dead because they did not see in any way how they could escape.”
Japan celebrated as the emperor and his subjects realized that the Divine Wind had destroyed their enemies. They regarded the event as Heaven’s assurance that their nation would remain inviolate, and the emperor’s reign intact.
AS THE STRANDED MONGOLS faced the prospect of a slow death by starvation, their immediate situation worsened. Patrolling the waters off Çipingu, Japanese sailors rescued several Mongols, who revealed that the remainder of their forces had taken refuge on the uninhabited island four miles from Japan’s coast. The Japanese proceeded “straight to the island with a vast number of ships well armed, and with a great multitude of men, and with little order and less wisdom all climb down immediately onto the land to take those remaining on the island. And when the thirty thousand saw their enemies come upon them, they went into a wood near the harbor.” From their hiding places, the Mongols watched the Japanese wander about the island “like those who feared nothing and knew little of such work.” Believing the Mongols were too weak to move or pose a threat, they did not even trouble to leave watchmen on their waiting ships.
There was a hill in the middle of the island, “and when their enemies came hastily to take them,” the Mongol warriors made a pretence of flight. They zigzagged their way across the island until “they came to the ships of their enemies and, not finding them occupied by any of the army, they climbed up there immediately.” To their astonishment, the ships were “empty and unguarded.” Once in possession of the ships, the Mongols “immediately hoisted the sails and left the island and like very valiant men went to the other great island of the enemies.” The desperate Mongols, once given up for dead, effected a stunning reversal of fortune.
ARRIVING AT ÇIPINGU, the Mongols quickly disembarked, as if they were Japanese soldiers; they carried with them “the standards and ensigns of the lord of the island.” In disguise, they marched directly for “the capital city,” where they were taken to be returning soldiers. “So they [the inhabitants] opened the gates and let them enter into the town.”
Once within the city gates, the disguised Mongols “found no men there but [only] old ones and women,” whom they “drove out.” Then they “took the fort as soon as they were in it and chase all people out…except only some fair young women who were there, whom they kept to serve them.”
Marco brings his story to an eloquent climax: “When the lord and the people of the island saw that they had lost their city and their fleet, and…when they had learned of the taking of the city and the fathers or sons driven out and the women kept, to their extreme disgrace, and especially the king, they wished to die of grief, knowing that so great a mistake with their extreme disgrace of the fatherland came about not through the power of the enemy but only through lack of prudence.”
AFTER THIS DISPLAY of ritual self-castigation, the Japanese, drawing on inexhaustible reserves of strength, mounted another defense against the invaders. Marco relates that “brave citizens encouraged the king, saying that this was not a time to lament, but to put themselves all of one mind to avenge themselves of so great an injury.”
The Mongols executed their plan with renewed vigor. “They came back to their island with other ships, having found many of them about those harbors, because owing to the vast multitude of ships, the Tartars, who were only thirty thousand, and also like men who flee, had not been able to remove them all. So having gone on board as best they could, they carried themselves over to the island.” Although the Japanese surrounded the Mongols, the trapped invaders held the women of the island hostage, “so that none would be able to go there nor to come out without their consent and will.”
The standoff between the Mongols occupying the city and the Japanese trying to retake it lasted seven months. Throughout, the Mongols “took pains day and night to find out how they could make this affair known to the Great Khan that he might send them help,” but the Japanese captured all their messengers, no matter how great their stealth and daring.
All the while, Kublai Khan remained ignorant of the protracted contest taking place in his name. “The Tartars day and night did not cease to attack the people of the island with very great damage and loss. And when they saw that they could not do this that they proposed by any device, and seeing that they lacked food and that they could hold out no longer, then finally they made agreement and truce with those outside, and gave themselves up, saving their persons in such a way that they must stay there all the days of their lives.”
IT FELL TO the combatants to negotiate a peace, as Marco carefully explains: “The islanders who for very many years had not had war and bore it very ill, and especially the loss of their women who were in the hands and power of their enemies, believing that they would never have them again, when they saw that the Tartars were willing to give them back the place and the women, joyful and satisfied with so great an offer all with one voice constrained the king to make peace on the terms offered. And so it was observed and the peace was made and the place returned to the king.”
Marco told a remarkable tale, but it is impossible to verify. Unlike other aspects of Kublai Khan’s failed siege of Japan, this suspiciously sweet denouement lacks corroboration in other sources. Yet his account fits so neatly with what is known of the failed effort that it is likely based on historical fact, and lost sources, all related con brio.
ALTHOUGH A significant portion of Kublai Khan’s forces survived, his campaign to bring Japan into the Mongol fold ended in the worst disgrace of his reign, threatening his prestige and throne. To the deeply superstitious Mongols, the entire episode, and especially the intervention of the Divine Wind, suggested that the heavens had turned against the emperor’s designs.
Kublai looked for scapegoats, and they seemed to be everywhere. Learning of the bickering and resentment among his generals, Kublai “immediately made them [the Mongols] cut off the head of one of the barons who was captain of that army who had fled so evilly, and the other he sent to the desert island named Ciocia, where he had many people destroyed for grave offenses.” The dishonored leader, never named by Marco, died the death of a traitor to the Mongols. “When he [Kublai] sends anyone to the aforesaid island to be killed,” Marco says, “he causes his hands to be very well wrapped round with skin of a buffalo lately flayed, and to be tightly sewn; and when the skin is dried it is shrunken round the hands so that by no means can it be moved from them, and so he is left there to end with a death of agony because he cannot help himself and has nothing to eat, and if he wishes to eat grass he must crawl on the ground. And in this way he made the baron perish.”
AGAINST THE ADVICE of his councilors, Kublai Khan prepared for a third invasion of Japan.
In 1283, two years after the kamikaze demolished the Mongol fleet, the shipyards of southern China sprang to life once more, obeying the Great Khan’s orders to build five hundred new battleships. Two years later, the Khan demanded the same contribution from the Manchurians of northern China. The Chinese protested Kublai’s warlike excesses, as did his own advisers. Opposition to the undertaking became universal, and in 1286 Kublai Khan reluctantly abandoned his visions of conquest.
AFTER THE ROUT in Japan, Kublai Khan never regained his political power or his diplomatic dexterity, and the entire Yüan empire suffered from diminished prestige. Kublai’s modern biographer Morris Rossabi observes: “The failures shattered the Mongols’ mantle of invincibility in East Asia.” And everyone took note. “One of the principal underpinnings of their power—the psychological edge of terror they held over their opponents—was badly shaken, if not dislodged.”
In defeat, Kublai Khan retreated from reality. He passed his days and nights feasting on boiled mutton, eggs, raw vegetables in pancakes, koumiss, and beer. He became depressed and obese. Portraits of the Great Khan in old age show him grown as fat as a Buddha, but not nearly so happy. How could he rejoice with his empire collapsing all around him, his favorite wife and son both dead, and his reputation in tatters? He sought relief from his political and physical ills in a variety of miracle cures, everything from drugs to more drinking to the incantations of shamans from as far away as Korea. None of the spells proved efficacious, and his drinking became still more excessive. The expansive yet shrewd monarch who had once greeted Marco Polo and his father and uncle had given way to a sad and self-pitying old man whose weaknesses encouraged his enemies.
Marco looked on in dismay as the Great Khan, along with the entire Yüan dynasty, nearly succumbed to the subversive designs of a single highly placed individual.
HIS NAME WAS AHMAD, and he had risen from obscurity to become the most powerful Muslim official during Kublai Khan’s long reign. Ahmad specialized in finance, an area in which the Mongols lacked expertise, and he cunningly turned his influence and high status to tremendous personal profit. He had the arrogance of a minister secure in his sovereign’s trust. He was Kublai Khan’s gatekeeper, feared and secretly despised, who bullied everyone at court and held them at bay, at least for a time. While the khan was devoting his energies to brilliant military conquests, his minister was conducting a reign of terror in the palace.
Ahmad made himself indispensable to the khan, yet remained an outsider because he was a Muslim. Although Kublai declared the prophet Muhammad to be one of the empire’s four spiritual beacons, he himself preferred to keep Muslims at arm’s length. Skilled in finance and trade, Muslims had their uses, Kublai believed. And they were considered more trustworthy than the Chinese, if only because they were beholden to the Mongols, in the same way that Marco was. Of the many Muslims who energetically served Kublai Khan, none rose higher or posed a greater threat to the Mongol rule of China—and the Polo family’s secure niche within it—than Ahmad. In his hunger for power, he came close to toppling the Yüan dynasty.
Marco observed Ahmad’s rise and fall firsthand; he knew the principals and was able to describe their bewilderment at the thought of one man—an outsider, no less—nearly toppling Kublai Khan. The entire affair was heavily documented in Mongol and Chinese annals, and was described by the Persian historian Rashid al-Din in 1304, not long after the events transpired, but it was unknown in the West. Marco Polo’s account marked the first time that Europeans heard of the power-hungry Ahmad and the dangerous machinations of the Mongol court.
TRADITION HOLDS that Ahmad hailed from a region south of Tashkent that the Mongols conquered fifty years before the Polo family traveled to China. The region, largely Muslim, was populated by Iranian and Turkic ethnic groups. Ahmad first appears in historical records as the retainer of a prominent member of the Quonggirat tribe who happened to be the brother-in-law of Genghis Khan. Later, he attracted the attention of Kublai, who came to rely on him for financial administration. In his account, Marco speaks of Ahmad as “a clever and strong man, who had great influence and authority with the Khan, who was so fond of him that he had every liberty.”
The theme of their collaboration was centralization, an approach that was utterly foreign to the nomadic Mongols, who had devised strategies for controlling sprawling regions with a minimum of bureaucracy. Kublai Khan, in contrast, labored to consolidate his empire by emulating the Chinese. While Kublai sought new worlds to conquer, Ahmad patiently restructured finances from one end of the empire to the other. He won appointment as commissioner of the imperial granary, and in this capacity established the Office for Harmonious Purchase; the idea was to buy grain at a fixed price to hold in reserve against the possibility of war and famine. In practice, the Office for Harmonious Purchase, along with a sister institution, the Office for Regulated Management, simply confiscated goods for the Mongol court. Ahmad made sure that Kublai Khan and his barons had everything they needed to live in their magnificent and self-indulgent style.
BY 1262, Ahmad had won promotion to the Secretarial Council, another Mongol stronghold, and appointment as commissioner of transportation throughout the empire. He lobbied to increase the salt tax, a potent source of revenue, and to buttress the central government’s grain reserves. Although he managed to consolidate his financial control over the Mongol realm, he bridled at having to answer to the council itself. For twenty years, Ahmad did battle with the council, trying to overrule it, circumvent it, marginalize it—anything that would make him answerable to Kublai Khan alone. His great adversary was the Chinese bureaucrat Chang Wen-ch’ien, who insisted on a strictly observed hierarchy in government. Time and again, Chang Wen-ch’ien persuaded the khan to keep the council’s powers intact.
Two years later, Ahmad won appointment as a director of political affairs for the Secretarial Council and, even more impressive, controller of the Imperial Treasure. He knew more about the finances of the Mongol Empire than anyone else, and exercised more power over it than anyone, with the exception of the khan. While Kublai Khan was engaging in sexual gymnastics with six concubines at a time, Ahmad was overseeing the administration of the empire’s finances. But Ahmad also maintained a large harem to which he constantly added by tendering lucrative government jobs in exchange for women he fancied. Husbands offered him their wives, and fathers their daughters, in return for coveted appointments.
Marco sharply observes: “There was no fair lady with whom, if he wanted her, he did not have his will, taking her for his harem if she was not married, or otherwise making her consent. When he knew that someone had a pretty daughter, he had his ruffians who went to the father of the girl, saying to him, ‘…Give her for wife to Ahmad, and we will make him give you a governorship or an office for three years.’ And so he gave Ahmad his daughter.” In these transactions, Ahmad always got his way, both with the khan, who would agree to the appointment, and with the girl in question, who had no other choice.
AHMAD’S INFLUENCE waned in 1264, when his followers became involved in a violent melee that, from a distance, resembled an insurrection. The resulting scandal shook the Yüan dynasty to its foundations. Ahmad was tried, found guilty of being unable to control his followers, and punished with a severe beating. In the khan’s uproarious court, corporal punishment in the form of canings and beatings was standard procedure for disciplining government officials, the Mongol equivalent of a censure or reprimand.
The irrepressible Ahmad rebounded from this humiliation to win an appointment as the chief of a new agency, the Office for Regulating State Expenditure. Once again he was in his element, issuing official complaints about the poor quality of linen produced in Manchuria and the inadequacy of the gold and silver foundries of Chen-ting and Shun-t’ien. Having learned of the production of asbestos, as reported by Marco Polo, the agency dispatched officials to nationalize the asbestos industry. Ahmad’s approach was stark: the Mongol government would take the lion’s share of everything. Indeed, no new source of potential revenue was too small to escape his notice. When he learned that silver was being mined in a remote location in the district of Shang-tu, he recommended that tin, an inexpensive by-product of the smelting process, should be sold, and the revenue paid directly to the government.
All the while, Ahmad schemed to consolidate his power. In 1270, Kublai appointed him director of political affairs for a new council directing the empire’s finances in the face of intense opposition from a coalition of respected Mongol and Chinese opponents, including Hsü Heng, a revered scholar and bureaucrat. Ahmad had his way again, and once he secured this post, he skillfully played on the divisions among his political enemies. Confronted with the prospect of another inquiry and beating, he deflected the blame to a lesser official, who became the scapegoat.
Wielding more influence than ever, he now presided over a growing ménage of four wives and forty concubines, not quite enough to overshadow his master’s retinue, but an impressive demonstration of the status he enjoyed. At the same time, he secured a prestigious post for his son Husain, as if laying the groundwork for a rival dynasty.
WHEN MARCO POLO first arrived at the Mongol court, all the elements of Ahmad’s financial control and Kublai Khan’s military conquests appeared to mesh flawlessly.
In January of 1275, Mongol forces ranged along the Yangtze River and put the remnants of the Song dynasty’s army to flight. Kublai Khan, his brain trust of Chinese scholars, and Ahmad met regularly to discuss the prospect of harvesting the wealth of the new additions to the empire. At issue was the matter of currency. Ahmad, renowned as a skillful debater, was in favor of replacing Song currency with the paper currency recently disseminated by the Yüan dynasty. Chinese officials argued that the Mongol commander, Bayan, had just promised the conquered region that Song currency would continue to circulate under Mongol control. They insisted that if Kublai Khan ordered otherwise, the Mongols would lose credibility. The Chinese wise men disagreed among themselves about the best course, and Ahmad, exploiting their dissension, prevailed. Yüan currency flooded the conquered Song territories, and to make matters worse, Ahmad imposed a punitive rate of exchange of fifty to one in favor of Yüan notes. At a stroke, the Chinese economy for the region was dismantled.
Once he had won this victory over Kublai Khan’s Chinese advisers, Ahmad maneuvered to reduce their influence at court. He ended the longstanding Mongol policy of free trade and local taxes in favor of imposing onerous central taxation. He replaced Chinese officials, whom he feared and distrusted, with Muslims. He took his lead from Kublai Khan, who relied on skilled foreigners to help administer the realm. Ahmad, for his part, made it seductively easy for Kublai Khan to rely on him to look after the government bureaucracy and provide the luxurious furnishings calculated to appeal to the khan’s weakness for opulence, while stifling dissent by any means necessary. Nor was Ahmad the only beneficiary of the policy of employing foreigners; the Polo company owed its favored position in the Mongol court to that practice, and Marco in particular owed his entire improbable career in the service of the khan to it.
AS AHMAD SOLIDIFIED his power, rumors circulated at court that he wanted even more. Everywhere Ahmad looked, he saw enemies, and he dealt with them all. With slight exaggeration, Marco insists that “whenever he [Ahmad] wished to put anyone whom he hated to death, whether justly or unjustly, he went to the khan and said to him, ‘So-and-so deserves death because he has offended your Majesty in this manner.’ Then the khan said, ‘Do what pleases you.’ And immediately he had the man put to death.”
In reality, Ahmad’s machinations were more subtle. For example, when Bayan, the Mongol commander, arrived home in victory, local officials attempted to give him a jade belt buckle from the Song to commemorate his triumph. In a gracious gesture of modesty, Bayan declined the gift, saying he could take nothing personally from the Song.
Displaying a talent for subversion, Ahmad falsely accused the honorable general of stealing a jade cup, and ordered an investigation. So deeply was Kublai in Ahmad’s thrall that the emperor blindly ordered an inquisition. Despite Ahmad’s scheming, Bayan escaped conviction, although a cloud of suspicion hung over him because the cup itself could not be located. Ahmad tried again to neutralize his potential rival by claiming that Bayan had needlessly massacred Song soldiers. He was no more successful in this attempt than in his previous campaign of slander, but with each charge leveled against him, Bayan the war hero lost stature at court until he no longer posed a serious threat to Ahmad.
Ahmad was more ruthless with other critics. Ts’ui Pin, the Chinese leader of an anti-Ahmad group, complained that Ahmad had established unnecessary government agencies to give his many relatives lucrative and influential government jobs, despite his pledge not to engage in nepotism. For a brief time, Ts’ui Pin had his way, and he forced Ahmad’s relatives—even his son Husain—off the government payroll. But Ahmad then arranged for Ts’ui Pin to be investigated. An inquiry concluded that Ts’ui Pin and two other conspirators had stolen grain from the government and cast unauthorized bronze seals to enhance their own power. In 1280, they were found guilty; all three were executed.
By then, Husain had returned to his former government post, established a new government bureaucracy himself, and doubled taxes in the wealthy Quinsai region. Ostensibly, the taxes financed distant Mongol military campaigns against Burma, Japan, and Java. All the while, he fended off charges of greed and indifference by claiming that local officials engaged in corrupt reporting and outright theft of grain supplies.
Throughout these controversies, Ahmad enjoyed the naïve trust of Kublai Khan, as always more interested in glorious military conquests and sensual indulgence than in the minutiae of finance and administration.
AFTER BAYAN’S DEATH the jade cup in question surfaced, proving his innocence. A chastened Kublai Khan realized how close to complete defeat Bayan had come at Ahmad’s hands, with the khan himself an unwitting accomplice. But Kublai Khan did nothing to restrain Ahmad’s reign of political terror.
IN CONTRAST, Kublai Khan’s son and heir apparent, Chinkim, loathed Ahmad with a passion. Of all his adversaries, Ahmad feared only Chinkim, who was spared the rigged inquisitions that brought down others. He was frequently on record denouncing the Muslim financial mastermind. Chinkim spoke not only for himself but also for the Chinese scholars and courtiers hovering around the khan; indeed, as time passed, he became strikingly sinicized, speaking Chinese and wearing traditional Chinese clothing. One of his closest associates had been Ts’ui Pin, brought down by Ahmad. Chinkim had even dispatched officials at the last minute to prevent the execution, but they had arrived too late. Now he wanted bloody revenge.
No matter how much Chinese culture he absorbed, Chinkim remained true to his Mongol roots. During one confrontation, he struck Ahmad so hard that the minister could neither open his mouth nor speak for a week. When Kublai asked how Ahmad had come to sustain his injuries, the Muslim was afraid to point the finger at the khan’s son, and pretended that he had fallen from his horse.
On another occasion, Chinkim attacked Ahmad in the presence of Kublai Khan, who, astonishingly, seemed to take no notice of the fracas.
By now, Ahmad was afraid for his life. To shield himself from Chinkim’s wrath, he pleaded with Kublai Khan to establish a high court of justice, in the hope that it would intercede. But Kublai refused, viewing the proposed body as a virtual duplicate of one already in existence.
Ahmad’s reign of bureaucratic terror lasted just a bit longer; he spent much of the next two years raising taxes to the breaking point and plotting to destroy his Chinese critics. If Kublai Khan ever suspected something was awry, he gave no indication; in fact, he promoted the feared Muslim minister again, this time to the position of vice chancellor. Ahmad was now more powerful than ever.
AHMAD DEFTLY PUNISHED his enemies in the Mongol court, but his rapaciousness sowed hatred beyond its confines. During an obscure military campaign in a northern province of the Mongol Empire, a Chinese soldier and ascetic named Wang Chu happened to encounter a Buddhist monk named Kao, who claimed to be skilled in magic. For a time, Kao marched with the Mongol army, but when his spells failed, he was mustered out. If not capable of working magic, he did demonstrate a flair for the macabre. To persuade the world of his death, he spread rumors and even killed a man, whose corpse he dressed as if it were his own. Once Kao and Wang Chu came together, they discovered their shared loathing for Ahmad, and they hatched a wild scheme to assassinate him.
Whether they acted alone or as instruments of a larger clandestine conspiracy remains an open question. The record suggests they were loners, but Marco insists that the Chinese whom Ahmad had oppressed “planned to assassinate him and to rebel against the rule of the city.” In Polo’s feverish retelling, Wang Chu emerges not as an ascetic but as a man “whose mother, daughter, and wife Ahmad had violated,” a man acting out the will of the Chinese, who despised Ahmad.
In the early months of 1282, the ascetic soldier and the devious monk conspired to insinuate themselves into Kublai’s court. Wang Chu worked up documents supposedly from Chinkim ordering him to report to the prince’s palace. It was all a deception, because Chinkim himself was nowhere to be found.
Next, Wang Chu approached Ahmad, bearing false reports of Chinkim’s imminent arrival at his palace. Ahmad and other dignitaries would be expected to greet him properly out in front.
Marco, drawing on unofficial sources and gossip, explains that they planned a much larger conspiracy: they were to signal with torches to others spread across the land to “kill all those who have beards, and make the signal with fire to the other cities that they should do the like.” Since the Chinese were beardless, those with beards would have been Mongols, Muslims, and Christians.
The two conspirators had raised a ragged little army of a hundred or so men to help carry out the plot. Under cover of darkness, they approached the palace on horseback, lighting their way with an impressive display of lanterns and torches. Occupying a prominent position in their midst, the monk Kao rode high on his horse, doing his best to impersonate Chinkim arriving at his palace.
At the same time, Ahmad was entering the city gate on his way to meet Chinkim and happened to meet a “Tartar named Cogatai, who was captain of twelve thousand men with whom he kept continual guard over the city,” according to Marco Polo, whose account of these events deserves attention because he claimed to be close at hand.
“Where are you going so late?” Cogatai asked Ahmad.
“To Chinkim, who is this moment come.”
Cogatai was understandably suspicious. “How is it possible that he is come so secretly that I have not known it?”
Historical records suggest that as he drew up, Kao, still posing as Chinkim, summoned the soldiers on guard to approach, a move that suddenly exposed Ahmad. Lying in wait, Wang Chu withdrew a substantial brass bat from his sleeve, leapt at Ahmad, and beat him to death.
Marco offers a more sophisticated insider account of the assassination: “The moment that Ahmad came into the palace, seeing so many candles lighted, he knelt down before [Kao], believing he was Chinkim; and Wang Chu who was there ready with a sword cut off his head. And seeing this, Cogatai, who had stopped in the entry of the palace, said, ‘Here is treason’ and immediately shot an arrow at [Kao], who was sitting on the seat, and killed him.” (In the historical record, Kao survived a bit longer.)
Cogatai ordered that “anyone found outside his house be killed on the spot” and proceeded to slaughter Chinese on the assumption that the two assassins had worked closely with the local populace. And the barbarism spread quickly to other cities.
WITHOUT LEADERSHIP, the uprising soon played itself out. Within days, Wang Chu and Kao gave themselves up to the authorities, proclaiming themselves heroes for ridding the empire of the wicked Ahmad.
On May 1, 1282, both conspirators were quartered—their limbs pulled off by horses walking in opposite directions—and beheaded as punishment for their deed.
Just before he was executed, Wang Chu cried out, “I, Wang Chu, now die for having rid the world of a pest. Another day, someone will no doubt write the story for me.”
WHEN NEWS OF Ahmad’s assassination reached Kublai Khan, the supreme ruler reacted with alarm and uncharacteristic decisiveness. He traveled to Shang-tu and ordered a thorough investigation. Expecting to learn of the perfidy of Ahmad’s murderers, Kublai instead heard tales of Ahmad’s treachery; now that the minister was gone, those whom he had harmed came forward to describe his flagrant dishonesty and abuse of power.
Indignant at these revelations, Kublai prosecuted Ahmad’s followers, his children, and other members of his clan. Within weeks it was decreed that anyone who had offered his wife or daughter to Ahmad in exchange for a government post should be removed from office, and all property that he had confiscated returned to its rightful owners. In all, 714 government appointees were dismissed, according to official records.
In June, the Yüan dynasty tallied Ahmad’s staggering assets, which included more than 3,700 camels, oxen, sheep, and donkeys. His slaves were freed, his property was claimed by the state or given away. Marco vigorously narrates Kublai’s relentless retaliation: “He ordered Ahmad’s body to be taken from the grave and flung in the street to be torn to pieces by dogs. And those of his sons who had followed the example of his evil deeds he caused to be flayed alive.” And Rashid al-Din, the era’s leading historian, adds a few grisly details of his own, revealing that Kublai, enraged even after Ahmad’s death, ordered the minister’s body to be “dragged from his grave, that a rope be tied to his feet and that he be hanged at the cross-roads in the bazaar; over his head they drove wheels.”
RETRIBUTION PERSISTED long after Ahmad had disappeared from the scene, largely because the culture of corruption that he created remained. According to Chinese custom, executions occurred in the fall, and when the season arrived, four of his sons, including Husain, as well as a nephew, were dispatched; to deepen the disgrace, their bodies were pickled. All Ahmad’s followers were blacklisted. The government compiled a catalog of his crimes and announced it in cities and towns throughout the empire so that all would know his evil deeds and treachery. Most of the hundreds of government offices he had established were dismantled, and the excesses associated with his administration, such as harsh treatment of prisoners, were curbed.
Ahmad’s personal effects included bizarre items that gave clues to his inner life and suggested he was not the conventional Muslim that Kublai Khan believed him to be. His closet held a pair of tanned human skins, and the eunuch who had cared for him told an alarming tale: Ahmad would from time to time place them on an altar and mutter mysterious invocations. Equally troubling, he owned a silk scroll depicting a provocative image of mounted soldiers surrounding a large tent and attacking the unseen occupant, perhaps the khan himself. Marco took these items as proof that “Ahmad so bewitched the khan with his spells that the khan gave the greatest belief and attention to all his words, and did all that he [Ahmad] wished him to do.”
Revelations such as these inspired Kublai Khan to purge Muslims from his court, as Marco relates: “When he recalled the cursed sect of Saracens [Muslims], by which every sin has been made lawful to them and that they can kill whoever is not of their law, and that the cursed Ahmad with his sons had not for this reason reckoned that they committed any sin, he despised it much and held it in abomination.” From that time forward, says Marco, Kublai Khan ordered that Muslims must conduct themselves “according to the law of the Tartars, and that they must not cut the throats of animals, as they did, to eat the flesh, but must cut them in the belly.”
Ahmad’s legacy bedeviled Kublai Khan and the Yüan court. Courtiers wondered aloud how such a power-mad schemer could have flourished in their midst for so many years, and questioned why his critics had remained silent until his death suddenly loosened their tongues. There was an outstanding reason for Ahmad’s steady ascent: he brought critical financial and bureaucratic skills to government. He imposed a uniform currency on a fragmented society, formalized taxation to pay for Kublai Khan’s expensive military campaigns, and partly succeeded in his goal of indoctrinating all of China with the revolutionary idea that a central Mongol authority administered the entire country.
One unresolved question about this enigmatic tyrant remains. Did Ahmad plan to carry out a palace coup, or did he expect to prosper indefinitely while remaining subordinate to Kublai Khan? If he had led such a coup, the advent of Muslim rule over China would have dramatically changed the course of Asian history. Not even Marco Polo ventured a guess about that prospect. For Marco, Ahmad’s fall marked a coming of age. He had arrived at the Mongol court as a young man enthralled with the larger-than-life figure of Kublai Khan, whom he regarded with undisguised hero worship. His account makes it seem that he could not believe his good fortune in establishing rapport with the powerful ruler. But the Ahmad affair demonstrated to Marco, and to the Mongol world, that Kublai Khan, for all his military prowess and enlightened domestic policies, was capable of making errors of judgment serious enough to threaten the empire itself.
FOR MORE THAN thirty years, the complementary skills of the warrior khan and the bureaucrat had permitted the Mongol Empire to flourish. The sumptuousness of the Shang-tu summer palace (Xanadu) reflected the tastes of Kublai Khan and the organizational skills of Ahmad. For all its excesses, their collaboration might have lasted even longer, had Ahmad known how to win the affection or respect of the Chinese people whom he ruled, and not just their fear.
Kublai Khan turned to a man whom he believed would be a safe choice to succeed Ahmad. His name was Sanga, and he was a Uighur, a member of a Turkic tribe. But he soon ran into trouble when a jealous rival told Kublai about Sanga’s supposed treachery. Kublai Khan disciplined the errant minister with a Mongol-style beating.
Sanga held his ground, and Kublai turned his wrath on the informant, who insisted that he was simply trying to warn the khan of danger. The khan held an inquiry and learned from a trusted Persian aide that Sanga was stockpiling pearls and gems at the expense of the government. When the khan asked to share in this hoard, Sanga protested that he had no such riches. The khan arranged for Sanga to be distracted briefly, and during that time the Persian retrieved not one but two caskets stuffed with valuable pearls.
“What is all this?” Kublai Khan asked his minister. “You have so many pearls, but refuse to give me even a few. Where did you get these riches?”
Sanga awkwardly explained that he had collected them from Muslims governing provinces throughout China. His answer infuriated the khan.
“Why did they bring me nothing? You bring me trifles and keep the most precious items for yourself.”
“They were given to me,” Sanga insisted, and offered to return them, if his lord and master wished.
Unimpressed, Kublai Khan condemned Sanga to be put to death by having his mouth filled with excrement. The Khan seized the hoard of gems and executed several of Sanga’s Muslim loyalists. Kublai had learned the lesson of the Ahmad uprising only too well. But he had eliminated one threat only to face others, as adversaries crowded him on all sides.
KUBLAI KHAN’S next challenge came from his detested “uncle,” Nayan, who was determined to become the Great Khan, at Kublai’s expense. While still a young man, Marco Polo says, Nayan had become “ruler of many lands and provinces, so that he could easily raise a force of 400,000 horsemen.” Having an army of this size at his disposal inspired dreams of glory: “He resolved that he would be a subject no longer.”
Although Nayan was a Nestorian Christian, as were many of his followers and soldiers, Marco’s sympathies clearly lay with Kublai Khan in this contest. But the conflict between the two warlords was in no sense a religious crusade. Nayan wanted power, and to acquire it he formed an alliance with another insubordinate member of the Mongol royal family, Kublai’s subversive nephew Kaidu, whom Marco describes as the khan’s “bitter enemy” and a perpetual menace to stability in Asia. “I assure you,” he says, “that Kaidu is never at peace with the Great Khan, but maintains constant warfare against him.” Marco despaired at the havoc this troublemaker had wrought over the years. “Kaidu has already fought many battles with the Great Khan’s men,” he says. Even though Kaidu had lost all the battles, he clamored for his share of Kublai Khan’s hard-won victories. To hear Marco tell it, Kublai would have obliged if only Kaidu had promised to appear at Cambulac whenever summoned. But Kaidu was “afraid for his life if he went,” and Kublai Khan maintained 100,000 “horsemen in the field” to contain his adversary.
In 1287, Nayan and Kaidu concocted a plot to attack Kublai simultaneously from opposite directions and force him into submission. “When the Great Khan got word of this plot,” Marco relates, “he was not unduly perturbed; but like a wise man of approved valor he began to marshal his own forces, declaring that he would never wear his crown or hold his land if he did not bring these two false traitors to an evil end.”
Within only twenty-two days, Kublai assembled an army consisting of 260,000 cavalry and 100,000 infantry, but the forces arrayed against him were larger still. “The reason why he confined himself to this number was that these were drawn from the troops in his own immediate neighborhood,” Marco reports. Kublai commanded some twelve additional armies, but they were “so far away on campaigns of conquest in many parts that he could not have got them together at the right time and place.” If he had summoned all his guards on duty in distant parts of his empire, “their numbers would have been past all reckoning or belief.” But such measures would have been too slow and too public; Kublai preferred speed, “the companion of victory,” and secrecy to “forestall Nayan’s preparations and catch him alone.”
CHINESE ANNALS confirm Marco’s account of this matter, and they suggest that Kublai was willing to sacrifice Bayan by sending him on a hazardous intelligence-gathering mission. With Bayan at close range, “Nayan conceived the plan of kidnapping him; but Bayan, informed of his plans, was able to escape and returned to the emperor.”
At the same time, other Mongol barons in northwestern China, learning of Nayan’s rebellion, sided with him, and as the annals relate, “the emperor was very afflicted.” Acting on the advice of a military official, Kublai Khan dispatched an envoy to try to talk sense into the upstart barons, now known as the confederates. Although the envoy was able to persuade them that their cause was doomed, Nayan refused to surrender. Rather, he formed allegiances with other leaders, who supplied him with troops. Kublai Khan’s forces surrounded their encampment. Eventually a “small, secret expedition” consisting of only a dozen “intrepid and determined men” under the command of a Chinese officer penetrated the enemy.
Although Kublai Khan won this contest, he had not succeeded in eliminating Nayan, whose power and ambition seemed to gain strength from the Mongol efforts to contain it.
ALTHOUGH MARCO wished to persuade his audience, and himself, that Kublai Khan was a wise and beloved leader who ruled the empire by virtue and the mandate of Heaven, the Venetian’s account occasionally betrays an opposing point of view—that the khan could be a wily despot who ruled China and rival Mongol clans by cunning and military force. “In all of his dominions,” Marco admits from the safe remove of his prison cell in Genoa, “there are many disaffected and disloyal subjects who, if they had the chance, would rebel against their lord.” To prevent local insurrection, Kublai Khan rotated the occupying armies every two years, as well as the captains in charge of them.
Maintaining large standing armies across the length and breadth of China cost Kublai Khan dearly. Marco relates that the troops, in addition to receiving regular pay, “live on the immense herds of cattle that are assigned to them and on the milk that they send into towns to sell for necessary provisions.” In time, the armies drained both the Mongol treasury and Chinese natural resources. The Mongols were stretched too thin to rule all of China, especially by force, and while they displayed amazing dexterity with their messenger service, and their admirable (if necessary) respect for local languages, religions, and customs, they presided over barely controlled chaos. Marco was fortunate to travel across China during the years of the Pax Mongolica, when the Mongols maintained a delicate balance between Chinese nationalism and Mongolian imperial ambitions. This state of affairs meant that travelers along the Silk Road enjoyed relative safety, especially in the Mongol strongholds in the north, where marauders who often terrorized traders were kept at bay. But as Marco came to realize, the status quo could not last, because Nayan expected to rule China himself.
DRAWING CONFIDENCE from the predictions of astrologers, as was his habit, Kublai Khan assured himself that his cause would be successful. Only then did he lead his forces—now reckoned at 400,000 horsemen—into battle against Nayan. Fortune once again favored Kublai Khan, as Marco points out: “When they arrived Nayan was in his tent, dallying in bed with [one of ] his wives, to whom he was greatly attached.” Nayan had felt so secure that he had not troubled to post sentries or send out patrols.
Without warning, the Great Khan appeared. “He stood on the top of a wooden tower, full of crossbowmen and archers, which was carried by four elephants wearing stout leather armor draped with clothes of silk and gold. Above his head flew his banner with the emblem of the sun and moon, so high that it could clearly be seen on every side. His troops were marshaled in thirty squadrons of 10,000 mounted archers each, grouped in three divisions; and those on the left and right he flung out so that they encircled Nayan’s camp in a moment. In front of every squadron of horse [men] were five hundred foot-soldiers with short pikes and swords. They were so trained that, whenever the cavalry proposed a retreat, they would jump on the horses’ cruppers and flee with them; then, when the retreat was halted, they would dismount and slaughter the enemies’ horses with their pikes.” The Mongols’ false retreats proved highly effective.
Nayan’s troops, nearly equal to the khan’s in number, straggled into their battle formations, to the accompaniment of drums, songs, and martial music produced by a two-stringed instrument. The two sides rode into battle, Kublai Khan’s banners with his sun-and-moon insignia flying, and Nayan’s standard displaying the “Cross of Christ.”
After lengthy delays, “the two armies fell upon each other with bow and sword and club, and a few with lances.” They clashed in a “bloody and bitter battle,” complete with “arrows flying like pelting rain.” Beneath them, “horsemen and horses tumbled dead upon the ground.”
Marco pays tribute to Nayan’s troops, claiming that the men stood ready to die for their leader, “but in the end victory fell to the Great Khan.” Seeing that he had lost the battle and his fiefdom along with it, Nayan tried to flee, but he and his generals were all captured, and they eventually surrendered. Kublai condemned Nayan to death according to Mongol custom. “He was wrapped up tightly in a carpet and then dragged about so violently, this way and that, that he died,” Marco reports. “Their object in choosing this mode of death was so that the blood of the imperial lineage might not be spilt upon the earth, and the sun and the air might not witness it, nor the limbs of Nayan be touched by any animal.”
KUBLAI KHAN received the show of loyalty that was his due. Barons from four provinces arrived to swear obeisance. But instead of submission and unity, Marco relates, ugliness quickly ensued. “Saracens, idolaters, Jews, and many people who do not believe in God made fun of the Christian faith and of the sign of the Holy Cross that Nayan had carried on his banner.”
When word of this blasphemy reached Kublai Khan, “he called to him the chief Saracens and Jews and Christians and spoke evil to those who made fun of it before him and before the Christians, and rebuked them severely, saying to them, ‘If the Cross of Christ has not helped Nayan, it has done reasonably and justly, because he was disloyal and a rebel against his lord.’” For this reason, Kublai Khan said, he deserved to die.
With that, Kublai Khan “called many Christians who were there and began to comfort them, saying that they had no reason or occasion for shame…, for Nayan who came against his lord was both disloyal and treacherous, and so there is great right in that which happened to him.” Although the Christian followers of Nayan remained suspicious of Kublai Khan, they were relieved, and perhaps surprised as well, that he did not “tempt them from their faith, but they stayed quiet and in peace.”
HAVING SECURED his power in China, Kublai Khan stumbled anew when he undertook a series of military skirmishes in Southeast Asia, provoking war where there had been stability and amity. He then repeated the Japanese disaster by attempting to conquer another island stronghold, Java.
Marco relates the Mongol invasion of Java with confidence, once again giving his European readers their first account of political struggle in a land they never knew existed. His account represents a remarkable feat of intelligence gathering on his part; even though his comprehension of events was partial and inevitably colored by the Mongol perspective, he remains generally accurate throughout.
Located south of Malaysia and Sumatra, in the Indian Ocean, Java is so distant from China that Marco probably never reached its shores, but he gathered stories to transmit to the West—the first accounts of this distant kingdom to reach Europe. “According to what the good sailors say who know it well,” he states, “this is the largest island in the world, for it is indeed more than three thousand miles around.” And it abounded in the most valuable commodity in the medieval world: spices. “They have pepper and nutmeg and spikenard and galingale and cubebs and cloves and all dear spicery that one could find in the world.” From the sound of things, trade was brisk—“Unto this island come great numbers of ships and merchants who buy many goods there and make great profit,” Marco says—but it excluded the emissaries of Kublai Khan, who “can never have it subjected to his rule because of the long way and for the danger that it was to sail there.”
Despite the hazards, Kublai did send envoys, led by his personal ambassador, Meng Ch’i, to visit Java’s ruler, King Kertanagara. The emissaries survived the voyage—at least, Marco tells of no shipwrecks or other losses en route—and upon reaching the Javanese court, they made the same outrageous demands that had once been made of the Japanese, insisting that the king submit unequivocally to the unseen khan across the sea. Kertanagara responded with a shocking insult: he branded the ambassador’s face.
To a Mongol ruler, there could be no greater insult than the disfigurement or murder of an ambassador. Seizing on this new incitement to war, Kublai Khan made ready for the invasion of Java with the zeal he had once brought to preparations for the invasion of Japan. Failing to heed the lessons of past failures, he appointed three commanders to carry out the task. One was a Mongol, Shih-pi, the commander in chief; the second a Chinese, Kao Hsing, appointed field general; and the third a Uighur, I-k’o-mu-ssu, charged with providing ships.
In 1292, the new Mongol invasion force departed. It was as grand as its predecessors: a thousand ships, twenty thousand men, a year’s supply of grain, and forty thousand ounces of silver to buy supplies en route—all of it ruinously expensive.
Kertanagara’s intelligence gave him ample warning of the assault, but he made the fatal mistake of committing all of his troops to the distant Malay Peninsula, where he believed the Mongols would land. Suddenly vulnerable in his homeland, Kertanagara found himself embroiled in a local rebellion. His clever rival, Jayakatwang, took advantage of the king’s weakness, sent in troops, and slaughtered Kertanagara.
That was not quite the end of Kertanagara’s influence. His wily son-in-law, Prince Vijaya, assumed the vacant throne and offered to submit to Kublai Khan if the Mongols would assist in putting down the Javanese uprising. To this end, Vijaya promised detailed maps describing the rivers and ports of Java. The Mongol leaders accepted the offer and pursued the upstart Jayakatwang, whom they captured and executed, much to Vijaya’s satisfaction.
Just when it seemed that the Mongols had carried off a great strategic success, Vijaya made an apparently simple request: two hundred unarmed men to accompany him to the kingdom of Madjapahit, where, he declared, he would formally submit to Kublai Khan’s envoys. Eager for this prize, the Mongols gave Vijaya his wish. But during the march to Madjapahit, Vijaya revealed his true purpose. His soldiers mounted a surprise attack against the unarmed Mongol escorts, and pursued Mongol forces in the region. They boldly attacked the Mongol general, Shih-pi, who barely escaped with his life. Shih-pi ordered a humiliating retreat to his ships that cost three thousand lives.
Safely on board his command ship, Shih-pi debated with the other Mongol leaders about the best means to punish Vijaya for his treachery, but they were unable to reach an agreement. Instead they sailed home to China and disgrace. Although the expedition returned with interesting Javanese artifacts—the horn of a rhinoceros, a reliable map and census of Java, and a letter from Bali written in gold characters—they were, unmistakably, a vanquished fleet.
The repercussions would be felt all the way back to Kublai Khan’s court.