FOR ALL ITS RICHES, Marco Polo’s Travels presents several challenges for modern readers. The first concerns the absence of an authoritative version of his account. There are scores of early Polo manuscripts, many of them drastically different from one another. Some versions rely on a single text, while others blend several; some contain abridgments, both subtle and obvious. Some, such as those rendered into French by Pauthier, and into English by Yule and Cordier, contain valuable annotations. Yet these versions tend to obscure the energy and quirky charm of the original by imposing a uniform tone on the entire work. The result can resemble a master painting dimmed by centuries of accumulated grime. But a relatively recent English translation by A. C. Moule and Paul Pelliot of the Latin manuscript discovered in the library of the cathedral of Toledo, Spain, in 1932 manages to evoke the spirit and substance of the original, or so it seemed to me after studying a number of other versions. Published in 1938 and based on the longest manuscript of Marco’s account known, it is 50 percent longer than other versions. In quoting this version, as well as others, I have made a number of changes for the sake of clarity and syntax. Where Moule and Pelliott stumbled or repeated patches of garbled text without clarification, I had recourse to the venerable 1818 translation by William Marsden, who based his version on the Italian translation by Giovanni-Battista Ramusio, as well as to various early manuscripts in Middle French, and to other translations that better conveyed the sense of a particular passage.
Another significant problem with Marco’s book that translators often overlook concerns the order of events, no small matter in a chronicle of this scope. In his prologue, Marco promises accounts of happenings that he never gets around to describing in the body of his text. And on occasion he describes events at the beginning of his account even though they occurred near the end of his travels. Some of this confusion, I suspect, arises from the circumstances under which the work was composed (Marco Polo in prison, telling his story to a collaborator who was a stranger to him), and some from errors that crept into the narrative as it passed from one set of scribes to the next, in the pre-Gutenberg era. Yet even various paragraphs or sentences within the Travels seem out of order. The disarray often reminded me of a manuscript dropped on a flight of stairs, then gathered up, with many of the pages out of order. To minimize confusion, I have related all the major events chronologically, which has meant departing from the order in which certain episodes appear in the original text.
I am indebted to the labors of several French scholars, including Jacques Gernet, A. C. Moule, M. G. Pauthier, and Paul Pelliot, for their elucidation of aspects of the text. In addition, Leonardo Olschki’s erudite Marco Polo’s Asia is valuable for its breadth and precision, despite Olschki’s tendency occasionally to overstate what Marco or the Mongols “always” or “never” did. In reality, the Travels is one of those multidimensional records in which most everything and its opposite are true, at different times and in different contexts.
A second group of challenges concerns the many languages involved in trying to understand the Mongols who dominate Marco Polo’s account. In his 1990 book The Mongols, David Morgan writes: “The sources available to the historian are in Mongolian, Chinese, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Japanese, Russian, Armenian, Georgian, Latin, and other languages. No one can hope to be able to read more than a fraction of them in the original.” Fortunately, I was able to turn repeatedly to the sound advice of Professor Morris Rossabi of Columbia University, the author of a distinguished biography of Kublai Khan and a scholar of Mongolia and Mongol history, to guide me through these linguistic thickets. I have also consulted the works of three thirteenth-century Persian chroniclers—Vassaf al-Hazrat, Juvaini, and Rashid al-Din—who discussed the exploits of the Mongols as a more-or-less contemporary phenomenon. All were court historians, and Rashid al-Din served as grand vizier in the Ilkhanate. True, they expressed their patrons’ convictions, but as a result of their privileged positions they had access to many sources that might otherwise have been lost. Wherever possible, I have let their words speak for themselves.
THE EPIGRAPHS to the chapters of this book are taken from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan.
PROLOGUE / The Commander
Concerning Marco Polo’s involvement in the Battle of Curzola, some commentators have suggested that Marco blundered into combat while leading a merchant vessel rather than a warship. Still others insist that he did not participate in the battle at all and was instead captured in a subsequent military skirmish at sea. Henry H. Hart’s brief, pithy Marco Polo, Venetian Adventurer, page 207, has Dandolo’s speech at the height of the Battle of Curzola, but Hart is among those who place Marco Polo’s capture in a different engagement between the Venetians and the Genoese.
Although Venice and Genoa were both city-states famed for their aggressive maritime trade, they were very different from each other. The Genoese were stubborn individualists. Their trading ventures were privately financed, and their sense of civic duty was minimal. Venetians, in contrast, were known for their collective behavior, and for their exclusiveness. Their ships were communal property, their sailors not permitted to serve other governments.
Henry Yule and Henri Cordier, volume 1, page 55, of their version of The Description of the World, provide a variant account of Marco Polo’s capture and imprisonment, quoting the Dominican friar Jacopo d’Acqui’s Imago mundi. Many details are familiar, but d’Acqui says that Polo was captured in a different military engagement. There is no reason to assume that d’Acqui has more claim to accuracy than other sources, but he was a contemporary of Marco Polo, and therefore wrote shortly after the events. But even d’Acqui commits obvious errors. Maria Bussagli’s essay inMarco Polo: Venezia e l’Oriente, edited by Alvise Zorzi, contains another variant. In this version, Marco Polo was on his way back to Trebizond to recover valuable possessions that had been confiscated several years earlier. I have also consulted Annali genovesi dopo Caffaro e suoi continuatori.
Few accounts of the naval actions off Curzola in 1298 fully agree on dates. For a variant, see W. Carew Hazlitt, The Venetian Republic, volume 1, pages 454–472. Conditions in a Genoese jail are described at length in Leondia Balestrieri’s “Le Prigioni della Malapaga.”
CHAPTER ONE / The Merchants of Venice
For a lucid exploration of the medieval ethos of Marco Polo’s era, see Janet Abu-Lughod’s eye-opening work, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350, and Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century,especially pages 55–56. The best modern history of Venice is John Julius Norwich’s A History of Venice. Mrs. Oliphant’s The Makers of Venice: Doges, Conquerers, and Men of Letters also has its charms.
The surprisingly sophisticated world of medieval Venetian and Italian contracts and commercial practices has been described in detail in Robert S. Lopez and Irving W. Raymond’s Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World; pages 14–15 and 168–178 are especially illuminating. See Benjamin Z. Kedar’s Merchants in Crisis: Genoese and Venetian Men of Affairs and the Fourteenth-century Depression for additional context. Lore about veneto comes from Jan Morris’s effervescent account, The World of Venice, page 31 in the 1993 Harcourt Brace edition.
Some of what is known about Marco Polo’s early years can be found in Hart’s Marco Polo, which has more context than biography, but see especially pages xvii, 55–56, and 63–64.
Rodolfo Gallo discusses the Ca’ Polo in “Nuovi documenti riguardanti Marco Polo e la sua famiglia,” note 3.
In Venice: Lion City, pages 30 and following, Garry Wills analyzes the basis of power in the Republic. Michael Yamashita describes the ceremony of marriage to the sea in Marco Polo: A Photographer’s Journey, page 41. Alvise Zorzi’s Vita di Marco Polo veneziano is a useful introduction to Marco in a Venetian context.
CHAPTER TWO / The Golden Passport
In their consideration of foreigners who found employment in the Mongol regime, Yule and Cordier mention an oral tradition placing Jews in China since the first century. Accounts of synagogues and Jewish travelers crop up occasionally in Chinese annals as early as the twelfth century, although the terminology thought to refer to Jews may indicate another group. For more on the long but tentatively understood history of Jews in China, see Yule and Cordier, volume 1, page 347. (All citations to Yule and Cordier refer to their version of The Description of the World.)
In his incisive The History of the Mongol Conquests, J. J. Saunders describes Mongol-Chinese segregation; see page 124. See also Hart, Marco Polo, page 16.
Igor de Rachewiltz, in “Marco Polo Went to China,” page 66, suggests that by “Latin,” Marco (or his translator) actually meant “Italian,” and thus the Polo brothers were the first Venetians that Kublai had met. If so, Marco was not, in this instance, exaggerating. Hart’s Marco Polo, page 38, note, traces the Polo company’s uncertain progress, and includes Ludolph von Suchem’s description of Acre. See also Richard Humble’s illustrated Marco Polo for another retelling.
CHAPTER THREE / The Apprentice
Just what Marco meant by “muslin” is open to question. The term generally refers to white or unbleached cloth woven from cotton, but his was made of silver and gold, in which case he may have had another fabric in mind; or perhaps he meant that the muslin fabric was trimmed with silver and gold threads.
Gibbon’s remark comes from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, volume 2, page 818. More about the caliph and Hülegü can be found in Zorzi’s Vita di Marco Polo. Yule and Cordier (volume 1, page 344, note 1) consider the Mongol taboo against spilling blood. For a diverting introduction to Mongol culture, see Ian Frazier’s “Invaders,” New Yorker, April 25, 2005. Kuo P’u’s remark appears in Irene M. Franck and David Brownstone, The Silk Road: A History, page 48. For extended analysis of the Dry Tree’s potential significance, see Yule and Cordier, volume 1, pages 128–139. The validity of Marco’s account of the Assassins has generated debate; some commentators believe that the hashish connection may be spurious, and that the Old Man did not drug his followers. For more, consult Leonardo Olschki, Marco Polo’s Asia, pages 369–370, and for recent observations on the Assassins, see Bernard Lewis, The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam, and Farhad Daftary, The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Isma’ilis.
The description of Balkh by Nancy Hatch Dupree can be found in The Road to Balkh, page 1. Juvaini’s comments appear in the same work on page 75 and following. Hart, Marco Polo, page 97, adds background. See also Dupree’s An Historical Guide to Afghanistan, page 42, for the destruction of Balkh by the Mongol invaders.
CHAPTER FOUR / The Opium Eater
Manuel Komroff includes an account by Benjamin of Tudela in Contemporaries of Marco Polo, pages 268–269. John Larner’s Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World, pages 12–13, has additional context; William of Rubruck’s comments on what he took to be Mongol squalor are on page 25. Carpini’s account is quoted in Christopher Dawson’s The Mongol Mission, pages 6–7, and in Margaret T. Hodgen’s valuable Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, pages 90–92.
James D. Ryan’s “Preaching Christianity Along the Silk Route: Missionary Outposts in the Tartar ‘Middle Kingdom’ in the Fourteenth Century” contains a trove of useful data concerning the issues confronting early missionaries to Asia.
The story of Genghis Khan’s horse is told by Mike Edwards in “Genghis: Lord of the Mongols,” National Geographic, December 1996. Juvaini’s observation about perdition is drawn from Morris Rossabi’s Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times, page 2.
For an interesting if technical discussion of the origins and evolution of the Silk Road, see Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China, volume 1, pages 181–204. This is but a brief sample of an extraordinary, multivolume survey of Chinese knowledge compiled by a scholar of China of exceptional gifts and vision.
Dr. Sarah Schlesinger of Rockefeller University generously outlined the prevalence of tuberculosis in Marco’s time, and the ramifications of the illness as he may have experienced it in Afghanistan.
CHAPTER FIVE / High Plains Drifters
Concerning asbestos, see Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China, volume 3, page 660. As Needham demonstrates, the Chinese were aware of asbestos for centuries, calling the material, not inaccurately, “stone veins.”
Of the Pamir, Dr. James B. Garvin, NASA’s chief scientist, and a geologist by training, notes, “Because of the arid environment, lack of human degradation of the landscape, [and] spectacular exposures of the effects of recent earthquakes and of the uplift of the mountain, this area is a premier natural laboratory for the investigation of…significant [geological] problems.”
CHAPTER SIX / The Secret History of the Mongols
Carpini’s account of life among the Mongols is drawn from Christopher Dawson’s The Mongol Mission, page 37. Vassaf’s observation can be found in the History of Vassaf, volume 1. The work dates from 1302. Shoaib Harris translated.
The various English translations of The Secret History of the Mongols differ dramatically from one another. Those wishing to learn more about this remarkable document would do well to compare them all. Among the more significant are the translation by Francis Woodman Cleaves; a verse adaptation by Paul Kahn; and the extraordinarily detailed rendering by Igor de Rachewiltz. I have relied on the English-language version by Urgunge Onon, published in Mongolia in 2005, which appears faithful to the letter and spirit of the original saga. My thanks to Nomin Lkhagvasuren for bringing it to my attention. The stanza quoted can be found on page 110.
Nicholas Wade in The New York Times quoted Juvaini on Genghis Khan; see “A Prolific Genghis Khan, It Seems, Helped People the World,” February 11, 2003. Chris Tyler-Smith’s “The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols” sheds light on Genghis Khan’s many descendants.
The evocative description of the Mongol conception of the soul comes from A. C. Moule and Paul Pelliot’s edition of Marco Polo, The Description of the World, volume 1 (reprinted 1976), pages 257–258. The quotations from David Morgan and from Juvaini are drawn from Morgan’s The Mongols, page 55. For a detailed analysis of the Chinese and Mongol military systems, see Chi’-Ch’ing Hsiao, The Military Establishment of the Yüan Dynasty.
The Mongol recipes offered here can be found (along with other dishes) in Paul Buell’s “Pleasing the Palate of the Qan.” But there is more to say about the Mongol diet and its effect on Mongol dynastic history. In “Dietary Decadence and Dynastic Decline in the Mongol Empire,” John Masson Smith Jr. offers a drastically different assessment of the healthiness of the Mongol diet. “Most Mongol rulers lived short lives,” he states. “Those in the Middle East died, on average, at about age 38, and the successors of Qubilai raised the ages, since he lived, atypically, for 78 years [sic]; Chinggis lived into his 60s; for the rest, few passed 50.” Smith blames the Mongols’ lack of longevity on “dietary inadequacies and improprieties,” by which he means too much mutton, mare’s milk, and alcohol, and not enough of other foods. He cites Marco Polo’s statistics as evidence, in part, of the Mongols’ tendency toward excess. They were, in short, eating and drinking themselves to death.
CHAPTER SEVEN / The Universal Emperor
Bar Hebraeus’s praise of Sorghaghtani can be found in The Cambridge History of China, volume 6, page 414. My thanks to Professor S. Tsolmon of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences for outlining the four major population segments.
Morris Rossabi’s Khubilai Khan offers the best modern assessment of Kublai’s ascent to power. I have drawn especially from page 8 and from pages 46 and following. Arigh Böke’s machinations are recounted in M. G. Pauthier’s notes for Le Livre de Marco Polo, beginning on page 237.
For a technical comparison of Chinese and Mongol currency, see Yule and Cordier, volume 1, pages 426–430. In Marco Polo’s Asia, pages 234–240, Olschki dissects the tensions animating relationships among Mongols and Muslims and considers reasons why Islam did not gain a firm grip on the Mongol Empire.
In Khubilai Khan, pages 40–41 and 155–160, Rossabi ably tells the story of ’Phags-pa and his script. See also Jack Weatherford’s Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, pages 205–206. And Zhijiu Yang’s Yuan shi san lun has an interesting discussion of the languages Marco Polo may have known or used, with reference to M. G. Pauthier’s thoughts on the subject. Marco Polo’s Asia, by Olschki, also discusses ’Phags-pa script and contains interesting assessments, pro and con, of the Mongol impact on Chinese culture (pages 124–128). Some early accounts ascribe five or seven wives to Kublai Khan rather than four; see Yule and Cordier, volume 1, page 358, note 2. For an explanation of Mongol succession issues, see the same work, pages 360–361, note 1.
CHAPTER EIGHT / In the Service of the Khan
Marco Polo’s accuracy in describing Cambulac can be gauged by the fact that the historian Rashid al-Din, his learned contemporary, described the city in very similar terms:
The surrounding wall of the city of Khanbaligh is flanked by 17 towers; between each [two] of these towers there is the distance of a farsang (or parasange). Daidou [Ta-tu, or Cambulac] is so populous that even outside of these towers there are great streets and houses; in its gardens there are many kinds of fruit trees brought from everywhere. At the center of this city, Khoubilai-Khaan has established one of his Ordou (a Mongolian term which like the Chinese Koung means “imperial dwelling”), in a very large palace called Karsi (in Chinese, tien, a cluster of pavilions destined for the emperor’s various uses).
The columns and the floors of this palace are all in cut stone or marble, and of great beauty; it is surrounded and fortified by four walls. Between one of these walls and the next there is a space equal to the distance covered by an arrow flung with force. The external court is for the palace guards; the next one is for the princes (omera, emirs) who assemble there each morning; the third court is occupied by the great dignitaries of the army, and the fourth by those who are in the prince’s intimate circle. The picture of this palace is based on one made on site.
At Khanbaligh and at Daidou there are two large and important rivers. They come from the north, where lies the road leading to the Khan’s summer encampment; at the frontier gorge of Djemdjal (the fortified gorge of Kiu-young) they join another river. Inside the town is a considerable lake which resembles a sea; there is a dam to bring the boats down. The water of the river further along forms a canal, and issues out into the bay which, from the ocean, extends into the vicinity of Khanbaligh. [From Pauthier’s edition of Marco Polo’s Travels, Le Livre de Marco Polo, page 266, note 5.]
For more on the complex subject of the Chinese calendar, see Yule and Cordier, volume 1, pages 388–389; Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China, volume 3, pages 390 and following; and Robert Temple’s The Genius of China, pages 36–38. Temple’s illustrated book can be considered a simplified introduction to Needham’s occasionally unwieldy magnum opus.
J. D. Langlois’s notable China Under Mongol Rule, page 3 and following, has more on the conceptual and historical roots of the Yüan dynasty, and the emperor’s role as personified by Kublai Khan.
The details of Kublai Khan’s astonishing wardrobe are drawn from Pauthier’s Le Livre de Marco Polo, page 285, note 4, and the General Ceremonial from the same work, page 290, note 4. The birthday rites were extremely intricate. Pauthier offers a record of an exhausting birthday worship service:
The “first introducer” says in a cadenced voice: “Bow down!”—“Rise!” He goes toward the vermilion vestibule (that of the emperor), and makes his obeisances before the chair, or imperial throne. The “first orderer” announces that all is in order and well executed. Then “the usher in chief” cries in a loud and cadenced voice: “Bow profoundly!” The “perambulating ushers” cry: “Bow!”—“Bow profoundly!”—“Rise!”—“Bow profoundly again!”—“Rise!” When all this has been successively and punctually executed as a preliminary, the “chief of the ushers” then announces: “The emperor in person, who is accompanied by ten thousand felicities, is coming!” The “perambulating ushers” cry: “Resume your places!”—“Bow profoundly!”—“Rise!”—“Bow profoundly again!”—“Rise!”—“Bow!”—“Replace your ivory tablets in your belts!”—“Bow!”—“Tap the ground three times with your foot!”—“Bend your left knee!”—“Prostrate the head against the ground three times!”
Pauthier notes, “It is the famous form of salutation in the presence of the emperor, prescribed by Chinese ritual, consisting in three prostrations, with bended knees and head placed on the ground, to which many European ambassadors refused to submit….” This was merely the introductory ceremony, which was followed by prolonged prayers to propitiate the heavens, also intricately choreographed, followed by more bowing, and concluded with processions. Only then did the formal birthday rites end.
Hart’s Marco Polo discusses coal in China on page 121.
On the extent of Mongol charity, Pauthier observes on page 346: “One may see there that Marco Polo was far from exaggerating the acts of benevolence of this kind attributed by him to Kublai Khan. Thus in 1260, the food supply having fallen short, money was gathered for distribution to a certain number of the needy. In 1261, the government remitted the overdue duties or taxes to the inhabitants of the three sectors of the capital…. During the whole reign of Kublai Khan, there is not one year in which the Annals do not report remission of duties, of taxes, of charges, for one reason or another, to the inhabitants of the capital, of the imperial summer residence and to various provinces or departments of the Empire; and distributions of aid in times of famine or public calamities.” He concludes, “We believe we can assert that the history of no sovereign and no dynasty in Europe could present a similar number of acts of generosity and benevolence.”
CHAPTER NINE / The Struggle for Survival
For more on the Mongol paiza, see Yule and Cordier, volume 1, pages 352–353.
Marco Polo’s account of the bridge has come under fire for its supposed inaccuracies. In some manuscripts he claims that the bridge had twenty-four arches, when other records maintain that it had thirteen, or eleven. Again, the discrepancy may be caused by descriptions of the bridge as it appeared at different times. For more on the history of this legendary bridge, see Yule and Cordier, volume 2, pages 4–8, note 1.
Dr. Sarah Schlesinger of Rockefeller University provided trenchant observations on the manufacture and molecular structure of silk.
Concerning the practice of making salt, Yule and Cordier (volume 2, pages 57–58, note 5) report that even in their day—that is, 1913—salt was being used for purchases in these markets.
The Penguin edition of the Travels includes remarks on the discrepancies concerning the date of Kublai’s military offensive against the Song (page 187, note). Descriptions of Mongol armor and arrows are based on artifacts in the collection of the Mongolian Museum of Natural History in Ulaanbaatar.
CHAPTER TEN / The General and the Queen
The psychological dynamics of childbearing are discussed in “Why Do Some Expectant Fathers Experience Pregnancy Symptoms?” Scientific American, October 2004, page 116.
For more on Bayan’s career, see Yule and Cordier, volume 2, pages 148–150. Details of Bayan’s life have been drawn from In the Service of the Khan: Eminent Personalities of the Early Mongol–Yüan Period (1200–1300), edited by Igor de Rachewiltz et al., pages 584–606.
CHAPTER ELEVEN / The City of Heaven
The chapter on Quinsai is the longest in Marco’s account, and this signifies its importance. Nevertheless, intriguing uncertainties remain. In his book Quinsai; with Other Notes on Marco Polo, A. C. Moule notes that the term “City of Heaven,” employed by Marco, does not appear in Chinese annals. Where Marco came by this term, or whether the residents of Quinsai used it, is open to question. Moule (page 11) attributes the precision with which Marco described Quinsai to “an official account which was sent to the Mongol general Baian [Bayan] when he approached the city.” As a result, “the number and accuracy of the topographical and other details mentioned or implied exceeds those in the description of any other place in the book.” Chief among the unanswered questions is Marco’s exact role in Quinsai. For more on this issue, see the rigorous Olschki, Marco Polo’s Asia, pages 174–175. It is possible that the notion that Marco was appointed governor of Quinsai by no less than Kublai Khan originated with Giambattista Ramusio long after the fact.
The controversy surrounding the number of bridges in Quinsai is taken up by Moule in Quinsai, pages 23–29. By coincidence, Marco also says there are twelve thousand houses in Quinsai, when there were, in fact, many times that number. “Twelve thousand” was a conventional term indicatingcountless houses. Despite Moule’s statement to the contrary, it seems likely that Marco was simply employing the same figure of speech concerning the number of bridges.
Wu Tzu-mu, about whom little is known, left a poignant description of Quinsai at the peak of its prosperity, in a work known as the “Account of the Gruel Dream” (1274) wherein a peasant dreams of luxury while a modest innkeeper prepares a simple meal—in other words, the poor man dreams of the abundance that Quinsai symbolizes. “In no matter what district, in the streets, on the bridges, at the gates, and in every odd corner, there are everywhere to be found barrows, shops, and emporiums where business is done,” he writes. “The reason for this is that people are in daily need of the necessities of life, such as firewood, rice, oil, salt, soya sauce, vinegar, and tea, and to a certain extent even of luxury articles, while rice and soup are absolute essentials, for even the poorest cannot do without them. To tell the truth, the inhabitants of Quinsai are spoiled and difficult to please.”
He evoked the city’s splendid teahouses catering to this demanding clientele: “They make arrangements of the flowers of the four seasons, hang paintings by celebrated artists, decorate the walls of the establishment, and all the year round sell unusual teas and curious soups. During the winter months, they sell in addition a very fine powdered tea, pancakes, onion tea, and sometimes soup of salted beans. During the hot season they add as extras plum-flower wine with a mousse of snow, a beverage for contracting the gall bladder, and herbs against the heat.” And, like Marco, he reveled in the city’s brothels: “Let us visit one of the chic establishments, with such promising signs as ‘The Happy Meeting,’ or ‘The Seduction,’ or ‘The Pleasures of Novelty.’…A dozen prostitutes, luxuriously dressed and heavily made up, gather at the entrance to the main arcade to await the command of the customers, and have an airy gracefulness.”
For reminiscences of the City of Heaven by Odoric of Pordenone and Ibn Battuta, see Pauthier’s edition of Marco Polo’s Travels, Le Livre de Marco Polo, page 502, note. Jacques Gernet’s splendid Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250–1276 discusses precautions against fire on pages 36–37 and 52.
Sexual mores in China receive extended treatment in R. H. van Gulick’s Sexual Life in Ancient China (see especially pages 138–260). For another scholarly discussion of Chinese sexual attitudes and practices, see Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China,volume 2, pages 146–150. Needham emphasizes the philosophical underpinnings of Chinese sexual customs, especially Taoism, and stresses the customs’ social and psychological benefits.
T’ao Tsung-i, a scholar and writer of the late Yüan dynasty, wrote about eunuchs in a traditional dialogue between the Yellow Emperor and one of his subjects, known as Ch’i Po, a legendary figure credited with discovering the art of healing the body, as follows. “The Yellow Emperor said: ‘There are men who because of injury to their genitalia have lost their sexual urge, their member will not rise and has become useless. Yet their beard and mustache do not disappear. Why is it that only eunuchs have no beard and mustache? I want to hear the reason for this.’ Ch’i Po replied: ‘In the case of eunuchs their genitalia are amputated, thereby their seminal duct is cut off and they can not emit semen…. Consequently their lips and mouth become arid, and no beardor mustache develop.’ The Yellow Emperor asked: ‘But there are some natural eunuchs who although they have not undergone that mutilation yet do not have beard or mustache. Why is this so?’ Ch’i Po answered: ‘That is because Heaven did not give them a sufficient sexual urge. Hence their seminal duct is not developed, and neither is their genitalia. They have ch’i [essence] but not semen.’”
Examples of Chinese public poetry can be found in Gernet, Daily Life in China, page 237, and the same work describes other customs in the City of Heaven on pages 184, 189–191, and 214–215.
Marco’s “lost Christians” may have belonged to a little-known sect of Armenian Christians, who differed from the Nestorians. The Armenian Christians were monophysites, asserting that Jesus had only one nature, which was divine, and incorporated his human nature. If they were Armenian Christians, they may have been reluctant to reveal their identity, fearing that the Nestorians outnumbered them.
CHAPTER TWELVE / The Divine Wind
In Le Livre de Marco Polo, his edition of Marco Polo’s Travels, Pauthier offers details about the Mongol fleet (pages 540–543). See also Yule and Cordier, volume 2, page 263, note 3.
Marco generated centuries of controversy by giving the date of the treaty of surrender by the Mongols to the Japanese as 1269 (see Polo, The Description of the World, edited by Moule and Pelliott, page 362). This is another miscalculation on the part of Marco, or his translators, who did not accurately convert the Mongol or Chinese lunar calendar date to the Western equivalent. Yule and Cordier correct the date to 1279, but since Kublai Khan attacked Japan repeatedly between 1274 and 1283, it is difficult to know exactly when the treaty, or the siege preceding it, occurred. There is also a question as to whether the story of the thirty thousand castaways occupying the Japanese capital by resorting to disguise was based on fact, or was simply a yarn that Marco found irresistable. Unlike virtually all of the other facts he relates concerning Kublai Khan’s failed siege of Japan, this element finds no corroboration in other sources. Yet Marco’s account is so detailed and plausible, and fits so neatly with what is known of the failed effort, that it is likely based on historical fact, and lost sources, perhaps embellished with Marco’s storytelling flare.
For Morris Rossabi’s useful analysis of the exercise of Mongol power, see his Khubilai Khan, page 212. And for a thorough assessment of the role of Muslims in the Yüan dynasty, see the same author’s “The Muslims in the Early Yüan Dynasty,” in China Under Mongol Rule, edited by J. D. Langlois Jr., pages 256–295. Rossabi writes, “By serving as intermediaries between the Mongol rulers and their Chinese subjects, the Muslims performed valuable services but simultaneously provoked the wrath of the conquerors and the conquered.” He also suggests that “the Mongols, consciously or not, used the Muslims as scapegoats, thereby diverting Chinese animosity from themselves.”
The Ahmad affair occasioned oft-repeated misunderstandings in Marco Polo scholarship. Some accounts speak of a minister named Po-lo who became involved late in the scandal. For example, Yule and Cordier (volume 1, page 442, note 5) write, “It is a pleasant fact that Messer Marco’s presence, and his upright conduct on this occasion, have not been forgotten in the Chinese Annals: ‘The Emperor…desired Polo, Assessor of the Privy Council, to explain the reasons which had led Wangchu to commit this murder. Polo spoke with boldness of the crimes and oppressions of Ahmad, which rendered him an object of detestation throughout the Empire. The Emperor’s eyes were opened, and he praised the courage of Wangchu.’” But Moule (Quinsai, page 84) has shown that the official in question, “Po-lo,” was not our Marco, but rather a Chinese. It is not known by what name Marco Polo was called in the Mongol court, or in the Chinese or Mongol annals. There is no record that he warned Kublai Khan of Ahmad’s treachery, or played an active part in the minister’s downfall, even though he recorded events accurately.
In the Service of the Khan, edited by Igor de Rachewiltz et al., has the best account in English of Ahmad’s rise and fall (pages 539–557); in this article, H. Franke draws heavily on Chinese sources as well as on Rashid al-Din, the Persian historian. And for another account of Ahmad’s rise and fall, see R. P. Lister’s Marco Polo’s Travels in Xanadu with Kublai Khan, page 138. In The Mongols, said to be a favorite of Theodore Roosevelt, Jeremiah Curtin recounts the Ahmad and Sanga episode (pages 372–373).
Marco gives the year of Nayan and Kaidu’s plot as 1286, but once again he seems to have become confused while converting a date from the Chinese or Mongol lunar calendar to the Julian calendar. Aspects of the rebellion appear in Pauthier’s edition, Le Livre de Marco Polo, page 237, note 4. The fate of the Mongol invasion force is recounted by Rossabi, Khubilai Khan, on pages 220 and following.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN / The Seeker
For a discussion of what was meant by “India,” see Yule and Cordier, volume 2, pages 426–427. Additional commentary on the final leg of Marco’s journey can be found in Hart’s Marco Polo, pages 145–167. And for a thorough and provocative discussion of Marco Polo’s spiritual experiences and the evolution of his beliefs, see Mario Bussagli’s “La Grande Asia di Marco Polo,” in Zorzi’s Marco Polo, Venezia e l’Oriente.
Marco associated Saint Thomas with a “race of men who are called gavi,” who make a practice of sitting on carpets. “When one asked them why they do this,” Marco reports, they replied, “because…we are sprung from the earth and to earth we must return.” Despite the men’s passivity, Marco insisted that ancestors of the gavi “killed Master Saint Thomas the Apostle long ago.” As a result of this deed, “none could go into the place where the body of Master Saint Thomas is, which is in the province of Maabar, in a little town.” Marco comments: “Twenty or more [men] could not put one of these gavi into the place where the body of Master Saint Thomas is buried, because the place does not receive them by virtue of the holy body.” Realizing that this requires elucidation, Marco explains, “They say they tried the experiment, and that one of the said gavi, dragged by force by many men to make him enter where the body of Saint Thomas is buried, could by no amount of force be moved…. And this very special miracle our Lord God showed for reverence of the most holy apostle.”
Those wishing to learn about differing interpretations of Thomas from a modern perspective would do well to consult Elaine Pagels’s Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (New York: Random House, 2003). The Buddhist influence on the Mongols is explained in Gianroberto Scarcia’s “I Mongoli e l’Iran: la situazione religiosa,” in Zorzi, Venezia e l’Oriente. And commentary on Marco’s distinctive name for the Buddha can be found in Pauthier’s edition of the Travels, Le Livre de Marco Polo, page 588, note, and in Olschki, Marco Polo’s Asia, pages 254–255.
I wish to acknowledge the assistance of Patrick Ryan, S.J., for his enlightening comments about Zanzibar’s religious history and traditions.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN / The Mongol Princess
Hart’s Marco Polo, page 142, note, offers the conventional account of the meaning of Kokachin’s name. My version relies on the convincing analysis of Professor S. Tsolmon in Ulaanbaatar on June 15, 2005, as it is better grounded in Mongol custom and language.
Francis Woodman Cleaves offers an exhaustive record of the sources of Kokachin’s travels in “A Chinese Source Bearing on Marco Polo’s Departure from China and a Persian Source on His Arrival in Persia.” The last leg of Marco’s journey receives colorful treatment by Mike Edwards inNational Geographic, July 2001.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN / The Prodigal Son
The best, if not entirely reliable, source of information about Marco Polo’s life after his return from China can be found in the works of Giambattista Ramusio, a prominent Venetian official and an accomplished scholar of geography. Ramusio called his three-volume compilation of accounts by celebrated explorers Navigazioni e viaggi, and he led off with Marco’s chronicle, thus canonizing it. The well-connected Ramusio wrote that he believed the very first copy of Marco’s manuscript was in Latin; Ramusio based his translation on that manuscript and several others.
Although Ramusio sounds scholarly enough, he breathlessly reported and reinforced traditions concerning Marco Polo instead of relying on facts alone. Ramusio explained, “Because in the continual repetitions of the story that he gave more and more often when speaking of the magnificence of the Great Khan, he stated that his revenue was from ten to fifteen millions in gold, and in the way in speaking of many other riches of those countries, he spoke always in term of millions, they gave him as a nickname, Messer Marco Milioni, and thus I have seen it noted in public books of the Republic where mention is made of him, and the court of his house from that time to the present is commonly called the Corte del Milioni”—as it is to this day.
The story of the Polos’ return has been recounted by Hart (Marco Polo, page 171), among others. Ramusio’s comment about the “charming and gracious” Marco Polo can be found in Hart’s book, pages 175–177.
The best English-language account of the Republic’s travails is contained in John Julius Norwich’s A History of Venice. “For the past twenty years nothing seemed to have gone right for them,” he writes on page 173. “Militarily they had suffered defeats on land and sea, with serious losses, both in ships and human lives. They had been forced to watch, powerless, while the enemy penetrated to the very confines of the lagoon. Their neighbors, on many of whom they depended for trade, were in a greater or lesser degree unfriendly. Their chief colony, Crete, was once again in revolt. They had suffered the chilly joylessness—to say nothing of the spiritual dangers—of an interdict, the terrors of an earthquake, the misery of flood.”
Giorgio del Guerra’s Rustichello da Pisa has the fullest record of its subject’s life. For more on Rustichello’s efforts in the Arthurian romance genre, see Fabrizio Cigni’s Il romanzo arturiano di Rustichello da Pisa. John Larner, in Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World, pages 47–49, presents a precise analysis of Rustichello’s abilities and limitations.
It has long been assumed that Rustichello and Marco wrote their original manuscript in Latin, or perhaps an Italian dialect, but scholars have converged on French as the language in which they composed. As evidence, they cite a remark circulated by a Benedictine known as John the Long of Ypres; in 1350, he wrote that Marco’s book was originally composed “in the French vernacular”—for better or worse. Yule and Cordier (Travels, volume 1, page 83) offer a pithy assessment of Rustichello’s linguistic skills. “The author is at war with all the practices of French grammar; subject and object, numbers, moods, and tenses, are in consummate confusion,” they complain. “Italian words are constantly introduced, either quite in the crude or rudely Gallicized.” These grammatical and linguistic idiosyncrasies are consistent with the idea that the Venetian traveler dictated his account to the Tuscan romance writer, who wrote in French, “a language foreign to them both.”
By way of illustrating the similarity to Marco’s account, it is worth quoting the opening of Rustichello’s earlier work, Meliadus: “Lords, emperors and princes, dukes and counts, barons and knights and vavasours [feudal tenants who ranked just below barons] and townsfolk and all the worldly men of this world who are accustomed to taking pleasure in romances, if you take this book and have it read from end to end, you will hear all the great adventures that befell the knight errants of the time of King Uther Pendragon….”
For another summary of Marco’s long and lively posthumous reputation, see Yule and Cordier, volume 1, page 116 and following. Harry Hart, in his Marco Polo, page 212, traces Ramusio’s account of Marco’s father’s second family, but remains skeptical. Ramusio was prone to error, and may have mistaken other relatives for supposed offspring of Niccolò Polo. It is possible that Niccolò did not actually remarry.
Details of Marco’s return come from Hart’s Marco Polo, page 209, and Marco’s new home is described by Larner in Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World, page 44.
Throughout his account, Marco evinces little curiosity about his father’s earlier experiences among the Mongols, and loses track of him for years on end. Marco never appears to worry about his father’s whereabouts or well-being, or, for that matter, his uncle’s. Nor does he offer details about their trading activities. Marco concerns himself with his own experiences; it is as though his father and uncle exist for the sole purpose of transporting him to China and bringing him to Kublai Khan; thereafter, they cease to play an active role in his life.
Ramusio’s remarks about Marco’s reassuring gestures of filial piety are quoted in Hart, Marco Polo, page 215. Hart also discusses the Venetian mint (page 179).
Regarding the presentation copy given to Monseigneur Thiebault, Hart (page 219) suggests that the flattery of Charles of Valois contained in the inscription casts doubt on the document’s authenticity. Nevertheless, the inscription demonstrates that Marco’s work was held in high regard by important people.
Giuseppi Castellani notes that Marco’s will referred to two kinds of coins, lire consisting of Venetian dinars and lire of Venetian dinar grossi. For further discussion of Venetian coins in the will, see “I valori delle monete espresse nel testamento di Marco Polo,”Rivista mensile della Città di Venezia 3, no. 9 (September 1924): 257–258. It is generally considered to be futile to try to estimate the value of these coins in today’s money.
The original Latin text of the will can be found in The Travels of Marco Polo: The Complete Yule-Cordier Edition, volume 1, beginning on page 70. Concerning the feminine headdress found among Marco’s possessions, see Olschki, Marco Polo’s Asia, pages 104–108. And Hart discusses Marco’s death in Marco Polo, page 230, note.
For more on Marco’s estate and the legal actions undertaken by his heirs, see Rolfo Gallo’s “Nuovi documenti riguardanti Marco Polo e la sua familiglia.” This is a useful survey, but details of these long-ago transactions may not be accurate, or accurately translated. Gallo surmises that on their return from China, Marco and his father and uncle devoted their riches to enlarging their home or buying a new one. Moneta’s will is quoted by Hart in Marco Polo, page 61.
EPILOGUE / The Storyteller
Bonaguisi is quoted by Hart in Marco Polo, page 259; on page 248 Hart mentions Fantina’s legal actions.
Moule and Pelliot discuss the dissemination of Marco Polo’s account in The Description of the World on page 40 of volume 1. For an interesting analysis of its flaws and inconsistencies, see John Critchley, Marco Polo’s Book, especially pages 1–11. Critchley can be rigorous to a fault, but he has a wonderful eye for contradictions and instances of illogic. For a comparison of various early Marco Polo texts, see Moule and Pelliot’s version, The Description of the World, volume 1, beginning on page 499. And for a complete list of early Marco Polo books and manuscripts, see the same volume, beginning on page 509. Also see Yule and Cordier’s edition, volume 2, beginning on page 523.
Il “Milione” veneto, edited by Alvaro Barbieri and Alvise Andreose, with an introduction by Lorenzo Renzi (who also refers to the possibility of manuscripts chained to the Rialto Bridge), contains a comprehensive, detailed account of the origins and relationships among various Marco Polo manuscripts. Renzi credits Luigi Foscolo Benedetto, who “untangled the dense mass of manuscripts…and devised the first systematic review of the multitude of witnesses” in 1928. Drawing on Benedetto’s work, Renzi summarizes, in part: “The more than 130 codices that have handed down to us the different versions of Polo’s work can be split into two main groups, labeled A and B, whose archetypes issue from a partially corrupted apocryphal version (01) of the lost original (0). Between the two derivative copies of 01, that differed one from the other for the degree of deterioration of the reading and reduction of content, the prototype of the B group was closer to the model. Group A is further divided into F, the only complete testimony in original linguistic form, and three conspicuous families that emanate from three lost Franco-Italian exemplars (F1, F2, F3), similar to F, but unrelated to it. F1 is the model of the rewriting in good French attributed to Grégoire (FG); from F2 issues the most ancient Tuscan abridgement (TA); from F3 the version of the Veneto region that we hereby publish. Group B comprises instead four editions that represent, to different degrees and levels, ‘a phase before F,’ meaning a more conservative stage in the transmission of Marco’s book. It includes Z, a Latin version of rich content, V, a rather rough translation in Veneto dialect, L, a Latin abridgement and VB, a very free Venetian re-elaboration, full of interpolations and misunderstandings. These texts presume lost Franco-Italian influences that should have been very close to F in form and subject, but are generally more correct in interpretation and more complete through certain passages….”
Some scholars insist that Columbus made his annotations in 1497 or 1498. For an extended discussion of the issue, see Larner’s Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World, beginning on page 155, and El libro de Marco Polo anotado por Cristóbal Colón, edited by Juan Gil. Unlike Larner, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, in his Columbus, pages 36–37, states that the admiral consulted Marco’s Travels in advance of the first voyage to the New World.
Hart (Marco Polo) presents the Samuel Purchas quotation on page 111. John Livingston Lowes, in The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, page 324 and following, opines that Coleridge’s memory was faulty, and that the poet actually had his famous opium dream in 1796. Caroline Alexander’s noteworthy study The Way to Xanadu contains a discussion of Coleridge and Marco Polo on pages xiv and xv.
In The Medieval Expansion of Europe, second edition, pages 194–195, J.R.S. Phillips discusses Mandeville and Polo. The enlightening introduction by C.W.R.D. Moseley to the Penguin edition of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, pages 9–39, is also worth consulting.
Yule and Cordier’s assessments of Marco Polo can be found in volume 1, pages 1 and 106–107, of their edition of the Travels. Despite its devotion to the minutiae of Marco’s account, and its charming record of correspondence among Victorian gentleman travelers concerning their impressions of Polo, their massive edition has its idiosyncrasies, of which the modern reader should be cognizant. When they find a passage too explicit for their taste, they silently omit it. More seriously, they delete entire sections late in Marco’s account, claiming that they are inferior, or, as they put it (volume 2, page 456), “are the merest verbiage and repetition of narrative formulae without the slightest value”—a highly questionable assessment, and not in keeping with their generally estimable scholarship.
The question of maps is one of the most vexed in all of Polo scholarship. It is possible that Marco intended to include some routes of use to merchants in his account, but they have been lost, or Rustichello, a romance writer rather than a geographer, failed to include them. Some contenders, or pretenders, to the status of Marco Polo maps have surfaced over time, but their authenticity is doubtful. For a review of these intriguing items, see Leo Bagrow’s “The Maps from the Home Archives of the Descendents of a Friend of Marco Polo.” It should be noted that maps discussed by Bagrow are modern copies of older maps, or purported older maps. It is possible that the maps that have been attributed to Marco Polo are nothing more than an elaborate scholarly hoax. Johann Ruysch is quoted by Hart in Marco Polo, pages 260–261. Also refer to J. H. Parry, The Discovery of the Sea, first California edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), page 51.
The best discussion in English of the Great Wall, as it relates to Marco Polo’s account, is Arthur N. Waldron’s “The Problem of the Great Wall of China.”
For a succinct discussion of the donnybrook kicked up by Frances Wood, see Luce Boulnois, The Silk Road, pages 353–355. Igor de Rachewiltz offers a persuasive and detailed critique of Frances Wood’s book in his “F. Wood’s Did Marco Polo Go to China?” For an even more detailed critique of Wood’s book, see de Rachewiltz, “Marco Polo Went to China.” My thanks to Professor de Rachewiltz for an appendix of additions and corrections to his work, which includes his observation about Chinese cartographers.
For a fine technical discussion about how Marco’s account of escorting the Mongolian princess Kokachin to Persia amounts to proof that Marco Polo went to China and served Kublai Khan, see Francis Woodman Cleaves, “A Chinese Source Bearing on Marco Polo’s Departure from China and a Persian Source on His Arrival in Persia.”