CHAPTER THREE
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
THERE WOULD BE no turning back. Leaving behind the frustrating delays endured in Venice, Acre, and Jerusalem, the Polo company reached Armenia, where, to Marco’s way of thinking, their journey to the heart of the Mongol Empire began in earnest. Contrary to expectations, they found it easier to travel without a conspicuous papal escort attracting notice and entangling them in officialdom.
They were soon engulfed by doubt. At this early stage, Niccolò and Maffeo were more adept at negotiation and diplomacy than at long-distance travel. The tangle of roads and trails extending before them occasioned confusion. Even in an age of faith, a successful expedition depended on preparation and knowledge leavened with luck, which found expression in timing. In the months ahead, the Polo company would come up short.
They had planned to make their way south from Armenia by camel or ox, or, if necessary, on foot across hundreds of miles of dangerous mountain trails until they reached the strategically located port city of Hormuz, on the Persian Gulf. From there, they would arrange for passage on a sailboat and navigate the Strait of Hormuz into the Indian Ocean. If they had a particular landfall in mind, Marco does not reveal it; perhaps they intended to decide once they reached Hormuz and took stock of conditions there. Among merchants plying the Indian Ocean, major port cities scattered along India’s western coast were favored destinations. From there, the Polo company could trek overland to the Mongol capital.
The vague plan placed them in harm’s way. Marco quickly realized that Armenia was among the most bitterly contested regions they planned to traverse. If only things were as they had been in the days of Alexander the Great—or so Marco implies in his frequent and admiring references to that youthful military figure, who cast a giant shadow across the landscape. In 330 BC, Armenia had been Alexander’s base of operations, and his countless descendants were everywhere, or so Marco believed. Alexander was the one figure in antiquity with whom Marco appears to have been familiar, mostly through exposure to Alexander romances, those spurious but entertaining accounts of the heroic conqueror’s deeds; such stories were common in this part of the world, where the Mongols had their own Alexander legends as well.
Alexander’s armies were succeeded by waves of Muslims, Byzantine subjects, Turks, Egyptian Mamluks, and eventually European Crusaders, all of whom staked claims to Armenia in bloody succession. By the time the Polos reached Armenia, they found it “subject to the lord Great Khan”—that is, Kublai Khan—but with a twist. “Though the inhabitants are Christians,” Marco writes, “they are not rightly of the true faith as the Romans are”—in other words, they were heretics—“and this is for want of teachers, for they were formerly good Christians.” They were devoted to amusing themselves in this “land of great enjoyment.” In days long past, the Armenians had been renowned as valiant warriors, and well-mannered, “but now they are all become very slavish and mean and have no goodness, except that they are very good gluttons”—or so they appeared to the anxious tenderfoot from Venice. Perhaps that situation was for the best, and the vulnerable Polo company survived the time spent traveling through Armenia without incident.
THE CAUTION young Marco experienced in Armenia turned to revulsion when he encountered “the province of Turkoman,” today’s Turkey. For one thing, he says, the inhabitants “worship Mohammed and hold his religion,” which was off-putting for him. More than that, they “have a brutish law and live like beasts in all things; and they are ignorant people and have a barbarous language.” This was another way of saying that the people of the region were so different from any he had encountered, and so incomprehensible, that he regarded them with conventional European disdain. He did overcome his distaste long enough to remark on their nomadic ways: “Sometimes they stay on mountains, and sometimes on moors according to where they know there is good pasture for their flocks, because they do not plough the land but make their living from flocks alone. And these Turkomans rarely dwell except in the fields with their flocks, and they have garments of skins and houses of felt or skins.”
Their carpets, on the other hand, attracted his merchant’s eye, already attuned to fine craftsmanship. “The sovereign carpets of the world,” he notes, as if delivering a sales pitch, “and of the most beautiful colors.” He appraises “cloth of crimson silk and of other colors and of gold, very beautiful and rich, in very great quantity.” His keen appreciation suggests that he traded enthusiastically in them, and that their “beautiful and rich” colors helped the Polo company profit from the transactions. The Polos were as happy to trade as to travel.
TRYING TO ADJUST to life on the road, Marco found the mingling of cultural and spiritual traditions—to say nothing of language, diet, and dress—unnerving. “These Mongols do not care what God is worshipped in their lands,” he exclaims. “If only all are faithful to the lord Khan and quite obedient and give therefore the appointed tribute, and justice is well kept, thou mayest do what pleaseth thee with the soul.” Those living under Mongol rule could do whatever they wished, whether they were “Jew or Pagan or Saracen”—that is, Muslim—“or Christian.”
This religious freedom was a source of amazement to young Marco, but the Mongols’ attitude toward Christianity baffled him. “They confess…that Christ is Lord, but they say he is a proud Lord because he will not be with other gods but will be God above all others in the world. And so in some places they have a Christ of gold or silver and keep him hidden in some chest, and say that he is the great Lord supreme of the Christians.”
Marco would have to adapt; the Silk Road was no place for orthodoxy or single-mindedness.
IN TURKEY, Marco gathered tales of Noah’s Ark, said to perch atop Mount Ararat, the tallest peak in the country. Even as he became aware of the multiplicity of religions all around him, he remained eager for this proof of biblical events concerning “the ship of the world.” As he recalled, the Book of Genesis states that “on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.”
In the spirit of innocent belief, Marco searched for the evidence, only to be frustrated. In its unlikely resting place, “this ark is seen from very far because the mountain on which it rests is very high, and there is snow there almost all the year, and in one part there is…a large black thing seen from far amidst those snows; but close by nothing of it is seen.” The tantalizing feature was likely a frozen lava field glimpsed from afar, alternately revealed and concealed by shifting snows, not a ship.
As Marco related the story of the final resting place of the Ark, he lost his enthusiasm for it. He implicitly acknowledged that there was no Ark on Mount Ararat, at least none that he could see—but how wonderful if there were.
MARCO RETURNED to reality when he reached the thriving commercial center of Mosul, on the Tigris River. Here he had his first taste of a desert empire, with its frenzied bazaars and outpouring of goods. Mosul had been under strict Muslim rule until the Mongols conquered the city in 1182, and by the time the Polo company arrived, it was open to various religions, including Christianity. The tomb of the Old Testament prophet Jonah was to be found here, although Marco was unaware of it. As an aspiring merchant, he more likely became familiar with muslin, the strong, densely woven, unbleached fabric that had long been locally produced.
In Mosul, Marco encountered the followers of Nestorius, a fifth-century patriarch of Constantinople who taught that Jesus was divided into two natures, one human and the other divine, loosely bound together in what Nestorians called synapheia, or conjunction. According to the historian Edward Gibbon, Nestorius learned “nicely to discriminate the humanity of his master Christ from the divinity of the Lord Jesus.” But to the Roman Christians of Marco’s time, this notion amounted to heresy, although the issue was more subtle than Gibbon’s offhand remark would suggest. In Nestorian teaching, Mary could be venerated only as the mother of the human Jesus, not as the Mother of God. Rome, in contrast, insisted on the “hypostatic” or fundamental unity of Jesus’ two natures. Intellectuals on all sides of the question debated this subject endlessly, and it is entirely possible that the dispute arose more from varying interpretations of the Greek philosophical terms in which they framed their discussion than from actual differences. Nevertheless, a permanent rift between the Nestorians and Rome remained in place.
Nestorians established their patriarchate at Baghdad, and their influence expanded throughout Syria, Asia Minor, Iraq, Persia, and even China. In 735, they had applied to the emperor of the Tang dynasty to build a church in the imperial capital, Ch’ang-an (now Xi’an). They received permission and made the city into a Nestorian hub, where they taught their adherents both the Old and New Testaments and occasionally converted Chinese and others. They prospered despite efforts to suppress their church until the end of the Tang dynasty in 907, when they scattered.
Throughout the Nestorians’ struggle to find a safe haven in Asia, much of Western Europe remained perplexed by these devout “Eastern Christians,” as they were sometimes called. Marco frequently took note of the Nestorians he encountered, but he considered them enigmatic and “inferior”—that is, heretical.
BAGHDAD, still the seat of the Nestorian Church in Marco Polo’s day, lies 220 miles to the southeast of Mosul. Marco discusses Baghdad with an air of confidence, but it is unlikely that he actually visited the city. To obscure that omission, he resorts to telling stories, beginning with a lengthy miracle tale pitting the thirty-seventh caliph, or Muslim ruler, of Baghdad against a humble Christian cobbler, with the fantastic outcome that the caliph secretly converted to Christianity. Rustichello’s fingerprints can be found all over this elaborate and somewhat cloying set piece.
In a similar spirit, Marco speaks with gusto about the end of the caliphate at the hands of the Mongols. In this case, his account follows what is known about actual events. He sets the scene in 1255—actually, it was 1258—when Hülegü, one of Genghis Khan’s grandsons, vowed to conquer the ancient caliphate and claim it for the rapidly expanding Mongol Empire. Since its heyday under Harun ar-Rashid over four centuries earlier, Baghdad had deteriorated, but it still posed a formidable challenge to would-be invaders. To forestall an assault, envoys of the caliph called on Hülegü and cautioned, “If the Caliph is killed, the whole universe will fall into chaos, the sun will hide its face, rain will no longer fall, and plants will cease to grow.”
Undeterred, and perhaps even provoked by the warning, Hülegü “resolved to capture it by a ruse rather than by force. Having about a hundred thousand cavalry, without counting infantry, he wished to give the Caliph and his followers in the city the impression that they were only a few.” Hülegü charged the city gates with few warriors, and “the Caliph, seeing this force was a small one, did not take much account of it,” whereupon Hülegü made a “pretence of flight and so lured [the caliph] back past the woods and thickets where his troops lay in ambush. Here he trapped his pursuers and crushed them. So the Caliph was captured together with the city.” Mongol warriors killed eight thousand inhabitants in the attack; only the lives of Christians were spared, thanks to the intervention of Hülegü’s wife, who shared their faith.
Marco describes a grotesque end to the caliph’s life: Hülegü confined the Muslim leader to his tower of treasure and let him starve to death amid his wealth. In fact, the caliph’s execution was more bizarre.
Despite their brutality, the Mongols abhorred the thought of spilling blood. Their methods of “bloodless” execution included smothering by stuffing the victim’s mouth with stones or feces. The caliph was subjected to a more dignified but even harsher ordeal. On February 10, 1258, he was wrapped in a carpet and trodden to death by horses. His family was also said to be executed, with the exception of a daughter, who became a slave in Hülegü’s harem.
After the Mongol conquest, Baghdad’s population shrank to a tenth of its former size. Nevertheless, the provincial capital still traded on its reputation as a center of commerce and of intellect, storied for its madrassas, libraries, giant moat, and, it was said, 27,000 public baths. Legends of the former glories of Baghdad and the court of Harun ar-Rashid remained potent enough to impress even Marco Polo.
IN HIS ACCOUNT, Marco abruptly turns his attention from Baghdad to Tabriz, the city reputedly built by one of the wives of Harun ar-Rashid, whose luxurious court served as the setting for the tales known as The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment. In this instance, the Venetian actually visited, and came away impressed by, the thriving commercial center—“the most splendid city in the province,” he calls it, as if compiling a guidebook for travelers. With its “market for merchandise from India and Baghdad, from Mosul and Hormuz, and from many other places,” Tabriz is worth a journey, he says, if only to see the “attractive orchards, full of excellent fruit” surrounding the city.
Even as he extols the commercial life of Tabriz, Marco expresses misgivings about the inhabitants, a “mixed lot” who were “good for very little.” The variety of people—“Armenians and Nestorians, Jacobites and Georgians and Persians”—competed strenuously against one another, and despite its prosperity, the area seethed with religious violence. “The Saracens of the region are wicked and treacherous,” he reports. He deviates from his habit of dismissing Muslims as idolaters, and sets forth his understanding of some disturbing facets of their laws: “Any harm they may do to one who does not accept their law, and any appropriation of his goods, is no sin at all. And if they suffer death or injury at the hands of Christians, they are accounted martyrs.” He asserts, “That is why they are converting the Tartars and many other nations to their law, because they are allowed great license to sin.”
It came as a relief to Marco to learn that Tabriz harbored a monastery housing a mendicant order of monks. Judging from their clothing, he guessed they were Carmelites, and noted the time they spent “weaving woolen girdles” to lay on the altar during Mass and to distribute to “their friends and to noblemen” in the belief that the girdles relieved pain. These phenomena Marco reports as if they were the most natural things in the world.
Although other Venetians were scarce, merchants from Genoa had long been represented in Tabriz, and were much better known. For them, as for merchants across Asia, Tabriz served as an important pearl market, perhaps the largest of all, supplied by abundant harvests from the Persian Gulf. The Polo company found that bargaining for pearls in the Tabriz market was a serious matter governed by firm rules. A buyer and seller squatted facing each other, their hands swathed in fabric. They haggled over the price not by speaking aloud, lest the terms be overheard by others seeking an advantage, but by squeezing each other’s fingers and wrists to describe and dispute the quality of the goods, and to convey the amount of the bid offered, and accepted. This unusual form of negotiation meant that bystanders had no indication of the actual terms of the deal, and the price remained flexible from one transaction to the next.
FROM TABRIZ, Marco entered Savah, in Persia, and then Kerman, known for its Persian rugs. Here Marco’s concerns about Islam relaxed a bit, and he found himself enjoying the climate and coveting the turquoise concealed in nearby mountains. He expresses admiration for the locals’ skill in fashioning “the equipment of a mounted warrior—bridles, saddles, spurs, swords, bows, quivers, and every sort of armor.” Even their artful needlework attracted his eye, as did the spectacle of falconry.
In the brilliant skies overhead, Marco caught his first glimpse of the aristocratic sport that would become a passion for him in his travels throughout Asia. It was one of the few endeavors common to both East and West, and for Marco, as for other gentlemen, it was the embodiment of power and grace. “In the mountains are bred the best falcons in the world, and the swiftest in flight,” he reports. “They are red on the breast and under the tail between the thighs. And you may take my word that they fly at such incalculable speed that there is no bird that can escape from them by flight.” So young Marco scanned the firmament, studying the swift aerial combat that mirrored human predatory behavior.
IN HIS SURVEY of Persia, Marco never pauses to indicate when, or even whether, he visited all the places that he describes, but occasionally he traces these early travels of his with a precision born of experience. His departure from the Persian kingdom of Kerman, in which he tarried, conveys a sense of the endlessly unfolding vistas before him. “When the traveler leaves the city of Kerman, he rides for seven days across a plateau, finding no lack of towns and villages and homesteads. It is a pleasant and satisfying country to ride through,” he notes, “for it is well stocked with game and teems with partridges.” After this passage, he writes of coming to a great escarpment, “from which the road leads steadily downhill for two days through a country abounding all the way in fruits of many kinds. There used to be homesteads here; but now there is not one, but nomads live here with their grazing flocks. Between the city of Kerman and this escarpment the cold winter is so intense that it can scarcely be warded off by any number of garments and furs.”
In Persia, he beheld evidence of the region’s intense geologic activity. Here, active faults and volcanoes had created some of the most calamitous events on the planet. The Polo company sought safer surroundings in the pleasant town of Rudbar, high in the Alborz Mountains in northwest Persia. Rudbar served as a merchants’ gathering place and offered lush pasture for livestock. The picturesque grazing herds inspired Marco to exercise the powers of description that would eventually win him fame. “Let me tell you first about the oxen,” he writes. “They are of great size and pure white like snow. Their hair is short and smooth because of the heat. Their horns are thick and stumpy and not pointed. Between their shoulders they have a round hump fully two palms in height. They are the loveliest things in the world to look at. When you want to load them, they lie down like camels; then, when they are loaded, they stand up and carry their loads very well, because they are exceedingly strong. There are also sheep as big as asses, with tails so thick and plump that they weigh a good thirty pounds. Fine, fat beasts they are, and good eating.”
JUST AS MARCO was beginning to feel at home in the Persian mountains, he stiffened at the mention of the Karaunas, “bands of marauders who infest the country.” The Karaunas preyed on the plump, grazing herds. More terrifying still, they were reputed to be adept at performing a diabolic enchantment that turned day into night over a distance as far as a man could ride during the space of seven days. “They know this country very well,” Marco says. “When they have brought on the darkness, they ride side by side, sometimes as many as ten thousand of them together,…so that they overspread the region they mean to rob. Nothing they find in the open country, neither man nor beast nor goods, can escape capture.”
The Polo company fled to the seaport of Hormuz, but not before they had several close encounters with these predators. “I assure you,” Marco’s account states with emphasis, “that Master Marco himself narrowly evaded capture by these robbers in the darkness they had made. He”—that is, Marco—“escaped to a town called Kamasal; but not before many of his companions were taken captive and sold [as slaves], and some put to death.”
Of this dangerous episode, Marco says nothing more. Events at their next stop outweighed all else.
HORMUZ ENJOYED a reputation as a prosperous haven on the Persian Gulf. Here the Polos expected to travel aboard one of the port’s many sailing vessels to a destination in India, and then proceed to China. Marco remarks on the “excellent harbor” and confidently notes that “merchants come here by ship from India, bringing all sorts of spices and precious stones and pearls and cloths of silk and gold and elephants’ tusks and many other wares. In this city they sell them to others, who distribute them to various customers through the length and breadth of the world. It is a great center of commerce, with many cities and towns subordinate to it.”
For the wandering Polo company, the sight of so much water after months in the desert evoked memories of Venice and the Adriatic Sea, but on closer inspection, Hormuz was not quite the gem it had seemed from afar. For one thing, “If a merchant dies here, the king confiscates all his possessions.” The climate also presented a hazard to unwary travelers. Wind from the surrounding desert could turn “so overpoweringly hot that it would be deadly if it did not happen that, as soon as men are aware of its approach, they plunge neck-deep into the water and so escape from the heat.”
While in Hormuz, Marco was horrified to learn that the deadly wind had surprised no less than six thousand soldiers (five thousand on foot, the rest on horseback) in the desert and “stifled them all, so that not one survived to carry back the news to their lord.” Eventually, the “men of Hormuz” learned of the mass deaths and decided to bury the corpses to prevent infection, but “when they gripped them by the arms to drag them to the graves, they [the corpses] were so parched by the tremendous heat that the arms came loose from the trunk, so that they [the men] had to dig the graves beside the corpses and heave them in.”
The sailing vessels, when he finally inspected them, were a disappointment. “Their ships are very bad, and many of them founder, because they are not fastened with iron nails but stitched together with thread made of coconut husks,” Marco reports in dismay. Nor did their other features inspire much confidence. “The ships have one mast, one sail, and one rudder, and are not decked; when they have loaded them, they cover the cargo with skins, and on top of these they put the horses that they ship to India for sale.” The design was cause for concern; Marco preferred the security of two rudders, two masts, and proper decks. These stripped-down vessels seemed to ask for trouble at the first hint of foul weather. Worse, “They have no iron for nails; so they employ wooden pegs and stitch [them] with thread. This makes it very risky to sail in these ships. And,” Marco says, “you can take my word that many of them sink, because the Indian Ocean is very stormy.” As if all that were not bad enough, these leaky ships were not even caulked properly with pitch; instead, they were “anointed with a sort of fish oil.”
The Polo company had seen enough. They would not sail to India, after all. Earning their livelihood by making calculations, and accustomed to living by their wits, they decided the prospect was too dangerous.
They left Hormuz as quickly as they had come, and returned to Kerman, where they rethought their method for reaching China and the court of Kublai Khan. Rather than trust their lives to precarious water craft, they would move in accordance with the rhythm of the camel’s languorous gait along the ancient traders’ routes that have come to be known as the Silk Road.
AS THEIR CAMELS and donkeys headed into the wasteland, Marco apprehensively noted “a desert of sixty miles in which water to drink is sometimes not found.” The Polos were concerned both for themselves and for the beasts of burden on which their lives and fortunes depended. At one point, they spent three days without sighting water they could use. “What water there is,” Marco reports, “is brackish and green as meadow grass and so bitter that no one could bear to drink it.” It was not only unpleasant, it was downright dangerous: “Drink one drop of it and you void your bowels ten times over. It is the same with the salt that is made from it. If you eat one little granule, it produces violent diarrhea.” Driven mad with thirst, animals that drank the water suffered as terribly.
And so their caravan moved on. For transportation—indeed, for survival itself—the Polo company relied on the Bactrian camel (Camelus bactrianus), which had served travelers along the Silk Road since biblical times. Unlike the single-humped dromedary, common in North Africa, the Bactrian camel has two lopsided humps to store fat, a long neck, minimal ears, and massive teeth, some of them pointed. The animals come in as many colors as the desert itself, from dirty white to deep, gritty brown.
Camels are suited to desert crossings. Their broad cloven hoofs resist sinking into loose sand, and their large nostrils are lined with hairs and can close like valves to prevent the inhalation of flying sand. Bactrians are especially sturdy animals, accustomed to sleeping on hard surfaces, with a thick, heavy coat to protect their bodies. They can go for several days without water, and even longer if they find plants on which to feed.
It has long been noted that camels possess a sixth sense for traversing the desert. In the third century AD, the Chinese writer Kuo P’u observed, “The camel is an unusual domestic animal; it carries a saddle of flesh on its back; swiftly it dashes over the shifting sands; it manifests its merit in dangerous places; it has secret understanding of springs and sources; subtle indeed is its knowledge!”
Marco, his father, and his uncle were acutely aware of their beasts of burden; the animals’ coarse, vital smell filled the nostrils of their masters. Atop their camels, the Polos did not so much stride as stagger. Yet a sturdy Bactrian camel can carry more than six hundred pounds, and under favorable conditions can cover thirty miles a day. For reliable transport across the desert, no other creature could match these characteristics.
After several days of strenuous travel atop their camels, the exhausted and thirsty travelers reached their first oasis.
SAPURGAN was the name of their salvation, “a town beautiful and great and fertile and of great plenty of all things needful for life.” There were stands of trees, perhaps poplars, their leaves bright and vivid in the desert air, and the region’s famous melons, tasting so ripe and sweet as to seem “the best in the world.” They sustained life year round, thanks to the preservation techniques Marco observed. “When they are dried they cut them in slices like threads or strips of leather,” he says, “and they become sweeter than honey.”
Still in the Persian mountains, Marco fell under the spell of another town, Tunocain. Entering early manhood, he was becoming acutely aware of women, and he dared to describe them with a robust appreciation and informality at odds with the accounts of pious miracles that Rustichello slipped into the account. The women of Tunocain caught his eye and, for the moment, engaged his heart; he calls them “the most beautiful in the world.” They were Muslim women, whose like he had previously dismissed as idolaters, but now he thought of them constantly. Even allowing for his penchant for overstatement, this revelation suggests that Marco’s experiences on the road were beginning to influence his assumptions about the world around him.
Near Tunocain, Marco took note of another shrine, the Dry Tree. Although he did not trouble to explain the tree’s significance to his audience, many knew that the Dry Tree appeared in Christian legends, and in Alexander romances, as an ancient, even immortal phenomenon possessing magical powers. Reverence for the Dry Tree, a startling apparition in this arid, mountainous area, seems to hark back to a primitive form of tree or nature worship. Marco describes the phenomenon with enough detail to suggest that he had actually seen it: “It is very large and thick, and its leaves are green on one side and white on the other, and it forms burrs like the burrs of chestnuts, but there is nothing inside them. They are not good to eat. Of its wood balsam is made. It is solid and very hard wood.” But he may have been relying on hearsay for his information.
AS MARCO LOST HIMSELF in a reverie of the region’s lore, his company advanced into the territory of the Assassins, who threatened powerful warlords and heads of state. Their notoriety had reached Western Europe as a result of a knife-wielding Assassin’s attack on Prince Edward (shortly to become King Edward I) in Jerusalem barely a year after the Polo company departed. Seriously wounded, Edward survived multiple stab wounds and fled home to England, but incidents such as these gave the Assassins a lasting mystique as a secretive fraternity of terrorists capable of striking when least expected. Marco and his collaborator realized that recounting tales of the Assassins would send a frisson of horror through their audience, and they played up the cult’s sinister mystique for all it was worth.
Relying on stories passed to him by his father and uncle, Marco explains that these notorious raiders were followers of a mythical-sounding but all-too-real figure known as the Old Man, who ruled from a fastness called Alamut, “Eagle’s Nest.” The Assassins’ name, he says, derived from the Arabic phrase meaning “those who eat hashish”—a ritual they performed to nerve themselves for their missions. He relates how the Old Man drugged and manipulated his followers to do his bidding: “Sometimes the Old Man, when he wished to kill any lord who made war or was his enemy, made them put some of these youths into that Paradise by fours and by tens and by twenties just as he wished, in this way. For he had opium…given to them by which they fell asleep immediately…and they slept three days and three nights. Then he had them taken and put into that garden, and made them wake.” At that moment, they beheld alluring women “singing and playing and making all the caresses and dalliance that they could imagine, giving them food and most delicate wines, so that intoxicated with so many pleasures and with the little streams of milk and wine that they saw,” they were made to believe that they were “truly in Paradise.” In summoning this vision of evil, Marco may well have exaggerated the role hashish played in the Assassin cult. Use of the drug was widespread in the region, not confined to Assassins, and the effects may have debilitated rather than emboldened its users.
The zealous Assassins inspired dread in surrounding kingdoms. Marco reports: “Many kings and many lords paid tribute to him [the Old Man] and cultivated his friendship for fear that he might bring about their death. This happened because at the time the nations were not united in their allegiance, but torn apart by conflicting loyalties and purposes.”
That was the state of affairs until 1256, when Kublai Khan’s brother, Hülegü, dislodged the Assassins from their Eagle’s Nest. Marco writes of a three-year-long siege that starved out the dangerous band and ended with their deaths. And he confidently reports, “To this moment, there has not been found any such Old Man nor any such assassin.” That was not strictly true, for remnants of the Assassins concealed themselves in the mountains in Marco’s day, their ability to menace their neighbors greatly reduced, but their notorious reputation still vital.
With his artful description, Marco perpetuated the Assassins’ infamy in the Western consciousness, but as he admitted, his account was based on dramatic hearsay rather than personal experience. In reality, the sect, founded by Hasan ibn al-Sabbah in 1090, was more complex than he suggested. Its fanatical members came to be known as Nizaris (so called after their caliph, Nizar ibn al-Sabbah) or as Ismai’ilis (a type of Shiite). They did inhabit a mountain fastness called Alamut, located south of the Caspian Sea. As the sect grew, outposts spread across Persia and Syria, and members were rigidly segregated into classes; potential martyrs and assassins belonged to the highest category. The young Venetian was unaware that Muslims also dreaded and stigmatized the Ismai’ilis, whom they considered dangerously heretical.
MARCO REMAINED uneasy as the Polo company gradually descended from the terrifying castle “through beautiful valleys and through beautiful slopes” to a lush plain “where there is much beautiful grass and much good pasture for cattle and fruit enough and of all things to eat in great abundance.”
The Polo company then made its cautious way eastward through what is now Afghanistan, the nexus of Central Asia. Seven hundred years later, the legendary English voyager Nancy Hatch Dupree would describe the road to Balkh in her book of the same name: “Here gnarled branches, blackened with dampness, form abstract patterns against the glistening snows of winter. These stark pictures soften as spring spreads a blanket of soft green; tulips bloom and children fashion delicate pink wands for the passerby. As spring advances, cherry, apricot, pear, and almond burst into bloom, their beauty sharp against brilliant blue skies or rain-laden black clouds. With summer the valley grows lush and fills with busy activity until the cold night air of fall adds riotous shades of yellow, gold and red before winter descends once more.” Such was the enchanted landscape that greeted the Polo company.
For six days they rode through these idyllic valleys dotted with peaceful Muslim villages and towns, a passage marking the beginning in earnest of their journey to China.
BALKH, their next stopover, was the most renowned and troubled metropolis in Afghanistan. It was, Marco says, “a noble city and great” and “the largest and most beautiful [city] found in those parts.” Or so it had been.
In its ancient prime, Balkh (or Bactria, as it was then known) had been home to the prophet Zarathustra (or Zoroaster), believed to have been born in about 628 BC, who brought a new religion to Persia. Zoroastrianism incorporated fire worship, a belief in the occult, many deities, and, in its later forms, an eternal flame burning at its Temple of Fire. Zarathustra’s mystique spread far and wide. Tradition holds that the prophet was murdered by nomads at the age of seventy-seven as he worshipped before his fire altar in Balkh. Much later, Arabs swept in and imposed Islam, designating Balkh as the Mother of Cities. And so it remained until the Mongols overran the region, and, in Marco’s words, “ravaged and wickedly damaged it.” Marco was referring to the events of 1220, when Genghis Khan led 100,000 cavalry through Balkh, leveling the city for all time.
His methods were exceptionally brutal. The thirteenth-century Persian historian Juvaini wrote that Genghis Khan “commanded that the population of Balkh, small and great, few and many, both men and women, should be driven out onto the plain and divided up according to the usual custom into hundreds and thousands to be put to the sword.” Returning to Balkh, he ordered that “a number of fugitives hidden in nooks and crannies…be killed. And whenever a wall was left standing, the Mongols pulled it down and…wiped out all traces of culture from the region.”
For the Mongols, these atrocities formed a necessary part of empire building. For their victims, the War of Mongol Aggression, as it might be termed, was a calamity without end. “With one stroke,” Juvaini continued, “the regions thereof became a desert and the greater part of the living [became] dead and their skin and bones [became] crumbling dust; and the mighty were humbled.” A devastated fort in the Islamic city of Bamiyan became known as Sharhr-i-Gholghola, “City of Noise.” It was also known as the Silent City, the Screaming City, or even the Cursed City, in memory of the Mongol massacre that exterminated every man, woman, child, and beast. Not even plants survived the Mongol assault. Although it remained a gateway to the Silk Road and the riches of China, Balkh never recovered from the slaughter.
In Balkh, Marco felt the endless pain of conquest. His powers of empathy growing, he could practically hear the screams of the victims as the Mongol invaders destroyed this once-prosperous enclave, and he recoiled at the spectacle of a civilization reduced to ashes by cruel invaders. He preferred boyish reveries of a prior invader, Alexander the Great, and marveled that he was following in the footsteps of Alexander’s army. It was said, and Marco believed, that blue-eyed inhabitants of the area were descended from Alexander’s soldiers (though the soldiers did not necessarily have blue eyes), and that local sheep and horses had as their ancestors the army’s animals. Alexander’s horse, Bucephalus, had reputedly sired local horses whose descendants still roamed the hills.
Marco took heart from Alexander’s superhuman example: if the young general could survive these treacherous parts, so could he. The Polos, of course, were merchants and traders, not conquerors, but they faced many of the same obstacles in their quest to lay claim to great wealth. Passing through these violent historical currents as if in a slipstream, the Polos were a commercial army in search of great natural riches.