CHAPTER FOUR
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree….
THE POLO COMPANY found the riches they sought in Taican (now the Afghan province of Talikan), where they encountered a precious commodity: salt. Mountains of salt, to be exact, “the best in the world,” and so hard that it took a great iron pick to pry it loose. Salt was a form of currency (Roman soldiers had been paid in salt), salt was preservation; salt was an engine of ancient and medieval economies. There was more to attract the Polos’ interest, for the region’s markets abounded in almonds, pistachios, and corn harvested from the alluring surrounding groves and fields. They were ready to get down to the business of trading.
Marco could not abide the people whom they encountered, “thieves and robbers and murderers” whose misdeeds were fueled by liquor. He reports: “They stay a great deal in taverns,” drinking fermented wine. Still, he was fascinated by their hunting prowess, which extended to the bloody chore of capturing porcupines: “When the hunters wish to catch them and set the very fierce large dogs upon them, the porcupines gather themselves all together and…shake themselves each with great fury and run and then throw the quills, which are lightly fastened on their backs,…at the dogs and men and wound them badly, very often in several places. Then the hunters go upon them and take them.”
Before long, Marco and his father and uncle were on their way once more.
NO ONE in the Polo company, or anyone else at that time, announced that he was going on the Silk Road; there was no such thing. Dealers trading in gems, spices, and silks and other fabrics traveled along a casual but ancient network of tracks, trails, and mountain passes snaking across Central Asia and China, encountering the occasional monk or missionary. The Silk Road as a distinct entity was not so christened until 1877, when Baron Ferdinand von Richtofen, a German geographer, conceived of the evocative but artificial image Seidenstrasse. Although the name suggests romance, luxury, and sensuality, the arduous experience of traveling the route was one of hardship and danger undertaken by those in search of wealth, conquest, or salvation.
Its tributaries extended from Central Asia—precisely where the “Silk Road” began would be impossible to say—to the eastern shore of China. Parts of the route ran south, deep into India. The Polo company entered near the westernmost reaches. Like other merchants, they traveled as part of a large caravan (in Persian, the word karvan meant “company”) and soon found themselves dependent on an extraordinary network of caravansaries—combination dormitories and stables catering to itinerant merchants. Often located near a stream, an oasis, or a village with a mosque, the caravansary gave an appearance of forbidding and secure massiveness, a sheer wall rising several stories above the ground, relieved by air holes near the bottom and small windows near the top. Travelers seeking entrance had to pass through a massive gate, which admitted them, camels and all, and was secured at night with iron chains. Within, they found a courtyard paved with flagstones on which dozens of exhausted camels and donkeys crouched around a central fountain ringed by a cloister, and beyond that area, storerooms and stables. In one corner of the quadrangular structure, a cooking fire burned, the food giving off pungent, mouthwatering aromas. A steward posted near the entrance supplied food and water, and kept order within. Stairways led to small, austere lodging rooms above the stables. Meanwhile, the travelers’ animals were tied up in the serai, or stables, below.
In Afghanistan, the caravansaries were known as robats—from an ancient term for rope to tie a horse. The Polos encountered robats throughout their travels along the Silk Road in Afghanistan; the structures were closely spaced, with a bit less than twenty miles (roughly a day’s journey) separating them. The distance was measured locally in farsakhs, with five farsakhs adding up to a full day’s journey. Caravans usually included both camels and donkeys, handled by a trainer known as a sareban, or camel rider, who rode atop the first camel. A surefooted donkey often preceded the camel, whose head was tied to the donkey’s tail. With this simple but practical method of travel, merchants trekked thousands of miles across Asia.
MARCO WAS NOT the first to travel what came to be called the Silk Road; he had been preceded by generations of Mongols, Turks, Arabs, mercenaries, and monks. Nor was he the first Westerner to describe his adventures in Asia. Nearly a hundred years earlier, Benjamin of Tudela, a rabbi from Navarre, had much the same idea concerning his journey. Benjamin’s travels brought him into contact with local officials, colorful characters, and other merchants. His account described commercial conditions from Barcelona to Constantinople, Baghdad, and points east.
From his vantage point in Baghdad, Benjamin compiled a Book of Travels, covering the years 1160 to 1173. Collecting reliable information about Jews in Palestine, Thebes, Antioch, and Tyre and on Mount Parnassus, he took note of Jewish merchants, dyers, shipowners, peasants, and laborers. He remarked on practices of obscure Jewish sects and wrote an account of a Jewish pseudo-Messiah and mystic in Persia, David Alroy, who had burst into prominence shortly before Benjamin’s excursion. In all, he included the names of 248 leaders of Jewish communities that he encountered throughout the Diaspora.
His curiosity led him to the cult of the Assassins—the same sect that would later alarm Marco Polo. “They fulfill whatever he commands them, whether it be a matter of life or death,” wrote Benjamin of their leader, in words that prefigure the Venetian’s account.
Unlike later merchants, Benjamin of Tudela did not penetrate deeply into Asia. After getting as far east as Baghdad, he returned home safely to Spain by way of Sicily. Nevertheless, he had seen much of the world. Despite his accomplishment, Benjamin of Tudela’s account, written with a collaborator in Hebrew, remained unknown in Europe, except among a handful of Jews. It was not published until 1543, and not translated into other tongues until the seventeenth century.
EUROPE remained in the thrall of legends of Prester John, the Christian leader who supposedly occupied a wealthy empire somewhere in Asia or Africa—no one knew exactly where, but theories abounded. The Church longed to make contact with him in order to fight the infidels inhabiting the gulf between East and West. Prester John was an illusion, but a powerful one, inspiring Christian missionaries to undertake pilgrimages to the East. Beginning in 1235, a series of papal bulls conferred upon missionary friars spiritual powers exceeding those of European bishops. They could, all on their own, undertake to combat heretics, convert infidels, reconcile schismatics—in other words, do whatever it took to bring recognizable, uniform Christianity to those who knew little of Rome, or who belonged to ancient sects that had gone their own way for centuries.
The earliest known missionary to travel to China, pioneering the route that the Polo company would follow, was Giovanni da Pian del Carpini, a Franciscan based in Cologne. Like Buddhist monks, Franciscans combined a vow of strict poverty with strong evangelical tendencies, and like Buddhists, they were suited for the rigors of life along the Silk Road. In 1245, carrying documents from Pope Innocent IV, Carpini and another Franciscan known as Benedict of Poland endured severe privation as they journeyed to an outpost on the bank of the Dnieper River, at the western edge of the Mongol Empire. Then, trekking to another Mongol outpost on the Lower Volga, they underwent the indignity of submitting, or being forced to submit, to a Mongol purification rite involving close proximity to crackling fires.
As they waited for the papal letters to be translated from Latin into Russian, Arabic, and Mongol tongues, they nearly perished from starvation, subsisting on a diet of millet gruel made with snow melt. Given the treatment to which they were subjected, the two beleaguered missionaries may not have realized that the Mongols were inclined to be respectful of holy men, no matter what their affiliation. Once their identity was confirmed, the missionaries were free to travel east.
Ahead lay a trek of three thousand miles across the Steppe and arid desert of Mongolia. The travelers covered the distance in fifteen months to reach the Mongol capital of Karakorum as a new khan, Güyük, was about to receive his title. Güyük welcomed the two missionaries from the West, heard their summons to Christianity, and replied that he would oblige only if the pope and all the secular leaders of Europe came to Karakorum to swear allegiance to him. Or, in the words of the new khan, “You must come yourself at the head of all your kings and prove to us your fealty and allegiance. And if you disregard the command of God and disobey Our instructions, we shall look upon you as Our enemy. Who ever recognizes and submits to the Son of God…will be wiped out.” It was a dispiriting conclusion to their arduous journey.
In November 1246, the two monks made their way back through wind-whipped snowstorms bearing disappointing news for Pope Innocent IV. Although the mission failed to achieve its stated purpose, it had been a remarkable journey of exploration. Carpini is believed to have been the first Westerner since AD 900 to travel east of Baghdad and return safely from the great no-man’s-land that was Asia.
CARPINI compiled the first comprehensive description of Mongol life for Western audiences, a work called Historia Mongalorum (History of the Mongols), or occasionally Liber Tartarorum (Book of the Tartars). No match for the drama animating Marco’s account, Carpini’s has the benefit of clarity and simplicity. The first eight chapters cover the country, climate, manners, religion, character, history, policies, and military tactics of the Mongols; the ninth is devoted to the other regions Carpini visited along the way. The account helped to explain and humanize the Mongols for Western readers by characterizing them as a remarkable and resourceful people.
Carpini vividly evoked the strange but noble appearance of the people who seemed destined to rule Asia and possibly Europe: “In appearance, the Tartars are quite different from all other men, for they are broader than other people between the eyes and across the cheekbones. Their cheeks also are rather prominent above their jaws; they have a flat and small nose, their eyes are little, and their eyelids raised up to the eyebrows. For the most part, but with a few exceptions, they are slender about the waist; almost all are of medium height. Hardly any of them grow beards, although some have a little hair on the upper lip and chin and this they do not trim.”
He was also alert to the most distinctive feature of Mongol grooming, the tonsure: “On the top of the head they have a tonsure like clerics, and as a general rule all shave from one ear to the other to the breadth of three fingers, and this shaving joins on to the tonsure. Above the forehead also they all likewise shave to two fingers’ breadth, but the hair between this shaving and the tonsure they allow to grow until it reaches their eyebrows, and, cutting more from each side of the forehead than in the middle, they make the hair…long; the rest of the hair they grow like women, and they make it into two braids which they bind, one behind each ear.”
He provided a close-up of Mongol dress: “The married women have a very full tunic, open to the ground in front. On their head, they have a round thing made of twigs or bark…and on the top there is a long and slender cane of gold or silver or wood, or even a feather, and it is sewn into a cap which reaches to the shoulders. The cap as well as the object is covered with buckram, velvet, or brocade, and without this headgear they never go into the presence of men and by it they are distinguished from other women.”
Despite his observation that some Mongol men kept as many as fifty or even a hundred wives, Carpini complimented the women on their chastity, and the Mongols as a whole on their honesty. He seems less secure but equally intrigued when discussing their fervent shamanism. They appeared to lack a concept of damnation and Hell everlasting, but, to his relief, they did believe in an afterlife, although it bore a strong resemblance to their present circumstances—eating, drinking koumiss, and tending their herds.
He warned of the extreme climate conditions awaiting travelers on the Silk Road: “The weather there is astonishingly irregular, for in the middle of the summer, when other places are normally enjoying very great heat, there is fierce thunder and lightning, which cause the death of many men, and at the same time there are very heavy snowfalls.” As if that were not bad enough, “there are also bitterly cold winds, so violent that at times men can ride on horseback only with great effort.” Such was the daunting prospect Marco faced as he made his way slowly to Kublai Khan.
CARPINI’S DATA, gleaned from personal observation, circulated across Europe in manuscript form, and became part of a popular medieval encyclopedia, the Speculum historiale of Vincent of Beauvais.
In its organization, subject matter, and scope, Carpini’s Historia anticipated Marco Polo’s Travels. Although he had not seen Carpini’s account before setting out for China, Marco gave every sign of having become familiar with it by the time he wrote his own, far more elaborate work, and he took significant cues from it. Like Carpini, Marco divided his account into sections discussing aspects of Mongol life, and like Carpini, he wished to humanize this tribe of noble savages. But Marco possessed a far more extravagant and excitable temperament than the dutiful, self-effacing Franciscan friar. He did not just humanize the Mongols, he extolled them. He did not simply describe the Mongol way of life, he lived it.
INSPIRED BY Carpini’s example, other travelers took to the Silk Road and returned to write of the wondrous and appalling things they had seen.
The missionary William of Rubruck, a Franciscan, set out with another Franciscan friar, Bartholomew of Cremona; a slave purchased in Constantinople; an interpreter; and several oxcarts adapted to crossing the Mongolian desert. His unsparing account of their adventures revealed the strangeness and adversity confronting those who dared to travel east. “When we arrived among those barbarians, it seemed to me,” remarked William, “that we were stepping into another world.”
He and his companions learned to bear the constant hunger, thirst, and loneliness of empty stretches of the Silk Road, but not, he wrote, “the wretchedness I endured when we came to inhabited places. I cannot find the words to tell you of the misery we suffered when we came to the encampments.”
To William, the Mongols seemed more interested in drinking and carousing than in wreaking havoc on Christians. They were—and this came as a revelation to Europeans predisposed to regard them as barbarians—thoroughly human. In passages strongly prefiguring Marco Polo’s acute observations, William commented on the makeup worn by the women. “It seemed to me her whole nose had been cut off, so snub-nosed was she,” he wrote of a chieftain’s wife. “She had greased this part of her face with some black unguent, and also her eyebrows, so that she appeared most hideous to us.” He unabashedly conveyed the nature of Mongol domestic arrangements. Men took “as many wives as they would,” and kept female slaves who served as concubines. When a maiden reached the age of marriage, her suitor claimed her by force, often with the help of the young woman’s father.
Accounts such as these fascinated those few scholars, noblemen, and clergy able to read them. William’s descriptions humanized the Mongols. They took care of their own, tolerated strangers, respected other religious beliefs—how different from more “civilized” Europeans they were in that regard—and lived in spiritual harmony with nature, both the seasons and the land. The Mongols, it turned out, were more complicated than even Carpini had reported.
IN SEARCH OF a rumored Christian khan, William of Rubruck endured terrible privations on various branches of the Silk Road. He was reduced, as Carpini had been, to eating cold millet, occasionally supplemented with semifrozen raw meat. William eventually made it to Karakorum, and he described this destination in all-too-realistic terms. It was, he said, a small village, not quite as large as Saint-Denis (the seat of French kings) outside Paris. Rather than a fortress of monolithic Mongol power, Karakorum showcased diversity. “It had two quarters. In that of the Saracens [Muslims] are the markets, and here a great many Tartars gather on account of the court,” he noted. “The other is the quarter of the Cathayans [Chinese], all of whom are artisans…. There are twelve temples of idols of different nations, two mosques,…and one Christian church at the very end of the city.” Karakorum was also a busy diplomatic center, receiving not just emissaries from the pope but delegations from emperors, sultans, and kings across Asia and Eastern Europe, all of them braving the intense cold.
Despite the atmosphere of religious variety and tolerance encouraged by the Mongols, William of Rubruck performed only six baptisms. He seems to have lost his theological bearings in this distant land, where religious beliefs did not conform to the strict categories with which he was familiar. He wrote of coming upon a man with a “cross painted in ink upon his hand,” whom he took to be a Christian, “for he answered like a Christian to questions which I asked him.” Yet the religious symbols that this man and others like him displayed did not strike Friar William as sufficiently orthodox. He concluded that the devotees were Christians who lacked adequate instruction in the practice of their religion.
WANDERING through Karakorum, William of Rubruck chanced on an “idol temple,” where the inhabitants, he noted, “do courteously invite and lovingly entertain all messengers, every man according to his ability and station.” He had located a Buddhist monastery, whose sacred aura seduced him with its parallel religious reality: “Their temples are built east and west; and upon the north side is a chamber, in [the] manner of a vestry. Sometimes, if it is a square temple, the vestry or choir place is built in the center. Within this chamber they place a chest long and broad like a table, and behind this, facing south, stands their principal idol…. They place other idols round about the principal one, all of them finely gilt over with pure gold; and upon the chest, which is in the manner of a table, they set candles and offerings…. They also have great bells like we have.”
The Buddhist priests beguiled Friar William, as they would later fascinate Marco Polo. “All their priests have their heads and beards shaved quite close and they are clad in orange-coloured garments; and being once shaven, they lead a chaste life, in groups of a hundred or two hundred together in one cloister. On the days when they enter into their temples, they place two long benches inside. Upon these they sit facing the singing men in the choir. They have certain books in their hands, which sometimes they lay down upon the benches, and their heads are bare as long as they remain in the temple,” he observed. “They read softly to themselves, hardly uttering any sound at all. Coming in amongst them, at the time of their devotions, and finding them all sitting mute, I attempted to get them to answer me, but could not by any means possible.”
The Buddhist manuscripts proved more eloquent: “They begin to write at the top of their paper, drawing their lines right down; and so they read and multiply their lines from the left hand to the right. They do use certain papers and characters in their magical practices, and their temples are full of such short scrolls hung round.”
William was sufficiently alert to detect other types of written communication. “The Cathayans write with a brush like painters use, and a single figure comprises several letters [and] signifies a word. The Tibet people write as we do, from left to right, and have characters quite similar to ours. The people of Tangut write from right to left as the Arabs do and multiply the lines going upwards.”
Decades before Marco Polo appeared on the scene, William reported on the existence of currency printed on “paper made of cotton the length and breadth of a palm”—a system of commerce so far in advance of anything in the West that it mystified Europeans.
WILLIAM ENGAGED the Buddhist monks in spirited theological debate, only to have his expectations confounded. When he inquired “what they believed concerning God,” they replied, to the friar’s dismay, “We believe there is only one God.” That was not the anticipated answer; William expected to hear about idol worship and other heathen practices among these non-Christians.
He tried again: “Do you believe that he is a spirit or some bodily substance?”
“We believe that he is a spirit,” came their reply.
Convinced this was an evasion, William demanded to know why, if they believed God to be a spirit, they made so many images to represent him. To this he added: “Since also you believe not that he was made man, why do you make him more like the image of a man than any other creature?”
The monks responded that William was mistaken; the images to which he referred did not represent God; they were tributes to the wealthy dead, whose relatives commissioned each image. “We, in remembrance of the dead, do reverence to it.”
Surely this was a corrupt practice. William said scornfully, “You do these things only for the friendship and flattery of men.”
“No, only for their memory.” With that, the monks turned the tables. “Where is God?” they asked the friar.
“Where is your soul?” William shot back. His hosts replied that their souls resided in their bodies.
William launched into a harangue. “Is it not in every part of your body, ruling and guiding the whole body, and yet it is invisible? Even so God is everywhere and ruleth all things, and yet he is invisible, being understanding and wisdom itself.”
Just as William was warming to his theme, his interpreter “became weary,” and the debate ended abruptly.
A PALPABLE spiritual thaw lessened the grip of the Karakorum winter as the region’s ruler, Möngke Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan, explained to William that as God had given humans five fingers on each hand, so the Supreme Being had passed on various religious beliefs to different peoples. This vision of religious tolerance, deeply ingrained in the Mongol consciousness, challenged everything that William, as a Christian missionary, believed; yet he could not deny the appeal of the khan’s point of view, or the implication that the totality of faith exceeded any single approach.
On the heels of this intriguing dialogue with William, Möngke expressed a guarded wish to establish diplomatic relations, or at least a dialogue, with the Christian West: “If you will obey us, send your ambassadors, that we may know whether you wish for peace or war.”
William of Rubruck never delivered this message, but his mission, which had lasted from 1253 to 1255, achieved partial success. Henceforth, the Mongol Empire would take a greater interest in the West, at least in matters of trade, if not religion.
WITH EACH JOURNEY, and each subsequent written account, the world appeared to Europeans to be getting bigger and more chaotic rather than smaller and more manageable. The travelers emphasized the great distances and unavoidable hardships they endured, and the irreconcilable differences that characterized the innumerable countries, cultures, languages, customs, and religions they encountered. The reports of emissaries as varied as Benjamin of Tudela, Giovanni da Pian del Carpini, and William of Rubruck all told of a world beyond Europe that was complex, tumultuous, and menacing, but nonetheless porous.
One way of appreciating the magnitude of Marco Polo’s accomplishment is to compare his account to those given by his predecessors. For all their fascination, the early observations were one-dimensional and literal. Marco, in contrast, freely mingled fact and fantasy, personal experience and legend, all of it buttressed by straightforward assessments of the people and places he encountered, and all of it energized by his braggadocio.
AS MARCO VENTURED into Afghanistan, he apparently lost himself in a series of idylls until he reached the remote province of Badakhshan in the northeast. Here, in what had been part of the ancient kingdom of Bactria, his characteristic purposefulness returned, as the trade route to the East began in earnest.
Marco Polo’s Afghanistan extended north to Turkistan, northeast to China with its occupying Mongols, south to the Indian subcontinent, and west to Persia. A crossroads of cultures, languages, and religions, Afghanistan had evolved into a center of trade and transportation, its dry plains, lush valleys, and snowy peaks crisscrossed by footpaths, equine trails, and caravan routes suitable for merchants such as the Polos.
This ancient network of trails had caught the attention of invaders, who turned Afghanistan into a sprawling battleground over the centuries. In time, it fell to Seleucids, Ephthalites, and eventually Turks, who ruled from the sixth century until the arrival of the Mongol armies in the service of Genghis Khan.
No other invaders did as much damage to Afghanistan’s delicate infrastructure as the Mongols. Their numbers were immense; an army of sixty or seventy thousand Mongol warriors on horseback would suddenly appear and overwhelm the region of their choice. The warriors could fire as many as six arrows a minute on horseback, facing forward or backward, at a full gallop. Their arrows darkening the sky, they chased down their enemies wherever they hid. (During one campaign in 1220, Genghis Khan himself rode into a mosque, slaughtering those who had fled there for safety. Later, chests intended to hold the Koran were filled with grain to feed the invaders’ horses.) The Mongols’ efficient armies destroyed the region’s irrigation system and turned fertile fields into the arid wastes confronting travelers like the Polos. Despite their small numbers, the Mongols had made themselves into the masters of this realm through sheer force and superior military ability. Their rapid and dramatic expansion into distant territories put all potential enemies on notice that resistance would be met with annihilation. The new Mongol order proved terrifying indeed.
YOUNG MARCO’S descriptions of travel along the Silk Road conveyed the vulnerability of his small family. Letters assuring papal protection for the Polo company were of no use in fending off highwaymen or religious zealots. If Marco or his traveling companions bore arms or other means of self-defense besides guile and cunning, he never mentions them. Nor does he refer to any extraordinary measures they may have taken to protect themselves against hunger, disease, or the elements. A drought; a sandstorm; a debilitating disease; a renegade squad of murderous thieves; jealous rivals; predators alerted by the approaching travelers’ scent; poor directions; a poisonous spring; the lethal bite of a snake, insect, or scorpion; a parasite lurking in food or underfoot; a sudden snowstorm or bolt of lightning—any of these common occurrences could have brought the expedition to a sudden end. No rescue party would have come looking for them, and few in Venice would have mourned their passing.
Despite these perils, the Polo company enjoyed several advantages. For one thing, the two elder Polos had come this way before. For another, the three Venetians were rarely alone. Wherever they went on the routes later known as the Silk Road, they passed other merchants, as well as holy men ranging from Nestorian Christians to Buddhists. The Silk Road, in reality, carried so much more than silk. And the Polos encountered an assortment of highly organized tradesmen and innkeepers who—for a price—served the needs of travelers before they departed in the predawn darkness and chill for the immense wasteland.
MARCO AND COMPANY spent three days riding their camels through a wasteland with “no dwelling nor food nor drink for the wayfarer except water; but grass enough for horses.” Finally, with the greatest relief, they reached Badakhshan, a “large province,” Marco writes, populated with Muslims, a “very great and broad realm which for length lasts quite twelve days’ marches.” The kings of Badakhshan, Marco believed, descended directly from Alexander the Great “and from his wife who was the daughter of Darius the Great who was lord of the great realm of Persia.”
The Badakhshan that greeted Marco Polo was, like the Badakhshan of today, a lush oasis in the desert. To come upon it after weeks on dusty, twisting trails was to encounter a haven promising ease and delight for the exhausted wayfarer. As Marco immediately noticed, the city owed its wealth and notoriety more to its rubies than to legends of Alexander. The rubies, he explains, “are produced in the rocks of great mountains, and when they wish to dig them they are gotten with great trouble, for they make great caverns in the mountains with very great expense and trouble to find them, and go far underground as in these parts here they do who dig the veins of gold and silver.” The king, according to Marco, dug for the gems himself, kept the most precious specimens, and killed anyone who dared to mine them without permission. “The king,” Marco says, “does this for his own honor that the balasci [rubies] may be dear and of great value everywhere as they are, for if he let other men dig them and carry them through the world so many of them would be taken away that all the world would be full of them and they would not be so dear nor of so great value, so that the king would make little or no gain.” The same principles applied to the sapphires in these mountains, as well as “ultramarine azure” (lapis lazuli), silver, copper, gold, and lead. Although Marco does not say so, it is likely that his father and uncle bargained for the gems with the king’s representatives, trading gold or stones that they brought with them for rubies and sapphires, which they concealed by sewing into the folds of their cloaks, keeping them close at all times, day or night. Camels needed water and grass to survive, while merchants such as the Polos needed gems to thrive.
Marco’s youthful imagination was caught by the sturdy horses of the area, who cantered over the stones without the protection of horseshoes. “They go in the mountains and on bad roads always, and do not hurt their feet, and the men gallop with them over the mountain slopes where other animals could not gallop,” he marvels, “nor would they dare to gallop there.” Marco reports with satisfaction a story that long ago in this region all horses were “born with a horn, with a mark, on the forehead like Bucephalus”—Alexander the Great’s famous mount—“because mares had conceived from that very horse. But afterwards the whole breed of them was destroyed. And the breed of them was only in the power of an uncle of the king, and when he refused to allow the king to have any of them, he was put to death by him; and the wife out of spite for the death of the husband destroyed the said breed, and so it is lost.”
In this region, Marco saw hawks and falcons above, and fields covered with grain underfoot, all dwarfed by steep, rugged mountains concealing towns that resembled fortresses.
AMID THIS spectacular setting, something peculiar befell the young Marco, about which he dropped only the slenderest of hints. “When he was in those parts he remained sick for about a year,” he says of himself, “and when he was advised to go up to the mountain”—by whom he does not say—“he was well again.” Those few words suggest an ordeal.
It is unlikely that he contracted malaria, as is often assumed, since there are no mosquitoes at that high altitude to carry the parasite. Instead, he may have suffered from the effects of syphilis, or severe emotional problems. But more likely, he had tuberculosis. The disease was prevalent in Europe during the years of his childhood. If he had contracted tuberculosis then, the infection could have lain dormant, and become active years later in response to stress induced by travel. He would have developed a fever and a cough, for which opium, or an opium derivative, was a common treatment, and as he recovered, he might have become addicted to the remedy.
In Marco’s day, Badakhshan was Afghanistan’s leading producer of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), and Afghanistan was, and remains, the leading opium producer in the world. The colorful fields through which he passed produced enormous quantities of poppies, but he would not have considered them flowers of evil. Their bright blossoms, gently swaying in the fresh breeze, looked harmless enough to a lad, as were many of their uses. Tiny black poppy seeds were used in cooking, imparting their nutty flavor to sweet pastries.
If he became an opium user for medical reasons, or simply to experience the drug’s effects, he would have begun by ingesting the poppy, and perhaps progressed to smoking it, or more precisely, its resin. (Injection did not exist at the time.) One explanation for the unusual length of time that he languished in Badakhshan could be that in the course of trying to recover from a febrile illness, he became dependent on opium, and had to detoxify—a protracted and agonizing process. The symptoms of withdrawal that he might have suffered include nausea, sweating, cramps, vomiting, diarrhea, depression, loss of appetite, anxiety, and rapid changes in mood. He would have become edgier, moodier, more sensitive to light, and more highly suggestible. Where his father and uncle saw a road or a bridge or a storm, Marco might have seen evidence of impersonal cosmic forces at work, sweeping them toward an inchoate destiny.
Fortunately, the mountains of Afghanistan were supremely beneficial to his health. “On the tops of the mountains the air is so pure and the sojourn there so health-giving that if, while he lives in the cities and houses built on the plain and in the valleys near the mountains, a man catches fevers of any kind,…he immediately climbs the mountains and, resting there two or three days, the sickness is driven away,” Marco marvels.
There is a sound medical basis for his confidence. High altitude and fresh air have long been known as effective treatments for tuberculosis. The low-oxygen mountain air inhibits the growth of mycobacteria, including those that cause tuberculosis. And exposure to sunlight—abundant at high altitudes—increases the body’s vitamin D, which in turn destroys pathogens. In all, the mountains of Afghanistan were a mixed blessing, promoting Marco’s rapid recovery from tuberculosis (if that was his affliction) even while snaring the young man in the coils of addiction.
No matter what happened to Marco at Badakhshan, he departed a more seasoned traveler, able to cope with the hardships and dangers of life along the Silk Road.