circumstantial of tales in their pack. Foolish artists might have held
themselves rich with these, but the honour of their family would demand
better credentials before welcoming fantastically arrayed strangers
into its bosom. The courtyard of the house behind the Malibran, at
which on their return from their travels they demanded admission,
is known still as the Corte del Milione, and its walls are still
enriched with Byzantine cornice and moulding, and with sculptured
beasts as strange as any to be met with in Cublay’s preserves. The
three travellers had the appearance of Tartars, and from long disuse of
their language they spoke in broken Italian. Tradition tells of the way
in which they heaped exploit upon exploit in the attempt to convince
their incredulous relatives of their identity; and at last, according
to Ramusio, they invited a number of their relations to a superb
banquet, at which they themselves appeared in long robes of crimson
satin. When the guests were set down, these robes were torn into strips
and distributed amongst the servants. Through various metamorphoses of
damask and velvet they came at last to the common dresses in which they
had arrived. And when the tables were moved and the servants had gone,
Marco, as being the youngest, began to rip up the seams and welts of
these costumes and take out from them handfuls of rubies and sapphires,
carbuncles, diamonds and emeralds. There was no longer any doubt or
delay; the shaggy tartar beards had lost all their terrors. These men,
who had suddenly displayed “infinite riches in a little room,” must
undoubtedly be what they claimed to be; happy the family to which the
magicians belonged; the Doge’s Palace need not be afraid to welcome
them; they must be set high in the State.
Yet the accumulation of treasure was by no means the most noteworthy
act of their drama. The Poli had been more than mere traders; from the
first they had been diplomatists of a high order. Their career seems
to give us the key to some of the wonderful faces that appear in the
crowds pictured by Venetian painters, especially those of Carpaccio.
They are the faces of men who have met the crisis of life unalarmed,
by virtue of a combination of daring and wisdom which is no common
possession. They are not cold; if they are severe they are full of
feeling--sensitive to the pathos and humour as well as the sternness
of reality. The Poli had been obliged to furnish themselves with
patience in lands where the transit of a plain is measured in weeks;
three years’ residence in a city of Persia is mentioned as a matter
of detail. We are not told the reason of delay, only that they could
not go before or behind. They had travelled in the true spirit of
adventure. On that first journey, when Marco was not of the company,
the Great Kaan’s messengers, who came to request an interview for
their master, who had never set eyes on a Latin, had found the two
brothers open-minded and trustful. They had acquitted themselves
well in Cublay’s presence, answering all his questions wisely and in
order. He had inquired as to the manners and customs of Europe, and
particularly as to Western methods of government and the Christian
Church and its Head. He had been “glad beyond measure” at what he had
heard of the deeds of the Latins, and decided to send a request to the
Christian Apostle for one hundred men learned in the Christian law and
the Seven Arts and capable of teaching his people that their household
gods were works of the devil and why the faith of the West was better
than theirs. The thought of the lamp burning before the sepulchre of
God in Jerusalem had stirred his imagination, and he craved some of its
oil for the light of his temple, or, maybe, his pleasure dome. So the
two Venetians had set out for Europe on his strange embassy. They were
provided with a golden tablet on which the Kaan had inscribed orders
for the supplying of their needs, food, horses, escorts in all the
countries through which they should pass. At the end of three years,
after long delays on account of the snows, they arrived at the port
of Layas in Armenia, and from Layas they had come to Acre in April of
the year 1269. At Acre they had found that Pope Clement IV was dead,
and no new election had as yet been made. Venetian history teems with
dramatic situations, but it would be difficult to find any stranger
than that in which the Polo brothers now found themselves placed.
Merchants of Venice, they came as ambassadors from the Lord of All
the Tartars to demand missionaries from the Father of Christendom,
who was not able to supply them because he was not in existence. In
their dilemma at Acre they consulted Theobald of Piacenza, Legate
of Egypt, who advised them to await the new Pope’s election and
meanwhile to return to their homes. His advice was accepted, and the
two brothers made their way onwards to Venice, where one of them,
Nicolas, discovered his son, young Marco, a lad of fifteen years old.
They remained in Venice for two years, but when, at the end of that
time, no Pope had yet been elected, the brothers felt their return to
the Kaan could be deferred no longer. There is something touching in
their fidelity to the pledge they had given and the constancy of their
merchant faith. They prepared to set out again. This time little Marco
went with them on an absence that lasted for seventeen years, and was
to gather a greater treasure for the world than any diamonds and rubies
and velvets to be prodigally scattered on the floor of the Corte del
Milione. At Acre they obtained Theobald’s permission to fetch some
of the holy oil desired by the Kaan from Jerusalem. The journey to
Jerusalem performed, they returned once more to Acre, and finally set
forth on their return journey to the Kaan with a letter from Theobald
testifying that they had done all in their power, “but since there was
no Apostle, they could not carry the embassy.” But when they had gone
as far on their journey as Layas, they were followed by letters from
Theobald, who was now Pope Gregory of Piacenza, begging their return.
They complied with great joy and set sail for Acre in a galley provided
for their use by the King of Armenia. This was the hour of their
triumph, for they were received by the Pope with great honour, given
costly presents for the Kaan, and provided with two friars of very
great learning. The names of these two are possibly better withheld,
for they were more learned than courageous. When they had come as far
on their journey as Layas, their incipient fears of the land of the
Tartars were wrought to a pitch by the sight of the Saracen Army which
was being brought against Armenia by the Sultan of Babylon, and they
insisted on handing their credentials over to the Poli and returning
at once to Italy. And the brothers were forced to go on their way
with worse than no preachers of their faith, with tidings of their
defection.
For three and a half years they journeyed on, detained often by floods
and bad weather. The news of their coming travelled before them to the
Kaan, and he sent his servants forty days’ journey to meet them. The
Kaan received them with joy, was graciously pleased with the letters
and credentials sent by the Pope, and accepted young Marco as his
liegeman and responsible messenger. Marco sped well in learning the
language, customs and writing of the Tartars, but it is clear he must
have acquired other than scholastic accomplishments. He was endowed
with tact and power of observation, and returned from his first embassy
full of news of the men and customs he had encountered; “for he had
seen on several occasions that when the messengers the Great Kaan had
sent into various parts of the world returned and told him the results
of the embassy on which they had gone, and could tell him no other
news of the countries where they had been, the Kaan said they were
ignorant fools.” For seventeen years young Messer Marco was employed in
continual coming and going. He was learned in many strange and hidden
things, and was placed in honour high above the barons--the darling of
Cublay’s heart. Again and again the three Venetians asked for leave of
absence to visit their country, but so great was the love Cublay
bore to them that he could not bear to be parted from them; until at
last an embassy arrived from Argon, King of Levant, asking for a new
wife of the lineage of his dead wife Bolgana, and the Kaan is persuaded
by Argon’s messengers to allow Marco and his two uncles to depart with
them in charge of the lady. They set out by sea, and after some twenty
months’ sailing and many disasters arrived at their destination. King
Argon was dead, and the lady Cocachin was bestowed on his son. Of the
six hundred followers who had set out with them on their journey only
eighteen had survived it. Their mission accomplished, the Poli made
their way to Trebizond, from Trebizond to Constantinople and from
Constantinople to Venice. This was in the year 1295.
[Illustration: THE DOGANA.]
And how would Venice, the place of his birth, reveal herself to Marco,
now he had seen so many wonders and glories in distant lands? We may
imagine the sun to have been setting as the travellers turned into the
Lido port, dropping a globe of molten fire vast and mysterious through
the haze, while the last dim rays gleamed golden on the windows of the
Riva degli Schiavoni. Venice lay among her waters, blue and glittering,
interspersed with jewelled marsh. The last gulls of those that so
gallantly had dipped and sailed all day upon the water were flying
home, their breasts and wings radiant in the level sunlight round the
home-coming ship. Many citizens of Venice must have been at the Lido
port, thronging to meet the merchant vessels, to greet their friends
or to have news of them from others. But none came to meet these three
travellers; alone they embarked in a gondola bearing their cargo
with them. Venice had clothed herself in all her beauty to give them
welcome. Which of Cublay’s glories could rival this splendour of the
lagoon with its countless treasures of light? The marsh lay in unequal
patches, each outlined with a luminous silver rim--a magic carpet of
dusky olive, threaded with strands of radiant azure and sprinkled with
ruby and amethyst. As their gondola moved slowly down towards the city,
the boats of the night fishers passed with the silence of shadows
between them and the glow. And when here and there a fisher alighted on
the marsh or moved across it like a spirit stepping on the waters, he
must have seemed to Marco the very memory and renewal of those strange
Eastern stories of which his mind was full. So, under the mystic glow
of the desert, he had seen figures of the caravan rise and move against
the tinted haze of the oasis. Onwards glided the boat towards the
Basin of San Marco--westward the luminous wonder of lagoon and marsh,
and a cold, clear intensity of stirring water to the east. And as they
drew nearer and ever nearer, our travellers’ hearts beat high with the
wonders of the city of their birth. The stars were piercing the night
sky in countless numbers: the yellow lights of the city quivered along
the Riva: the masts of the fishing-fleet swung clear against the pale
western glow in the waterway of the Giudecca: the flowing tide wound
silver coils about the black shadows of their hulls. Past the Dogana,
keystone of Venice to the Eastern traveller, their little boat moved
down the quiet waters of the Grand Canal, deep into the heart of that
great shadowy city, apparent Queen over all the glories of the Cities
of the East.
Chapter Six
VENICE OF CRUSADE AND PILGRIMAGE
The story of Venice and the Crusades forms one of the most interesting
pages of her history in relation to the East. The gradual awakening of
her consciousness to the fact that the pilgrimages to the Holy Land
might be of close significance to herself culminates in her attitude
towards the great Fourth Crusade at the opening of the thirteenth
century. The Crusades were, in fact, a commercial speculation for
Venice, but a speculation into which she infused all the vitality and
fulness of her nature. And she became, not merely a place of passage
for the East, but a superb depository of relics to detain pilgrims
on their outward way; a hostel so royally fitted with food for their
senses, their religious cravings and their mystic imaginings, that one
and another may well have been beguiled into delaying their departure
for more strenuous sanctities. The narratives of the pilgrims,
with their enthusiasms, their details of relics, their records of
Venetian ceremonies, religious, commercial or domestic, coloured by
their quaintly intimate personal impressions, form one of the most
picturesque pages of Venetian chronicle.
Pietro Casola, a Milanese pilgrim of the late fifteenth century, gives
us a picture of a city that is sumptuous and rich in all its dealings,
yet pervaded by a harmony and decorum that has stamped itself on the
face of each individual citizen. We feel that Pietro Casola has really
had a vision of the meaning of Venice, when, among the inventory of
wonders of the Mass for the pilgrims on Corpus Christi day, of the
velvets, crimson and damask and scarlet, the cloth of gold and togas
sweeping the ground, each finer than the last, he pauses to add, “There
was great silence, greater than is ever observed at such festivals,
even in the gathering of so many Venetian gentlemen, so that you could
hear everything. And it seemed to me that everything was ruled by one
alone, who was obeyed by each man without resistance. And at this I
wondered greatly, for never had I seen so great obedience at such
spectacles.” In the record of this arresting impression, more even than
in the description of many coloured drapery and white cloths spread
on the piazza, of the groves of oak-trees bordering the route of the
procession and the candles lit among them, we seem to see before us
the rhythmic solemnity of that unique _Procession_ on the Piazza of
Gentile Bellini. We need only Casola’s other observant characterisation
of the Venetian gentleman to complete the picture. “I have considered,”
he says, “the quality of these Venetian gentlemen, who for the most
part are fair men and tall, astute and most subtle in their dealings;
and you must needs, if you would treat with them, keep your eyes and
ears open. They are proud; I think it is on account of their great
rule. And when a son is born to a Venetian, they say among themselves,
‘A Signor is born into the world.’ In their way of living at home
they are sparing and very modest; outside they are very liberal. The
city of Venice retains its old manner of dress, and they never change
it; that is to say, they wear a long garment of whatever colour they
choose. No one ever goes out by day without his toga, and for the most
part a black one, and they have carried this custom to such a point
that all nations of the world who are lodging here in Venice, from
the greatest to the least, observe this style, beginning from the
gentlemen to the mariners and galleymen; a dress certainly full of
confidence and gravity. They look like doctors of law, and if any were
to appear outside his house without his toga he would be thought a
fool.” Without doors the women also belonged to this sober company,
or at least the marriageable maidens and those who were no longer of
the number of the “belle giovani”; so sombrely were they covered when
outside their houses, and especially in church, that Casola says he at
first mistook them all for widows, or nuns of the Benedictine Order.
But for the “belle giovani” it is another matter; they give relief to
the week-day sobriety of these Venetians, so decorous and black when
off duty, though revelling in such richness of velvet and brocade when
the trumpet of a public function stirs their blood.
[Illustration: THE SHADOW OF THE CAMPANILE.]
We are indebted to Casola for a picture of a Venetian domestic festival
at the birth of a child to the Delfini family. He realised fully that
he was admitted, together with the orator of the King of France, in
order that he might act as reporter of Venetian magnificence. It was
in a room “whose chimney-piece was all of Carrara marble shining as
gold, so subtly worked with figures and leaves, that Praxiteles and
Pheidias could not have exceeded it. The ceiling of the room was so
finely decorated with gold and ultramarine, and the walls so richly
worked, that I cannot make report of it. One desk alone was valued
at five hundred ducats, and the fixtures of the room were in the
Venetian style, such beautiful and natural figures, so much gold
everywhere, that I know not if in the time of Solomon, who was King of
the Jews, when silver was reputed more vile than carrion, there was
such abundance as was here seen. Of the ornaments of the bed and of the
lady ... I have thought best rather to keep silence than to speak for
fear I should not be believed. Another thing I will speak the truth
about, and perhaps I shall not be believed--a matter in which the ducal
orator would not let me lie. There were in the said room twenty-five
Venetian damsels, each one fairer than the last, who were come to
visit the lady who had borne a child. Their dress was most discreet,
as I said above, _alla veneziana_: they showed no more than four to
six finger breadths of bare neck below their shoulders back and front.
These damsels had so many jewels on their heads and round their necks
and on their hands--namely, gold, precious stones and pearls--that it
was the opinion of those who were there that they were worth a hundred
thousand ducats. Their faces were superbly painted, and so also the
rest of them that was bare.” The account of this sumptuous interior is
peculiarly valuable when we realise the date to which it belongs, the
period of the first greatness of Venetian Art, a period which has been
sometimes regarded as one of almost naïve simplicity. Casola, with his
customary exactitude, dwells on the frugality of Venetian gentlemen in
the matter of food--a frugality that caused the guest to reflect that
the Venetians cared more to feed the eye than the palate. It was not
yet the period of the sumptuous living deplored by Calmo only half a
century later.
Casola was a more secularly minded pilgrim than the priest of Florence,
Ser Michele, who paid five visits to the bones of the Holy Innocents at
Murano, and only at the fifth visit was counted worthy, as he humbly
deemed, to see the relics: Providence, in the form of the sacristan,
having till then failed him. The more festive Casola--who paid
repeated visits to Rialto, “which seemed to be the source of all the
gardens in the world,” who spent one day in vain attempts to count the
multitudinous boats in and about the city, and who was so frivolous,
for all his long white beard, as to buy a false front on the piazza--in
the midst of his expatiations on the Venetian maidens, pulls himself
suddenly together with a sense of incongruity between his diversions
and his goal, and shakes himself free from the allurements of Venice,
crying: “But I am a priest, in the way of the saints; I did not try
to look into their lives any further. To me it seemed better, as I
have said above, to go in search of the churches and monasteries and
to see the relics of which there are so many. And this seemed to me a
good work for a pilgrim who was awaiting the departure of the vessel
to go to the Holy Sepulchre, bringing the time to an end as well as he
could.” In the Accademia at Venice there is a curious little painting,
attributed to Carpaccio, of the assembly of the martyrs of Mount
Ararat in the Church of Sant’ Antonio di Castello, which stood once on
the site of the Public Gardens. It was a familiar sight for Venice,
the dedication of pilgrims that is represented here; and there is a
strange pathos in the slim, small figures as they move in two lines
half-wavering up the aisle, each wearing a crown of thorns, perhaps
in prophecy of coming martyrdom. They are not marching confidently to
victory like an army; their crosses are held at all angles, forming
errant patterns among themselves. Some are girt for their journey
in short vestments under their long robes. It is curiously unlike a
procession native to the city; there is a dreamlike, mystic quality
about it and a lack of body in its motion which is enhanced, perhaps,
by the extreme detail with which the interior of the church is
transcribed--the models of vessels in the rafters; the votive limbs
and bones hung on the wooden screen, offerings of the diseased cured
by miracle, as they may be seen in San Giovanni e Paolo to-day; the
coiled rope of the lamp-pulley; the board with a church notice printed
on it; and everywhere, winding in and out of the picture, seen through
the portal of entrance, disappearing behind the sanctuary screen, the
interminable procession of the ten thousand little pilgrims.