_Marco Polo_
A VENETIAN TRAVELLER OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY
Et por ce, veul ie que un et autre sachent a tos iors mais les euvres
des Veneciens, et qui il furent, et dont il vindrent, et qui il sont, et
comment il firent la noble Cite que l'en apele Venise, qui est orendroit
la plus bele dou siecle.... La place de Monseignor Saint Marc est
orendroit la plus bele place qui soit en tot li monde; que de vers li
soleil levant est la plus bele yglise qui soit el monde, c'est l'Yglise
de Monseignor Saint Marc. Et de les cele Yglise est li paleis de
Monseignor li Dus, grant e biaus a mervoilles.
--MARTINO DA CANALE
And Kinsai [Hangchow] is the greatest city in the whole world, so great
indeed that I should scarcely venture to tell of it, but that I have met
at Venice people in plenty who have been there.... And if anyone should
desire to tell of all the vastness and great marvels of this city, a
good quire of paper would not hold the matter, I trow. For 'tis the
greatest and noblest city, and the finest for merchandise, that the
whole world containeth.
--ODORIC OF PORDENONE
Let us go back in mind--as would that we could go back in body--to the
year 1268. It is a year which makes no great stir in the history books,
but it will serve us well. In those days, as in our own, Venice lay upon
her lagoons, a city (as Cassiodurus long ago saw her[B]) like a
sea-bird's nest afloat on the shallow waves, a city like a ship, moored
to the land but only at home upon the seas, the proudest city in all the
Western world. For only consider her position. Lying at the head of the
Adriatic, half-way between East and West, on the one great sea
thoroughfare of medieval commerce, a Mediterranean seaport, yet set so
far north that she was almost in the heart of Europe, Venice gathered
into her harbour all the trade routes overland and overseas, on which
pack-horses could travel or ships sail. Merchants bringing silk and
spices, camphor and ivory, pearls and scents and carpets from the Levant
and from the hot lands beyond it, all came to port in Venice. For
whether they came by way of Egypt sailing between the low banks of the
Nile and jolting on camels to Alexandria, or whether they came through
the rich and pleasant land of Persia and the Syrian desert to Antioch
and Tyre, or whether they slowly pushed their way in a long, thin
caravan across the highlands of Central Asia, and south of the Caspian
Sea to Trebizond, and so sailed through the Black Sea and the
Dardanelles, Venice was their natural focus. Only Constantinople might
have rivalled her, and Constantinople she conquered. To Venice,
therefore, as if drawn by a magnet, came the spoils of the East, and
from Venice they went by horse across the Alps by the Brenner and St
Gothard passes to Germany and France, or in galleys by way of the
Straits of Gibraltar to England and Flanders;[1] and the galleys and
pack-horses came back again to Venice, laden with the metals of Germany,
the furs of Scandinavia, the fine wools of England, the cloth of
Flanders, and the wine of France.
[Footnote B: 'Hic vobis, aquatilium avium more, domus est.']
But if geography gave Venice an unrivalled site, the Venetians did the
rest. Through all the early years of their history they defied
Constantinople to the east of them, and Pope and Holy Roman Emperor to
the west; sometimes turning to one, sometimes to the other, but
stubbornly bent all the while upon independence, replying, when invited
to become subjects: 'God, Who is our help and protector has saved us to
dwell upon these waters. This Venice, which we have raised in the
lagoons, is our mighty habitation, no power of emperor or of prince can
touch us'; apt, if threatened, to retire to their islands and derisively
to fire cannon balls of bread into the mainland force, which sought to
starve them out.[2] Always they were conscious that their future lay
upon the waters, and in that East, whose colour had crept into their
civilization and warmed their blood. They were eastern and western both,
the Venetians, hot hearts for loving and conquering, icy heads for
scheming and ruling. Bit by bit they secured the ring of mainland behind
them, all the while keeping at bay the Saracen and Slav sea rovers,
whose ships were the terror of the Mediterranean. Then they descended
upon the pirates of Dalmatia, who thus harassed their trading vessels,
and took all the Dalmatian coast. The Doge of Venice became Duke of
Dalmatia. 'True it is,' says their chronicles, 'that the Adriatic Sea is
in the duchy of Venice,'[3] and they called it the 'Gulf of Venice'. Now
it was that there was first instituted the magnificent symbolical
ceremony of wedding the sea, with the proud words 'Desponsamus te mare
in signum veri perpetuique domini'![4]
She was a maiden city, bright and free,
No guile seduced, no force could violate,
And when she took unto herself a mate
She must espouse the everlasting sea.
And truly it seemed as though the very sea had sworn to honour and obey
her.
Then came the Crusades, when Europe forgot its differences and threw
itself upon the paynim who held the holy places of its faith, when men
from all lands marched behind the banner of the Cross and the towers of
Jerusalem were more real than the Tower of Babel. Now, at last, Venice
saw her dream within her hand. It was Venice who provided galleys and
Venice who provided convoys and commissariat and soldiers, at a good
round sum; and when time came for the division of the spoil, Venice
demanded in every captured town of Palestine and Syria a church, a
counting-house and the right to trade without tolls. Her great chance
came in the Fourth Crusade, when her old blind Doge Enrico Dandolo
(whose blindness had the Nelson touch) upon the pretext that the
Crusaders could not pay the transport fees agreed upon, turned the whole
Crusade to the use of Venice, and conquered first Zara, which had dared
to revolt from her, and then her ancient--her only--rival, the immortal
Byzantium itself. It is true that the Pope excommunicated the Venetians
when they first turned the armies against Zara, but what matter? They
looted Constantinople and brought back the four great gilded horses to
St Mark's--St Mark's, which has been compared to a robbers' cave crowded
with the booty of the Levant, and which held the sacred body of the
saint, stolen from Alexandria by the Venetians, nearly four centuries
before, concealed in a tub of pickled pork, in order to elude the
Moslems. A Venetian patriarch now said Mass in St Sophia. Venice
received the proud title of 'Ruler of a half and a quarter of the Roman
Empire,' ('quartæ partis et dimidiæ totius imperii Romaniæ'--the words
have a ring of trumpets), and the Doge, buskined in scarlet like the
ancient Roman emperors, now ruled supreme over four seas--the Adriatic,
the Aegean, the Sea of Marmora, and the Black Sea. Venetian factories
studded all the Levantine coasts, in Tripoli and Tyre, Salonica,
Adrianople, and Constantinople, in Trebizond on the Black Sea, even at
Caffa in the far Crimea, whence ran the mysterious road into Russia.
Crete and Rhodes and Cyprus were hers; her galleys swept the pirates
from the seas and brooked no rivals; all trade with the East must pass
through Venice, and Venice only. The other trading cities of Italy
struggled against her, and Genoa came near to rivalling her, but in
1258, and again in 1284, she utterly defeated the Genoese fleet. Not for
the city of 'sea without fish, mountains without woods, men without
faith, and women without shame' was it to bit the horses on St
Mark's.[5] In 1268 Venice seemed supreme. Byzantium was her washpot and
over the Levant she had cast her shoe. Truly her chronicler might
write of her:
Dalmatia, Albania, Rumania, Greece, Trebizond, Syria, Armenia, Egypt,
Cyprus, Candia, Apulia, Sicily, and other countries, kingdoms and
islands were the fruitful gardens, the proud castles of our people,
where they found again pleasure, profit, and security.... The Venetians
went about the sea, here and there and across the sea, and in all places
wheresoever water runs, and bought merchandise and brought it to Venice
from every side. Then there came to Venice Germans and Bavarians, French
and Lombards, Tuscans and Hungarians, and every people that lives by
merchandise and they took it to their countries.
Small wonder that (as a later traveller observed) the Venetians were
proud of their great rule, and when a son was born to a Venetian were
wont to say among themselves, 'A Signor is born into the world.'
Is it not true to say that Venice was the proudest city on earth, _la
noble cite que l'en apele Venise, qui est orendroit la plus bele dou
siecle_?[6] Life was a fair and splendid thing for those merchant
princes, who held the gorgeous East in fee in the year of grace 1268. In
that year traders in great stone counting-houses, lapped by the waters
of the canals, were checking, book in hand, their sacks of cloves, mace
and nutmegs, cinnamon and ginger from the Indies, ebony chessmen from
Indo China, ambergris from Madagascar, and musk from Tibet. In that year
the dealers in jewels were setting prices upon diamonds from Golconda,
rubies and lapis lazuli from Badakhshan, and pearls from the fisheries
of Ceylon; and the silk merchants were stacking up bales of silk and
muslin and brocade from Bagdad and Yezd and Malabar and China. In that
year young gallants on the Rialto (scented gallants, but each, like
Shakespeare's Antonio, with a ship venturing into port somewhere in the
Levant) rubbed elbows with men of all nations, heard travellers' tales
of all lands, and at dawn slipped along the canals in gondolas (not
black in those days, but painted and hung with silk), saluting the
morning with songs; and the red-haired ladies of Venice whom centuries
later Titian loved to paint, went trailing up and down the marble steps
of their palaces, with all the brocades of Persia on their backs and all
the perfumes of Arabia to sweeten their little hands.
It was in that year, too, that one Martino da Canale, a clerk in the
customs house, began to busy himself (like Chaucer after him) less with
his accounts than with writing in the delectable French language ('por
ce que lengue franceise cort parmi le monde, et est la plus delitable a
lire et a oir que nule autre') a chronicle of Venice. It is of the
water, watery, Canale's chronicle, like Ariel's dirge; he has indeed,
'that intenseness of feeling which seems to resolve itself into the
elements which it contemplates.' Here is nothing indeed, of 'the surge
and thunder of the Odyssey', but the lovely words sparkle like the sun
on the waters of the Mediterranean, and like a refrain, singing itself
in and out of the narrative, the phrase recurs, 'Li tens estoit clers et
biaus ... et lors quant il furent en mer, li mariniers drecerent les
voiles au vent, et lesserent core a ploine voiles les mes parmi la mer a
la force dou vent';[7] for so much of the history of Venice was enacted
upon deck. It is a passing proud chronicle, too, for Canale was, and
well he knew it, a citizen of no mean city.
'Now would I,' he says, 'that every one and all know for ever
the works of the Venetians, who they were and whence they
came and what they are, and how they made the noble city
which is called Venice, which is this day the fairest in the
world. And I would that all those who are now living and
those who are to come know how the noble city is builded and
how all good things abound in her, and how the sire of the
Venetians, the noble Doge, is powerful, and what nobility is
found therein and the prowess of the Venetian people, and how
they are all perfect in the faith of Jesu Christ and obedient
to holy Church, and how they never disobey the commandment of
holy Church. Within this noble Venice there dares to dwell
neither heretic, nor usurer, murderer, thief nor robber. And
I will tell you the names of all the Doges that have been in
Venice, one after the other, and what they did to the honour
of holy Church and of their noble City. And I will tell you
the names of the noble captains whom the noble Doges sent in
their time to lay low their enemies, and concerning the
victories that they won I will have you know, for it is
fitting.... In the year of the incarnation of our Lord Jesu
Christ MCCLXVII years, in the time of Milord Renier Zeno, the
high Doge of Venice, I laboured and strove until I found the
ancient history of the Venetians, whence they came first and
how they builded the noble city called Venice, which is today
the fairest and the pleasantest in the world, full of beauty
and of all good things. Merchandise flows through this noble
city even as water flows from the fountains, and the salt
water runs through it and round it and in all places save in
the houses and the streets; and when the citizens go abroad
they can return to their houses by land or by water, as they
will. From all parts there come merchandise and merchants,
who buy merchandise as they will and take it back to their
own countries. Within this town is found food in great
plenty, bread and wine, land fowl and river fowl, fresh meat
and salt, and sea fish and river fish.... You may find within
this fair town many men of gentle birth, both old men and
young _damoisaus_ in plenty, and merchants with them, who buy
and sell, and money changers and citizens of all crafts, and
therewith mariners of all sorts, and ships to carry them to
all lands and galleys to lay low their enemies. And in this
fair town is also great plenty of ladies and damsels and
maidens, very richly apparelled.'[8]
It happened that there was a new Doge that year, our year
1268, Lorenzo Tiepolo by name, and a great procession of the
gilds took place before the palace on the Piazza of St Mark
to welcome his accession. Martino da Canale was watching it
and wrote it all down in his chronicle. First came the navy
sailing past in the harbour, fifty galleys and other ships,
with their crews cheering and shouting on deck. Then came the
gilds on foot: first the master smiths, with garlands on
their heads and banners and trumpets; then the furriers
apparelled in samite and scarlet silk, with mantles of ermine
and vair; then the weavers richly bedight, and the ten master
tailors in white with crimson stars. Then the master
clothworkers passed, carrying boughs of olive and wearing
crowns of olive on their heads; then the fustian makers in
furred robes of their own weaving, and the quilt makers with
garlands of gilt beads and white cloaks sewn with
fleurs-de-lis, marching two by two, with little children
singing _chansonettes_ and _cobles_ before them. Then came
the makers of cloth of gold, all in cloth of gold, and their
servants in cloth of gold or of purple, followed by the
mercers in silk and the butchers in scarlet, the fish sellers
robed and furred and garlanded, and the master barbers,
having with them two riders attired as knights-errant, and
four captive damsels, strangely garbed. Then came the
glass-workers in scarlet furred with vair, and gold-fringed
hoods, and rich garlands of pearls, carrying flasks and
goblets of the famous Venetian glass before them, and the
comb and lantern makers, with a lantern full of birds to let
loose in the Doge's presence, and the goldsmiths wearing
wreaths and necklaces of gold and silver beads and sapphires,
emeralds, diamonds, topazes, jacinths, amethysts, rubies,
jasper, and carbuncles. Master and servants alike were
sumptuously clad, and almost all wore gold fringes on their
hoods, and garlands of gilded beads. Each craft was
accompanied by its band of divers instruments, and bore with
it silver cups and flagons of wine, and all marched in fair
order, singing ballads and songs of greeting, and saluted the
Doge and Dogaressa in turn, crying 'Long live our lord, the
noble Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo!' Gild after gild they marched in
their splendour, lovely alike to ear and eye; and a week fled
before the rejoicings were ended and all had passed in
procession. Canale surpasses himself here, for he loved State
ceremonies; he gives a paragraph to the advance of each gild,
its salutation and withdrawal, and the cumulative effect of
all the paragraphs is enchanting, like a prose ballade, with
a repeated refrain at the end of every verse.[9]
What, they lived once thus in Venice, where the merchants were the
kings,
Where St Mark's is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings?
Listening to the magnificent salutation of the Doge by the
priests of St Mark's, 'Criste, vince, Criste regne, Criste
inpere. Notre signor Laurens Teuples, Des gracie, inclit Dus
de Venise, Dalmace atque Groace, et dominator de la quarte
partie et demi de tot l'enmire de Romanie, sauvement, honor,
vie, et victoire. Saint Marc, tu le aie,'[10] who, hearing,
could have doubted that Venice, defier of Rome and conqueror
of Constantinople, was the finest, richest, most beautiful,
and most powerful city in the world?
But was she? Listen and judge. Thousands of miles away from
Venice, across the lands and seas of Asia, a little south of
the Yangtze River and close to the sea stood the city of
Kinsai or Hangchow, the capital of the Sung emperors, who
ruled Southern China, not yet (in 1268) conquered by the
Tartars.[11] Like Venice, Kinsai stood upon lagoons of water
and was intersected by innumerable canals. It was a hundred
miles in circuit, not counting the suburbs which stretched
round it, and there was not a span of ground which was not
well peopled. It had twelve great gates, and each of the
twelve quarters which lay within the gates was greater than
the whole of Venice. Its main street was two hundred feet
wide, and ran from end to end of the city, broken every four
miles by a great square, lined with houses, gardens, palaces,
and the shops of the artisans, who were ruled by its twelve
great craft gilds. Parallel with the main street was the
chief canal, beside which stood the stone warehouses of the
merchants who traded with India. Twelve thousand stone
bridges spanned its waterways, and those over the principal
canals were high enough to allow ships with their tapering
masts to pass below, while the carts and horses passed
overhead. In its market-places men chaffered for game and
peaches, sea-fish, and wine made of rice and spices; and in
the lower part of the surrounding houses were shops, where
spices and drugs and silk, pearls and every sort of
manufactured article were sold. Up and down the streets of
Kinsai moved lords and merchants clad in silk, and the most
beautiful ladies in the world swayed languidly past in
embroidered litters, with jade pins in their black hair and
jewelled earrings swinging against their smooth cheeks.[12]
On one side of this city lay a beautiful lake (famous in
Chinese history, and still one of the fairest prospects upon
earth), studded with wooded islands, on which stood pavilions
with charming names: 'Lake Prospect', 'Bamboo Chambers', 'The
House of the Eight Genii', and 'Pure Delight'. Here, like the
Venetians, the men of Kinsai came for pleasure parties in
barges, nobly hung and furnished, the cabins painted with
flowers and mountain landscapes, and looking out they saw on
one side the whole expanse of the city, its palaces, temples,
convents, and gardens, and on the other the stretch of clear
water, crowded with coloured pleasure boats, over which came
echoing the high, clear voices and the tinkling instruments
of the revellers. There is no space in which to tell of the
King's palace, with its gardens and orchards, its painted
pavilions, and the groves where the palace ladies coursed the
game with dogs, and, tired of the pastime, flung off their
robes and ran to the lake, where they disported themselves
like a shoal of silver fishes. But a word must be said of the
junks, which came sailing into the harbour four and twenty
miles away, and up the river to the city; and of the great
concourse of ships which came to Zaiton (perhaps the modern
Amoy), the port of the province. Here every year came a
hundred times more pepper than came to the whole of
Christendom through the Levantine ports. Here from Indo China
and the Indies came spices and aloes and sandalwood, nutmegs,
spikenard and ebony, and riches beyond mention. Big junks
laded these things, together with musk from Tibet, and bales
of silk from all the cities of Mansi[C], and sailed away in
and out of the East India Archipelago, with its spice-laden
breezes billowing their sails, to Ceylon. There merchants
from Malabar and the great trading cities of southern India
took aboard their cargoes and sold them in turn to Arab
merchants, who in their turn sold them to the Venetians in
one or other of the Levantine ports. Europeans who saw Zaiton
and the other Chinese seaports in after years were wont to
say that no one, not even a Venetian, could picture to
himself the multitude of trading vessels which sailed upon
those eastern seas and crowded into those Chinese harbours.
They said also with one accord that Kinsai was without doubt
the finest and richest and noblest city in the world. To the
men of Kinsai, Venice would have been a little suburb and the
Levant a backyard. The whole of the east was their trading
field, and their wealth and civilization were already old
when Venice was a handful of mud huts peopled by fishermen.
[Footnote C: Mansi or Manji was southern China and Cathay was
northern China, the boundary between them lying along the
River Hoang-Ho on the east and the southern boundary of
Shensi on the west.]
Nor was Kinsai alone and unmatched in all its wonder and
beauty, for a three days' journey from it stood Sugui, which
today we call Suchow, lying also on the great canal, with its
circumference of twenty miles, its prodigious multitudes
swarming the streets, its physicians, philosophers, and
magicians; Sugui, with the ginger which was so common that
forty pounds of it might be bought for the price of a
Venetian silver groat, the silk which was manufactured in
such vast quantities that all the citizens were dressed in it
and still ships laden with it sailed away; Sugui under whose
jurisdiction were sixteen wealthy cities, where trade and the
arts flourished. If you had not seen Hangchow, you would have
said that there was no city in the world, not Venice nor
Constantinople nor another worthy to be named in the same
breath with Sugui. The Chinese indeed, seeing the riches and
beauty of these two cities, doubted whether even the pleasant
courts of heaven could show their equal and proudly quoted
the proverb:
_Shang yeu t'ien t'ang,
Hia yeu Su Hang_.
(There's Paradise above, 'tis true,
But here below we've Hang and Su.)[13]
Kinsai seems far enough away in all conscience from Venice in
the year 1268, and Venice was all unwitting of its existence,
far beyond the sunrise. Yet there was in the city of the
lagoons that year, watching the same procession of the gilds
which Canale watched, a boy who was destined to link them for
ever in the minds of men--a lean lad of fourteen, Marco Polo
by name, who was always kicking his heels on the quay and
bothering foreign sailors for tales of distant lands. He
heard all they had to tell him very willingly, storing it up
in that active brain of his, for his curiosity was
insatiable; but always the tales that he heard most willingly
were about the Tartars.
At this time the Tartars were at the height of their power in
the West and the East. Tartars ruled at Peking all over
northern China, Corea, Mongolia, Manchuria, and Tibet, and
took tribute from Indo-China and Java. Tartars were spread
over central Asia, holding sway in Turkestan and Afghanistan.
The Golden Horde ruled the Caucasus, a large part of Russia,
and a piece of Siberia. Tartars held sway in Persia, Georgia,
Armenia, and a part of Asia Minor. When the great Mangu Khan
died in 1259, one empire lay spread across Asia and Europe,
from the Yellow River to the Danube. There had been nothing
like it in the world before, and there was nothing like it
again, until the Russian Empire of modern times. By 1268 it
was beginning to split up into the four kingdoms of China,
central Asia, Russia, and Persia, but still it was one
people. Now, the attitude of the West to the Tartars at this
time was very interesting. At first it feared them as a new
scourge of God, like Attila and his Huns; they overran
Poland, ravaged Hungary, and seemed about to break like a
great flood upon the West, and overwhelm it utterly. Then the
tide rolled back. Gradually the West lost its first
stupefaction and terror and began to look hopefully towards
the Tartars as a possible ally against its age-old foe, the
Moslem. The Christians of the West knew that the Tartars had
laid the Moslem power low through the length and breadth of
Asia, and they knew too, that the Tartars had no very sharply
defined faith and were curious of all beliefs that came their
way. Gradually the West became convinced that the Tartars
might be converted to Christianity, and fight side by side
beneath the Cross against the hated Crescent. There grew up
the strange legend of Prester John, a Christian priest-king,
ruling somewhere in the heart of Asia; and indeed little
groups of Nestorian Christians did still survive in eastern
Asia at this time.[14] Embassies began to pass between Tartar
khans and western monarchs, and there began also a great
series of missions of Franciscan friars to Tartary, men who
were ethnologists and geographers at heart as well as
missionaries, and have left us priceless accounts of the
lands which they visited. In the year of grace 1268, much
was known about central Asia, for in 1245 the Pope had sent
the Italian friar John of Plano Carpini thither, and in 1251
another friar, William of Rubruck, a French Fleming, had been
sent by the saintly Louis, King of France. Both got as far as
Karakorum, the Tartar camp on the borders of northern China,
though they did not enter China itself. They had brought back
innumerable stories about the nomad conquerors, who carried
their tents on carts, and drank fermented mares' milk, about
the greatness of the khan and his welcome to the strangers
from the West, and the interest with which he listened to
their preaching.[15] These tales were common property now,
and Marco Polo must have listened to them.
Marco Polo was always talking of the Tartars, always asking
about them. Indeed, he had reason to be interested in them.
This (as we have said) was the year of grace 1268, and eight
years before (some, indeed, say fifteen years) his father,
Nicolo Polo, and his uncle Maffeo had vanished into Tartary.
They were rich merchants, trading with their own ship to
Constantinople, and there they had decided to go on a
commercial venture into the lands of the Golden Horde, which
lay to the north of the Black Sea. So they had sailed over to
the Crimea, where they had a counting-house at Soldaia, and
taking with them a store of costly jewels, for they were
jewel merchants, they had set off on horseback to visit the
Khan of the West Tartars. So much the Venetians knew, for
word had come back from Soldaia of their venture; but they
had never returned. And so Marco, kicking his heels upon the
quay, caught sailor-men by the sleeve and asked them about
those wild horsemen with their mares' milk and their
magicians and their droves of cattle; and as he asked he
wondered about his father and his uncle, and whether they
were dead and lost for ever in the wilds of Tartary. But even
while he asked and wondered and kicked his heels on the quay,
while the Doge Tiepolo was watching the procession of the
gilds and the clerk Canale was adding up customs dues or
writing the ancient history of the Venetians, at that very
moment the two Polos were slowly and wearily making their way
across the heights of central Asia with a caravan of mules
and camels, drawing near to golden Samarcand with its teeming
bazaars, coming nearer and nearer to the West; and in the
following year, 1269, they reached Acre, and took ship there
for Venice, and so at last came home.
They had a strange story to tell, stranger and better than
anything the lean, inquisitive boy had heard upon the quays.
They had soon disposed of their jewels and they had spent a
year at the camp of the Khan of the Golden Horde of Kipchak
on the mighty River Volga. Then war broke out between that
ruler and the Khan who ruled the Persian Khanate, and it cut
off their way back. But Marco's curiosity was inherited; and
no Venetian was ever averse to seeing strange lands and
seeking out new opportunities for trade; so the Polos decided
to go on and visit the Khan of central Asia or Chagatai, and
perhaps make their way back to Constantinople by some
unfrequented route. They struggled over plains peopled only
by tent-dwelling Tartars and their herds, until at last they
reached the noble city of Bokhara. They must have followed
the line of the Oxus River, and if we reverse the marvellous
description which Matthew Arnold wrote of that river's course
in _Sohrab and Rustum_, we shall have a picture of the
Polos' journey:
But the majestic River floated on,
Out of the mist and hum of that low land,
Into the frosty starlight, and there moved,
Rejoicing, through the hush'd Chorasmian waste
Under the solitary moon; he flow'd
Right for the Polar Star, past Orgunjè,
Brimming and bright and large: then sands begin
To hem his watery march, and dam his streams,
And split his currents; that for many a league
The shorn and parcell'd Oxus strains along
Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles--
Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had
In his high mountain cradle in Pamere,
A foil'd circuitous wanderer:--till at last
The long'd-for dash of waves is heard, and wide
His luminous home of waters opens, bright
And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars
Emerge and shine upon the Aral Sea.
For three years the Polos remained at Bokhara, until one day
it happened that an embassy came to the city, on its way back
from the khan in Persia to the great Khan Kublai, who ruled
in far-off China, and to whom all the Tartar rulers owed
allegiance. The chief ambassador was struck with the talents
and charm of the brothers, who had now become proficient in
the Tartar language, and persuaded them to accompany him on
his journey to the presence of the Great Khan, who had never
yet set eyes on a man of the West, and would, he assured
them, receive them honourably. They would not have been
Venetians had they refused such an opportunity, and, taking
their Venetian servants with them, they journeyed for a year
with the Tartar embassy across the heart of Asia, and so
reached the great Kublai Khan. Many years later Marco himself
described their reception, as they had told it to him:
Being introduced to the presence of the Grand Khan Kublai,
the travellers were received by him with the condescension
and affability that belonged to his character, and as they
were the first Latins who had made their appearance in that
country, they were entertained with feasts and honoured with
other marks of distinction. Entering graciously into
conversations with them, he made earnest inquiries on the
subject of the western parts of the world, of the Emperor of
the Romans, and of other Christian kings and princes ... and
above all he questioned them particularly respecting the
Pope, the affairs of the Church, and the religious worship
and doctrine of the Christians. Being well instructed and
discreet men, they gave appropriate answers upon all these
points, and as they were perfectly acquainted with the Tartar
language, they expressed themselves always in becoming terms;
insomuch that the Grand Khan, holding them in high
estimation, frequently commanded their attendance.[16]
[Illustration: III. PART OF A LANDSCAPE BY CHAO MÊNG-FU]
The Great Khan finally decided to send these two intelligent strangers
back to their own land on a mission from himself to the Pope, asking for
a hundred men of learning to be sent to teach and preach to his Tartars,
and for some holy oil from the lamp which burned over Christ's sepulchre
in Jerusalem. He provided them with a golden tablet of honour, which
acted as a passport and secured that they should be entertained and
their journey facilitated from city to city in all his dominions, and so
they set forth once more upon their homeward journey, But they were
delayed by the dangers and difficulties of travel, 'the extreme cold,
the snow, the ice, and the flooding of the rivers', and it was three
years before they at last reached Acre in the April of 1269, and finding
that the Pope had died the year before, and that no election had yet
been made, so that they could not immediately accomplish their mission,
they decided to visit their home again, and so went back to Venice.
There Nicolo found that his wife, who had been with child at his
departure, was dead, leaving behind her a son Marco, our young
haunter of quays.
[Illustration: IV. MADAME EGLENTYNE AT HOME]
This was the marvellous tale which the same Marco drank in from the lips
of his new-found father and uncle. But more marvels were to come. For
two years the Venetians remained at home, awaiting the election of a
Pope in order to deliver the Great Khan's letters; but no election was
made, and at last, fearing that Kublai might suspect them of playing him
false, they decided to return to the East, and this time they took with
them Marco, now a well-grown lad of sixteen or seventeen years with a
bright eye that looked everywhere and took in everything, observant and
sober beyond his age. But when they got as far as Ayas on the Gulf of
Scanderoon, news was brought them of the election of Tebaldo di Piacenza
as Pope Gregory X, and as Tebaldo had already interested himself in
their mission, they returned with all speed to Acre, and obtained from
him letters to the Khan (they had already visited Jerusalem and provided
themselves with some of the holy oil), and two Dominican friars, 'men of
letters and science as well as profound theologians,' though not the
hundred men of learning for whom the Khan had asked; and so they set out
again from Acre in November 1271. The Dominicans may have been profound
theologians, but they were somewhat chicken-hearted adventurers, and
when rumours reached them of wars in the district of Armenia, through
which they had to pass, they hastily handed over their letters to the
Venetians, put themselves under the protection of the Knights Templars,
and scuttled back to the coast and safety as fast as they could go,
leaving the Polos, 'undismayed by perils and difficulties, to which they
had long been inured,' to proceed alone. Assuredly, St Francis crows
over St Dominic somewhere in the courts of Heaven; his friars never
feared for their skins, as they travelled blithely into the heat of
India and the cold of central Asia; and it is easy to imagine the
comments of fat William of Rubruck upon the flight of the profound
theologians.
The account of this second journey of the Polos may be read in the
wonderful book which Marco afterwards wrote to describe the wonders of
the world. They went from Lajazzo through Turcomania, past Mount Ararat,
where Marco heard tell that Noah's ark rested, and where he first heard
also of the oil wells of Baku and the great inland sea of Caspian. Past
Mosul and Bagdad they went, through Persia, where brocades are woven and
merchants bring caravan after caravan of treasures, to Hormuz, on the
Persian Gulf, into which port put the ships from India, laden with
spices, drugs, scented woods, and jewels, gold tissues and elephants'
teeth. Here they meant to take ship, but they desisted, perhaps because
they feared to trust themselves to the flimsy nailless vessels in which
the Arabs braved the dangers of the Indian Ocean. So they turned north
again and prepared to make the journey by land. They traversed the salt
desert of Kerman, through Balk and Khorassan to Badakhshan, where there
are horses bred from Alexander the Great's steed Bucephalus, and ruby
mines and lapis lazuli. It is a land of beautiful mountains and wide
plains, of trout streams and good hunting, and here the brothers
sojourned for nearly a year, for young Marco had fallen ill in the hot
plains: a breath of mountain air blows through the page in which he
describes how amid the clean winds his health came back to him. When he
was well, they went on again, and ascended the upper Oxus to the
highlands of Pamir, 'the roof of the world' as it has been called in our
own time, a land of icy cold, where Marco saw and described the great
horned sheep which hunters and naturalists still call after him the
_Ovis Poli_,[17] a land which no traveller (save Benedict Goës, about
1604) described again, until Lieutenant John Wood of the Indian Navy
went there in 1838. Thence they descended upon Kashgar, Yarkand, and
Khotan, where jade is found, regions which no one visited again until
1860. From Khotan they pushed on to the vicinity of Lake Lob, never to
be reached again until a Russian explorer got there in 1871. They halted
there to load asses and camels with provisions, and then, with sinking
hearts, they began the terrible thirty days' journey across the Gobi
Desert. Marco gives a vivid description of its terrors, voices which
seem to call the traveller by name, the march of phantom cavalcades,
which lures them off the road at night, spirits which fill the air with
sounds of music, drums and gongs and the clash of arms--all those
illusions which human beings have heard and seen and feared in every
desert and in every age.
What might this be? A thousand fantasies
Begin to throng into my memory,
Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire,
And airy tongues that syllable men's names
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses.
At last they arrived safely at Tangut in the extreme north-west of
China, and, skirting the frontier across the great steppes of Mongolia,
they were greeted by the Khan's people, who had been sent forward to
meet them at the distance of forty days' journey, and so at last they
reached his presence in the May of 1275, having journeyed for three
years and a half.
The Great Khan received the Polos kindly, listened attentively to the
account which they gave of their mission, commended them for their zeal
and fidelity, and received the holy oil and the Pope's gifts with
reverence. He then observed the boy Marco, now a 'young gallant' and
personable enough, no doubt, and inquired who he was, and Nicolo made
answer, 'Sire, this is your servant, and my son,' to which the Khan
replied, 'He is welcome, and much it pleases me,' and enrolled Marco
among his own attendants. It was the beginning of a long and close
association, for Kublai Khan soon found that Marco Polo was both
discreet and intelligent, and began to employ him on various missions.
Moreover, Marco, for his part, found that the Great Khan was always
desirous of learning the manners and customs of the many tribes over
whom he ruled. Kublai had to the full that noble curiosity which is the
beginning of wisdom, and it irked him exceedingly that his envoys, good
conscientious men, followed their noses upon his business, looking
neither to right nor to left, and as like as not never even noticed that
among the aboriginal hill tribes of the interior called Miaotzu there
prevailed the peculiar and entertaining custom of the _couvade_, wherein
Chinese go to bed
And lie in, in their ladies' stead.[18]
'The Prince, in consequence,' says Marco, 'held them for no better than
fools and dolts and would say, "I had far liever hearken about the
strange things and the manners of the different countries you have seen
than merely be told of the business you went upon,"'
Very different was the habit of the Venetian, who as a lad, had lent ear
so readily to swarthy sailors on the Rialto. He quickly picked up
several of the languages current in the Great Khan's empire, and here is
his account of his proceedings when on a mission to foreign parts:
Perceiving that the Great Khan took a pleasure in hearing
accounts of whatever was new to him respecting the customs
and manners of people, and the peculiar circumstances of
distant countries, he endeavoured, wherever he went, to
obtain correct information on these subjects and made notes
of all he saw and heard, in order to gratify the curiosity of
his master. In short, during seventeen years that he
continued in his service, he rendered himself so useful, that
he was employed on confidential missions to every part of the
empire and its dependencies; and sometimes also he travelled
on his own private account, but always with the consent and
sanctioned by the authority of the Grand Khan. In such
circumstances it was that Marco Polo had the opportunity of
acquiring a knowledge, either by his own observation or by
what he collected from others, of so many things until his
time unknown, respecting the Eastern parts of the world, and
these he diligently and regularly committed to writing....
And by this means he obtained so much honour that he provoked
the jealousy of other officers of the court.[19]
It is small wonder that when first the lad came back with his reports
the Great Khan and his courtiers marvelled and exclaimed, 'If this young
man live he will assuredly be a person of great worth and ability.'
It was while on these various public missions that Marco Polo journeyed
through the provinces of Shansi, Shensi, and Szechuen, and skirted the
edge of Tibet to Yunnan, and entered Northern Burma, lands unknown again
to the West until after 1860. For three years he was himself governor of
the great city of Yangchow, which had twenty-four towns under its
jurisdiction, and was full of traders and makers of arms and military
accoutrements.[20] He visited Karakorum in Mongolia, the old Tartar
capital, and with his Uncle Maffeo spent three years in Tangut. On
another occasion he went on a mission to Cochin China, and by sea to the
southern states of India, and he has left a vivid picture of the great
trading cities of Malabar. He might indeed have pondered with Ulysses,
I am become a name
For always roaming with a hungry heart,
Much have I seen and known, cities of men,
And manners, climates, countries, governments,
Myself not least, but honoured of them all.
He describes the great capital Cambaluc (Peking) in the north, and the
beautiful Kinsai (Hangchow) in the south. He describes the Khan's summer
palace at Shandu, with its woods and gardens, its marble palace, its
bamboo pavilion swung like a tent from two hundred silken cords, its
stud of white mares, and its wonder-working magicians. Indeed his
description of the summer palace is better known to Englishmen than any
other part of his work, for Shandu is Xanadu, which Coleridge saw in a
dream after he had been reading Marco's book and wove into
wonderful verse:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree,
Where Alph the sacred river ran,
Past caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sunless sea.
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense bearing tree,
And here were forests, ancient as the hills
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
Nor is it only palaces which Marco Polo describes, for he tells of the
great canal and inland river trade of China, the exports and imports at
its harbours, the paper money, the system of posts and caravanserais,
which linked it together. He gives an unsurpassed picture of that huge,
rich, peaceful empire, full of wealth and commerce and learned men and
beautiful things, and of its ruler Kublai Khan, one of the noblest
monarchs who ever sat upon a throne, who, since 'China is a sea that
salts all the rivers that flow into it,'[21] was far more than a
barbarous Mongol khan, was in very truth a Chinese emperor, whose house,
called by the Chinese the 'Yuan Dynasty', takes its place among the
great dynasties of China.
Even more than Marco Polo tells us he must, indeed, have seen. The
impersonality of the greater part of the book is its one blemish, for we
would fain know more of how he lived in China. There is some evidence
that he consorted with the Mongol conquerors rather than with the
Chinese, and that Chinese was not one of the languages which he learned.
He makes no mention of several characteristic Chinese customs, such as
the compressed feet of the women, and fishing with cormorants (both of
which are described by Ordoric of Pordenone after him); he travelled
through the tea districts of Fo-kien, but he never mentions
tea-drinking, and he has no word to say even of the Great Wall.[22] And
how typical a European he is, in some ways, for all his keen interest in
new and strange things. 'They are,' he says of the peaceful merchants
and scholars of Suchow, 'a pusillanimous race and solely occupied with
their trade and manufactures. In these indeed they display considerable
ability, and if they were as enterprising, manly, and warlike as they
are ingenious, so prodigious is their number that they might not only
subdue the whole of the province, but carry their rule further
still.'[23] Nearly five hundred years later we find the same judgement
expressed in different words: 'Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle
of Cathay.' The answer is a question: Would you rather be the
pusillanimous Chinese, who painted the landscape roll of which a portion
is reproduced opposite page 52, or the enterprising, manly, and warlike
European of the same period, whose highest achievement in pictorial art
is the picture of Marco Polo's embarkation, reproduced opposite page 21?
What is civilization and what progress? Yet Marco Polo shows himself
throughout his book far from unable to appreciate other standards than
those of his own land and religion, for of Sakya-muni Buddha he says
that, 'had he been a Christian he would have been a great saint of our
Lord Jesus Christ,' and he could honour Kublai as that great
Khan deserved.
Nevertheless, although Marco Polo shows less knowledge of the Chinese
than one might expect from the extraordinary detail and fidelity of his
observation in other directions, he must have known many of these
charming and cultivated people, at Kinsai or Cambaluc, or at the city
which he governed. Among others, he must have known the great artist who
painted the roll mentioned above, Chao Mêng-fu, whom the Chinese called
'_Sung ksüeh Tao jen_' or the 'Apostle of Pine Trees and Snow'. He was a
lineal descendant of the founder of the Sung dynasty and a hereditary
official. When that dynasty at last fell before the Tartars, he and his
friend Ch'ien Hsüan, 'the Man of the Jade Pool and Roaring Torrent',
retired into private life. But in 1286 Chao Mêng-fu was summoned to
court by Kublai Khan, and, to the indignation of his friend, returned
and became secretary in the Board of War, occupying his time in this
post (what must Marco Polo have thought of him!) in painting his
marvellous pictures. He became a great favourite of the Khan and was
always about the court, and Marco Polo must have known him well and
perhaps have watched him at work painting those matchless landscapes,
and those pictures of horses and men for which he was famous. Marco
loved horses, as, indeed, he loved all kinds of sport (of which he had
plenty, for the Khan was a great hunter and hawker), and he has left a
word picture of the white brood mares at Shansi, which may be set beside
Chao Mêng-fu's brush picture of the 'Eight Horses in the Park of Kublai
Khan'.[24] He knew, too, perhaps Chao Mêng-fu's wife, the Lady Kuan, who
painted most exquisitely the graceful bamboo and the peony, so loved by
Chinese artists, and of whom it is related that 'she would watch the
moving shadows of the sprays thrown by the moon on the paper windows,
and transfer the fugitive outlines to paper with a few strokes of her
supple brush, so that every smallest scrap of her work was mounted in
albums as models for others to copy'.[25] Chao Mêng-fu and the Lady Kuan
had a son, Chao Yung, who is of special interest to us, for he painted a
picture of a Tangut hunter, and Marco Polo has also given a description
of the Tartar horsemen and of the province of Tangut, where he saw and
described the musk deer and the yak.
But we must return to the history of the Polos in China. From time to
time in Marco's book we hear also of his father and uncle, travelling
about the empire, growing rich by trade, and amassing a store of those
jewels, in the value of which they were so skilled, even helping the
Khan to reduce a rebel town, by constructing siege engines for him on
the European model, handy Venetians that they were, who could lay their
hands to anything.[27] Without doubt they were proud of their Marco, who
from an inquisitive lad had grown to so wise and observant a man, and
had risen to so high a position. So for seventeen years the three Polos
abode in the Khan's service in China. The long months slipped by; and at
last they began to feel upon them a longing to see Venice and the
lagoons again, and to hear Mass once more beneath the majestic roof of
St Mark's before they died. Moreover, Kublai Khan was growing old
himself, and the favour which he had always shown to them had excited
some jealousy among his own people, and they feared what might happen
when he died. But the old Khan was adamant to all their prayers; wealth
and honours were theirs for the asking, but he would not let them go.
They might, indeed, have died in China, and we of the West might never
have heard of Marco Polo or of Kublai Khan, but for a mere accident, a
stroke of fate, which gave them their chance. In 1286 Arghun, the Khan
of Persia, lost by death his favourite wife Bolgana, and, according to
her dying wish, he sent ambassadors to the Court of Peking to ask for
another bride from her own Mongol tribe. Their overland route home again
was endangered by a war, and they therefore proposed to return by sea.
Just at that moment, Marco Polo happened to return from a voyage on
which he had been sent, and spoke with such assurance of the ease with
which it had been accomplished, that the three ambassadors conceived a
strong desire to take with them all three of these ingenious Venetians,
who seemed to know so much about ships. Thus it was that the great Khan
was prevailed upon, very reluctantly, to let them go.
Early in 1292 they set sail from the busy port of Zaiton in fourteen
big Chinese junks (of which Marco, writing of the shipping of the
Indian and China seas, has left an excellent description),[28] with the
three envoys, the princess, a beautiful girl of seventeen, 'moult bèle
dame at avenant,' says Marco, who had an eye for pretty ladies, and a
large suite of attendants. One version of Marco's book says that they
took with them also the daughter of the king of Mansi, one of those Sung
princesses who in happier days had wandered beside the lake in Hangchow,
and who had no doubt been brought up at Cambaluc by the care of Kublai
Khan's favourite queen, the Lady Jamui. The voyage was a long and
difficult one; they suffered lengthy delays in Sumatra, Ceylon, and
Southern India, occupied by Marco in studying the sea charts of the
coast of India which the Arab pilots showed him, and adding to his
knowledge of these parts, which he had already visited. Thus it was over
two years before the junks reached Persia, and two of the three envoys
and a large number of their suite had died by the way. When at last they
landed, it was found that Arghun, the prospective bridegroom, had
meanwhile died too, leaving his throne in the charge of a regent for his
young son. But on the regent's advice a convenient solution of the
difficulty was found by handing the princess over to this prince, and
Marco and his uncles duly conducted her to him in the province of
Timochain, where Marco Polo noticed that the women were 'in my opinion
the most beautiful in the world', where stood the famed and solitary
_arbor secco_, and where men still told tales of great Alexander and
Darius. There they took leave of their princess, who had come on the
long voyage to love them like fathers, so Marco says, and wept sorely
when they parted. It was while they were still in Persia, where they
stayed for nine months after handing over the princess, that the Polos
received news of the death of the Great Khan whom they had served so
faithfully for so many years. He died at the ripe age of eighty, and
with his death a shadow fell over central Asia, darkening the shining
yellow roofs of Cambaluc,
the barren plains
Of Sericana, where Chineses drive
With sails and wind their cany waggons light,
the minarets of Persia, and the tents of wild Kipchak Tartars, galloping
over the Russian steppes. So wide had been the sway of Kublai Khan. A
shadow fell also upon the heart of Marco Polo. It was as though a door
had clanged to behind him, never to open again. 'In the course of their
journey,' he says, 'our travellers received intelligence of the Great
Khan having departed this life, which entirely put an end to all
prospects of their revisiting those regions.' So he and his elders went
on by way of Tabriz, Trebizond, and Constantinople to Venice, and sailed
up to the city of the lagoons at long last at the end of 1295.
A strange fairy-tale legend has come down to us about the return of the
Polos. 'When they got thither,' says Ramusio, who edited Marco's book in
the fifteenth century, 'the same fate befell them as befell Ulysses, who
when he returned after his twenty years' wanderings to his native Ithaca
was recognized by nobody.' When, clad in their uncouth Tartar garb, the
three Polos knocked at the doors of the Ca' Polo, no one recognized
them, and they had the greatest difficulty in persuading their relatives
and fellow-Venetians that they were indeed those Polos who had been
believed dead for so many years. The story goes that they satisfactorily
established their identity by inviting all their kinsmen to a great
banquet, for each course of which they put on a garment more magnificent
than the last, and finally, bringing in their coarse Tartar coats, they
ripped open the seams and the lining thereof, 'upon which there poured
forth a great quantity of precious stones, rubies, sapphires,
carbuncles, diamonds, and emeralds, which had been sewn into each coat
with great care, so that nobody could have suspected that anything was
there.... The exhibition of such an extraordinary and infinite treasure
of jewels and precious stones, which covered the table, once more filled
all present with such astonishment that they were dumb and almost beside
themselves with surprise: and they at once recognized these honoured and
venerated gentlemen in the Ca' Polo, whom at first they had doubted and
received them with the greatest honour and reverence.[29] Human nature
has changed little since the thirteenth century. The precious stones are
a legend, but no doubt the Polos brought many with them, for they were
jewel merchants by trade; they had had ample opportunities for business
in China, and the Great Khan had loaded them with 'rubies and other
handsome jewels of great value' to boot. Jewels were the most
convenient form in which they could have brought home their wealth. But
the inquiring Marco brought other things also to tickle the curiosity of
the Venetians, as he lets fall from time to time in his book. He
brought, for example, specimens of the silky hair of the Tangut yak,
which his countrymen much admired, the dried head and feet of a musk
deer, and the seeds of a dye plant (probably indigo) from Sumatra, which
he sowed in Venice, but which never came up, because the climate was not
sufficiently warm.[30] He brought presents also for the Doge; for an
inventory made in 1351 of things found in the palace of Marino Faliero
includes among others a ring given by Kublai Khan, a Tartar collar, a
three-bladed sword, an Indian brocade, and a book 'written by the hand
of the aforesaid Marco,' called _De locis mirabilibus Tartarorum_.[31]
The rest of Marco Polo's life is quickly told. The legend goes that all
the youth of Venice used to resort to the Ca' Polo in order to hear his
stories, for not even among the foreign sailors on the quays, where once
the boy Marco had wandered and asked about the Tartars, were stories the
like of his to be heard. And because he was always talking of the
greatness of Kublai Khan's dominions, the millions of revenue, the
millions of junks, the millions of riders, the millions of towns and
cities, they gave him a nickname and jestingly called him Marco
_Milione_, or _Il Milione_, which is, being interpreted, 'Million
Marco'; and the name even crept into the public documents of the
Republic, while the courtyard of his house became known as the _Corte
Milione_. To return from legend to history, the ancient rivalry between
Venice and Genoa had been growing during Marco Polo's absence, nor had
Venice always prevailed. Often as her galleys sailed,
dipping deep
For Famagusta and the hidden sun
That rings black Cyprus with a lake of fire, ...
Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges,
The pirate Genoese
Hell raked them till they rolled
Blood, water, fruit, and corpses up the hold.
At last in 1298, three years after Marco's return, a Genoese fleet under
Lamba Doria sailed for the Adriatic, to bate the pride of Venice in her
own sea. The Venetians fitted out a great fleet to meet it, and Marco
Polo, the handy man who knew so much about navigation, albeit more
skilled with Chinese junks than with western ships, went with it as
gentleman commander of a galley. The result of the encounter was a
shattering victory for the Genoese off Curzola. Sixty-eight Venetian
galleys were burnt, and seven thousand prisoners were haled off to
Genoa, among them Marco Polo, who had now a taste of the results of that
enterprise, manliness, and warfare, whose absence he so deprecated in
the men of Suchow.
But soon there began to run through the streets and courtyards of Genoa
a rumour that in prison there lay a certain Venetian captain, with tales
so wonderful to beguile the passing hours that none could tire of
hearing them; and anon the gallants and sages and the bold ladies of
Genoa were flocking, just as the men of the Rialto had flocked before,
to hear his stories of Kublai Khan.
Lord of the fruits of Tartary
Her rivers silver-pale,
Lord of the hills of Tartary,
Glen, thicket, wood, and dale,
Her flashing stars, her scented breeze,
Her trembling lakes, like foamless seas,
Her bird-delighting citron-trees
In every purple vale.
'Messer Marco,' so runs Ramusio's account of the tradition which
lingered in Venice in his day, 'finding himself in this position, and
witnessing the general eagerness to hear all about Cathay and the Great
Khan, which indeed compelled him daily to repeat his story till he was
weary, was advised to put the matter in writing, so he found means to
get a letter written to his father in Venice, in which he desired the
latter to send those notes and memoranda which he had brought home
with him.'
It happened that in prison with Marco Polo there lay a certain Pisan
writer of romances, Rusticiano by name,[32] who had probably been taken
prisoner before at the battle of Melaria (1284), when so many Pisan
captives had been carried to Genoa, that the saying arose 'He who would
see Pisa let him go to Genoa.' Rusticiano was skilled in the writing of
French, the language _par excellence_ of romances, in which he had
written versions of the Round Table Tales, and in him Marco Polo found a
ready scribe, who took down the stories as he told them, in the midst of
the crowd of Venetian prisoners and Genoese gentlemen, raptly drinking
in all the wonders of Kublai Khan. It was by a just instinct that, when
all was written, Rusticiano prefixed to the tale that same address to
the lords and gentlemen of the world, bidding them to take heed and
listen, which he had been wont to set at the beginning of his tales of
Tristan and Lancelot and King Arthur: 'Ye Lords, Emperors and Kings,
Dukes and Marquises, Counts, Knights and Burgesses and all ye men who
desire to know the divers races of men and the diversities of the
different regions of the world, take ye this book and cause it to be
read, and here shall ye find the greatest marvels.' But he adds, 'Marco
Polo, a wise and learned citizen of Venice, states distinctly what
things he saw and what things he heard from others, for this book will
be a truthful one.' Marco Polo's truthful marvels were more wonderful
even than the exploits of Arthur's knights, and were possibly better
suited to the respectable Rusticiano's pen, for his only other claim to
distinction in the eyes of posterity seems to be that in his abridgment
of the Romance of Lancelot he entirely omits the episode (if episode it
can be called) of the loves of Lancelot and Guinevere. 'Alas,' remarks
his French editor, 'that the copy of Lancelot which fell into the hands
of poor Francesca of Rimini was not one of those expurgated by
Rusticiano!' [33]
Marco Polo was released from prison (there must have been mourning in
the palaces of Genoa) and returned to Venice at the end of a year.
Sometimes hereafter his name occurs in the records of Venice, as he
moves about on his lawful occasions.[34] In 1305 we find 'Nobilis
Marchus Polo Milioni' standing surety for a wine smuggler; in 1311 he is
suing a dishonest agent who owes him money on the sale of musk (he,
Marco, had seen the musk deer in its lair); and in 1323 he is concerned
in a dispute about a party wall. We know too, from his will, that he had
a wife named Donata, and three daughters, Fantina, Bellela, and Moreta.
Had he loved before, under the alien skies where his youth was spent,
some languid, exquisite lady of China, or hardy Tartar maid? Had he
profited himself from the strange marriage customs of Tibet, of which he
remarks (with one of his very rare gleams of humour), 'En cele contree
aurent bien aler les jeume de seize anz en vingt quatre'? Had Fantina,
Bellela, and Moreta half-brothers, flying their gerfalcons at the quails
by the shores of the 'White Lake' where the Khan hunted, and telling
tales of the half legendary father, who sailed away for ever when they
were boys in the days of Kublai Khan? These things we cannot know, nor
can we ever guess whether he regretted that only daughters sprang from
his loins in the city of the lagoons, and no Venetian son to go
venturing again to the far-distant country where assuredly he had left a
good half of his heart. Perhaps he talked of it sometimes to Peter, his
Tartar servant, whom he freed at his death 'from all bondage as
completely as I pray God to release mine own soul from all sin and
guilt'. Some have thought that he brought Peter the Tartar with him from
the East, and the thought is a pleasant one; but it is more likely that
he bought him in Italy, for the Venetians were inveterate slave-owners,
and captive Tartars were held of all the slaves the strongest and best.
So his life passed; and in 1324 Marco Polo died, honoured much by his
fellow-citizens, after making a will which is still preserved in the
library of St Mark's.
A characteristic story of his death-bed is related by a Dominican friar,
one Jacopo of Acqui, who wrote some time later. 'What he told in the
book,' says Jacopo, 'was not as much as he had really seen, because of
the tongues of detractors, who being ready to impose their own lies on
others, are over hasty to set down as lies what they in their perversity
disbelieve or do not understand. And because there are many great and
strange things in that book, which are reckoned past all credence, he
was asked by his friends on his death-bed to correct the book, by
removing everything that went beyond the facts. To which his reply was
that he had not told _one half_ of what he had really seen.'[35] How
well one can see that last indignant flash of the dying observer, who in
the long years of his youth had taken notes of strange tribes and
customs for the wise and gracious Kublai Khan, and whom little men now
dared to doubt. Indeed, modern discovery has entirely confirmed the
exactitude of Marco Polo's observation. It is true that he sometimes
repeated some very tall stories which had been told to him, of dog-faced
men in the Andaman Islands and of the 'male and female islands' so
beloved of medieval geographers. These were sailors' yarns, and where
Marco Polo reports what he has seen with his own eyes, he reports with
complete accuracy, nor does he ever pretend to have seen a place which
he had not visited. The explorers of our own day, Aurel Stein, Ellsworth
Huntington, and Sven Hedin, travelling in central Asia, have
triumphantly vindicated him. 'It is,' says an eminent French historian,
'as though the originals of very old photographs had been suddenly
rediscovered: the old descriptions of things which were unchanged could
be perfectly superimposed upon present reality,'[36] and Huntington and
Aurel Stein took with them to the inaccessible districts of central Asia
as guide-books the book of the Chinese pilgrim Hiwen Thsang (seventh
century) and the book of Marco Polo, and over and over again found how
accurate were their descriptions.
It is indeed almost impossible to exaggerate the extent of Marco Polo's
accomplishment. It is best estimated in the often-quoted words of Sir
Henry Yule, whose edition of his book is one of the great works of
English scholarship:
He was the first traveller to trace a route across the whole
longitude of Asia, naming and describing kingdom after
kingdom, which he had seen with his own eyes, the desert of
Persia, the flowering plateaux and wild gorges of Badakhshan,
the jade-bearing rivers of Khotan, the Mongol steppes, cradle
of the power that had so lately threatened to swallow up
Christendom, the new and brilliant court that had been
established at Cambaluc: the first Travellers to reveal China
in all its wealth and vastness, its mighty rivers, its huge
cities, its rich manufactures, its swarming population, the
inconceivably vast fleets that quickened its seas and inland
waters; to tell us of the nations on its borders with all
their eccentricities of manners and worship; of Tibet with
its sordid devotees; of Burma with its golden pagodas and
their tinkling crowns; of Laos, of Siam, of Cochin China, of
Japan, the Eastern Thule, with its rosy pearls and
golden-roofed palaces; the first to speak of that Museum of
Beauty and Wonder, still so imperfectly ransacked, the Indian
Archipelago, source of those aromatics then so highly prized
and whose origin was so dark; of Java the Pearl of Islands;
of Sumatra with its many kings, its strange costly products,
and its cannibal races; of the naked savages of Nicobar
and Andaman; of Ceylon, the Isle of Gems, with its Sacred
Mountain and its Tomb of Adam; of India the Great, not as a
dreamland of Alexandrian fables, but as a country seen and
partially explored, with its virtuous Brahmans, its obscene
ascetics, its diamonds and the strange tales of their
acquisition, its sea-beds of pearl and its powerful sun; the
first in modern times to give any distinct account of the
secluded Christian Empire of Abyssinia, to speak, though
indeed dimly, of Zanzibar with its negroes and its ivory and
of the vast and distant Madagascar, bordering on the Dark
Ocean of the South, with its Ruc and other monstrosities; and
in a remotely opposite region, of Siberia and the Arctic
Ocean, of dog-sledges, white bears and reindeer-riding
Tunguses.[37]
The knowledge which Marco Polo had thus brought to Europe, the
intercourse between East and West which his experience had shown to be
so desirable, continued to grow after him. Merchants and missionaries
alike travelled by land or sea eastward to Cathay.[38] Another of those
indomitable Franciscan friars, John of Monte Corvino, went out at the
age of fifty and became Archbishop of Peking. Churches and houses of
friars were founded in some of the Chinese cities. Odoric of Pordenone,
another friar, and a very good observer too, set forth in 1316 and
sailed round India and through the Spice Islands by the same sea route
by which the Polos had brought their Tartar princess back to Persia, and
so reached Canton, 'a city as big as three Venices ... and all Italy
hath not the amount of craft that this one city hath.' He left a
wonderful account of his travels in China, including descriptions of
Peking and Hangchow, and ends his stories with the words, 'As for me,
from day to day I prepare myself to return to those countries, in which
I am content to die, if it pleaseth Him from whom all good things do
come'--no doubt where he had left his heart, but he died at Udine in
Italy. Later there went out another friar, John Marignolli, who was
Papal Legate to Peking from 1342 to 1346.
Nor was it only missionaries who went to Cathay. Odoric, speaking of the
wonders of Hangchow, refers for confirmation to Venetian traders who
have visited it: ''Tis the greatest city in the whole world, so great
indeed that I should scarcely venture to tell of it, but that I have met
at Venice people in plenty who have been there'; John of Monte Corvino
was accompanied by Master Peter of Lucolongo, 'a great merchant,' and
John Marignolli mentions a _fondaco_ for the use of Christian merchants,
which was attached to one of the Franciscan convents at Zaiton. Above
all, there is Francis Balducci Pegolotti, that intrepid factor who
served the great commercial house of the Bardi of Florence, and who
wrote a priceless handbook for the use of merchants about 1340. In this
he gives detailed instructions for the guidance of a merchant, who
wishes to proceed from Tana on the Black Sea by the overland route
across Asia to Cathay and back again with £12,000 worth of silk in his
caravan, and remarks casually, in passing, 'The road you travel from
Tana to Cathay is perfectly safe, whether by day or night, according to
what merchants say who have used it'--'il chanmino dandare dana Tana al
Ghattajo _è sichurissimo_![39] Think only of what it all means. Marco
Polo travelling where no man set foot again till the twentieth century.
The bells of the Christian church ringing sweetly in the ears of the
Great Khan in Peking. The long road across central Asia perfectly safe
for merchants. The 'many persons at Venice' who have walked in the
streets of Hangchow. This is in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth
centuries, in the despised and hidebound Middle Ages. _È sichurissimo_!
It takes some of the gilt off Columbus and Vasco da Gama and the age
(forsooth) of 'discovery'.
But a change came over everything in the middle of the fourteenth
century. Darkness fell again and swallowed up Peking and Hangchow, the
great ports, the crowding junks, the noble civilization. No longer was
the great trade route _sichurissimo_, and no longer did Christian friars
chant their Masses in Zaiton. The Tartar dynasty fell and the new rulers
of China reverted to the old anti-foreign policy; moreover, Islam spread
its conquests all over central Asia and lay like a rampart between the
far east and west, a great wall of intolerance and hatred stronger by
far than the great wall of stone which the Chinese had once built to
keep out the Tartars. All Marco Polo's marvels became no more than a
legend, a traveller's tale.
But that great adventurer was not done for yet. Nearly a century and a
half after Marco's death a Genoese sea captain sat poring over one of
the new printed books, which men were beginning to buy and to hand
about among themselves. The book which he was reading was the Latin
version of Marco Polo's travels. He was reading it with intentness and
indeed with passion. As he read he made notes in the margin; on over
seventy pages he made his notes.[40] From time to time he frowned and
turned back and read again the tale of those great ports of Cathay and
the gold-roofed palaces of Cipangu; and always he wondered how those
lands might be reached, now that the wall of darkness covered central
Asia, and anarchy blocked the road to the Persian Gulf. One day (may we
not see him?) he lifted his head and smote his hand upon the table. 'I
will sail west', he said. 'Maybe I shall find the lost island of Antilha
in the western ocean, but maybe on its far rim I shall indeed come to
Cipangu, for the world is round, and somewhere in those great seas
beyond the coast of Europe must lie Marco Polo's rich Cathay. I will
beseech the kings of England and of Spain for a ship and a ship's
company, and the silk and the spices and the wealth shall be theirs. I
will sail west,' said the Genoese sea captain, and he smote his thigh.
'I will sail west, west, west!' And this was the last of Messer Marco's
marvels; he discovered China in the thirteenth century, when he was
alive, and in the fifteenth, when he was dead, he discovered America!