Biographies & Memoirs

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Mongol Princess

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw….

AS KUBLAI KHAN entered a slow, painful decline, Marco and his father and uncle desperately sought release from service. With each passing year, it seemed more likely that they would not live to see Venice again. Worse, if Kublai Khan died while they were still in China, their paizas—and their lives—would be worthless. They might fall victim to his enemies, or whoever seized the throne and wished them out of the way. So a timely release from service was a matter of life and death.

Marco describes the circumstances behind their deliverance from glorified servitude with considerable care, tracking the course of a fond wish as it developed into an obsession and, finally, a plan. “When Master Niccolò, Master Maffeo, and Master Marco had stayed with the Great Khan at his court [for] many years,” he begins, “they said among themselves that one day they wished to go back to their…native country, for it was now high time to do so. Though they found themselves very rich in jewels of great value and in gold, an extreme desire to see their native land again was always fixed in their minds; and even though they were honored and favored, they thought of nothing else but this.” Marco summarizes their plight in a manner that is both poignant and realistic: “Seeing that the Great Khan was very old, they feared that if he were to die before their departure they might never be able to return home, because of the length of the way and the infinite perils that threatened them; though they hoped to be able to do this if he were alive.”

When he judged the moment to be right, Marco’s father, Niccolò, seized his chance. “One day, seeing that the Great Khan was very cheerful, [he] took occasion to beg of him on his knees in the name of all three leave to depart to their home, at which word [the khan] was all disturbed and answered, ‘Why do you wish to go to die on the way? Tell me. If you have need of gold I will give you much more of it than you have at home, and likewise every other thing for which you shall ask.’”

The khan promised to advance them “whatever honors they might wish” to guarantee their loyalty. His words implied that he considered the Polo company bound to him for life, if not for eternity.

On bended knee, Niccolò argued, “That which I say is not for want of gold, but it is because in my land I have a wife and by the Christian law I cannot forsake her while she lives.”

Kublai Khan considered this carefully worded appeal. “On no condition in the world am I willing that you depart from my realm,” he answered, “but I am well content that you go about it where you please.”

Still frustrated, Niccolò, pleaded, as Marco put it, “very sweetly,” for formal permission to quit the kingdom, only to be undone by his family’s longstanding loyalty to the Mongol leader. “The Great Khan loved them so much, was so much pleased with their deeds, and kept them willingly about him, that for nothing in the world did he give them leave.” Only now did the Polos realize that Kublai Khan might consider their departure a sign of his diminishing power; at this volatile point in his reign, he could not afford that challenge.

WHEN IT SEEMED that negotiations had reached a standstill, Kublai Khan, inspired by the unlikeliest of circumstances, the effort to find a successor for a distant queen, devised a solution that saved face for all parties.

As Marco reports, “It happened that the Queen Bolgana, who was wife of Argon, died.” Argon, or Arghun as he was sometimes known, was the “lord of the Levant,” a western kingdom loosely affiliated with the Mongol Empire. At the same time, Argon had been locked in a fierce quarrel with his uncle Acmat Soldan, who had converted to Islam and committed the outrage of stealing his brother’s wives. Argon vowed to avenge this wrong and kill Acmat Soldan, who in turn vowed to kill him, but not before torturing him. The two spent years at war with each other, and eventually Argon won out.

For the sake of maintaining a semblance of stability in the empire, Kublai Khan was prepared to oversee the line of succession in this distant kingdom. Marco explains that on her deathbed, the queen had expressed the wish “that no lady might sit on her throne nor be wife of Argon if she were not of her line.” Then, he continues, “Argon took three of his barons”—Oulatai, Apusca, and Coja by name—and sent them “very grandly as his messengers to the Great Khan with a very great and fair company in order to ask that he should send him a lady who was of the line of the Queen Bolgana…to marry him.”

The three emissaries completed the hazardous mission to Kublai Khan, who “received them most honorably and made joy and feasting for them. Then, since King Argon was his very great friend, [Kublai sent] for a lady who had Cocacin for name, who was of the lineage they desired.” This was the Mongol princess known to history as Kokachin. She was seventeen years old, “very fair and amiable,” and she instantly won the emissaries’ approval. Her name, which meant “blue like Heaven,” has often been taken to indicate that her eyes were blue, which would have been highly unusual among the Mongols. More likely, her eyes were dark, and the name, like many Mongol names, included a color, in this case blue, suggestive of Heaven.

Kublai commanded the three barons, “Take her to Argon your lord, for she is of the family he seeks, so that he may take her safely to wife.”

In Marco’s telling, their journey sounds like a fairy tale, but it is replete with the awkwardness of reality, beginning with a false start. “When all things necessary had been made ready and a great brigade to escort with honor this new bride to King Argon, the envoys, after taking leave of the Great Khan, set out riding for the space of eight months by that same way they were come.” Soon enough, they encountered trouble. “On the journey they found that by a war newly begun between certain kings of the Tartars the roads were closed, and not being able to go forward they were obliged against their will to return again to the court of the Great Khan, to whom they related all that had befallen them.”

The reversal of fortune provided the Polo company with a slender chance to escape the Mongol Empire, as Marco explains. “At the same time the ambassadors were come for that lady, Master Marco returned with a certain embassy from India, who was gone as ambassador of the lord and had been or passed through the kingdom of Argon.” Marco was overflowing with mesmerizing tales as he described “the embassy and the other different things that he had seen on his way and how he had gone through foreign provinces and very strange seas, and [he told] many wonderful new things of that country.”

By virtue of his extensive travels, Marco possessed impressive credentials as a worthy guardian for the young princess on her journey to King Argon. “The three barons who have seen Master Niccolò and Master Maffeo and Master Marco, who were Latins”—that is, Christians—“and wise men, had very great wonder. And when they heard that those [the Polos] had a wished to depart, then they thought and they said among themselves that they wished that they may go with them by sea; for their intention was to return to their country by sea for the sake of the lady, because of the great labor that it is to travel by land…. On the other hand, they would gladly take them [the Polos] as their companions in this journey because they knew that they had seen and explored much of the Indian Ocean and those countries by which they must go, and”—the narrator proudly adds—“especially Master Marco.”

Marco’s professed expertise in sailing enabled him to secure a commitment from Kublai Khan. “As Marco who had sailed to those lands had said, his Majesty should be content to do them this kindness that they should go by sea, and that these three Latins, that is, Niccolò, Maffeo, and Marco, who had experience in sailing the said seas, must accompany them to the lands of King Argon.”

Even with this point in their favor, Kublai Khan, a latter-day Pharaoh, still resisted the idea of letting the Polo company go. “Nevertheless, as he could not do otherwise, he consented to all that they asked of him.”

Displaying the humanity that originally drew Marco to him, Kublai Khan “made them all and three come before him and spoke to them many gracious words of the great love that he bore them, and they should promise that when they had been some time in the land of Christians and at their home, they would return to him.” The Polos, eager to be on their way after years of delay, agreed to this promise without any intention of keeping it. Timing was critical. As was apparent to all, Kublai Khan was nearing the end of his life. They had no choice but to leave now, under any terms they could negotiate.

The bargain they struck with the Mongol ruler did not allow them complete freedom; Kublai Khan could claim that he had dispatched the Polo company on just another mission in the service of the empire. But no return was planned. Once they completed their task, the Polos would be free to go.

IT WAS NOW 1292, and Marco Polo was a man of thirty-eight, having spent seventeen years in the service of Kublai Khan. He no longer had occasion to masquerade as someone other than a merchant of Venice, even though he was most memorable, and most convincing, when he pretended to be someone else, a replica capable of surpassing the original. Confined within the limits of his own identity, he was diminished. By way of compensation, he no longer had to play the role of dutiful son serving an extended, strenuous apprenticeship to his father and uncle, or that of the charming protégé of the most powerful ruler on the face of the earth. He was simply the itinerant, observant merchant, impressed by ingenuity, dismissive of folly, susceptible to the temptations of the flesh, and moved by faith. The mature Marco cast a cold eye on the dealings around him, seeing these machinations for what they were, not for what his fertile imagination might take them for.

Despite his disillusionment, Marco was intoxicated by the prospect of returning home. Later, when he came to tell his story, he seems to have intended to describe this turning point in his travels twice, as if to underscore its importance. But his manner of handling it was odd. He devoted a significant part of the prologue to narrating the episode in considerable detail rather than summarizing it. In fact, the description of his departure from Kublai Khan’s court was by far the longest entry in the prologue, and the space devoted to it suggests that Marco regarded it as the most noteworthy event of his entire career in the service of the Mongol Empire.

With every mile he traveled on the Silk Road and beyond, Marco composed his own epitaph, combining the fragments of experience to form a great, if erratic, epic, romantic yet existential, purposeful yet impulsive. Marco never set out to discover a particular place, and never thought of himself as an explorer—“wayfarer” was the term he used to describe himself. His adventures occurred, and would continue to occur, by accident rather than design. He did not, and could not, plan; he lived by his wits and his talent for improvisation. A wanderer by temperament, he knew how to blend in rather than stand out.

Although Marco never stopped seeing himself as a merchant, he evinced little interest in becoming wealthy himself even as he constantly tallied the wealth of others. He believed in commerce as he did in little else. For Marco, commerce and travel were synonymous, and beyond that, they were the essence of life. They were, it seemed to him, more comprehensive undertakings than politics or war; in fact, he implicitly viewed war as an ill-considered obstacle to the essentially commercial nature of human endeavor. Kublai Khan’s charisma (and concubines) held more fascination for Marco than gold or gems. Surely there were easier ways to grow rich than traveling across a continent, exposing himself to danger every step of the way. But it was the process—the negotiations, the observations, the conflict—that engaged Marco’s attention, not the outcome. By the time he began his trip home, he counted himself wealthy in knowledge and experience rather than in tangible assets.

JUST BEFORE the Polo company left the Mongol court, Kublai Khan, exuding a melancholy dignity, gave new, even more elaborate paizas to the travelers to guarantee their safety and well-being. The paizas were things of beauty, “two tablets of gold sealed with the royal seal with orders written thereon that they should be free and exempt from every burden and secure through all his lands.” The Polos’ manner of travel promised to be equally luxurious. “Wherever they might go,” Kublai ordered, “they must have all the expenses for themselves and for all their train, and an escort given them that they may be able to pass in safety.”

In fact, Kublai Khan had elaborate plans for his favored merchant ambassadors, and he transformed their passage into an international mission of considerable significance. “He entrusted them with many things on his own behalf”—presumably letters and other personal items—“and with an embassy to the pope and to the king of France, and to the king of England, and to the king of Spain and to the other crowned kings of Christendom.”

Fully assembled, the expedition was magnificent: fourteen large ships, each equipped with four masts and twelve sails. Marco’s enthusiasm at the adventure before him in 1292 fairly bursts from the account. His yearning for blue water and the tang of the open sea is palpable. The prospect engaged his nautical expertise. “I could tell you how they [the ships] were made,” he says, “but because it would be too long a matter I will not mention it to you at this point”—although he does remark that four or five of the ships held 250 men each. A mighty fleet would be making its way to King Argon, bearing him a longed-for princess.

The actual departure occasioned still more generosity from Kublai Khan and the seemingly inexhaustible Mongol treasury. “When the ships were fitted out and furnished with food and with all things necessary, and the three barons and the lady and these three Latins, the two brothers Master Niccolò and Master Maffeo, and Master Marco, were ready to go to King Argon, they presented themselves to their lord, and took leave of the Great Khan and with great joy came to the ships that were prepared and assemble themselves on the ships with a very great company of ladies and gentlemen. And the Great Khan made men give them many rubies and other very fine jewels of great value, and also expenses for ten years.”

The ceremony marked the last time they would see Kublai Khan. After twenty years abroad, their long voyage home commenced, and the adventure of a lifetime began to draw to a close.

THE POLO COMPANY’S mission to deliver Princess Kokachin to her rightful king and kingdom has attained special significance in recent years because it is the only event described by Marco that is confirmed in detail by Chinese and Mongol sources. In 1941 and again in 1945, Yang Chih-chiu, a Chinese scholar, compared Yüan dynasty sources with Marco’s detailed rendition of the circumstances of his departure from China and discovered that they matched almost perfectly, with the significant omission of the names of the three emissaries from Kublai Khan.

An account written in about 1307 by Rashid al-Din, the authoritative chronicler of the era, told very much the same story, mentioning Princess Kokachin and the three ambassadors who accompanied her, corresponding closely with the details Marco set forth. Like his Chinese counterparts, Rashid al-Din did not mention the three Polos by name, but the existence of an independent informant confirming precise features of Marco’s description amounts to more than coincidence. Taken together, these sources confirm that Marco escorted the princess to King Argon and was in service to Kublai Khan, just as he claimed.

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“THEY SET OUT from that island, and I tell you that they sailed through the great sea of India for eighteen months before they came to the land of King Argon,” Marco reports, “and in this journey they saw strange and different things and they found many great marvels.” In his haste, he never did tell his collaborator, Rustichello, what those things were, but to judge from the scant information about the voyage that he did provide, the 1293 ocean voyage was violent and traumatic.

“When they entered into the ships in the land of the Great Khan,” Marco reports, “there were between ladies and men six hundred people, without [counting] sailors. And when they reached the land where they were going, they made a count that all had died on the way except only eighteen. And of those three ambassadors there remained but one, who was named Coja; and of all the women and girls none died but one.” Disease, shipwreck, and pirates were the likely culprits, but Marco does not offer an explanation, despite his penchant for depicting dramatic events and circumstances that would show him in a heroic light. Given his fascination with ships, it seems likely that an important and dramatic segment of his account devoted to these matters has been lost. All that remains of the traumatic episode is a collection of tantalizing fragments hinting at extreme suffering and sorrow. Despite all, the Polos and the young Mongol princess survived.

Marco had endured an ordeal surpassing anything he had previously faced, even as a young man making his way across the Steppe for the first time. In his descriptions, he was now more subdued, less inclined to boasting, not so much disillusioned as disoriented. Marco recovered his former vitality when reliving previous episodes for the sake of entertaining his readers, but as he narrates the latter part of his tale, he no longer gives the impression of leading a charmed existence. Instead, his more reverent tone suggests that he felt fortunate simply to count himself among the living.

THE SURVIVORS’ unanticipated arrival in Argon’s kingdom generated shock rather than relief. Matters in this distant land had changed drastically since those three ambassadors had left for Kublai Khan’s court several years earlier. Argon was dead—poisoned, perhaps, by his enemies.

Marco was dismayed. In Argon’s place, the Polos found that “one named Quiacatu held the lordship of Argon, for the boy who was not yet fit to rule, for he was young.” Not knowing what to do with the princess whom they had risked their lives to escort, they eventually decided to present her to “Caçan, the son of Argon, to wife,” and despite his youth, the two were joined in matrimony.

If Marco and his father and uncle believed that they had discharged their responsibilities and could at last leave the service of Kublai Khan, they were disappointed. Once again, they were nearly undone by their loyalty and their ability to accomplish seemingly impossible long-distance assignments in the service of the Great Khan. The young princess did not wish them to leave her alone in this strange and threatening land, and because she was a princess, her wish was law. They tried to comply with her every request, but in the end, Marco reports, “when Master Niccolò and Master Maffeo and Master Marco had done all the duties about the lady and the missions, with which the Great Khan had charged them, they returned to Quiacatu, because their road must be that way, and there they stayed nine months.”

Nine months! They could only have wondered, with good reason, if they would ever see the great domes of San Marco, greet their wives, and resume their comfortable lives in Venice. During the endless layover, the Polo company endured a suffocating excess of hospitality and affection from their grateful hosts. Even when the weather cooperated, and political conditions permitted them to leave, the young woman whom they had escorted across China did not wish to see her guardians depart. Once more, the Polos found themselves pleading and making far-fetched promises to return in exchange for permission to leave. At last their wish was granted, but even then, “when these three messengers left her to return to their country, she wept for grief at their departure.” Perhaps she finally came to the realization that she had been the vehicle of their escape from the Mongol Empire. The unfortunate Kokachin, who had risked all to journey to this distant kingdom, died a short time later, in June 1296. Poisoning by a faction opposed to Kublai Khan is the most likely explanation for her untimely death.

As the Polo company prepared to depart, Quiacatu, in the spirit of Kublai Khan, bestowed a series of gifts, blessings, and burdens in the form of elaborate paizas: “four tablets of gold…two with gerfalcons and one with a lion and the other was plain, each of which was one cubit long and five fingers wide.” The tablets declared “that these three messengers should be honored and served through all his land as his own person, and that horses and all expenses and all escort should be given them in full through any dangerous places for themselves and the whole company.”

The beneficence of Kublai Khan was endless, even now. “Many times there were given them two hundred horsemen, and more or less according as was necessary for their escort and to go safely from one land to another. And this was very necessary many times, for they found many dangerous places, because Quiacatu had no authority and was not natural nor liege lord and therefore the people did not refrain from doing evil as they would have done if they had a true and liege lord.” The farther the Polos strayed from Argon’s kingdom, the less they could count on their paizas to protect them against brigands with no allegiance to Kublai Khan.

From this point on, they would have to fend for themselves if they were to survive the long voyage home.

IT WAS NOW 1294, with the Mongol New Year beginning in February. Kublai Khan was so weary and depressed that he shunned those who had traveled to the court to offer their greetings and good wishes for the coming year. His favorite general, Bayan, attempted to remind him of the great military victories they shared, but even he failed to revive the khan.

On February 18, Kublai Khan died at the age of eighty in the safety and comfort of his palace.

Two days later, a funeral caravan bearing Kublai Khan’s mortal remains slowly made its way from the palace north toward the Khenti Mountains. In keeping with Mongol custom, his burial place, believed to be near that of his grandfather, Genghis, was concealed amid the setting’s brooding majesty. No records describing it survive, nor has the site itself been located. It was a singularly subdued conclusion for an emperor noted in his lifetime for daring and excess.

Kublai’s chosen successor, Chinkim, had died years before. In his place, Kublai’s grandson Temür became the next Mongol emperor, inheriting a kingdom in disarray. He commanded that an altar be built in Kublai Khan’s memory, and conferred on him a posthumous Chinese name: Shih-tsu, “Founder of a Dynasty.”

Early chroniclers of the Yüan dynasty spread Kublai Khan’s fame far and wide. Muslims came to know of this extraordinary man through the writings of Rashid al-Din. Chinese and Korean chroniclers celebrated Kublai Khan’s accomplishments, and Bar Hebraeus wrote warmly of Kublai’s long and momentous reign. For all their scope, none of these chronicles compares with the vivid account left by Kublai’s best-known European chronicler, Marco Polo. He alone had extensive personal experience with his subject, and he still held the paiza, or passport, that the emperor had given him years before, when Marco first left Cambulac. He wrote about the Mongol leader with such passion, tinged with awe, that he single-handedly enlightened the West about one of the most powerful rulers who had ever lived.

MARCO POLO learned of Kublai Khan’s death during his passage home to Venice with his father and uncle. If he always remembered where he was or what he was doing when he heard the momentous news, he did not confide the details to Rustichello. He simply recalled, “While Masters Niccolò, Maffeo, and Marco were making this journey, they learned how the Great Khan was cut off from this life, and this took away from them all hope of being able to return any more to those parts.”

Instead of conferring the liberation that Marco anticipated, Kublai Khan’s demise tolled the death of adventure, and even of hope itself. At the time of their leave-taking, the Polos had employed their negotiating skills to free themselves from privileged servitude. Now that they were beyond the reach of this beneficent tyrant who had controlled their destiny, they could only reflect that they would never see Cambulac again. The splendor and immensity of Asia were lost to them forever. The end of Kublai Khan’s long reign terminated a unique partnership between East and West, a powerful ruler and a small merchant family. The Mongol leader had given the Polo company standing, but more than that, he had imparted to his protégé a sense of purpose. He was the personification of magic and might.

IN THE FINAL CHAPTERS of his chronicle, Marco’s boundless curiosity alights on the largely unexplored land of Russia. In reality, his route home did not take him anywhere near Russia, or any of the other northern lands that suddenly piqued his interest, but his account, a careful summary based on admittedly secondhand information, is memorable for its eloquence and its evocation of a landscape and way of life that other Europeans could scarcely imagine.

The approach to Russia from the east, to hear Marco tell it, could deter even the hardiest merchant. “No horse can go there,” he advises, “because it is a land where there are many lakes and many springs and streams that make that region very marshy, and because of the exceeding cold of that province there is almost always ice so thick that boats cannot pass by there, and yet there is not so much strength in the ice that it can bear heavy carts or heavy animals.” Nevertheless, merchants or trappers trading in fur managed to traverse this wasteland, turning a “great profit” for their trouble, and these hardy souls were his likely source of information for the region.

Marco had heard that travel across this difficult territory could be accomplished in stages lasting thirteen days, known as a “journey,” at the end of which the weary, frozen traveler could count on finding a hamlet consisting of “several houses of timber raised above the ground in which can comfortably live men who bring and receive merchandise.” Commerce again surmounted nearly every obstacle; to Marco, this was more a fact of life than a source of wonder.

“In each of these hamlets,” he continues, “is a house which they call a post where all the messengers of the lord who go through the country lodge.” A cold-weather version of the caravans that served as Marco’s primary means of travel over the years, they struck familiar notes in the way they were organized. “At each of these posts are keepers with forty very large dogs, little smaller than an ass, and these dogs are all accustomed and taught to draw just as oxen do in our country, and they draw sledges, which are calledsliozola,…to carry the messengers from the one post to the other, that is, from one journey to the next.”

The sleds, in particular, intrigued Marco, who may have heard about them in detail from a fellow merchant. “A sled,” he explains for an audience unfamiliar with the idea of travel across frozen wastes, “is a vehicle that has no wheels, but they are made of very light wood and flat and smoothed underneath, and they are raised at the ends in the way of a semicircle, in such a way that they go up over the ice and over the mud and over the mire.”

Marco familiarized himself with the details of dog handling to an uncanny degree. His account reads as if written by one who held the reins himself: “Those who conduct the sledges harness six dogs of those large ones…with yokes, two and two in proper order, to take those sledges. And these dogs, no one leads them but they go straight to the next post and draw the sledge very well both through the ice and through the mire. And so they go from one post to the other…. He who guards the post mounts on a sledge also, and has himself taken by the dogs, and he takes them by the straightest way and by the best. And when they are come to the next post that is at the end of the journey, they find there are also the dogs and the sledges and another guide ready to carry them forward for the second journey; and this is done because the dogs could not bear such labor as that for all the thirteen days’ journey; and so those that have brought them turn back. And so it goes through all these journeys, changing dogs, sledge, and guide at every stage…till the messengers of the lord are carried…to the mountains, and buy the skins, and return to their own land through the plain.”

Marco radiates enthusiasm for the trade, especially when he enumerates the skins in which the messengers deal—“little animals of great value,” he marvels, “from which they have great profit and great benefit; these are sables and ermines and squirrels and ercolins and black foxes and many other precious animals from which are made the dear skins.” Nevertheless, when he considers the conditions endured by merchant trappers in this harsh climate, Marco, the restless traveler and sensualist, turns away. “They have all their houses underground because of the great cold that is there, and they always live underground.” Equally damning is the Venetian’s last word on the subject: “They are not a beautiful people.” The prospect of being confined for months in a subterranean dwelling with them ended Marco’s daydreams about growing rich in the skin trade.

It was time for the lover of open spaces, sunlight, and intrigue to move on.

NEXT TO THE fur-trapping wastes, Marco located an even grimmer region, the Valley of Darkness, so called because of the dense mists obscuring the area, which he occasionally calls “the land of shadows.” Although he seems to be describing an allegorical domain, he believed he was depicting an actual place just beyond the Mongol sphere of influence—far indeed from the centers of power to which he has become accustomed during the previous two decades. Men here, he relates, “live like animals.”

Despite the inhospitable climate, a handful of Mongols ventured into the area, taking unusual precautions to guard their safety. They “come in on mares that have foals, and they leave the foals outside, and have them watched by keepers whom they set at the entry of that region, because the mares when they have made their journey go back to their children and by the perception and scent of the foals know the way better than the men know.” The only reason Marco finds for risking travel to the area is, inevitably, the prospect of trade in sable, ermine, “and many other dear skins.”

Surprisingly, Marco has kind words for the inhabitants of the land of shadows. “These people are handsome, very large, and well made in all their parts,” he notes with relief, “but they are very pale, and have no color, and this happens because of the want of sunlight.”

Marco had endured his share of frigid Mongolian weather, but he describes the Russian winters as more brutal than anything he had experienced—“the greatest cold that is in the world, so that with great difficulty one escapes it”—and he evokes the sting of the cold so vividly that it seems as if he had suffered it himself. “If it were not for the many stoves that are there,” he advises, “the people could not escape from perishing by the too great cold. But there are very frequent stoves, which the noble and powerful piously cause to be built just as hospitals are built with us. And to these stoves all the people can always run when there is need. For cold so intense prevails at times that while men go through the land toward home or from one place to another for their business, when they go from one stove they are almost frozen before they reach another, though the stoves are so frequent that one is separated from another by sixty paces.”

Seeing no reason to doubt this arrangement, Marco reports: “It very often happens that if a man who is not well-clothed, or cannot travel so fast because he is old, or is of weaker constitution and nature than others, or because his house is too far off, falls to the ground frozen by the too great cold before from one stove he can reach another, and would die there. But others passing by take him immediately and lead him to a stove and strip him, and when he is being warmed there his nature is restored, and he comes back to life.”

Marco is on surer ground when he describes the peculiar stoves, which resembled saunas. He speaks of “thick beams placed in a square one above the other,” and says, “they are so closed up together that nothing could be seen between one and another, and between the joints they are very well caulked with lime and other things so that wind nor rain can come in anywhere. Above at the roof they have a window by which the smoke goes out when fire is lighted in them to warm them. Logs are kept there in abundance, of which the people put many on the fire and make a great pile, and while the logs burn and give out smoke, the upper window is opened and the smoke goes out of it.” These contraptions were so numerous throughout Russia that “every noble or rich man” talked of having one.

MARCO’S LOCAL sources—traders and merchants who had actually ventured into this curious land—confirmed that the Russians were inordinately fond of their liquor. They told how nobles and “magnates,” men and women, as well as “husbands, wives, and children,” gathered in companies as large as fifty solely to drink a “perfect wine, which is called cerbesia,” flavored with honey. “There are men who might be called innkeepers,” Marco goes on, “who keep this cerbesia for sale. These companies go to these taverns and continue the whole day in drinking. They call that drinkingstraviza. In the evening, the innkeepers make reckoning of the cerbesia they have consumed, and each pays the share belonging to himself and wife and children, if they are there.”

Special times were reserved for women only to drink their fill of cerbesia, with customs unique to their sex. “When the ladies stay all day,” Marco reports, “they do not leave them because they wish to pass water, but their maids bring great sponges and put them under them so stealthily that the other people do not notice. For one seems to be talking with the mistress and another puts the sponge under, and so the mistress passes water in the sponge as she sits, and afterward the maid takes away the sponge quite full, and so they pass water whenever they wish to do so.”

Marco’s final vision of the Russian people, based on an anecdote he had heard, is comic and grotesque. He begins: “While a man was leaving the drinking with his wife to go home in the evening, his wife set herself down to pass water, the hair of her thigh being frozen by the exceeding cold was caught up with the grass, so that the woman being unable to move herself for pain cried out.”

Marco concludes his tale with a bawdy turn: “And then her husband, who was very drunk, being sorry for his wife, stooped down there and began to blow, wishing to melt that ice with warm breath. And while he blew, the moisture of the breath was frozen and so the hairs of the beard were caught together with the hair of the woman’s thigh. Therefore in the same way he could not move because of the exceeding pain; and there he was bending down like this.” At this point, Marco, if he was telling the tale in company, may have demonstrated just what he meant for the amusement of his audience.

“Thus, if they wished to leave that spot, it was necessary for some[one] to come by who should break up that ice.” Given enough drunken laughter, it is possible that no one would have been able to hear Marco utter the last words of his crude joke.

MARCO CONVEYS the impression that he could go on forever with his histories, tales, miracles, myths, jokes, and unique experiences. “Now you have heard all the facts that were possible to tell of Tartars and Saracens and of their life and customs,” he advises, “and of as many other countries in the world as was possible to search and know”—with one significant exception.

By way of an encore, Marco wished to narrate a journey by water; he had been landlocked for too many years, and he craved a fresh wind and a billowing sail. “We have said or spoken nothing of the Greater Sea nor of the provinces that are around it, though we have well explored it all.” He briefly flirted with the temptation to embark on the sequel, but he ultimately rejected the idea, since, he explains, “it seems to me to be wearisome to speak that which may be unnecessary and useless, since they are so many who explore it and sail it every day. As is well known, such as are Venetians and Genoese and Pisans and many other people who make that journey so often that everyone knows what is there.” In fact, not everyone in the last decade of the thirteenth century, when most people never wandered more than a few miles from their place of birth, knew what was there, but perhaps those whom Marco knew and respected did.

“Therefore, I am silent and say nothing to you of that.” Another time, perhaps.

In the end, Marco acknowledges there was little he could have done to alter the trajectory of his life. “I believe our return was the pleasure of God,” he concludes, “that the things that are in the world might be known. For, according as we have told at the beginning of the book,…there was never any man, neither Christian nor Saracen nor Tartar nor pagan, who has ever explored as much of the world as did Master Marco, the son of Master Niccolò Polo, noble and great citizen of Venice.”

The result was an epic that overflows its limits, one that is inexhaustible and self-replenishing. In it, Marco traveled through time as well as space. Along the remote westernmost stretches of the Silk Road in the Pamir highlands, he visited a more primitive world, and encountered people and societies unchanged since prehistoric times. In China, he moved forward hundreds of years into a technological and cultural utopia. Yet his vision of the future, as embodied in the highly civilized city of Quinsai, was troubled by new manifestations of ancient struggles. Undone by their success in commerce, and subverted by superstition and sensuality, the Chinese of Quinsai, as depicted by Marco, were not masters of their national destiny; they were vulnerable to aggressive warriors like the Mongols, preferring to deter threats at home, such as fire, to those coming from afar, such as warriors on horseback, bent on conquest. In China, Marco saw the future, but it was hardly less chaotic than the present.

Sealed off from one another by brigands, warring kingdoms, and the rise of Islam until the coming of the Pax Mongolica, East and West had their Silk Road for conveying goods—as well as religious figures—back and forth. Perhaps the most influential aspect of that Sericulture Superhighway was not silk itself, or any other tangible item, but intelligence about distant places whose nature was seriously misunderstood, or whose existence had been unknown. Marco visited many of those places; he considered himself a trader in fabrics, gems, and spices. But ultimately he traded in knowledge of the world and its people, thereby anticipating the Renaissance, and beyond. Through his account, he led both East and West into the future.

It was not a peaceful prospect, as experienced and presented by Marco. It was as pagan as it was pious, but it was recognizably human; it was a world in which people reached across geographic, religious, and political boundaries to connect. Unlike the isolation imposed by the harsh conditions of the Middle Ages, Marco’s vision of the future required constant travel, endless trading, and ceaseless communication in many languages. It was a world in which Christians traded with Muslims, with “idolaters,” with anyone who grasped the rudiments of trade—and in which an entire regime, such as the Yüan dynasty, incorporated individuals from an astonishing variety of cultures, all in the service of an ideal. It was blended and heterodox, ultimately unified not by a government, or a system of belief, but by a force Marco believed to be even more universal, and thus more powerful: the impulse to trade.

WHEN THE POLO COMPANY reached Trebizond, a compact and corrupt little kingdom in the Byzantine Empire located on the Black Sea, disaster struck—though not in the form of a storm, or disease, or even violence. Rather, the Polos became victims of thievery, despite all their precautions and connections. In Trebizond, they finally exceeded the limits of the paiza’s influence. The local government confiscated four thousand hyperpyra (a widely circulated gold Byzantine coin) from the company. While it is difficult to affix a modern value to the hyperpyra, that amount could have purchased a thousand pounds of silk. In other words, they were robbed of a significant part of the fortune they had risked their lives to acquire during their decades abroad.

Marco omitted the painful and embarrassing Trebizond episode from his account. No mention of it would be made until years later, in his uncle Maffeo’s will, which addressed the sensitive subject of family debts. In omitting it, Marco avoided reopening old wounds. Equally important, the setback did not square with the successful image of the enterprising Polo company that he wished to project throughout his Travels.

Instead of dwelling on the loss, Marco lists the stops along the way to suggest their brisk progress home: “From Trebizond they came away to Constantinople, and from Constantinople they came away to Negrepont, and from Negrepont with many riches and a great company, thanking God who had delivered them from so great labors and infinite perils, they went into a ship and came safe at last to Venice; and this was in the year 1295 from the Incarnation of the Lord Christ.”

AFTER TWENTY-FOUR years of adventures, narrow escapes, trading in exotic lands, and high-level diplomatic missions, the Polo company’s expedition through Asia, India, and Africa had come to an end. The Polos had changed beyond recognition during their years abroad. In their dress and manner they resembled Mongols, and they had almost forgotten their native tongue.

In the late thirteenth century, Venetians wore plain garb. Women dressed in long, flowing skirts cinched at the waist with a broad embroidered belt, and they covered their heads with hoods or veils for the sake of modesty. Beige and heather fabrics predominated, occasionally enlivened with an orange or reddish hue. Men wore sleeveless tunics, buttoned in front over a long-sleeved, collarless white chemise, and loose-fitting breeches and a soft cap with a narrow brim.

The three Polos, in contrast, wore the Mongol clothing to which they had become accustomed over two decades. Mongol dress, resplendent in scarlet and yellow and sky blue silks, was far more flamboyant than the Venetian fashion. Mongol men and women alike wore the del, or caftan, a long garment like a coat, with a flap in front and full sleeves long enough to be pulled over the hands in cold weather. It was often made of silk. Mongol men and women also wore loose trousers underneath their caftans, and the women had underskirts, too.

As they walked along the canals and piazzas of Venice attired in their brightly colored caftans, the Polos turned heads and excited comment. And if they wore their hair in the Mongol style, they would have been even more conspicuous. Whereas Venetian men concealed their hair under caps, Mongol men had long braided hair looped up behind the ears, and they shaved the tops of their heads, leaving just a forelock.

Marco Polo had learned to overcome being a stranger in the Mongol Empire, only to find that he had become a stranger once more, now that he was home.

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