A PLEASURE DOME DECREED
by
Philip R. Liebson
Delivered to
The Chicago Literary Club
April 2, 2001
In 1995, I read an essay entitled "Cityscapes," in
which I described an
imaginary dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in a book
by Italo
Calvino, Invisible Cities. In it, Marco described the
invisible cities in the realm of
the great Khan. The descriptions of these fanciful cities
whetted my interest in the
realities of the relationship between the Venetian traveler and
the Mongolian
warlord.
Associated with this were my early memories of the
film Citizen Kane,
with the fictional estate of Xanadu and the large K overriding
the front gate.
Then there is the poem of Samuel Coleridge.
Coleridge, in the summer of 1797 was in poor health and removed
himself to an
isolated farmhouse between the towns of Porlock and Linton in
Somerset. As a
result of the effects of an opiate, he fell asleep while he was
reading a sentence
from a current book entitled Purchas's Pilgrimage: "Here
the Khan Kublai
commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto.
And thus ten
miles of fertile ground were enclosed within a wall".
Awakening from sleep,
Coleridge apparently had the sense of a vivid poem of two or
three hundred lines,
but his writing was interrupted by a person from Porlock who
detained him for
over an hour on business. He remembered only 8 or 10 lines from
this but
managed to compose a 54 line poem entitled Kubla Khan, or a
Vision in a
Dream. A Fragment.
Its first few lines introduced an estate of dancing rocks,
greenswards and
"caverns measureless to man":
In Xanadu did Kublai Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to the sunless sea.
Kublai Khan lived in the 13th century. It was a century in
which trade
between the East and West flourished, mostly though Islamic
intermediaries. It
was also a time of great migrations, most notably the Mongol
tribes, who swept to
East and West, from the Hungarian plains to Northeastern China.
Through this
presentation, I hope to convince you of a connection between
Kublai Khan and a
noted event in the history of Chicago, with Marco Polo as the
catalyst.
Marco Polo is perhaps the best known European traveler of
the medieval
period , at least to contempoorary Americans. He had the great
fortune of living
in those interesting times, in a Venice that was at the center
of European trade
but with strong peripheral ties to the Orient with trade
through the Black Sea
and the Saracen lands. Parenthetically, the greatest Asian
traveler of that time
may have been the Chinese monk Hsuan Tsang who traveled over
10,000 miles in
17 years in the 7th century, throughout Asia and produced a
Chinese literary
classic The Great Tsang Classics of the Western World,
but very few
Americans have heard of him. Marco was also fortunate in having
a father and
uncle heavily involved in foreign trading.
Venice was ideally located for the purpose of trade,
especially in the days of
Marco Polo, located as it is at the head of the Adriatic. She
had the galleys, the
sailors, and the merchants to influence much of the trade with
the Middle East.
Venetian factories proliferated over the coasts of the Levant
from the Dalmatian
Coast through the Aegean Sea, across to Lebanon, in
Constantinople and in the
far reaches of the Black Sea as far as Caffa in the Crimea.
When the Fourth
Crusade began in 1204, aimed at the Pope's Eastern Rival
Constantinople, Venice
provided the ships and sailors but received in return a
Venetian church, counting
house and the right to trade without tolls in all the captured
towns of Palestine
and Syria, in addition to a quarter of the territory of
Constantinople after its
conquest. Venice's only coastal rival in the West, Genoa, was
soundly defeated by
her fleet in 1258.
Four years before this victory, Marco Polo was born in
Venice. As a result of
his travels in the East over 20 years, he later compiled a
document that would be
translated into innumerable languages over centuries. Its
authenticity would be
argued about for as many centuries. The roads he traveled in
the stretches of
Asia and the Near East would not be seen again by Europeans
until the 19th and
early 20th centuries. Marco's father Niccolò and uncle Maffeo
were long time
well-to-do traders with the Middle East, establishing a base of
operations in the
Crimea. In 1265, the two brothers set out on an a quest to
increase trade in the
Mongol court of the sovereign of the Western territories in the
large Mongol
empire which had expanded explosively after Genghis Khan had
marshaled his
Tartar horsemen on conquest.
At this point, permit me to digress from the elder Polo's
venture to
provide a background of the Mongols, the Church and the
European perspective
of Asia at the time. The Tartars were given the name by
Europeans for an
obscure Mongolian tribe ironically almost virtually destroyed
by Genghis Khan's
armies. The name was close to the term, Tartarus, indicating to
the Europeans
the infernal regions. The Mongols had swiftly, within 2
generations, built a vast
empire, through planning, discipline, and efficiency. They
fought on horseback
and could hit targets with precision while running at a gallop.
The armies were
incredibly mobile, the leaders ruthless. Whole towns which
resisted were
exterminated. Western Europe itself was left unconquered beyond
the borders of
Hungary because of the death of Genghis' son Ögedei in 1242,
who had succeeded
Genghis after his death in 1227. The son's untimely death
caused the abrupt
withdrawal of the Golden Horde and preventing their overrunning
of Europe. At
the time, the Mongols had reached the Dalmatian coast and their
campfires were
virtually within site of the Venetian lands. The resulting
domain was too large to
be controlled by one leader, extending as it did from the
eastern shores of China
to the borders of Hungary and Romania, far larger than any
previous empire and
only rivaled in area by the Soviet Union in the 20th century.
The four domains of
the empire included the Golden Horde, ruling over the Caucasus,
and much of
European Russia and parts of Siberia; the kingdom of Persia,
Georgia, Armenia,
and Asia Minor; the central Asian empire of Turkestan and
Afghanistan, and the
Eastern Empire of Kublai Khan.
There had been an attempt by Pope Gregory IX in 1241 to
raise a crusade
against the Mongols, without success. However, the successes of
the Mongols
against the Saracens raised the possibility of an alliance of
the Church against
Islam. The succeeding Pope, Innocent IV, wrote letters to the
Mongol Khans and
sent missionaries to assert the content and superiority of
Christian doctrine, in
the expectations that the Mongols would accept it and convert
en masse. As might
be expected, the reigning Khan, in Mongolia, submitted an
uncompromising
rebuttal and a demand for the Popes personal appearance and
submission. His
letter said, in part:
"You have said, Become Christian, it will be good' . This
petition of yours
we do not understand. How do you know whom God forgives and to
whom He
shows mercy? Now you must say with a sincere heart: We shall
become your
subject; we shall give you strength".
Over the next several decades, there were several
missions of Dominican
friars to the Mongolian Khan in central Asia, and emissaries
from St. Louis, King
of France. From these came a number of manuscripts describing
the habits of the
Mongols, but seeing no evidence that the Great Khan would
consider conversion.
We are used to Mercator projection maps or globes of the
world, with
primarily an East-West orientation. The medieval understanding
of the world,
from the European perspective, was displayed in the form of an
O in which a T
was placed. The left arm of the T was formed by the Don River,
the right by the
Nile, and the upright by the Mediterranean Sea. Above the arms
of the T was
Asia, and below the arms, Europe on the left and Africa on the
right. At the
center of the O stood Jerusalem and at the top, in the Far East
was the Earthly
Paradise. It was believed that four rivers led out from
Paradise, after initially
long underground courses. These were believed to be the Nile,
the Ganges, the
Tigris and the Euphrates. Somewhere on the Asian side of the
Caucasus, confined
in a great bronze wall, were the giants Gog and Magog, who
would break down
the walls and bring destruction to the world, at the coming of
the Apocolypse.
Monstrous races were supposedly found in the great confines of
Asia, dog-headed
men, men with faces on their breasts and Sciopods, humanoids
with one leg
though amazingly swift. It was believed that a great Christian
king and priest,
Prester John, a Nestorian Christian, descended from the Magi
ruling Persia, in
turn ruling a large portion of the Indian subcontinent, had
defeated Medes and
Persians in battle and only difficulty in ferrying his armies
across the Tigris
prevented him from assisting the Christians in defeating the
Saracens in the Holy
Land. This information was contained in a presumed letter from
Prester John,
distributed late in the 12th century. In this letter were
descriptions of his
magnificent palace, the precious stones in his river from
Paradise, of fountains of
youth, and the absence of serpents, a land of milk and honey,
gold and silver.
This letter was expanded by copyists with great imaginations
and tale telling
abilities and distributed throughout Europe. As Gog and Magog,
unleashed,
would signal the end of the world, so Prester John , or his
son, King David,
would rescue Eastern Christianity from the infidels of Islam.
The Nestorian
Christians , following doctrines divergent from the Greek and
Latin Churches,
had established patriarchies in the Middle east and many parts
of Asia. It may
have been the victories of a Nestorian Christian chieftain, one
Yeh-la Ta-shih,
over a Moslem sovereign in the mid 12th century, that gave rise
to the myth of
Prester John. It was even rumored in Church circles that
Kublai Khan's mother,
who was a Christian, was the daughter of Prester John.
Returning to the initial quest of the elder Polos, they
were quite successful in
their ventures to increase their fortunes in the provincial
Mongol court, located
north of the Caspian Sea. A conflict among local chieftains
prevented their
return to Venice but they were persuaded to travel eastward to
Northern China
where the present Grand Khan, Kublai, was at his summer
residence. This was
called Shang-tu (or transliterated, Xanadu) .
At the time, the Grand Khan Kublai, the grandson of
Genghis, was in his 50's,
was somehat gout ridden and was attempting to consolidate his
empire in China.
He had conquered northern China, relocated his capital from
Mongolia to Beijing
(Cambulac in those days) and in 1271 adopted the Chinese
dynastic name of
Yuan. There, he had built for himself the magnificent palatial
complex, the
Forbidden City and built his summer palace in Shang-tu. The
City contained
Arabic, Mongolian, Western Asian, and Chinese Architectural
styles here as
with most of the following descriptions wee must rely on Marco
Polo's words -not
the smallest area comprised a vast number of Mongolian nomadic
tents and a
playing field for Mongolian horsemanship. He already ruled
much of northern
China, Mongolia, Tibet , Korea and Manchuria, and received
tribute from
Indo-China and Java. The surrounding city itself was built by
Kublai beside the
old city of Cambulac, across a river, on the advise of his
astrologers, who warned
him that the inhabitants of the old city would rebel if his
palace was built there.
The new city surrounding the palace was 24 miles in
circumference, with
surrounding suburbs containing hostels for foreign visitors,
each district assigned
to a specific nation. According to Marco, no sinful woman could
live within the
city itself, all 20,000 living in the suburbs, presumably
serving the needs of the
visiting merchants.
"They [the prostitutes] have a captain general, and
there are chiefs of
hundreds and thousands responsible to the captain. ..The
captain is called upon to
provide one of these women every night for the ambassador and
one for each of
his attendants From the number of these prostitutes you may
infer the number
of traders and other visitors who are .coming and going about
their business."
In the center of the capital city was a huge bell which
tolled curfew.
Guards rode around the city to clap anyone seen on the streets
into prison.
Anyone found guilty of violating the curfew was punished
according to the
gravity of the offense" with a proportionate number of strokes
of a rod", which,
Marco assures us, sometimes causes death. This punishment was
used to avoid
bloodshed, which the Khan's astrologers felt was wrong.
In addition, every gate of the city was guarded by 1,000 men.
Marco also
assures us that this was not out of mistrust for the
inhabitants, but out of respect
for the great Khan, although, Marco admits, "the Khan does
harbor certain
suspicions of the people of Cathay".
Although Kublai Khan could be ruthless with his enemies,
he was open to the
various traditions of strangers and was quite interested in the
folkways of the
lands he controlled but also of the far distant lands of
Europe. His court included
Persians, Turks, Saracens, Hebrews, and Nestorian Christians.
Kublai adopted
the name of the Yuan dynasty from the Chinese but the Mongols
remained aloof
from the Chinese language and much of its culture.
Although the Mongols were primarily Buddhist, they did not
attempt to
support or patronize Buddhism, and did not financially support
the Tibetan
Buddhist monasteries in the Chinese realm that they controlled.
There was,
however, a literacy test on Buddhist scriptures imposed on
Buddhist monks
because of belief of Kublai Khan that too many Buddhists were
escaping military
service. Failure in this test brought a loss of military
exemption.
Niccolò and Maffeo got along well with Kublai Khan,
so well, that
they evinced in him an interest in Christianity. In fact, there
were many
Nestorian Christians in his domain although the Roman Church
looked down on
this sect as not acceptable representatives of the true faith.
As suggested before,
Kublai Khan was unusually tolerant for that period, far more
tolerant than
European monarchs. He would involve himself with all major
religious
ceremonies, whether Christian, Buddhist, Hebrew, or Moslem, of
which there was
ample representation in all groups. He provided safe passage of
Niccolò and
Maffeo back to the West with the mission of carrying letters to
the Pope
requesting one hundred intelligent men who were acquainted with
the seven arts.
In addition, he requested some oil from the lamp of the Holy
Sepulchre in
Jerusalem.
When Niccolò and Maffeo returned to Venice in 1269, Marco,
who had never
met his father, was 15, early orphaned by the death of his
mother, and a frequent
visitor of the wharves, perhaps sensing in the sea air the
perfumes of the East.
According to Eileen Powers in her book, Medieval People,
Marco " was always
kicking his heels on the wharf and bothering foreign sailors
for tales of distant
lands".
He had never seen his father and uncle, and perhaps had given
them up for
dead.
As for the mission, unfortunately, the Pope, Clement IV,
had just died, and
because of problems with disputed elections in Rome, it took
two years to elect a
new pope. There appears to be a historical thread of electoral
balloting difficulties
in peninsulas. Marco, joining his father and uncle, traveled to
Acre, in the Holy
Land, awaiting the naming of the new Pope. By fortunate
coincidence, they met
the papal legate in Acre, who gave them letters for the great
Khan, but failed to
provide the hundred intelligent men, the representation
consisting of two
Dominican friars, who very shortly on the journey thought it
prudent to leave the
Polos for safety when a local civil war erupting near their
route. However, some
of the holy oil from the Sepulchre was obtained, and the Polos
proceeded
Eastward. By a stroke of fortune, the papal legate of Acre was
finally named
Pope Gregory X, and so an official Pontifical blessing and
appropriate credentials
could be conferred.
What followed led to a unique document on the travels of
Marco Polo over the
next 26 years. It took four years for them to reach the court
of Kublai Khan.
Although on many occasions during their sojourn in the court,
they wished to
return to Venice, the Khan would not permit it, holding them in
high regard, and
especially relying on Marco to provided him with interesting
information about
his domain. Much of what Marco described was unbelievable to
his European
contemporaries and skepticism extended down through the
centuries. This
skepticism was bolstered by the closure of routes to China in
the mid fourteenth
century and it was only in the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries that
Europeans again traveled some of the routes between the Black
sea and the
empire in China. On his deathbed in 1324, in Venice, Marco when
his friends
insisted that he correct all the hyperbolic material from his
book which went
beyond the facts, he replied that he had not recounted one
half of what he had
actually seen.
Getting back to the narrative, the three Polos were greeted
by the Great Khan
in his summer palace of Shang-tu. This was about 1275 and he
had reigned since
1260. He was to continue his reign until 1294. Within the
previous two years, he
had consolidated his reign in both North and South China. The
Polos were to
remain for 17 years.
According to Marco Polo, Shang-tu was a huge palace of
marble and
stone, richly adorned with gilt edging, with 16 miles of
parkland and groves
where game animals of all sorts roamed. A second palace in the
middle of a grove
was constructed entirely of varnished canes, each shingle
fastened by nails, and
held together by 200 cords of silk. It was built so that it
could be dismantled ,
moved, and reconstructed. Kublai Khan stayed at Shang-tu during
the summer
months, and left precisely on August 28th on the advise of his
astrologers, after
making a libation from the milk of some of his 10,000 mares
kept for the purpose
of producing a fermented milk called Khermess. On that day,
mare's milk was
flung into the air and over the earth to quench the thirst of
spirits who guarded
all of the Great Khan's possessions.
Great as Shang-tu was, it was dwarfed by the palace in
Cambulac (Beijing).
The walls were covered with gold and silver and decorated with
pictures of
dragons and birds and scenes of battle. The hall was vast
enough to serve more
than 6,000 guests. According to the description, the whole
building was so
immense and so well constructed that "no man in the world could
imagine any
improvement in design or execution. Between the inner and outer
walls were
parkland and stately trees. On the northern side of the palace
was a mound 100
paces in height and over a mile in circumference where trees
were transplanted
from afar if Kublai fancied it, with the help of elephants and
placed into the
mound which was covered with lapis lazuli, which is intensely
green". To enhance
the effect, a palace was built atop the mound, entirely of
green.
Possibly through interpreters, possibly in a
smattering of Mongolian
which the elder Polos may have learned in their previous
sojourn, the Khan
asked them about the political situation in Europe, and about
the Church. There
were no hundred missionaries requested by the Kublai Khan when
the elder
Polos had previously left, but the holy oil from the Jerusalem
sepulchre was well
received, possibly to be used by some of the Khans's Christian
wives or for
magical purposes.
Marco was brought to the high councils of the Khan,
possibly because of
his adeptness at learning the customs of the Mongols, possibly
because of his
communication skills in describing the characteristics and
novel customs of the
inhabitants of Chinese cities he visited while on diplomatic
missions for Kublai.
Unfortunately, many of the Khan's messengers did not have these
skills of
observation and merely carried out their assignments. However,
there were many
Chinese-speaking central Asians in the court as well- far more
adept at the
regional languages than Marco, making his predominant role
somewhat
questionable.
Allow me at this point to compare the Venice of Marco
Polo's time with the
greatest contemporary jewel cities of China, then called
Quinsay, now Hangchow.
The Cambridge Medievalist, Eileen Powers, in her book
Medieval People
describes the jewel of the Adriatic as "a sea-bird's nest
afloat on the shallow
waves". From the four corners of Medieval Europe and beyond
came wools from
England, cloth from Flanders, wine from France, and from the
Levant and the
Orient silk and spices, camphor, ivory and pearls, perfumes and
carpets. The
jeweled city was symbolically wedded to the Adriatic through a
ceremony on
Ascension Sunday. A contemporary Venetian writer, Martino da
Canale, who was
a clerk at the customs house, described the city in terms of
its nobility, fountains,
and canals. It was a city of perfection, according to Martino.
Its inhibitants were
perfect in their faith in Christ and the holy Church, never
disobeying
commandments. There were no heretics, usurers, murderers,
thieves, or robbers.
We may deduce from this that Shakespeare did not get his
inspiration from
Martino da Canale.
At the same time, thousands of miles to the East, on the
border of the China
Sea but slightly inland, in the South of China, recently
conquered by the Mongols
when the three Polos reached Kublai Khan, stood the vast city
of Quinsai. Marco
visited Quinsai . According to his description, the city, far
vaster than Venice,
similarly stood on lagoons and canals, with a large lake to its
West. Although
Marco describes it as a hundred miles in circumference, he may
have been using
the Chinese equivalent of a mile, actually 4/10 of a mile. Even
so, this distance
dwarfed Venice. Quinsai's population was over a million at that
time, far beyond
that of Venice. At the time, there may have been at least half
a dozen Chinese
cities with population over a million. In comparison, Venice
had a population well
under 100,000. Cairo, Constantinople and Baghdad, the largest
cities in Europe
and the Near East, had populations of not quite 150,000. Paris
and London had
scarcely 30,000. Marco had a fascination with numbers, the
title of his book of
travels being Il Milione.
In the city of Quinsai, he documented 12,000 stone bridges
over the canals,
many so lofty that fleets of ships could pass beneath them. The
streets of the city
were paved with stone or brick, the main street two hundred
feet wide, running
from one end of the city to the other, with every four miles a
great square. In
each of the squares was held three days a week a market
frequented by 40, 000 to
50,000 persons, with an ample supply of " roebuck, red-deer,
hares, rabbits,
partridges, pheasants, quails, fowls, capons, and of ducks and
geese of infinite
quantity". There were 12 gates leading to the 12 quarters of
the city, each
quarter greater than the whole of Venice.
The lake outside the city was 30 miles across, surrounded by
beautiful
palaces and mansions, with pleasure boats of all shapes and
sizes. Marco was very
precise in his descriptions: the boats and barges "could hold
10, 15, 20 or more
persons, are were from 15 to 20 paces in length, with flat
bottoms and ample
width of beam. Anyone who wishes to go a-pleasuring with women,
or with a
party of his own sex, hires one of these barges, which are
always completely
furnished with tables and chairs and with other apparatus for a
feast". The Lake
had wooded islands on which stood mansions with enchanting
names such as
"Bamboo Chambers" and "Pure Delight". Although Quinsai was 25
miles from
the coast, it was reached by junks sailing from a harbor
through the river leading
into the city. As with Venice, Quinsai was the center of a
universe, with a
hundred times more pepper entering the city from Indo-China
than came to the
whole of Europe from the Levant. Musk came from Tibet, spices,
ebony and
sandalwood from the Indies, silk from the cities of South
China, and immense
cargoes from Quilon and Calicut on the Malabar Coast of
Southern India,
through the Straits of Malacca. In addition to Quinsai, other
large port cities
such as Zaiton (the present Amoy) and Canton, were reached by
multitudes of
trading vessels, far greater than those reaching Venice,
according to
contemporary European observers. Marco could only conclude
that "everything
appertaining to this city [Quinsai] is on so vast a scale, and
the Great Khan's
yearly revenues are so immense that it is not easy even to put
it into writing, and
it seems past belief to one who merely hear it told".
Amazingly, although the Polos spent 17 years in China
itself, there is little
documentation of how the time was spent. Except for his jouney
to and from
China, Marco Polo's narrative is not chronlogical for this
period and few
incidents are mentioned in the book. Although it was mentioned
that Marco was
at one time govenor of a district named Yang-chau, there is no
evidence of this
from the records of the district. Similarly, although Marco
recounts their
involvement in assisting in the engineering of a siege, this
specific event occurred
before the Polos could have reached China. On the other hand,
it is entirely
possible that Marco could have been assigned to carry out
diplomatic missions to
the South east and India.
The Polos finally had their opportunity to return to
Venice. Some time in
the year 1292, a Mongol princess was to be sent by sea to
Persia to wed the Khan
of the domain. The Polos, being able seamen, were relied upon
by Kublai Khan to
accompany her. At the time, Kublai was nearing 80, his death
was imminent, and
times would not be propitious for foreigners with such
influence like the Polos' to
remain. And so, a fleet of 14 ships and 600 sailors and
retainers left the port of
Zaiton, stopping at Sumatra to avoid the monsoons. By the time
they reached
Persia after sailing through the strait of Hormuz, the Persian
Khan had died, and
so the Princess was handed over to his son.
The Polos eventually reached Venice in 1295 but not before
they were robbed
during the latter stages of their return journey of much of
their treasure
accumulated over the years and the additional parting gifts
from Kublai. It is told
that when they appeared virtually in tatters, their family did
not recognize them,
and had accepted them as dead. However, a banquet was prepared
by the Polos
in which the families were invited. The travelers opened up the
seams of the
shabby garments and out dropped myriads of rubies, diamonds and
emeralds.
This event was in fact a fabrication added to one of the
numerous editions of the
Book several centuries later by a Venetian writer to add a
little spice to the
adventurers' return.
It is also argued by some historians that the Book of Marco
Polo was written
while he was in a Genoese prison, after he was captured while
commanding a
Venetian galley the first time the Venetians had lost to the
Genoese. He
presumably met a Pisan romance-writer named Rustichello who was
a master at
Arthurian tales- for which he had much time, having languished
in prison for
several years before Marco arrived. Presumably, Marco dictated
the book to
Rustichello, which was written in a French-Venetian dialect
peculiar to the time.
The style was that of a court epic much utilized by the
French in that period,
of which Rustichello was an expert. The original no longer
survives but numerous
editions in many languages were written over the next century,
with, of course,
many variations in content.
There is much debate about how much of the original
Book was
Marco's and how much the fanciful imagination of Rustichello.
The Prologue
begins in an introductory style almost verbatim with that of
one of Rustichello's
Arthurian tales. One may wonder at how Marco could recall such
detail away
from home, since he presumably did not bring his notes to the
battle in which
was captured by the Genoese. It is entirely possible that he
could have received
the notes from Venice, despite being in the Genoese prison.
Whatever the extent
of the collaboration, considering the longevity and popularity
of the adventures
recorded, it might be said that every As-Told-To Book
collaborator should have
Rustichello as his ideal. The imprisonment ended within a year
and by 1299
Marco was safely back in Venice, where he lived the life of a
minor patrician and
died in 1324.
The Book itself is frequently a monotonous travelogue, with
some
spectacular or unusual sights or characteristics surprisingly
left out no mention
of the Great Wall of China, nothing about the binding of
women's feet, nothing
about the tea ceremonies, and certainly, nothing about the loss
of much of their
treasure in the Near East on their return to Venice. However,
the Book did
explain the phenomena of salamanders existing in the flames
[the "salamanders"
were in fact pieces of asbestos], and the unicorn identified as
a rhinoceros. Marco
Polo was the first European to recognize that a large island
existed in the Ocean
Sea East of China called Cipangu, in fact Japan, where the
ruler had a palace
roofed with fine gold. There is no evidence that Marco ever
visited Japan. By a
curious irony, when the Japanese started their undeclared war
in China in 1937,
it began on a bridge near Shanghai named after Marco Polo.
Within 20 years after Marco's death, trade with the Mongol
world became
more difficult. European Christian travelers through the Near
East were more at
risk when the Khans of the Golden Horde converted to Islam, and
a series of
massacres of European traders ensued in the ports of the Black
Sea.In the Mid-
and late 1300's came the Black Death, then Tamurlane, by which
time the
Chinese had overthrown the Khan's Yuan dynasty, installing
their own Ming
dynasty and closing whatever trade there was with the West for
centuries to
come.
However, interest in reaching the Far East by European
adventurers
continued. This clearly paved the way for Columbus to seek a
Western route.
There has been considerable controversy as well as to how much
Columbus,
ironically, a Genoese sea captain, was influenced by the book.
There is no
conclusive evidence that he himself read it but some
circumstantial evidence that
he had. One might consider that the permanent European
inhabitation of the
New World initiated by Columbus was a reflection of the
influence of Marco Polo
in his descriptions Far Eastern trade. Both Marco and Columbus
were shrewd
businessmen who saw the value of the painting as well as the
paint. Certainly,
Columbus was well aware of the extraordinary prizes available
by direct trade
with China. Ironically, the Book became more popular after the
discoveries of
Columbus.
To complete this fanciful association of Marco Polo and
Columbus, we may
move to the final pleasure dome in our narrative, precisely 401
years after
Columbus' initial discovery of Hispaniola. On the south east
side of Chicago, near
a large lake, a White City of 633 acres with lagoons, canals,
bridges and palaces
were erected. Gondolas filled the lagoons and inhabited by
visitors from the four
corners of the earth, with bazaars carrying the products of
distant shores. Among
the chief architects of this fair was Daniel H. Burnham, whose
motto "Make no
small plans" would have been appreciated by Kublai Khan along
with the
amplitudes of its buildings and grandeur of its plan. Within
its amplitudes, Marco
Polo surely would have enough material for another book.
References
I am indebted to the following sources:
1. Eileen Power: Medieval People. 1963- Harper and Row:
Chapter III-Marco
Polo: A Venetian Traveler of the Thirteenth Century. This
describes and
contrasts in lyrical terms the characteristics of Venice and
Quinsai in the 13th
century, besides drawing a portrait of Marco Polo.
2. John Larner. Marco Polo and the Discovery of the
World. Yale University
Press 1999. A detailed scholarly work on how The Book came to
be written,
evaluation of its veracity, the response of historians
throughout the centuries to
the work, the changes in content of the various editions, and
its influence through
the ages.
3. Marco Polo. The Travels. Translated by Ronald Latham.
Penguin Books.
London 1958. A straightforward and eminently readable version,
with an
excellent introduction by the translator.
4. Walker Chapman. Kublai Khan: Lord of Xanadu.
Bobbs-Merrill. 1967. A
comprehensive but succinct narrative of the Great Khans from
Genghiz to
Kublai.
5. Colin McEvedy. The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval
History. Penguin Books.
Detailed Maps and Notes of the periodic changes in population
patterns, trade
routes, and the boundaries of religious control in Europe, the
Mediterranean and
the steppeland of the East from 352 AD to 1483.
6. Janet L. Abu-Lughod. Before European Hegemony. The World
System AD
1250-1350, Oxford University Press 1989. A scholarly and
well-written analysis of
the patterns of trade in Europe, the Middle East, and the Far
East during Marco
Polo's time, their mutual interdependence, and how trade
influenced political
power in these spheres.
7. Richard W. Southern. The Making of the Middle Ages.
Oxford 1953. An
outstanding, elegant, and insightful perspective of the
medieval period by one of
the most influential medievalists of the 20th century.
8. Norman F. Cantor. Inventing the Middle Ages. Quill.
William Morrow. New
York. 1991. An opinionated , comprehensive evaluation of the
influence of late
19th and 20th century Medievalists and how they changed our
perspective on the
Middle Ages, by a distinguished Medievalist.
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