Marco Polo went, saw, and lived, what his contemporary Europeans could have only dreamt of. His testimony proves invaluable to the historical record, though his validity has been questioned for centuries – and rightfully so. Merchants and sorcerers, spectacular cities and never-ending deserts fuse together in one book of wonders.
Controversy in context
Marco Polo compiled part of his memoirs with the assistance of his cellmate Rustichello de Pisa while in Genoese captivity. He summarized 25 years of voyages throughout Asia in a book that can be classified as either a novel or a memoir, depending on the chapter. Late medieval readers may have taken his testimony quite to heart – after all, Polo visited lands that took several months to go through, if one was lucky. Myth and legend alike had engulfed perceptions of Asia since Classical times, and Polo’s narrative did nothing to spill some truth to it; if his last words are to be believed, he supposedly told of less than half of the things he ever saw.
As Europeans established steadier contact with East Asia in the 16th and 17th centuries, questions about Marco Polo’s trips began to arise, from cultural observations on the peoples he described, to geographical matters. Many scholars went as far as dismissing the tale altogether, claiming that Polo only visited Acre, and perhaps at most, the western Caucasus – the rest being second-hand testimonies and outright falsehoods.
These are valid claims, when in context. Marco Polo’s narrative is inconsistent when acknowledging distances, measuring them in days, but rarely specifying whether that is walking or riding an animal, less so the distance covered any given day. Directions are spotty, although - in the merchant’s defense - a lot of the regions he traveled through were inhospitable deserts, and never-ending plateaus, of which he does make mention when describing them – further detailing how in some quite particular regions there are no sources of drinking water, but ample salt-lakes or potentially noxious springs. This meticulous detail of existing places in the Central Asian deserts serves as strong evidence of Polo’s visit to the area, or at the very least, that he came close enough to them.
On the other hand, there are names. The term Saracen had been in use in Europe for some time to refer to Muslims essentially everywhere save for Spain, which came to include peoples of many nationalities and ethnicities – Arabs being one of those peoples. Polo does make use of the term, and it makes sense; many of the peoples he likely encountered were unknown to all but a few Europeans. The further east the narrative goes, though, Polo ceases to refer to peoples by their names and instead addresses them as the inhabitants of the regions described, or Saracens. A few of the former include the Kurds, Cumans, Georgians, and Armenians, including some details of each of these peoples.
Of the Kurds, Polo says that they live in a region where muslin and expensive fabrics and carpets are produced. Of the Cumans, he mentions that they predated Mongolian presence in the steppes north of the Caucasus (although, as usual, referring to the Mongols as Tartars). Of Georgians, he particularly mentions the name of their king, David, and that they are “Christians of the Greek rite”, by which he means, Orthodox. He goes deeper, explaining part of the ancient history of the Caucasus region, going back as far as Alexander’s attempt to conquer it, and saying that their people are “handsome, capital archers, and most valiant soldiers.”
Cities throughout Asia also fall under the naming problem, getting somewhat cryptically spelled names. Mosul is called Mausul, Baghdad is Baudas, and Kabul is Caobul. Further, Polo constantly refers to regions and areas as kingdoms and princedoms, which while inadequate, might have been used to facilitate understanding of the text; after all, the book is directed to a European audience, about places and tales that Polo experienced in vastly different languages.
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The Book of Wonders
The first few chapters of the Book of Wonders, as the tome of Marco Polo’s adventures was titled, refer to his father and uncle’s travels. It’s only in Chapter X that Marco’s own tale commences, in what amounts to a side-note on his travel from Venice to Acre in the Holy Land. There is really no description of Acre itself, as it was a city within the sphere of direct European contact. In Acre, they met with newly elected Pope Gregory X, who had yet to depart to Rome, who allegedly empowered two friars to dispense all kinds of ordinations and absolutions in their eastbound journey.
In the following chapters, he seldom mentions whether he visited any given place himself, or whether he heard of it from someone else. However, descriptions of the regions and customs of the peoples support that he may have been to the places he speaks of. Though he opens the travels describing the two Armenias, as he calls them, the journey starts in Turcomania, which corresponds to modern-day Anatolia. It is noteworthy that he mentions that its inhabitants, which can be assumed to be Turks, speak “an uncouth language of their own.” This testimony favors the notion that Polo did not, as some scholars have postulated, speak Turkish dialects – the merchant says that he spoke, in addition to his native, four languages. These may have been a few variants of Persian and Mongolian, different enough from each other to count as different languages. Polo most likely did not speak Chinese, as the language of Kublai Khan’s court was most definitely Mongolian.
His descriptions of Turcomania, the horses bred there, the fabrics woven, the adjacent regions (including “Casaria”, a then anachronistic term for Khazaria; by Polo’s time, the Khazars had largely been absorbed by other Turkic tribes) and its Greek and Armenian minorities are far too accurate and convincing, to truly believe he never went these regions. At the time, Turcomania was under the control of the Ilkhanate, the southwestern division of the Mongol Empire. As the journey progresses east, Polo is careful to note which of the four Khans towns or provinces were subject to.
The heart of the Silk Road
Subsequently, the journey takes to the southern Caucasus. He describes current-day Mosul, where he first acknowledges Cathay (a medieval name for China), and Baghdad, telling of an interesting anecdote. According to Polo, prior to the Mongol conquest, the caliph of Baghdad (which he says was caliph “to all Saracens of the world”) had decided to slay all Christians living within his realm. Quoting Christian scriptures, he gave them ten days to move a mountain through an act of faith. The Christians thus sought a shoemaker of incomparable faith, who, through profound prayer managed to move said mountain, to the utter astonishment of all Christians and Muslims present. Allegedly, many of the latter converted to Christianity on the spot, and Polo claims that even the caliph himself was baptized into the Christian faith – though conveniently for Polo, he kept it a secret until his death.
This tale is a common trope in medieval literature. By the late 13th century, practically everyone in Europe, save for in parts of the Iberian Peninsula, Lithuania and Finland, was Christian. Thus, even in “secular” stories, moralizing anecdotes that promoted, or at the very least presented the virtues of keeping one to faith, were omnipresent in literature. Yet, as Marco moves eastward, he loses interest in the Christian faith. He acknowledges Nestorian Christians, an ancient sect that had remained quite active as far east as Afghanistan. Whereas in centuries prior, Europeans speculated about the kingdom of Prester John, a legendary Christian monarch who would come to the Europeans’ aid to ultimately defeat the Muslims and retake the Holy Land, Marco Polo fails to entertain such notions. These may have just been misinterpretations of the Christian kingdoms in the Caucasus.
Polo’s journey continues to Persia, where he remarks on the quality of the horses and, interestingly, states that they cost 200 livres tournois in the local currency, same going for donkeys that could fetch 30 marks of silver. This again supports that Marco may have visited the area, as for him to make this conversion he had to have a strong understanding of the local currency in Persia, and the exchange rates going with it. Further, he names the 8 different subdivisions of Persia, and praises the Ilkhanate’s government on establishing a law-and-order regime, explaining that prior to the Mongol conquest, deadly bandits proliferated in the area.
In Persia, he notes, everyone is a Saracen, and a great many fruits and crops are grown, alongside with cotton. Marco tells that in Persia wine is produced, and quickly anticipates that the European reader will be surprised by the fact, because “the Saracens don’t drink wine, which is prohibited by their law”, then pointing out that the wine is boiled and thereafter drunk as a sweet beverage. Again, strong evidence that the Venetian did indeed spend time in Persia, and proof that Europeans, or the literate ones at least, were well acquainted with the Muslim world and Islamic doctrine.
Whether going east or back west, if there is one place that Marco Polo almost undoubtedly visited, it’s the port city of Hormuz, on the shores of the Persian Gulf. Polo goes into tremendous detail about the journey from northern Persia to the city of Hormuz, and thoroughly elaborates on the city itself. He names the “king” (likely a governor), describing the weather in particular affinity, the ships of the Indian merchants arriving at the docks, and the many commodities traded, the healthy diets of its inhabitants, the peoples’ looks and religion, and the terrible storms that run throughout the Indian Ocean, making the trip by sea a particularly fearsome enterprise – a route that Polo himself is supposed to have taken on his journey back home.
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Into the unknown: the deserts of Central Asia
After describing Hormuz, Polo tells the reader that he will tell of “the countries towards the north (…) in regular order”; essentially, from west to east, starting where he deviated south towards Hormuz. A constant in this section of the book is the abundance of deserts. Around Cobinan and Tonocain, a city and a province, respectively, there are deserts so barren that water and food must be carried for the cattle. Brief descriptions of both imply that Polo may have spent at most a few days there, as will be the case in many other places towards Tartaria. It is unclear what animals he and his entourage traveled with, although it is almost certain that the Polos would have used camels, these being the most ubiquitous and reliable beasts of burden for extended journeys through the desert. A good camel could have carried a few hundred kilos for nearly a week without water or food.
When going towards the city of Sapurgan, Polo exceptionally mentions that “sometimes also you meet with a tract of desert extending for 50 or 60 miles”, atypical to his way of defining distances in days. This vagueness makes the Silk Road seem stranger, more distant and mythical than it was perceived even before Polo’s journey.
Upon reaching a certain city named Balc, in the north of modern Afghanistan, he speaks of the marble ruins of palaces and temples, a product of waves upon waves of war and destruction, and that its inhabitants preserve the tale of it being the city where Alexander married Darius’s daughter. Polo also marks this as the border between the Ilkhanate (or the domains of the Tartar Lord of the Levant, as he calls him), and the Chagatai Khanate.
Further east, Polo ventures into the mountains of Central Asia. Into the province of Badashan, he notes, everyone is of Muslim faith, and its hereditary kings claim Darius as their ancestor. All through the Central Asian mountains, Polo wanders on and off about the wonders he sees in one province and hears of others. In Tangut, he observes idolaters who curiously burn their bodies; in Keshimur (Kashmir), he observes sorcerers who can darken the skies and weather. Elsewhere, Polo claims pyromancers and conjurers of cheap tricks to abound. Wandering these desertic plateaus, the Venetian speaks of how the region is involved in the production and trade of rubies and lapis lazuli, the latter still being plenty in Afghanistan today.
While in Central Asia, Polo breaks from his usual narrative and speaks in first person to tell of an acquaintance of his who had devised a fabric allegedly made of salamanders, one so wonderful that could get bleached when put to fire. There are a few options here at play, and arguably all equally likely. The material may have been asbestos, Polo was exaggerating, or it was indeed some sort of unique fire-proof fabric lost to time. After all, ancient and medieval secrets, such as the recipe for Greek fire, were so precious that they were ultimately forgotten as a result of their secrecy.
Although the Book of Wonders is generally written in a linear way, Polo’s somewhat incoherent narration makes it possible that some of the places he describes or mentions on his way eastward, he might have visited or heard of well after meeting the Khan for the first time, an encounter that seems to have transformed him.
The Man and the Empire: Kublai Khan
Polo arrived in China in the middle of the 1270s, as the conquest of the country by the Mongols was finishing up; bits and pieces mostly to the southeast of the country were the Song Dynasty’s last remnants. Polo narrates the conquest of China, most likely from what he heard of the other members of the Khan’s court, emphasizing certain battles and setbacks suffered by the Tartars, as he kept calling them.
When Marco Polo finally starts describing Kublai Khan and his court, he does well in telling the reader Khan means “the Great Lord of Lords”; in practice, no single word in most Indo-European languages makes justice to this title, and Polo showers the Mongolian ruler in praise of his greatness. In a chapter already into the Mongolian part of his story, he describes the Khan as having a white face, with fine eyes, being of “middle height” and perhaps corpulent – his language is ambiguous, perhaps suggesting he was overweight without dishonoring his once lord. He tells of his four wives and his legitimate sons, adding that the entourage of each member of the royal family numbers in the hundreds of people. Polo further states that the Khan’s wives and concubines were sometimes called upon to serve him as diplomatic or administrative envoys.
As any other European would have been, Marco was marveled at the Khan’s palace in the winter capital of Khanbaliq (nowadays called Beijing), which he calls the capital of Cathay, one of medieval China’s many names. The palace in question was a whitewashed square of over six kilometers in perimeter. Each corner and half-length of the palace’s walls housed what Polo calls a palace; they may have been keeps, much in the European fashion, where garrison guards lived. Allegedly, pieces of the Khan’s own armor were scattered throughout those keeps.
In the courtyard, there was a one-story hall “so large that it could easily dine 6000 people”, its walls covered in vibrant red, green, and blue lacquers. The hall was adorned with carpentry; gold and silver cups and plates were everywhere to be seen. Gardens, as well as a menagerie and artificial lake stocked with fish, were kept in the enclosure. Supposedly, when Kublai Khan saw trees of his liking, he had them uprooted and carried back to his palace on the backs of elephants, which may very well be true; after all, the Mongol Empire had lucrative commercial connections with south-eastern Asia, where elephants were prized beasts of war and burden since ancient times.
War being as essential to Mongolian existence as horsemanship itself, Polo describes the meritocratic system of the Mongolian military, mentioning that officers who distinguished themselves in battle were promoted to command units ten times the size of their original ones – already in the early 13th century, the Mongols were using the decimal system to organize their armies, not to mention of the riches in bullion and gems bestowed to them. The Keshican, which Marco translates as “knights devoted to their lord”, constituted the household guard. 12,000 strong, these heavily armored horsemen worked in shifts of three days and nights of 3,000 men each. Etymologists and historians have concluded that the name seems to derive from the name of a Mongol tribe that dwelled north of Beijing, the Keshikten.
Khanbaliq gets a share of text as well, accurate enough to corroborate Marco’s presence. Enclosed by a square forty kilometers worth of thick walls, the city is described as having plenty of houses and squares, and streets so perfectly straightened that one can see from one wall to the other through them. But the description is relatively bland and short when compared to the Khan’s palace.
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On the Khan’s Service
Upon meeting the Khan, Marco brings up the Tablets of Authority; these instruments were crucial in stressing how much security had improved under Mongol rule in most of Asia. Polo describes how military officers were given ornate tablets of silver and gold, of value according to their rank, measuring their weight in saggi, a standard unit in Yuan Dynasty China. On it, an inscription reads “By the strength of the Great God, and of the great grace He hath accorded to our Emperor, may the name of the Kaan (sic) be blessed; and let all such as will not obey him be slain and be destroyed”. Essentially, Mongol rule was so strong, that under a Khan’s jurisdiction, a man could carry bullion worth a small fortune just to validate him as a royal emissary, and guarantee assistance and supplies, as well as direct protection by the Khan – which is exactly what happened to Messer Polo.
Marco Polo’s adventures started in Asia Minor, where the environment was relatively familiar for most 13th and 14th century Europeans. Yet, after arriving in China, and entering the Khan’s service, things started going wild.
In the seventeen years Marco is said to have spent in China, he mostly acted as an ambassador or envoy to Kublai Khan. While most of his tales could come across as true, given the independently verifiable evidence, his own claim of being a provincial governor for three years casts a shadow of doubt over all of them. To his favor, though, he might have just tried to convey a sort of office or administrative occupation to which medieval Europeans simply had no equivalent.
It seems that Polo traveled much of eastern China, and the northern bits of Indochina, his modus operandi for telling of the places he went through remained the same as he used on his way to China. He drops the names of cities and towns, loosely describing them and their peoples, and spelling their names in ways that are often puzzling to historians and linguists alike. As usual, he is generally content with saying what places sell what at the best prices. But across all of China, it seems, silk and spices are as common as bread and beer would have been in Europe.
A particular group of “idolaters” Polo kept finding throughout Central Asia and southern China, he remarks, holds all life sacred, and go far out of their way to avoid harming insects even, when erecting buildings or working the fields. Their peculiar way of worship and their temples are consistent enough that, when cross-referencing a religious map of eastern Asia, one can safely guess he is describing Buddhists, one of the few pre-Modern descriptions of the faith by a European.
Apart from Khanbaliq, one of the cities in Cathay that really caught his attention was Kinsay (modern-day Hangzhou.) Kinsay, Marco says, has 12,000 bridges looming over its many canals (as likely an exaggeration as is his claim that the Khan employed 10,000 falconers), and is adjacent to a massive lake, which its inhabitants thoroughly enjoyed on hot days. Per his calculations, Polo estimates that the city might have held well over 300,000 people – though an astonishing number, this is likely. During the Middle Ages, China might have concentrated as much as a fourth of the world’s populace, and in peacetime, under the Tang and Song dynasties, its biggest cities made any Christian city in Europe look like a village. People in Kinsay, he observed, use paper money; not that Europeans were unfamiliar with the concept, but they did not embrace paper as currency until a few centuries later. Overall, his description of Kinsay is so lengthy and thorough, that it’s reasonable to believe he spent considerable time there.
He also heard stories. In the span of a century, the Mongols had conquered the better part of Asia. Mighty kingdoms and empires were just unable to stand their ground, and generally, it was only geography that prevented them from steamrolling into a country and claiming it for their own; the deserts of western India, the Himalayas, and the thick jungles of northern Indochina for example. But there was something else.
Everyone knew that east of China there was an immense ocean. And in it, there lay an island, where there was a mythical city made fully of gold, where gold was so abundant that it literally served to pave the streets and floors. Polo’s mention of Cipango, as the island was known, seems to be the first time we can confirm a European ever heard of the country we now call Japan. He further explains how the Mongols attempted to invade it twice and how they were twice foiled by terrible storms, an incident that the Japanese attributed to the “Divine Wind” - or in Japanese, kamikaze.
There and Back Again
After nearly two decades of serving the Khan, Polo understandably felt homesick. So he asked the Khan permission to return; he may have done so a few times earlier, but the Khan seems to have enjoyed Polo’s company and appreciated his service far too much. Thusly, he imposed on him and his entourage one last task.
The Polo triad was to escort Kokachin, a Yuan princess, to marry Arghun Khan, khan of the Ilkhanate. At the time, the khanates were warring against each other, so the land route was out of the way. They would sail, hugging the coast, and passing through the straits of Malacca. Marco acknowledges the difficulties of seafaring in the Indian Ocean, saying that it can take up to two years to sail from China to western Asia, though this may be compounded by the fact that he had to wait for five months for monsoon winds to shift to the island of Sumatra, where he claims man-fish hybrids lived, alongside with unicorns that were the size of elephants – he meant, rhinoceros - and eagles that could carry elephants on their talons.
On their journey back to the port of Hormuz, the fellowship moored on the coasts of the Indian Ocean, both on the Indian mainland and the islands of modern-day Sri Lanka, which he called Ceylon, where Polo describes that many nudists lived. But upon arriving, indeed nearly two years after their departure, Polo received bittersweet news; Kublai Khan had since died. For once, the Khan had been a noble and generous friend to Marco, his father and uncle, but on the other hand, this released them from their obligations. Thus, they returned to Venice, arriving in 1295, ending a wondrous journey. They returned to the city, loaded with silks, gold, silver, gemstones, and all manners of precious goods, to find most of their family and friends having presumed them dead, and with good reason. The last chapters of the book are spent summarizing the war waged by the many khans over Asia, something which is often overlooked but comes to reaffirm how steady and firm Polo’s contact with the Mongols was.
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Polo’s Everlasting Legacy
Polo’s legacy has been controversial, to say the least. As early as the 14th century, his claims concerning Cipango were being disputed. His reputation improved a bit in the 15th century when cartographers took his notes on distances to faith. One such reputed scholar, Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, produced a map that found its way to the hands of a certain Genoese sailor, who tried his best to sell the idea of a city of gold to many monarchs in Europe. Most turned him away; after all, most educated Europeans were aware that the distance from Europe to Asia was shorter going east rather than west, and better yet, there were well-known lands in between.
In 1492, the pleas of this relentless sailor yielded results with Isabella of Castille and Ferdinand II of Aragón. Probably startled by Portugal’s astronomical progress in establishing contact with the far east earlier in the 15th century, the Spanish monarchs gave Christopher Columbus three caravels and a bunch of rowdy sailors to try some luck.
While the European colonization of the Americas is the most tangible consequence of Polo’s travels, they have permeated popular culture through and through. The book series A Song of Ice and Fire, for instance, places the pseudo-legendary kingdom of Yi-Ti far into the east; what characters in the saga know of the land is whatever tales they read or hear from others, its descriptions loosely approximating a notion of medieval China. On the other hand, Bilbo Baggins’ journey in The Hobbit is somewhat reminiscent of Marco Polo’s; a mysterious man got into his home offering a potentially lucrative expedition into the unknown, which created a lifelong friendship, and when the protagonist came back, richer than all amongst him, everyone thought him dead.
There is something, it seems, that charms the mind and spirit about the romanticized unknown. Centuries after Polo’s time, when humans acquired the ability to journey around the world in a few hours, our gazes finally lifted up from the horizon to focus on the sky; whatever may come next, only the future knows.
