Marco Polo E-Book

Robin Brown

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

The incredible story of Marco Polo's journey to the ends of the earth has for the last seven hundred years been beset by doubts as to its authenticity. Did this intrepid Venetian really trek across Asia minor as a teenager, explore the length and breadth of China as the ambassador of the ruthless dictator, Kublai Khan, and make his escape from almost certain death at the hands of Kublai Khan's successors? Robin Brown's book aims to get to the truth of Marco Polo's claims. Covering his early life, his extraordinary twenty-four-year Asian epic and his reception in Italy on his return, Marco Polo places the intrepid Venetian in context, historically and geographically. What emerges confirms the truth of Polo's account. Polo, scholars now agree, opened vistas to the medieval mind and stirred the interest in exploration that prompted the age of the European ocean voyages. All who now enjoy the fruits of Marco Polo's incredible journey through Asia - whether in the form of spectacles, fireworks, pasta or any of the many products of the Silk Road - will find in Robin Brown-Lowe's book a fascinating portrait of a man who made history happen by bringing about the meeting of East and West.

Leseprobe

The Incredible Journey

ROBIN BROWN

Foreword by Jeremy Catto

First published in 2005

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2011

All rights reserved

© Robin Brown, 2005, 2011

The right of Robin Brown, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 7230 0

MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 7229 4

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

Foreword

Map showing Marco Polo’s Journeys

General Introduction: Marco Millione

The Prologue

BOOK ONE

The Journey Out

BOOK TWO

Introduction

Lord of Lords

BOOK THREE

Introduction

The Journey Home

Postscript

FOREWORD

After two centuries of strenuous exploration and a landing on the moon, we are all familiar with incredible journeys. Even in the remote past, the capacity of humans to accomplish immense distances by land or sea never fails to surprise. In the century of Marco Polo the Mongols, nomads of the northern steppes, exemplified this in a dramatic though not unprecedented manner by sweeping through the settled lands to the south of them in large numbers, and demonstrating that they could reach from China at one end of the Eurasian landmass to Central Europe almost at the other in the course of a single season. In comparison the snail-like progress of the Polo family from Venice to the Mongol capital of Khan-Balik (Beijing), taking years to get there, seems much less impressive. But in another sense their journeys (for taken together there were several) can properly be described as incredible. For one thing, not everybody believed them. They were written up by an author of romances, Rustichello of Pisa, who claimed to have been told the story in a Genoese prison, and they circulated as an item in the well-known genre of the prose romance, like the entirely fictional Travels of Sir John Mandeville. Rustichello certainly gave the book its entrancing quality as a story, and it may owe some of the literally unbelievable details to his literary invention. Contemporaries treated it as a story, at best suspending their disbelief. Many later and more literal-minded critics have dismissed the whole of it as a literary forgery on much less substantial grounds, for instance for such negative reasons as the lack of any reference to the Great Wall of China; they have forgotten that in the Mongol Empire of Kublai Khan the Wall was a meaningless internal border and was probably ruinous for long stretches. The Travels of Marco Polo were not a guidebook to China, but a literary confection, an artful story. They can only be appreciated as a master-piece of Rustichello’s marvellous story-telling genius.

Nevertheless, there is overwhelming evidence from independent Chinese and other sources that (and this is the other, more popular sense in which the journeys are incredible) both the main structure of Marco Polo’s travels and a surprising amount of the detail are authentic. The court of the Khan, the organisation of the Mongol Empire, the important role within it of indigenous Christian priests of the Nestorian church and many other features of the Central Asian world as he described them are confirmed by the reports of the Christian missionaries and envoys (Marco himself, in a sense, among them) sent by the Roman curia to the terrifying but hope-engendering new rulers of the East. He was neither the first nor the last of the series of travellers, from Giovanni di Piano Carpini between 1245 and 1248 to Guillaume du Pré in 1365, who sought to use the Mongol power to defend and enhance Latin Christendom. But the confirmatory evidence from China is even more impressive. Marco’s description of the Imperial Palace at Khan-Balik is authenticated by the lineaments of the surviving Forbidden City. His account of the cities of Kinsai (Hangzhou) and Zaiton (perhaps Quanzhou) with its abundant commerce on the China Sea accord with contemporary Chinese descriptions. There is so much detail of trading and manufacturing activity, both in China and in Central Asia, that we must suspect Rustichello of using some lost relazione or commercial report written by Marco for the use of Venetian merchants – in which case the statement that he heard the story from Marco’s own lips in a Genoese prison must be a literary device.

One of the notable features of the Travels is its account of exotic animals and plants unknown in Europe. Marco Polo was careful to record them both as sources of wealth and objects of trade, and as dangerous beasts of prey – the horses, falcons and sheep of Central Asia, the white horses of Mongolia, the Mongols’ sables and other furs, the musk deer of Tibet, the snakes of Kara-jang, the featherless and furry hens of Kien-ning-fu, the rhinoceros (or ‘unicorns’) of Sumatra, the tarantulas of south India, the elephants and unique birds of Madagascar and many others. Previous accounts of the travels have not given them much attention; now, at last, Robin Brown, a noted naturalist and maker of nature films, has taken proper account of Marco’s observations. This is a very welcome addition to the considerable but patchy literature devoted to the Travels of Marco Polo.

Jeremy Catto Oriel College, Oxford

General Introduction

MARCO MILLIONE

The truly incredible story of Marco Polo’s journey to the ends of the earth, the book that earned him the title ‘the Father of Geography’, has for the last seven hundred years been bedevilled by doubts as to its authenticity. How much of his tale is a factual record, how much hearsay, and how much the best that Marco, bored with incarceration in a Genoan gaol, could recollect or indeed imagine? Did this intrepid Venetian actually trek across Asia Minor, explore the length and breadth of China as the roving ambassador of Kublai Khan, the most ruthless dictator in history? Did he really make his escape from almost certain death at the hands of Kublai’s successors by directing the construction of fourteen huge wooden ships in which he delivered Kublai’s relative, a beautiful princess, as bride to the Caliph of Baghdad after a voyage halfway round the world and so fraught with danger that it resulted in the death of 600 members of his crew?

Marco claims to have survived Mongol wars, hostile Tartar tribes, insurrections, blizzards, floods, the freezing cold of the world’s highest mountain plateaux and the scorching heat of its most arid deserts. Indubitably it was he who wrote the very first descriptions of real ‘dragons’ (Indian crocodiles) and huge, striped ‘lions’ (tigers) that swam into rivers to prey on men in boats, horned, armoured ‘monsters’ (rhinoceros), armies of elephants with castles of archers on their backs, of a bird with feathers nine feet long (the great auk); of the salamander; and of cloth that would not burn (asbestos) and black rocks that burned like wood (coal). For good measure he claimed that the currency used in this mysterious Orient – where the cities were larger than any in the West and a rich trade was to be had in glorious silks, cloth of gold, pearls, silver, gold, Arabian horses, ceramics, spices and exotic woods – was paper! And in passing he introduced his native Italians to ice cream (frozen creams) and, yes, pasta (noodles) from his observations of Chinese cuisine.

Such wonders are supported by a wealth of minor detail: regional histories, descriptions of cities, inhabitants, races, languages and government, people’s different lifestyles, diets, styles of dress, marriage customs, rituals and religions. There are accounts of trading practices, crafts, manufactured products, plants, animals, minerals and terrain. And all this from a teenager who went to China aged seventeen!

Understandably for a red-blooded young Italian, he waxes lyrical about the beautiful Arabian and oriental girls, especially those who are obliged to sleep with travellers before they can expect to marry!

It is Marco Polo who furnishes Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s fevered brain with the images that produced the immortal lines ‘in Xanadu did Kublai Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree . . .’, and it is Marco who supplies the erotic detail about what went on in such domes and of the damsels, practised in the art of ‘dalliance and seduction’, ensconced in love-pavilions admin-istering what we now call recreational drugs to an early cult of Middle Eastern suicide-bombers.

His adventures read like a medieval soap opera and indeed they turn out to have been written, or at least ghosted, by a writer of them, the romance-writer Rustichello of Pisa, who shared Marco’s prison. Small wonder that initially these seemingly tall tales were greeted with open incredulity and derision. Who was there to confirm one word of it? No one! And that was to hold true for almost five hundred years. Ethnocentric Europeans simply refused to entertain the notion that a civilisation larger and more advanced than their own existed in the East. Europe was undoubtedly the centre of civilisation, as everyone knew. Europeans had visited the fringes of the Orient and ventured into North Africa, and the people they had seen were observably backward and primitive. Marco Polo’s accounts of a massive empire employing advanced financial systems, such as the use of paper currency, were staunchly and universally rejected as romantic fiction.

He became known by the derisory title ‘Marco Millione’ (‘Marco of the Millions’), the teller of a million tall tales. After his death he was lampooned at Venetian carnivals by a comic figure dressed as a ruffian clown whose act consisted of outlandish and exaggerated gestures and expressions.

Sadly this reputation prevailed throughout his lifetime. Indeed, right up until the twenty-first century, to tell ‘a Marco Polo’ was to be guilty of exaggeration verging on the untrue. The priest who attended Marco Polo on his deathbed in 1324 felt impelled to ask him whether he wished to recant any of his story. Marco replied curtly: ‘I have not written down the half of the things I saw.’

Now, the passage of time and the travels, mostly in the twentieth century, of others have largely vindicated Marco Polo. His route map is somewhat eccentric and he is not always very objective about hearsay information (if it is spicy he, or Rustichello, prefers to keep it that way), but he usually warns the reader when he is quoting questionable sources. It should also be remembered that the account was written down from memory supported (it is thought) by notes brought from Venice to his prison cell.

Admittedly, contemporary doubters of Marco Polo have emerged in recent times, their work based largely on what are seen as significant omissions from his description of China, in particular his failure to describe the Great Wall or to note that Chinese women bound their feet. Indeed, a case for his never having visited China has been built on his missing structures as large (or feet as small) as this.

But again Marco Polo’s account has won through. The academic consensus is that the Great Wall of China did not reach its current all-embracing form until the Ming dynasty, in about 1500. If the story had mentioned the wall it would certainly be fictional.

Marco Polo is now confirmed as the first traveller to describe a journey across the entire continent of Asia and to name the countries and provinces in the proper consecutive order. A growing awareness that the man could be relied upon also encouraged further exploration of the world: a well-thumbed copy of Marco Polo’s book was taken by Christopher Columbus on his voyages to the New World.

Even his erotic ‘gossip’ has been shown to have an essential veracity, a good example of which is the story of the ‘Old Man of the Mountains’. Admitting that the story is hearsay and probably ancient history he nonetheless includes it, and with all the titillating detail he can bring to it.

The Old Man of the Mountains lived in a beautiful mountain between two lofty peaks and there built a luxurious garden boasting every fragrant shrub and delicious fruit from far afield. Streams (conduits) flowed with milk, honey and wine, and damsels skilled in the arts of singing, the playing of musical instruments and love (to which Marco Polo refers delicately) lived in a series of luxurious pavilions; the whole guarded by an impenetrable fortress through which the only access was via a secret tunnel.

At first glance this has all the hallmarks of a licentious fairy story, good tabloid stuff, at which Rustichello, remember, was an expert.

The Old Man of the Mountains made a selection from among the young men of the mountains who were renowned for their daring and bravery and were well versed in the martial arts. Every day he described to these young acolytes the ‘Paradise’ which the Prophet Mohammed had promised the Faithful and eventually he revealed to them that he too possessed the key to Paradise. They were then drugged with opium and hashish, carried unconscious through the secret tunnel and handed over to the obliging damsels in whose company they spent four or five days enjoying the singing, playing, delicate food, wines or milk and honey, and, says Marco Polo, ‘exquisite caresses’.

Drugged back into unconsciousness at the end of this experience they were carried out with happy smiles on their faces and awoke to a promise from the Old Man of the Mountains that they could return any time to Paradise if they swore fealty to him. Moreover, this would almost certainly be their fate as he was recruiting them to a cult of political assassins who would wreak suicidal mayhem across the Levant. Marco Polo records: ‘They had absolutely no regard for their own lives in the execution of their master’s will and their tyranny became the subject of dread in all the surrounding countries.’

Many of Marco Polo’s debunkers say this type of reporting is driven either by Rustichello’s imagination or the licentious thoughts of a young man in his early twenties. His book is certainly illuminated by his obvious attraction to Oriental women; for instance, he describes the Northern Persians as ‘a handsome race especially the women, who, in my opinion, are the most beautiful in the world’. Of a region further east, he says that its women ‘are in truth, very handsome, very sensual’. And everywhere there is a fascination for sexual mores, as in his description of the women who are not allowed to marry if they are virgins and whose parents get round this problem by leaving them beside busy roads for the enjoyment of travellers.

But contemporary research, including a very descriptive work by the war correspondent and travel-writer Martha Gellhorn, has confirmed the truth of Marco Polo’s seemingly fantastical tale.

The Old Man of the Mountains was in fact Alo-eddin (Aladin?), a dissident Sunni rebel of the early Muslim faith who, after falling out with the Caliph of Cairo, fled east where, with his fanatical followers, he captured the mountain fortress of Alamut and established a sect which must surely be regarded as the prototype of today’s suicide squads. Hassan lived at Alamut for four decades, reportedly never leaving the place other than occasionally to walk the battlements, and came to be known as Sheik-al-Jabal, the ‘Old Man of the Mountains’. He did indeed raise an elite corps of assassins, in fact the word owes its origins to the ‘hassashin’, as these killers were said to be ‘crazed’ by hashish when they carried out their murders. They almost invariably gave their own lives in these attacks (mostly carried out for maximum terror effect, in public view and in broad daylight) in the belief that they would go directly to Paradise.

Nor was the sect just a passing phenomenon. The Old Man of the Mountains and his successors held sway for more than two centuries over vast areas of the Middle East and Asia Minor, from Kurdistan to Egypt, where they eventually kept formal embassies and occupied dozens of castles. Elements of the sect still exist today (thoroughly peacefully) as part of the Aga Khan’s Sunni Muslim following.

Marco travels through mountains one of which, he claims, has Noah’s Ark on its summit. As he was in the location of Mount Ararat this represents the first actual identification of the site. He also describes a substance which has all the characteristics of crude oil and, given that today this region is a major oil producer, here we have another first. In what is now modern Iran he describes the tomb of the Three Wise Men and recounts the ‘Christmas’ tales associated with them.

He also gives the first potted history of the legendary Prester John credited at this time by the West with ruling over a ‘lost faith’ of Christians (Nestorians) deep inside Asia who, if only they could be contacted, might mount an attack on Islam’s flank to assist the Crusaders. Marco admits, however, that his information on Prester John is hearsay and historically questionable. Nowadays the consensus is that Prester John was probably a powerful Tartar prince, a khan in his own right, but the possibility of a Christian kingdom lost in the soft underbelly of Asia obviously fascinated Marco Polo and he refers to Prester John (calling him George in one reference) on several occasions.

Similarly, serious doubts as to Marco’s veracity were aroused by the many ‘magical’ objects which Marco Polo saw and described. His reports of black rocks that burned and a mineral wool that when roasted in fire ‘echoed the Salamander’ in becoming fire resistant were greeted with disdain by his original readership. Of course, we now know that he was describing coal and asbestos, both then unknown in Europe.

When he lectured on how he had climbed to the ‘Roof of the World’ and described the wonder of water being slow to boil, people shouted ‘Marco Millione’ at him. Hundreds of years later, in the high latitudes of Afghanistan, more or less where Marco said it was, the Pamir Plateau was discovered and named, and we all know now that a lack of oxygen makes it difficult for climbers to boil their tea there. Indeed, parts of the ‘Roof of the World’ have not been explored to this day. It is also an exceptionally tough climb even for those dressed in the latest weatherproofs, using modern mountaineering equipment and assisted by oxygen cylinders.

Marco’s story also seems particularly ‘incredible’ when you realise that he is describing a trek made without maps 700 years ago. The fact that he survived at all is little short of miraculous. Literally nothing in the way of extreme travel equipment existed then, indeed the very concept of travel on the scale undertaken by Marco Polo did not exist. He walked or rode through half a dozen wars, through lands where the plague, leprosy, typhoid, smallpox and malaria (to mention but a few) were endemic. He climbed in areas where there would have been an ever-present danger of falling, frostbite and other accidents, all of which would almost certainly have proved fatal in his time. He spent days, nay weeks, in awful, waterless deserts like the Gobi and the Lot. In virtually all of the countries he traversed a traveller positively expected to be attacked, robbed and murdered and, given his colour, hair type and language, he must have appeared frighteningly alien to all he met.

And yet he survived all this for twenty-five years in a place and in an age when there was only the most primitive of surgery, medicine based on superstition, the odd efficacious plant, and certainly no hospitals. There were times when he was obviously seriously ill – he describes having to go up into the mountains for almost a year to recover his health on his way out to Kublai’s court in China. But these difficulties are always marginalised and it is clear that essentially he was inspired by and loved every minute of his incredible journey.

I am not at all surprised that nobody believed him. He was a traveller from time, someone who had visited the future and, incredibly, come back to tell the tale.

Admittedly, Marco and his family were almost the first Westerners to exploit a very narrow window of opportunity to go East. Europe was awakening from the Dark Ages. Western trade promoted by the Crusades was rapidly expanding. In China an ancient insular civilisation had succumbed to the Tartars whose ruthless chief, Kublai Khan, was in the process of building one of the largest empires ever to exist. When that empire crumbled the doors to China swung closed again, barring Western entrepreneurs like the Polos for centuries to come.

As a trading nation, Venice had benefited enormously from the construction of ships for the Crusades, even agreeing to fund one such endeavour as a smokescreen for the invasion and conquest of Constantinople. Its own empire was not insubstantial, boasting possessions as far away as the Greek mainland.

But up until this time (1250) only fables existed of the faraway land of China, mostly legends dating from the time of the great Greek incursions of Alexander the Great. Between Europe and China stood a singularly unfriendly Muslim Middle East which regarded all Europeans as aggressive infidels practising a heretical religion and bent on the conquest of their most holy sites. And in part they were right. For hundreds of years the holy rule of Allah had been to keep out these apostates at all costs. A virtually identical view existed on the European side.

While a meagre exchange of trade was sustained by a clan of itinerant merchants, this did not entail an exchange of cultures and ideas, or even of much basic information. There had always been a ‘Silk Road’ between Europe and Eastern Asia since the time of the Roman Empire but little accurate information had travelled down it. Europeans thought, for example, that silk was a vegetable product made from a bark, rather than from the cocoons of silkworms.

While Europe was coordinating its financial muscle, and trading states like Venice and Genoa were casting speculative eyes eastwards, China, largely unknown to the West, was beginning to collapse. The culture was decaying of old age and the ‘barbarians’ from the north, as the Tartars were known, had started to make serious inroads into the Chinese lands.

This unlikely dominance of the most advanced and sophisticated race on earth by a rabble of mounted raiders from the northern steppes had been initiated about fifty years earlier by Genghis Khan who was just thirteen when he inherited the chiefdom of a small Mongolian tribe. Genghis lived to see the Mongol ‘horde’ dominate more land than any other race on earth and drive the Europeans back to the banks of the Dnieper.

In 1206 Genghis (or Chinghiz) had been elected leader of the Mongols by a great confederacy of these nomad people, gathered at Karakoran, a plain they regarded as holy, and there, as Marco Polo avows, they made up their minds to conquer the whole world.

Similar forces were rallying in the West. A year before the accession of Genghis, the gateway to the East, Constantinople, had been invaded and conquered by mercenaries led by Baldwin of Flanders, with the direct and moral support of the Pope in Rome and the material support of the merchants of Venice. They were rewarded by the lion’s share of the trade in the Levant, which Marco Polo describes as stretching from eastern Persia to the Mediterranean.

Genghis Khan spent the next twenty-seven years of his life uniting the Mongol tribes, by a combination of savage retribution and shrewd diplomacy. That achieved, he turned his attention to a Tartar invasion of northern China, orchestrated under three huge armies commanded by three of his sons and four of his brothers. He himself commanded the largest army, assisted by his youngest son, Tule, father of Kublai Khan, who would become Marco Polo’s mentor and master.

All three armies were successful and seemingly would have been content to rest in the conquered north had it not been for an unfortunate incident involving the Shah (or Khan) of Persia.

Genghis sent word to Persia offering, according to Marco Polo, ‘Greetings. I know thy power and the vast extent of thy empire; I regard thee as my most cherished son. Thou must know that for my part I have conquered China and all the Turkish nations north of it. Thou knowest that my country is a hall of warriors, a mine of silver, and I have no need of other lands. I take it that we have an equal interest in encouraging trade between out subjects.’

This offer appeared to have been received favourably, but the first Mongol traders were put to death and when, through an ambassador, Genghis demanded the surrender of the governor responsible, the ambassador was summarily beheaded and the rest of the delegation returned to Genghis, ignobly shaved of their beards.

The war that followed earned Genghis Khan a permanent place in history as a barbaric slaughterer; it was a reputation not undeserved. He marched his armies across the continent and over the mountains of Tibet. Tashkent surrendered, Bokhara fell and Shah Mohammed of Persia was harried from two sides by separate Mongol forces. Cities were sacked and burned and their inhabitants slaughtered. After a siege of six months, the city of Herat was taken by a Mongol army said to be eighty thousand strong. The entire population of more than 1.5 million men, women and children was massacred.

Meanwhile the flying columns harrying the Shah were sweeping on into Europe, driving the Turkish resistance before them. In 1222 the Mongols advanced into Georgia and, after yet another set of envoys had been put to death by the Russians, Genghis Khan swung his troops into Greater Bulgaria in an orgy of slaughter, rape and pillage which was to render his name synonymous with unbridled savagery for all time. Europe was only saved from further Mongol incursion by the death of Genghis Khan and of his son, who died suddenly when the Mongol armies were already occupying Hungary, Poland and Kiev and were encamped on the east bank of the Dnieper.

It was into the very heart of this mighty Tartar advance that Marco Polo, his father Nicolo, and his uncle, Maffeo, opportunistic merchant adventurers from Venice, marched when Marco was just seventeen.

In 1255 they had set out for Constantinople to set up a trading post dealing in goods from the Orient, the earlier barriers to trade between Europe and Asia having been broken down by Mongolian expansion. Nicolo left behind his wife, fully expecting to return home within a year or so. But on one of their trading expeditions they found their way home blocked by a war for the Caucasus region between two of Genghis Khan’s grandsons. They were obliged to deviate dramatically to the east, ending up in Bokhara, a city to the north of Afghanistan and one then as now famed for its carpets. There they met an ambassador of Kublai Khan who inferred that the only way they could get home was to obtain a firman from the Grand Khan himself, and with this in mind they decided to accompany Kublai Khan’s ambassador to the court in China. Circumstances had caused them unwittingly to travel further east than any traders before them.

It was also the first time Kublai Khan came into extended contact with sophisticated Westerners; he had just begun to settle into the rule of a vast kingdom with all the problems that such a task entailed. Moreover, the Polo brothers were astonished to discover that he did not act like the mass murderer of European legend, but instead apparently wanted his people to convert to Christianity.

Kublai gave the two Venetians an epistle to the Pope requesting that he send him a hundred ‘learned men’, which the Polos took to mean priests (historians have suggested that what Kublai really wanted was more foreign advisers to help him administer his disparate kingdom). One cannot escape the thought that the world would have been a very different place had the Polos been able to deliver this religious manpower.

To confirm his Christian leanings, Kublai Khan also asked the Polos to bring him some of the holy oil from the lamp that was kept burning over the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Kublai Khan had a taste for such curios: later he would send to India for a beggar’s bowl said to have belonged to Buddha and to Madagascar for feathers of the great auk.

The Polos did other favours for the Grand Khan and convinced him of the value of foreign advisers. His uncles, Marco claims, later helped bring the war in southern China to a close by showing Kublai Khan’s generals how to make siege engines and were rewarded with a golden tablet from the Grand Khan guaranteeing their safe passage out of China. This is generally regarded as a rather dubious claim.

Their return journey took four years. Overcoming huge risks at the hands of the various belligerent Tartar tribes and the usual problems with extremes of climate they finally reached the Venetian colony at Acre, where the papal legate informed them that Pope Clement IV had died and that no one had yet been elected to replace him. The brothers decided it was time they went home, where Nicolo discovered that his wife had died but that he was the father of a son, Marco, now aged fifteen.

The papal election hit an impasse and many months passed. The brothers, fearful that their absence might fatally compromise the unique trading links they had managed to forge with the Grand Khan, decided to proceed with their commission as best they could. With Marco, they travelled to Jerusalem and picked up the holy oil. The Papal Legate, Tebaldo, would only commit himself to two priests, but when the Polos ran into a Tartar rebellion in the eastern Mediterranean these friars got cold feet and went home – a momentous decision if you consider the impact even a hundred Catholic priests might have had on Kublai’s world.

Nicolo, Maffeo and the young Marco were struggling on alone when they were called back. News reached them that Tebaldo had been elected Pope, taking the name Gregory X, and that if they could return to Laius, in Southern Albania, they would find letters waiting for them which had been sent by fast ship from the new Pope to be taken to Kublai Khan. They picked up the letters, they were in possession of the holy oil and, in a sense, the young Marco Polo, a devout Catholic in a time of fervour for the Crusades, replaced the hundred learned priests!

Ahead of them stretched another four years of gruelling travel. After almost a year the intrepid trio found themselves in the Persian Gulf where they had planned to board a local ship to sail from Hormuz to China. Expert ship-builders themselves, they were appalled by the apparently flimsy construction of these craft. Marco notes with contempt how the ships ‘were sewn together’, detail which has added the stamp of authenticity to his report. We now know that Arabian and Indian dhows have been constructed in this way since time immemorial, but the Polos were so concerned they elected to take on the even more hazardous overland journey.

Marco contracted a fever (probably malaria) from which he nearly died; he was saved, he says, by ‘the magical quality’ of the high air of the mountains of Afghanistan. (The late, great explorer, Wilfred Thesiger, with whom I made a documentary film, lived among the Marsh Arabs of lower Iraq for seven years, and routinely escaped the clouds of mosquitoes which are the plague of the marshes in summer by going climbing in these same mountains.)

Marco convalesced for a year before tackling the Pamir Plateau between Afghanistan and Tibet, in itself an incredible achievement and one of which a modern climber boasting a supply of oxygen and all the modern climbing gear would be proud. Known now as ‘The Roof of the World’ as a result of Marco’s enthusiastic description, its height inadvertently revealed with Marco’s observation that water took longer to boil.

The Polos stayed to trade among the Tibetan Buddhists in Campichu for about a year, moved into Turkistan, crossing the then unexplored and terrifying Gobi Desert on foot until finally they reached an unknown eastern coast which turned out to be that of China. They had crossed virtually the whole of Asia and had started to despair of ever finding Kublai Khan and his court – when the court came to them!

Cautious and cunning as ever, Kublai had been watching their progress for a long time from afar.

When the Polos’ by now decrepit expedition was still forty days’ march from his capital, Kublai Khan sent escorts to accompany them in style to the city of Shangtu about 180 miles west of Peking. It was 1275 and Marco was now a man of twenty-one years. He was adept in the Tartar languages thanks to lessons from his father and his uncle, and obviously he knew the country well.

The young Marco Polo immediately revealed himself as an observant raconteur with an interest in the unusual and the erotic and, as time went by, it seems that gift for telling tales was exactly what Kublai wanted (no derisory Marco Millione here). For their part Kublai’s own high officials, kow-towing constantly as tradition dictated, and terrified of the Khan’s savage rages which could lead to lethal injunctions, preferred to confine themselves to carefully phrased and censored diplomatic reports.

Kublai Khan seems to have spotted Marco’s latent talents and taken the young man under his wing. While Nicolo and Maffeo were left in peace to trade (and are hardly mentioned in Marco Polo’s book hereafter) Marco was groomed, as he describes it, as the Grand Khan’s roving ambassador. Twenty-seven years now pass, years of extraordinary travel, adventure, political intrigue and military campaigns as Marco Polo matures into the role of ‘ambassador at large’ to his lord and master Kublai Khan.

These stories are told in three ‘Books’ that cover the initial journey out to China and the Kublai Khan’s very mobile court, Marco’s travels and adventures in the employ of the Great Khan, and finally the trials and tribulations of getting home. There are a confusion of Introductions and Prologues, sometimes called the Invocation.

Over the years the story has appeared under various titles such as The Travels of Marco Polo, A Description of the World, Della Navigazioni e Viaggi. It is generally agreed that the lost original was written in bad French. The book is still one of the great works of travel, arguably the greatest because of its vast range. Even now after the lapse of seven centuries it remains the authority for certain parts of Central Asia and of the vast Chinese Empire.

Dates remain slightly vague as we do not know Marco Polo’s exact birth date. His father Nicolo had gone, in 1260, with his brother, Maffeo, on an initial pioneering journey trading in the lands of the Tartars. The generally accepted date for Marco’s birth is 1254 with the brothers returning to Venice with a commission from Kublai in 1269 when Marco was about fifteen. They set out to return to the Great Khan’s court in 1271 when Marco was probably in his seventeenth year, and the three of them remained in Kublai’s court for a further seventeen or so years, returning to Venice in 1295. The journeys back and forth themselves took years. Marco, now a rich Venice merchant in his early forties, becomes embroiled in a war with Genoa, which the Venetians lost, and our hero ends up in jail where, sometime in the next eighteen months, with Rustichello, he writes a book which few believe. Indeed, how little Marco was credited may be judged from the fact that the map of Asia was not modified by his discoveries until fifty years after his death in 1324.

MANUSCRIPT VERSIONS AND RECENSIONS

Let us return to Marco in prison, possibly stuck there for life. The sea battle he took part in was supposed to have been conclusive, with the richest of the Venetian merchants pooling their funds to build a fleet of sixty fighting craft each rowed by dozens of oarsmen and designed to smash and crush the upstart Genoans.

Genoa had approximately the same number of ships, and the Genoans won. Moreover, they won convincingly, dragging all the Venetian ships back into harbour with their masts and pennants trailing in the water as a mark of disrespect. The humiliated commander of the Venetian fleet was so cast down that he dashed his head on a stone of the jetty and killed himself. All the ‘Gentlemen Captains’ of the Venetian fleet, most of them rich merchants, were gaoled, not too uncomfortably, and within the year most of them had returned home after the payment of substantial ransoms.

Not so Marco Polo. No one knows whether the Genoans wanted to keep him or whether his family failed to put up the money. He was in the second year of his confinement when he met Rustichello, a minor writer of romantic fiction. It is not known whether they fortuitously ended up in the same cell together or whether Marco Polo, bored and thinking he might fill his time by setting down the story of his travels, sent for Rustichello.

Crucially, whether or not Marco Polo could call on notes has never been satisfactorily established. Ramusio, the first editor of a printed version of Marco Polo’s travels, claims that Marco Polo did send to Venice for his notebook and papers, but we have no confirmation of them ever arriving in Genoa.

Most introductions to a Marco Polo manuscript make a point of mentioning that he always made detailed notes to satisfy the Grand Khan’s love of minutiae and gossip. But this observation appears to have been emphasised later when the authenticity of the account was under heavy attack. I believe that Marco Polo did in fact have access to his notes; there is simply too much detail for the author to have remembered it all more than two years after his return to Venice.

Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s edition (c. 1553) is believed to be one of the earliest printed editions of a Marco Polo translation, if not the earliest. In it he describes how Marco languished in his prison in Genoa. Venice was actually at war with Genoa and the rich Polo family was called upon to equip a fighting galley. Marco sailed as the ‘merchant captain’ of this ship as part of an armada of some sixty vessels commanded by the fighting cleric Andrea Dandolo and fought in the battle of Curzola on 6 September 1298, which proved a diaster for Venice. Marco was carried as a prisoner to Genoa and accounts vary as to how long he was interred and why he was not exchanged for ransom money. Be it one year or three, captivity was wearisome and he talked a lot, finally attracting the attention of one Rustichello of Pisa, a romance writer who quickly ‘saw a book’ in Marco’s ramblings.

Some accounts have Rustichello as a fellow-prisoner in the Genoan gaol, but I consider it more likely that Rustichello was called in to ghost-write Marco’s book. The luck involved in finding a famous romance writer languishing in the same prison stretches credibility (even though by now credibility had already begun to stretch in several directions). The book which eventually came to be written is a product of Marco’s recollections of journeys undertaken anything from five to thirty years previously, and of Rustichello’s creative writing abilities, of which there is considerable evidence. Not for nothing was Marco later to be called ‘Marco Millione’ for what the public mostly regarded as innumerable tall stories. That said, his manuscript has in the main stood up remarkably well to seven hundred years of intense scholarly nit-picking, indeed as China has been explored new findings and details have, if anything, tended to corroborate his story.

As for his co-author, we learn that Rustichello was not an obscure Pisan gaolbird but a fairly eminent writer of his day who had enjoyed the patronage of Edward the Confessor and accompanied him on a Crusade to Palestine where he may even have met the Polos. He wrote a romanticised history of Arthur of Round Table fame, another on the battle of Troy and a biography of Alexander the Great, paying as much attention to the romance as to the history.

Polian scholars, in particular the éminence grise, Italian Professor L.F. Benedetto, have demonstrated that Marco’s invocation in his introduction to ‘Emperors and Kings, Dukes and Marquises’ to read the book is taken verbatim from Rustichello’s Arthurian romance. But this is no more than window-dressing. There was just one man and one alone who, in 1298, had been where no European had ever been before – and that man was Marco Polo.

The poet John Masefield, who was also a Polian scholar and wrote the fine introduction to the little 1908 Everyman edition entitled prosaically Travels: Marco Polo, speaks of Marco’s achievements as follows:

When Marco Polo went to the East, the whole of Central Asia, so full of splendour and magnificence, so noisy with nations and kings, was like a dream in men’s minds. Marco Polo saw her in all her wonder, more fully than any man has seen her since. His picture of the East is the picture which we all make in our minds when we repeat to ourselves those two strange words ‘the East’ and give ourselves up to the image which that symbol evokes. It makes us proud and reverent of the poetic gift to reflect that this king (Kublai), ‘the lord of lords’, ruler of so many cities, so many gardens, so many fishpools, would be but a name, an image covered by the sands, had he not welcomed two dusty travellers, who came to him one morning from out of the unknown.