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MARCO
POLO
G. F. HUDSON
IT IS, I THINK,an interestingcoincidencethat this day on which I have the
honour to address you to mark the 7ooth anniversary of the birth of Marco
Polo is also the occasion of the opening of an international political conference
in the city of Geneva attended by envoys from London, Paris, Washington,
Moscow and Peking. Marco Polo knew of three of these cities, for London
and Paris were then, as now, the capitals of England and France respectively,
and Peking was the city which he visited and made famous in Europe under
the name of Cambaluc, then the seat of the Great Khan of the Tartar empire
and today the capital of the Chinese People's Republic. Moscow he does not
mention by name in his book, but he gives an account of Russia as a country
with several kings, some of whom paid tribute to the Khan of the Tartars of
the Ponent ruling from his royal camp near the present city of Stalingrad.
Of Washington and America I am afraid Marco Polo had no knowledge, for
the site of the District of Columbia was then virgin forest and the continent
of the Western Hemisphere was hidden from European eyes in the unknown
vastness of the Ocean Sea. But leaving aside this new nation which a later age
was to bring forth, the other four major powers whose representatives are, as
I address you, gathered together in conference at Geneva represent very
fairly the two main divisions of Marco Polo's world. In the second half of the
thirteenth century there was Latin Christendom extending from the Atlantic
coast of France to Hungary and consisting of a number of independent kingdoms and city-republics which all recognized however the spiritual jurisdiction of the Papacy and a vague political pre-eminence of the Holy Roman
Emperor; eastward, reaching from the Carpathians to the shores of the Pacific,
was the Tartar empire with its four great sub-realms, among which formal
supremacy belonged to the Great Khanate holding China, Mongolia and
Tibet. Today Britain and France represent the Europe which has inherited
the civilization of medieval Latin Christendom, while the Soviet Union and
the Chinese People's Republic, now linked together by a common ideology
and bonds of military alliance, are the territorial heirs of three of the four
divisions of the Tartar empire of Marco Polo's time-that is to say, the Great
Khanate, the Chagatai realm, which covered most of central Asia, and the
Golden Horde, which held the steppes of the Volga and the Don and took
tribute from Russia. The lands of the fourth of the Tartar kingdoms, the
Ilkhanate of Persia and Iraq, are not at present included behind what is
commonly called the Iron Curtain, but the route of the journey made by the
two elder Polos from the Crimea to Peking would today, if it could be made
at all, lie entirely within Communist-ruled territory, just as in the thirteenth
century it lay entirely within the Tartar empire.
The elder Polos, when they set out from Venice, were interested in EastWest trade-a subject which is still very much in the news. But then as now
trade and politics tended to get mixed up, and so we find the Polos returning
300
MARCOPOLO
after their long absence as diplomatic envoys from the Great Khan to the
Pope. But it is neitheras tradersnor politiciansthat we principallyremember
the elder Polos and the young Marco; it is as explorers and revealers to
Europe of what was to all intents and purposes a new world. The fame of
Marco Polo rests on his book entitled 'The description of the world,' which
is not a mere record of personal travel, but an attempt at a universal geography filled out with his own observations and information obtained by
enquiry during his journeys in Asia. This book made an enormous addition
to Europeanknowledgeof the East. It providedthe first comprehensiveand
detailed accountof China and South-east Asia, the first mention, though only
from hearsay, of Japan, and much new information about Persia, India,
Turkestan and Mongolia. Two emissaries from Europe, John de Plano
Carpini and William of Rubruk, had already made the journey across the
steppes to Karakorumin Mongolia, which was the residence of the Great
Khans before they moved their capital to Peking. But these envoys never
reached China, of which they only had hearsay reports. In eastern Asia
there were also certain individuals of European origin who appear for a
moment in the pages of Carpini, Rubruk and Marco Polo-a German who
constructed mangonels for the Tartars, a French goldsmith, a nephew of a
Norman bishop taken prisoner in Hungary, a Greek adventurer named
Theodoulos. But these flotsam and jetsam of the Tartar conquests were not
the stuff of which geographersand historiansare made; it is unlikely that any
of them ever returnedto their native lands and, if they did, they have left no
written record of their experiences or their knowledge. The traveller who
writes books may not see more than anotherwho does not, but inevitably he
has the advantagewith posterityand in so far as he providesa full and truthful
account of what he has learnedhe deservesto be honoured, even though our
curiosity may be aroused by referencesto those other pioneers who remain
for ever mute because either circumstancesor their own incapacitydebarred
them from raising memorials to themselves by the written word. Even the
elder Polos did not write anything, and their originaljourney would not be
known but for Marco's record of it. Nor is it certain that Marco himself
would have written anythingor caused anythingto be written for publication
-but for the turn of fortune which made him a prisonerof war in Genoa in
1298.
Medieval men who were neither clergy nor lawyers or professionalpoets
and romancers did not lightly embark on the enterprise of book-writing.
In that age before printing there were no publishers on the look out for
interesting reminiscencesof a returned traveller; books could only be published by laboriouscopying of a manuscript,and it was more often a matter
of expenditure than of profit for the writer. Moreover, in the thirteenth
century serious prose writing was still done almost entirely in Latin, and if
a man was not a Latinist, it was not easy for him to express himself in one of
the vernacularlanguagesof Europe, which at that time were still primarily
media for poetry and romance. We know from Marco Polo's own account
that he broughtback notebookswith him from the East and had them sent to
him from Venice while 'The description of the world' was being written.
But as everyoneknows who has ever tried to write a book, there is a long and
MARCO POLO
30i
difficultroad to travel between rough notes and a readableliterarywork, and
Marco's jottings might have been lost as irretrievablyas most notebooks
throughoutthe ages had it not been for a battle in 1296 between armed merchant ships of Venice and Genoa in the Gulf of Alexandretta,between Cyprus
and what is now the Turkish mainland. The Genoese were victorious and
Marcowas amongthose carriedoff captiveto Genoa. In prisonthere he made
the acquaintance of a fellow-captive, a man from Pisa named Rusta or
Rustichello, who was a professional romance-writer.It may be supposed
that Marco began telling stories of his travelsto while awaythe tedious hours
of confinement and that Rustichello with his literary experience saw the
possibility of a successful book in these strangetales of far-off lands. At any
rate the outcome was that after sending to Venice for his notebooks-and it
may be observed in passing that, despite the brutalitieswhich often accompaniedmedievalwarfare,the treatmentof prisonersof war tended to be much
less strict than would be required by modern military regulations-after
getting his notebooks from Venice, Marco Polo dictated the work we now
have to Rustichello who put it into literary form. That the style is Rustichello's is placed beyond doubt by a comparisonof the book with an earlier
original work of Rustichello's, a romance entitled 'Guiron le courtois,' in
which the manner and turns of phrase are identical. The substance, on the
other hand, is undoubtedlyMarco Polo's, as is shown not only by the frequent
digressionsand fresh starts naturalin a work taken down from oral dictation,
but above all in the general truthfulness and accuracy of the contents to
which modern scholarshiphas paid such a high tribute. It would have been
easy enough to compose a book full of marvels and good stories to take the
fancy of a medieval audience, and Rustichello as a romance-writerwould
have had a naturaltendency in this direction, but Marco Polo aimed at producing a serious world geography, and though his account is enlivened by
some ratherover-simplifiedhistoricalepisodes,the workas a whole is a careful
and sober presentationof the truth as knownto Marco,the charmwhich made
the book so popular arising from the novel and exciting quality of the facts
themselves.
The book was originally written in a French dialect mixed with Italian
which was currentin the ports of the Mediterraneanat that time-a speech
quite distinct from what is called court French-and was later translatedinto
several other languages including Latin. The first English translation was
that made by John Framptonin 1579; it is describedon the title-page as "The
most noble and famous travels of Marcus Paulus, one of the nobilitie of the
state of Venice, into the East partes of the world, as Armenia,Persia,Arabia,
Tartary, with many other kingdoms and provinces. No lesse pleasant, than
profitable,as appearethby the table or contents of this booke. Most necessary
for all sortes of persons and especiallyfor travellers. Translatedinto English.
At London, Printed by Ralph Newbery, Anno I579."
I do not wish to bore an audience interested in geographywith the many
and complexproblemswhich arisewith regardto the manuscripttransmission
of Marco Polo's book. It must be pointed out however that these difficulties
do not only concernthe textual critic and paleographer;in so far as they affect
proper names, they do involve the geographical contents of the book. In
302
MARCO
POLO
times when an original manuscriptcould only be multiplied by handwritten
copies, even ordinary words underwent the most strange corruptions in
copying, and much more so, names of persons and places which were quite
unfamiliarto the scribe. In many cases it is only possible to identify a proper
name by comparing,with due referenceto the context, the varying forms of
it found in different manuscripts. Further, some manuscripts have whole
passages which are missing from others, and in nearly all cases it is fairly
certain that these passages are not interpolations, but survivals from the
original work because they contain informationwhich can hardly have come
from any other source than Marco Polo. Medieval copyists often omitted
passages which they thought would not be interesting to readers, or did so
simply to lighten their own labour. One of the most importantmanuscripts
for restoringthe originaltext of Marco Polo is one in Latin which was located
by Sir Percival David in the Chapter Libraryof the Cathedralof Toledo in
Spain in 1932; it containsseveralpassagesnot found in any other manuscript,
including a most important account of the Uigurs and their capital Karakhojo in Turfan, an areawhich was still in the thirteenth century the centre
of a highly developed civilization.
But to returnto Marcohimself and the beginningof his story. He was born
in 1254 after the departureof his father Nicolo on that voyage to Constantinople which was to take him on to China and keep him away from home for
over fifteen years. Marco says that he was fifteen when his father returnedto
Venice in I269. There must have been a long period during Marco's childhood when the Polo family did not know whether Nicolo and his brother
Maffeo, who had gone with him, were alive or dead. They could have sent
back letters by a Venetian ship from Constantinopleor Soldaia, the modern
Sudak, the Crimean port which was the terminus of maritime trade, but
after they took their plunge into the continental interior they would have
had no means of communication with their kinsfolk and nothing would
have been heard of them until they arrivedback again on the shores of the
Mediterranean.
The site of the Polo's house in Venice was the groundlateroccupied by the
MalibranTheatre, which has now been turned into a cinema. The house was
known in the fifteenth century as the Ca Milion and the courtyardon which
it stood as the Corte del Milion, a name which in the nineteenth century was
transferredto the former Corte Sabbionera. The only remains of the house
consist of the doorway with a Byzantine cross over the centre of the arch.
This certainly was the Polos' house after Marco's time, but it is doubtful
whether Marco was in fact born and broughtup in it, for documentsrelating
to the family indicatethat they originallylived in the parishof San Felice and
it has been suggested that the Polos bought the Ca Milion house after their
returnfrom the East. They seem to have gone up in the world financiallyas
a result of their travels, though they were never by Venetian standards
wealthy.
The name Milion was a nickname given to Marco Polo himself, and II
Milione is still the popular Italian name for his book. According to one
almost contemporaryaccount he was so called because of his wealth, but this
is certainlya mistake,and the true explanationis undoubtedlythat the name
MARCO POLO
303
was bestowed in derision because of the large numbers occurringin the book
for the populations of Eastern cities or the revenues of the Great Khan.
Great as was the popularityof Marco's book even in his own lifetime, there
were plenty of people to call him a liar and accuse him of imposing on his
audience with his tales of Oriental grandeur. Generally speaking, this incredulity was quite misplaced; there are certainly some exaggeratedfigures
in the book, but it has to be rememberedthat, with the wet rice agricultureof
monsoon lands, there was a greaterdensity of populationin India and China
than in Europe of that age. Marco Polo was justifiablyimpressedby the vast
numbers of the subjects of Kublai Khan, and when he states that Quinsai,
the modern Hangchow, was the largest city in the world he was almost
certainlycorrectfor the date of which he is speaking.
Let us turn now to that recordof the actualjourneys as we find it in Marco
Polo's book. There were two separatejourneys; the first made by Nicolo and
Maffeo, leaving Venice before Marco was born, and the second which they
made when they returned to China and took the young Marco with them.
His book is naturallybased primarilyon his own experience of places and
routes and we only have a cursory outline of the elder Polo's first journey;
what he knew of it was only what they told him and this must have been
much less vivid or distinct in his memory than his own recollection of the
secondjourney. Nevertheless, as I have said before, the firstjourney was the
real pioneer venture and it is to the story of it that we will now turn.
Nicolo and Maffeo set out from Venice in the year 1253, apparentlywithout any intention of doing more than carryon business in Levant ports where
Venetian mercantilefamilies commonly traded and had agencies and warehouses. From Venice they went to Constantinople, and after remaining
there for some time they went on to Soldaia or Sudak in the Crimea,a port
where Italian merchants met caravans bringing merchandise, principally
furs, from Russia and Siberia. Business at Soldaia however was not very
good, and so the two brotherstook the crucial decision to go up country and
try their luck at the court of the Khan of the Golden Horde, who was,
accordingto our narrative"at that moment at Bolgaraand at Saray,"which
means that his camp was on the move either up or down the Volga. The
rulers of the Golden Horde, having wide steppe lands suitable for a nomadic
existence,had not yet adopteda sedentaryway of life like their relativesof the
collaterallines of the descendantsof Chingiz Khan who reigned in China and
Persia;they still lived in camp, but they neverthelesswent in for great luxury
and splendour with an abundanceof gold, silk, furs and precious stones in
their dress and the furnishing of their tents. The Polos took with them
jewellery as their stock in trade and rode forth from Sudak along the caravan
route to the Volga. Several years were to pass before they again set eyes on
the sea.
Travel acrossthe steppe lands was on horseback;furthereast, in the sandy,
waterless desert tracts of central Asia, the beast of burden was the camel.
Beyond the Crimean coastal towns with their mixed population of Greeks,
Armeniansand Italians, the country up to the Volga was wild grass steppes
inhabited by Turkish-speakingnomads, the Kumans or Kipchaks; the only
Mongols in the Golden Horde were in the immediateretinue of the Khan.
304
MARCO POLO
The Polos gave their jewels to the Khan (whose name was Barca) and
received, we are told, more than twice as much as they were worth. Trading
with a Tartar khan was a gamble which might or might not come off. One
could not, of course, bargainor fix a price in dealing with such a potentate,
nor was it allowed to trade with his subjects before he had taken his pick of
the wares offered. The method of trade was to give one's goods unconditionally to the khan and trust to his generosity for payment. This was not quite
so recklessa proceedingas it might seem, for after the first period of the conquests, when the Tartars plundered and ravaged without restraint, their
leaders began to comprehend not only that people could not pay tribute if
they were exterminated, but also that in order to make the most of royal
revenues it was expedient to encourage merchants. So Barca not only
allowedthe two Venetiansa good profiton what they had given him, but also,
accordingto Marco, "sent them in several directionsto sell;" we are not told
what their business was, but we may surmiseit was the fur trade, about which
Marco has some details in a later chapter of his book indicating special
knowledge.
Nicolo and Maffeo remained a year doing business in the territory of the
Golden Horde, and were then about to return to Venice when an unforeseen
accident occurred. In I262 war broke out between Barca and Hulagu, the
Ilkhan of Persia. The various branches of the house of Chingiz Khan still
retained a certain solidarity among themselves in pride of their origin, but
they had acquiredthe habit of waging war on one another in order to settle
family quarrels. Hulagu held the passes of the Caucasus and his raiding
horsemen now infested the route by which the Polos were intending to make
their return journey. They were cut off in the interior of what is now the
Soviet Union. But if they were unable to return to the west, they were still
free to go east, and so they made their way to the commercialmetropolis of
central Asia, the far-famed city of Bokhara. There they stayed three years
waiting for the war to end and meanwhile presumably engaging in trade
with successive transmutationsof their originalstock so as always to make a
living. Then came the great opportunity. An embassy from Hulagu to the
Great Khan was passing through Bokhara,and hearing of the two Venetian
merchants,invited them to join the party, telling them that the Great Khan
had never seen any Latins and very much wished to do so. The Polos consented and accompanied Hulagu's embassy to Peking. There they were
receivedwith great honour by Kublai, who askedthem all kinds of questions
about Europe. Finally Kublai appointedthem, together with a Mongol noble
called Cogatal,as his envoys to the Pope, inviting the latterto send a hundred
wvisemen of the Christianreligion to China to propagatethe faith.
What was Kublai's purpose in this remarkableinvitation? It was probably
not a simple one. He appearsto have been genuinely interested in matters
of religion and his mother had been a Christian-that is to say a Nestorian,
for Nestorian Christianity,centred in Mesopotamia, had spread widely in
Central Asia where neither the Catholic nor Greek Orthodox forms of
the Christian religion had ever yet penetrated. But Kublai was probably
influenced also by political considerations. He may have thought it a good
idea to have diplomatic relations with Latin Europe as a possible check on
MARCO POLO
305
his own unruly relatives the khans of the Golden Horde and of Persia. He
may also-and this is even more likely-have wished to recruit his civil and
diplomatic service by attracting to China foreigners who would depend
entirely on him and have no connection with his own subjects. This is the
way in which he subsequently made use of the Polos, and clergy would be
eligible for appointments of the same kind, for in that age ecclesiastics of
whateverreligion were found performingpolitical functions in the service of
secular princes. The Mongols in China were in a very precariousposition;
it had taken them two generationsof warfareto conquer the country and in
I266 or 1267, when the Polos reached China, the conquest was still incomplete. Kublai was awareof the sullen hostility of the Chinese people; he was
awarealso that it was impossible to administerChina without a civil service,
but he could not produce civil servantsfrom among his Mongol warriorsnor
did he dare to entrust the administrationentirely to Chinese. Kublai and his
successors therefore relied greatly on the services of civilized non-Chinese,
mostly Persiansand Uigurs from Turkestan,who would not be likely to make
common cause with the Great Khan's Chinese subjects. To add a European
contingent to these foreign officials would be quite in keeping with the
principles of Mongol administration.
The Polos made their returnjourney to Europe, not as merchants,but as
ambassadorsof the Great Khan, and they carried a golden tablet with the
imperial seal which commanded for them all the facilities of the postal
servicewithin the limits of the Tartarempire. Cogatalfell ill and died on the
way, but the two Venetians went on without him. Their route now was not
back to the Crimea,but through northern Persia and they reachedthe coast
of the Mediterraneanin I269 at a place called Laias at the head of the Gulf
of Alexandrettain what was then the kingdom of Lesser Armeniaand is now
part of Turkey. Here they heard that Pope Clement IV was dead, so that
they would not be able to deliver their letters until a new Pope was elected.
Meanwhilethey returnedto Venice, and there, as alreadymentioned, Nicolo
first saw his son Marco, now aged fifteen. The election of a new Pope was
on this occasion long delayed, and two years passed before the Polos were
able to obtain from an occupantof the Holy See a reply to the messageof the
GreatKhan. GregoryX furnishedthem with LettersApostolicand appointed
two Dominican friars to go with them in response to Kublai's invitation to
Catholic priests. This time the elder Polos took the young Marco in their
company,and togetherwith the friarsthey went to Laias and set out on their
second journey to China. The friars however turned back because of reports
of raids into Armeniaby the cavalryof Sultan Bibars,who at that time ruled
over Egypt and Syria and was in conflict with both the remnant of the
Christian Crusadersin Syria and the Tartar Ilkhans who controlled Iraq.
The Polos were less nervous than their clerical companionsand went on by
themselves without encounteringthe dread Mamluk horsemen.
The route followed by the Polos on their second journey is not certain at
all points becauseMarco does not alwaysmake it clearwhetherhe is referring
to places through which he passed or to places off the route, but known from
hearsay. There is no doubt howeveraboutthe main directionsof the journey.
The travellerswent from Laias to Erzerumand then on to Tabriz, which was
250
o
Mdies
250 500
750
Jlvarco Polo'sroute ------
1000
MARCO
POLO
307
the capital of the Tartar Ilkhanate of Persia; thence south-east across central
Persia to Ormuz, the island port at the entrance to the Persian Gulf, where
they had the intention of taking ship to China to avoid the rigours of travel
over the mountains and deserts of central Asia. But inspection of Arab
shipping at Ormuz gave them so strong an impression of its unseaworthiness
that they decided to go by the overland route after all. They retraced their
steps to Kerman and then went north-east to the upper Oxus valley whence
they made the crossing of the Pamirs. This was almost certainly not the
route which the elder Polos had followed in their first journey, going from
Bokhara. They probably went by what the Chinese call the Tien-shan-peilu, a route which followed roughly the line of the present Turksib railway
as far as Alma Ata, then passed through Kulja and Urumchi skirting the
northern slopes of the great Tien-shan mountain range and turned southeast at Hami for a crossing of the Pei-shan desert to the Chinese province of
Kansu. The advantage of this route was that it avoided high mountain
passes, but for travellers coming from Persia the most direct route was the
more southerly Tien-shan-lu, going south of the Tien-shan, even though it
involved the crossing of the lofty plateau of the Pamirs. Once over the
Pamirs this route went by Kashgar, Khotan, Charchan, past the great salt
marsh of Lop Nor and through Tun-huang, where Sir Aurel Stein made
his great finds in the Cave of the Thousand Buddhas, to Suchow in Kansu.
From Kansu the Polos went by the bend of the Yellow River north of the
Great Wall, for it was summer and the Great Khan's court was not in
Cambaluc, but at the summer palace at Shandu, the Xanadu of Coleridge's
famous poem.
The Polos now remained for seventeen years in China, according to
Marco's account, in Kublai's service. There is no doubt that they entered
this service voluntarily and did very well for themselves out of it, but they
were in a sense captives, for they were entirely dependent on the Great Khan's
favour and protection, and he would certainly have taken it ill if they had asked
for the equivalent of an exit visa without giving him the benefit of their
abilities over a long period. Marco was twenty by the time he reached
Kublai's court, and the Great Khan tested his talents by sending him on a
mission to Yunnan and Burma which took the greater part of a year. Marco,
writing of himself in the third person, tells us: "because he had many times
seen and heard that the Great Khan, when the messengers he had sent
through the different parts of the world came back and told him of the
mission for which they were gone but were not able to tell him other news of
the countries where they had gone, told them that they were fools and
ignorant and said he would better like to hear the news and the customs and
usages of those countries than he did to hear those matters for which he had
sent them; so Marc, when he went on that mission, would fix his attention
on all the novelties and strange things he heard and saw in order that he
might recount them on his return to the Great Khan."
What Kublai really wanted indeed was a combination of an intelligence
agent and a good newspaper reporter and for this purpose he seems to have
found the Polos very satisfactory. He felt moreover that he could trust them
because they were unconnected either with his Chinese subjects or with the
308
MARCO
POLO
dominions of the rival branchesof his own dynasty. We do not know all the
places visited by the Polos on the assignmentsthey were given, but they certainly travelled extensively within China and their wide experience was the
basis for the very thorough description of the country which Marco gives.
Finally they were allowed to leave China to return to Europe, but their
departurewas to be still in the Great Khan's service, for they were commissioned to escort the Tartar princess Kukachin to Persia as bride for
Kublai's great-nephewthe Ilkhan Arghun. It was consideredthat the overland journey would be too perilous for this high-born lady as the caravan
routes were endangeredby a rebellion in central Asia, so she was sent on a
Chinesejunk from the port of Zaiton, the modern Chuan-chow, in South
China, by sea round Malaya and acrossthe Bay of Bengalwith calls on the
coasts of Sumatra, Ceylon and Malabar, to Ormuz, where the Polos had
wished to make the voyage in the opposite direction more than twenty years
previously. By the time the party reached Ormuz Arghun was dead, but
this did not make much differenceto the betrothal,as Kukachinwas forthwith married off to his son instead. The Polos meanwhile, their mission
accomplished, returned to Venice by way of Erzerum, Trebizond and Constantinople.
In their travels, made not merely as a means of getting from one place to
another, but with notes of distance and direction, the Polos had acquired a
knowledge of the shape and extent of Asia which far surpassed not only the
confinedgeographicalawarenessof the early Middle Ages but even the most
developed conceptions of classical antiquity. Ptolemy, whose work marked
the climax of Greek geographicalscience, had no clear idea of the coast of
Asia beyond Malaya,and puts a region of unknownland to the east of China.
Marco Polo was not a mathematical geographer, and as far as is known, he
never made a map, but he provided from his own direct observations material
which was to be incorporated by the cartography of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries. Marco himself, in so far as he tried to represent his
discoveries to himself cartographicallyprobably tried to fit them into a
world-map of conventional type like that of Marino Sanudo, which dates
from a time about twenty years after Marco's return from China, but had
hardly been affectedat all by the new knowledge.
The section of Marco Polo's travels which modern geographers have found
most interestingis that from eastern Persia to China across the Pamirs and
through east Turkestan, for, whereas from the time of Vasco da Gama the
West soon obtaineda knowledgeof the outer lands of Asia superiorto that of
the Polos, the mountain-girt interior remained almost inaccessible to
Europeans until late in the nineteenth century and has been one of the last
regions of the earth's surface to be fully explored. Even now, Marco Polo's
record is one of the important sources for the obscure history of central
Asia, and archaeology has confirmed his version of the former importance of
such ruined cities as Karakhoja in Turfan and Karakhoto in Etzingol.
As we have seen, the Polos came up from Ormuz through eastern Persia
to the Oxus, passing through Kerman and skirting the great Dasht-i-Lut
desert. In Badakhshan they saw ahead of them the great barrier of the
Pamirs and high on the plateau they would have caught sight of the great
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309
peak of Mustaghataonly 3000 feet lower than Mount Everest. Marco Polo
writes that the country of Pamir is the highest place in the whole world and
that there is no dwelling or inn there in forty days'journey, but that travellers
have to take with them the food they need; he also tells of the big wild sheep
of the Pamirs with their huge twisted horns which zoologists have named
after him.
From the Pamirsthey came down to Kashgarwith its gardensand orchards,
but ahead of them lay many weary miles of desert sand on the way through
east Turkestan, and the country of Lop Nor, the great salt marsh which
swallows up the snow-fed waters of the river Tarim. Apart from the widely
spaced caravantowns in their piedmont oases, the only inhabitants of this
desert heart of Asia were nomads whose encampments, guarded by savage
dogs, must have been so familiara sight for the Polos on both their journeys.
We may be sure that the mountainand desert tracts of centralAsia cannot
have looked very different to Marco Polo nearly seven centuries ago than
they do today. For the appearanceof towns and people modern photographs
would be much less helpful and unfortunatelywe have no visual record of
the Polos' travelsto correspondwith the literary. One result of this was that
although Europeansacquireda great deal of informationabout the Far East
from the Polos and later travellersthey continuedto have curious ideas about
it when it came to artisticrepresentation.
Something should here be said about the controversialquestion of Marco
Polo's linguistic attainments. He says according to the standard text that
when the elder Polos first arrivedat the court of the Great Khan they could
speak "the tongue of the Tartars and Tataresque," which is obscure; one
manuscripthowever has "the tongues of the Tartars and the Turks," which
is almost certainly the correct reading. The speech of the real Tartars was
Mongol, but the currentlanguageof the Golden Horde, except at the Khan's
court, was Kipchak Turkish; however, as these Turks came to be called
Tartars in Europe because they were included in the Tartar empire, a confusion between the two languages could easily arise. Of himself Marco says
that he knew several languages to speak and four written ones. The great
problem is whether Chinese was one of them. Marco Polo never refers in
his book to the peculiarityof the Chinese script; it is indeed the most remarkable omission in his account of China, and some scholars have inferredthat
as a temporarymember of the non-Chinese ruling group, he never bothered
to learn the Chinese language. But the failure to mention the Chinese script
is just as remarkableeven if he had never learnt the language, for he could
not have travelled about China for seventeen years without seeing it continually before his eyes, and I am personallyconvinced that his silence about
it is just one of those things that are liable to happen in composing a book;
that he originallymeant to have a paragraphabout it but in the end forgot to
put it in. I do not think Marco could have been really successful in his
missions in Chinawithout learningboth to speak and read Chinese. It seems
most likelythat the four Asian languageshe claimshe could readwere Persian,
Turkish-that is, not Kipchak, for he never went to the Golden Horde
territory, but Uigur which the Tartars used as a diplomatic languageMongol, which had by this time acquiredan alphabet, and Chinese.
3Io
MARCOPOLO
The names China and Chinese do not occur in Marco Polo, except in the
designation of the South China Sea, which he calls the Sea of Chin. The
word is ultimately derived from the Ch'in or Ts'in dynasty of the third
century B.C.; it became the name for China among the Hindus and Arabs.
The Chinese have never since the time of the Ch'in called their country or
themselvesby this name; the country is Chung Kuo or the CentralLand and
the people have called themselves either by the name of the reigning dynasty
or Hanjen, men of Han, after the Han dynasty which succeeded the Ch'in.
Medieval Europe howevercame to know of Chinaunder the name of Kitai or
Catai,which is still the Russianname for it, though it reallybelongs to a tribe
of eastern Mongolia which conquered part of North China in the tenth
century. North China is always Catai (Cathay) for Marco Polo, but South
China is distinguishedunder the name of Mangi or Manzi. This is reallythe
name of a non-Chinese tribe of the south, which was applied as a nickname
to the southern Chinese by the northerners;as a separategeographicalentity
it representedthe territoryof the native Sung dynastywhich held out in the
south until iz8o while the north was successivelyconqueredby the Kitai, the
Jurchits and the Tartars. The bulk of the population of China was by this
time concentratedin the Yangtze valley, and Quinsai or Hangchow, which
had been the last Sung capital, was accordingto Marco Polo the largest city
in the world. Though no longer a political capital after its surrender to
Kublai in 1276, it was a city of great wealth and the most refinedluxury. The
greatest eloquence in Marco's book is reserved for the praise of it. Here
Chinese civilizationwas to be seen in its most perfect form, and it is greatly
to his credit that he seems to have appreciatedits quality more than the
imperialmagnificenceof Cambaluc.
It was aboveall MarcoPolo's accountof the coastlandsof Chinaand Southeast Asia, and of Japan and the Spice Islands lying far out in the seas to the
east of Asia, that was to be so importantfor later geographersand explorers,
and especially for the great enterprise of Columbus. Europe already had
some knowledge of China, however vague and indistinct, from the overland
caravanroutes, but the Pacific Ocean with its islands was an entirely new
world. Marco Polo revealed the existence of an abundantshipping in these
waters, and he had himself made his voyage to Ormuz in a Chinese junk.
Instead of an Asian hinterlandfading away eastwardinto the unknown there
was hencefortha populous coastlinefull of commerceopposite to the Atlantic
shores of Europe across the supposedly empty space of the so-called Ocean
Sea. The question was one of distance; how far would it be to go from
Spain or England to China and Japan by sailing west? The problem was
solved, wrongly but in a manner to encouragethe practicalattempt, by the
fifteenth century geographerswho revived the study of Ptolemy and tried to
combine his world-mapwith the informationgatheredby medievaltravellers.
Owing to the great overestimateof overland distances derived from deadreckoningPtolemy had made the Eurasiancontinental mass extend through
far too many degrees of latitude. But he had made his known Asia end eastward in unknown land; this was identified with the lands discoveredby the
Polos and another fifty degrees were assigned to it. When in addition to all
this, Columbus adopted a theory which greatly reduced the true size of the
MARCO
POLO
3II
earth, he was equipped with the belief which led him to expect to find Japan
in the region of the West Indies.
The main objectiveof Columbuswas Japan,and his vision of its marvellous
wealth which he was going to tap was derived from the accountof it given by
Marco Polo: "Cipanguis an island to the sunrising which is on the high sea
1500 miles distant from the land of Mangi. It is an exceedingly great island.
The people are white, fair fashioned and beautiful. They are idolaters and
keep themselves by themselves; they are ruled by their own king and pay
tribute to no other. Moreover I tell you that they have gold in very great
abundance,because gold is found there beyond measure, but no man takes
gold out from that island, becausethe king does not easily allow it to be taken
out and no merchantgoes there from the mainlandbecause it is so far, and
ships arerarelybrought there from other regions,for it abounds in all things.
... The lord that is the chief ruler of that island has a palace which is all
covered with sheets of fine gold."
The Chinese who told Marco Polo were right about the seclusion of Japan
in this period and right also about the sheets of gold, though wrong in supposing that this gold was at all solid. Japanhas never as a matterof fact been
rich in gold, but the Japanesehave carriedfurtherthan any other people the
use of gold leaf for architecturaldecoration. The interior of the Kinkakuji
in Kyoto, which was recently destroyed by fire, was originally covered with
gold leaf, and this special taste seems already to have developed in the
thirteenth century. The misunderstandingwhich arose from reportsof these
golden palaces fired the imaginationof Columbus and gave him confidence
that he could show an immense profit for the expedition which he finally
persuadedthe Spanish Sovereignsto support. His world was that of Behaim's
globe, on which we see Japanwell out from the mainlandof Asia,where Marco
Polo placed it. Between it and Europethere is nothing except an islandcalled
Antilia, which appearson several medievalmaps and probablyrepresentsan
accidental discovery of the West Indies. When Columbus reached Cuba he
thought he had passedAntiliaand found Cipangu,but there was no sign of any
gold. Later, when he did find some gold in Haiti, he decided that must be
Cipanguand that Cubawas a peninsulaof the mainlandof Asia; even so it was
all verypuzzling,for therewereno cities and the people were primitivesavages.
The Contarinimap of 1507 illustrateshow the Americasemergedinto geographicalknowledge in the sea space between Europe and eastern Asia. In
it Asia has, as it were retreated,together with Japan,and the West Indies are
shown in more or less their correct position, with the mainland of South
Americato the south of them, but North America is still missing and there
is open sea from Cuba westwardto Asia. A few years more and it was known
that the Americas stretched continuously from north to south athwart the
imaginedsea route from Spain to Japan,and Japanitself was at last reached,
not from the east, but by the Portuguese coming up from the Indian Ocean.
During the sixteenth century the work of discoverywent rapidlyforwardand
by the time Orteliusproducedhis great Atlas the dutlines of the world as we
know it were firmly established. But exploration has never again quite
recoveredthe excitement of that enchanted hour when Columbus searched
in the forests of Cuba for Marco Polo's fabled palace of the golden roof.