Читать книгу Empires of the Monsoon - Richard Hall - Страница 15

Gold and silver to fill my storehouse year by year;

Corn and rice to crowd my sheds at every harvest.

Chinese slaves to take charge of treasury and barn.

Foreign slaves to take care of my cattle and sheep.

Strong-legged slaves to run by saddle and stirrup when I ride,

Powerful slaves to till the fields with might and main.

Handsome slaves to play the harp and hand the wine;

Slim-waisted slaves to sing me songs, and dance …

—a bridegroom’s dream, in Ballads and Stories from Tim-Huang (c. A.D. 750 trans. Arthur Waley)

THERE ARE too few guidelines in his book to tell precisely where Marco Polo travelled during his twenty years in the East, yet he certainly saw much of China, and journeyed beyond its borders, apparently to carry out diplomatic tasks for the Great Khan.¹ One mission took him to India by sea, but the ship in which he was a passenger seems to have reached Sumatra too late to catch the summer monsoon. He had to wait on the island for five months, until the wind began blowing again towards the north.

Marco filled his time by learning all he could about this unfamiliar part of the world. He describes the woods and spices produced in the region of Sumatra and ‘Malayur’, for he is always thinking of the trading possibilities. (At one point he steps outside his narrative to mention having brought a particular variety of seed back to Venice in the hope of cultivating it there; but the climate had defeated him.)

On the other hand, Marco – doubtless encouraged by his scribe Rustichello – never misses a chance to dwell upon the macabre. He denounces as fraudulent several embalmed specimens of tiny ‘pygmies’ which had reached Europe from the East and caused much amazement. Having been where they were made, he knows they are nothing but small monkeys with faces like humans. The Sumatrans were experts at ‘doctoring’ the monkey corpses to make them look more convincing.

He goes on to tell of a kingdom called Dagroian, where the people had one ‘particularly bad’ custom. When a sick patient was considered unlikely to recover he was suffocated and cooked: ‘Then all his kinsfolk assemble and eat him whole. I assure you that they even devour all the marrow in his bones.’ He discerned a religious purpose here, for if any flesh were left it would breed worms, the worms would die of hunger and the dead man’s soul would suffer torment because so many souls ‘generated by his substance’ had met their deaths.

When Marco was finally able to sail on from Sumatra he showed none of his earlier fear of the Indian Ocean, doubtless because he was now on board a large Chinese junk, markedly different from the filthy horse-boats of Hormuz. It was from his narrative that Europe was to gain the first detailed description of these oriental ships, by far the world’s most advanced sea-going vessels at that time. They carried crews of up to four hundred, were propelled by sails made of split bamboo cane on as many as four masts, and the hulls had strong watertight bulkheads to limit the flooding if the sides were pierced by reefs. Unlike the Arab and Persian ships, in which passengers had a wretched time, the junks were described by Marco as planned for comfort, ‘with at least sixty cabins, each of which can comfortably accommodate one merchant’.

The young Venetian travelled up both sides of India, going from port to port and giving a precise account of the trading prospects there. Since the old fantasies about monstrous beasts and bizarre humans still fascinated Europe, the lack of them in Marco’s memoirs may have been a disappointment to some of his readers; on the other hand, this first coherent account of India’s exotic richness was destined to arouse much excitement among both monarchs and merchants.

His first stopping-place had been Ceylon, and what impressed him there was the abundance of rubies, sapphires, topazes and other gems. One ruby, the length of a palm and as thick as a man’s arm, was so famous that the Great Khan sent emissaries to buy it; but the king of Ceylon turned them away. Marco’s detailed account implies that he may have been among these emissaries.

As he voyaged up the west side of India, along the Malabar coast, Marco marvelled at the immense production of pepper, cinnamon, ginger and other spices. Some regions produced cotton, and everywhere it was possible to buy beautiful buckram, as delicate as linen, and fine leather, stitched with gold and embossed with birds and beasts. The merchants of India, known as banians, from an old Sanskrit word, were scrupulous in their trading, and goods could be left with them in complete safety; so it was not surprising that ships came to Malabar from many lands. Towards the end of his journey Marco visited the great Gujarati port of Cambay, the terminus for much of the trade across the western half of the Indian Ocean. The merchants of Cambay regularly travelled as far as Egypt, and many of their goods were sold on to the Mediterranean countries.²

About the time when Marco was in India, the ruler of Ceylon, named Buvanekabahu, had sent an envoy to Cairo in a bid to win a share of this trade. His message to the Mamluke rulers said: ‘I have a prodigious quantity of pearls and precious stones of every kind. I have vessels, elephants, muslins and other cloths, wood, cinnamon, and all the objects of commerce which are brought to you by the banian merchants.’³ However, the Indian monopoly was to prove far too strong for him to break, although the discovery of Ceylonese coins near Mogadishu, in the Horn of Africa, suggests that Buvanekabahu may have had some success in expanding his island’s trade.

Marco was impressed by India’s exports of cotton and imports of gold; one of the shipping routes took merchants directly across the ocean, to exchange brightly-coloured cloth for the gold of southern Africa. A trade which continued to fascinate him was the traffic in horses from Arabia and Persia. ‘You may take it for a fact that the merchants of Hormuz and Kais, of Dhofar and Shihr and Aden, all of which provinces produce large numbers of battle chargers and other horses, buy up the best horses and load them on ships and export them.’ Some were sold for as much as 500 saggi (about 2,500 grams) of gold, and one kingdom alone on the Coromandel coast imported about 6,000 horses a year. By the end of the year no more than 100 would still be alive, because the Indians had no idea of how to care for them. According to Marco, the merchants who sold the horses did not allow any veterinarian to go with the animals, because they were ‘only too glad for many of the horses to die’.

The social customs of India are also recounted in the Description of the World, including the practice of suttee, by which widows flung themselves on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Marco notes how Hindu superstitions governed business deals; the appearance of poisonous spiders or the length of shadows were taken as omens. He tells of the behaviour of yogis in great detail, and while their beliefs seemed bewildering at times – even green leaves had souls, so it was a sin to eat off them – he had come across many strange things on his travels and was usually too broad-minded to scoff.

The Indian people were ‘idolators’, and the inquisitive Venetian soon discovered what went on at Hindu festivals. True to form, he took a particular interest in the temple maidens, who did a great deal of dancing to conciliate the gods and goddesses: ‘Moreover, these maidens, as long as they are maidens, have such firm flesh, that no one can in any way grasp or pinch them in any part of their bodies. And, for the price of a small coin, they will let a man try and pinch them as hard as he likes. When they are married, their flesh remains firm, but not quite so much. On account of this firmness, their breasts do not hang down, but always remain stiff and erect.

Amid such diverting ribaldry there was ample proof that the riches of the East were indeed beyond compare. What had Marco said about Beijing? ‘It is a fact that every day more than 1,000 cartloads of silk enter the city; for much cloth of gold and silk is woven here.’ Almost anywhere in the East, it seemed, a few groats would purchase treasures worth a fortune, if they could be brought back to Europe.

Marco never set foot in Africa, but he had collected a hotchpotch of facts and falsehoods about it during his travels. He begins his description of the continent by giving an accurate account of Socotra island, with its population of Nestorian Christians. However, he is far from clear about Socotra’s position, putting it ‘about 500 miles’ to the south of two completely mythical places, about which absurdities had been written for centuries: the Male and Female islands, whose inhabitants met once a year for sexual congress.

He next tells how whales are hunted in the Indian Ocean, with so much detail that the account reads more like recollected experience than hearsay. One part tells what the hunters do after drugging a whale with a concoction of tunny fish:

Then some of the men climb on to it. They have an iron rod, barbed at one end in such wise that, once it has been driven in, it cannot be pulled out again … One of the hunters holds the rod over the whale’s head, while another, armed with a wooden mallet, strikes the rod, straightway driving it into the whale’s head. For, on account of its being drunk, the whale hardly notices the men on its back, so that they can do what they will. To the upper end of the rod is tied a thick rope, quite 300 paces long, and every fifty paces along the rope, a little cask and a plant are lashed. This plank is fixed to the cask in the manner of a mast …

Marco goes on to remark upon the amount of ambergris found in that part of the Indian Ocean, rightly saying that it comes from the whale’s belly.

He calls Madagascar ‘one of the biggest and best islands in the whole world’, about 4,000 miles in circumference. This almost doubles Madagascar’s true size, but is a geographical revelation, considering the time when he was writing. He could have collected such details only from Indian or Arab captains who had sailed to the island. Marco then goes on to air that persistent myth of the rukh, living in Madagascar. Calling it a gryphon, Marco rejects reports that it is a cross between a lion and an eagle, asserting that ‘actual eye-witnesses’ describe it as like an ‘eagle of colossal size’. He then adds a brief, intriguing aside, saying that the Mongol emperor had despatched emissaries to Madagascar and Zanzibar to ‘learn about the marvels of these strange islands’. The first was imprisoned, so a second was sent to have him freed.

One of Marco’s worst errors was to mix up Madagascar and Mogadishu in the Horn of Africa: ‘The meat eaten here is only camel-flesh. The number of camels slaughtered here every day is so great that no one who has not seen it for himself could credit the report of it.’ This is exactly true to Mogadishu, but certainly not of the great island 2,000 miles to its south. (It is testimony to the influence of Marco Polo that the name Madagascar, taken directly from his writings, has survived despite being based upon a total confusion.)

When he goes on to talk of Zanzibar island, he seems to confuse it with the entire Zanj region, claiming that it is 2,000 miles in circumference. Of the Africans he says: ‘They are a big-built race, and though their height is not proportionate to their girth they are so stout and so large-limbed that they have the appearance of giants. I can assure you that they are also abnormally strong, for one of them can carry a load big enough for four normal men. And no wonder, when I tell you that they eat enough food for five.’ Their hair was ‘as black as pepper’ and they ‘went entirely naked except for covering their private parts’.

His description of their physical features leaves no doubt that Marco had met and studied Africans, for many were held in slavery in India, and others employed as mercenaries. He may also have encountered them in China, where by the thirteenth century it was not uncommon for the rich to have black ‘devil-slaves’. They were, he says, good fighters who ‘acquit themselves very manfully in battle’.

His narrative turns next to Abyssinia, ‘Middle India’, whose king is correctly identified as a Christian, with six vassal monarchs within his empire. The Muslims lived ‘over in the direction of Aden’, and Marco relates how the sultan of Aden (‘one of the richest rulers in the world’) enraged the king of Abyssinia in 1288 by seizing one of his bishops and having him forcibly circumcized ‘in the fashion of the Saracens’. As a result, the Abyssinian Christians declared war and won a momentous victory, ‘for Christians are far more valiant than Saracens’. The story ends with a description of the lands laid waste to avenge the mutilated bishop, then is rounded off with a flourish which has a ring of the scribe Rustichello: ‘And no wonder; for it is not fitting that Saracen dogs should lord it over Christians.’

In the closing decade of the thirteenth century, when his long stay in the East neared its end, Marco sailed once more across the Indian Ocean, with his now elderly father and uncle. They were travelling in great style and comfort, in a fleet of fourteen junks fitted out to the orders of Kubilai Khan, and were on their way to Persia, to the court of King Arghon.

The task given to the Venetians was to present Arghon, whose Christian wife had died, with a new bride selected by Kubilai Khan; she was a seventeen-year-old princess ‘of great beauty and charm’ named Kokachin. However, for some unexplained reason the fleet took almost two years to deliver the princess to Persia, by which time Arghon had died in battle. His brother Gaykhatu, now ruling in his place, told her escorts that Kokachin should instead become the bride of Arghon’s young son Ghazan, who happened to be away at the time fighting a war at the head of 60,000 troops. This instant solution seems to have satisfied everyone, including the princess. The Polos set off again towards the west, to Europe and home, their duty done.

It was a misfortune for them that they had reached Persia just too late to meet Arghon, for no Mongol ruler had ever been keener to unite with European Christianity in a great war to vanquish Islam (which was, at that moment, temptingly weak and disunited). In the course of his seven-year reign Arghon sent four missions to Europe, vainly appealing for a commitment to a simultaneous assault on both flanks. One mission was led by a Genoese named Buscarel, who arrived in his home city a year before the Vivaldi brothers set out to circumnavigate Africa. His stories of the riches of the East may well have encouraged the Vivaldis to embark upon their ill-fated voyage.

The most eminent of Arghon’s envoys was Rabban (‘Master’) Sauma, a Chinese Christian of the Nestorian faith.⁴ His formidable journey illustrates how contacts between Asia and Europe flourished during the brief outward-looking interlude of Mongol power towards the end of the thirteenth century. Sauma had been born in Canbaluc (later called Beijing), and after long years of religious study travelled to Persia. His companion was a prominent fellow-Christian named Yaballaha, who was a Mongol. They had reached Baghdad, religious capital of the Nestorian sect to which they belonged, just as their patriarch was dying; Yaballaha was chosen to replace him.

The new patriarch fervently supported Arghon’s plans for a combined onslaught on Islam, so he put forward his friend Sauma as the best person to go to Europe to advance this cause. Helped on his way by King Arghon’s gifts of gold and thirty horses, Sauma rode the well-used route to the Black Sea port of Trebizond, then to Constantinople and on to Italy and Rome. Wherever he went he noted down everything of interest: the eruption of Etna as his ship sailed up the coast of Sicily, a sea battle off Naples, the beauties of the country round Genoa (‘a garden like Paradise, where the winter is not cold, nor the summer hot’). The northernmost point of his itinerary was Paris, where he met Philippe IV and was impressed to learn that the University of Paris had 30,000 students.

From there he rode to Bordeaux to present gifts to Edward I of England. He had some trouble with the names, recording him as ‘King Ilnagtor in Kersonia’; that is, King of Angleterre in Gascony. But Edward was so gratified by the message borne by his Chinese visitor that he wrote a letter promising to fight in the proposed conflict to extirpate the ‘Mohometan heresy’ for good. Back in Rome in February 1288, Sauma met the newly-elected Pope, Nicholas IV, and ‘wept with joy’ when Nicholas gave him the Eucharist.

In the end, Sauma’s diplomatic efforts were as fruidess as all the rest. Although the Mongols had once believed that the sky-god Tenggeri had chosen them to conquer the entire world, when their enthusiasm for the task waned they turned in upon themselves and retreated to the steppes. The Silk Route was closed to Europeans and the Indian Ocean, with all its bustling commerce, remained even less accessible. The wondrous world the Polos had known once again became little more than a tantalizing legend for the Christians of the West.