IV: Past the Point of No Return: Beyond the Desert
Coming out of the desert, Marco might have been reminded of the words of William of Rubruck, a Franciscan missionary who travelled the road before him - but nowhere near as far - twenty years earlier, when he had remarked
“When we arrived among those barbarians, it seemed to me that we were stepping into another world.” It would certainly feel like that to Marco, seeing the huge Buddhist monasteries, hearing their lavish chants and then experiencing the, as he would have seen it, lack of morality between men and women in the city, the disregarding (in his eyes) of the sanctity of marriage.
“The lay people can take up to thirty wives,” he wrote.
“He holds the first wife for the greatest and best. If he sees that any of his wives is old and is not good and that she does not please him he can well put her away and can take to wife the sister of the wife divorced, and do with her as he likes, and take another, if he wishes. Again, they take cousins for wives, and they are also allowed to take the wife of their father, except their mother, and also the wives of brothers or every other relation.” Pondering this alternative morality, he concludes in disgust,
“They live in this way like animals with no law.”
So much blatant immortality amid such opulent displays of religious devotion must have left the young man confused indeed. Mind you, given what we’ve already seen about how Venetian men treated their women, how quickly Niccolo “got over” the death of his wife and took another, some of this moral rectitude rings really hollow. Something that was not even heard of in Europe though was the practice of cremation. The idea of burning one’s body - no matter how many times Bill Sykes may have used it as an epithet - was wholly alien to “civilised” Europe. In such harsh climes, though, it can be allowed, burial might not be possible, or even advisable. Marco related how such cremations were entirely at the behest and under the control of the
"necromancer or astrologer [who] makes his divination by diabolical arts and says to his kinsmen when he has done his arts and seen under what constellation, planet, and sign he was born, the day and the hour that the body must be burned.” Nobody was allowed cremate anything until the magicians gave the go-ahead, and if that meant you had to provide temporary storage for the remains of your dearly departed for days, weeks, even months, then in China that’s what they called tough titty.
They weren’t totally without a sense of understanding though. The body, while kept as the astrologers awaited the optimum moment when the stars were aligned, was perfumed with spices such as camphor, so that the smell of the decaying corpse would be covered. As we saw with I think one of the Native American tribes in my History of the American West journal (or was it the History of America? One of them, anyway) the relatives of the deceased tended to treat it as if they were still alive, laying out food for it at the table and giving them wine to drink. This extended to the burial, where these people believed that the spirit of the deceased presided over his or her own funeral, and would have to be given food and drink in case it got peckish while it waited for its former housing to be burned.
Oh yes, these guys took the afterlife really seriously, ensuring that the dead relative would retain his or her place in the societal strata which they firmly believed continued on after death. They would cut out figures of people from tree bark (something Marco had never seen done before) and also make representations of coins and animals and then throw them onto the cremation fire, this to represent the friends, slaves, animals and of course wealth he will have in the afterworld.
These customs were of course odd to Marco Polo, but he certainly was happy to participate in another, perhaps even weirder one:
“If a stranger comes to his house to lodge, [a man] is too much delighted at it, and receives him with great joy, and labors to do everything to please,” instructing his “daughters, sisters, and other relations to do all that the stranger wishes,” even to the point of leaving his house for several days while “the stranger stays with his wife in the house and does as he likes and lies with her in a bed just as if she were his wife, and they continue in great enjoyment. All the men of this city and province are thus cuckolded by their wives; but they are not the least ashamed of it. And the women are beautiful and vivacious and always ready to oblige.”
Well now, if you ask me, there’s being friendly and welcoming, and there’s being all but subservient to strangers. I mean, a kind of pimping in one way, but done by people who clearly don’t understand the concept. They ask for nothing in return: no money, no goods, no favours. Hell, they probably couldn’t even smack a biatch upside the head if they had to! But seriously, I have to wonder how much say the women had in these “welcoming customs”? Probably not much if any. I mean, it’s easy to be “always ready to oblige” if the alternative is the flat of your man’s hand or even his fist. Then again, maybe they did enjoy it; maybe they were just that permissive, and maybe this had been the custom for so long it was like second nature to them. Who am I, in the end, to judge, as the judge said?
I wouldn’t say he was the first, but possibly one of the first apologists - certainly at this point the most famous, I would imagine, Marco seemed to rewrite the history of the feared Mongols as it suited him Europe and the west should see it, and not as it was. Most of it is pretty fanciful, and requires at least a whole container of salt to be taken with it to allow any sort of credence to what he says. For instance:
“When he [Genghis Khan] had gained and taken the provinces and cities and villages by force, he let no one be killed or spoiled after the victory; and he put governors in them of such justice that he did them no harm nor took away from them their things.” Moreover, Marco claims,
“These people who were conquered, when they saw that he saved and guarded them against all men and that they had taken no harm from him, and they saw the good rule and kindliness of this lord, they went too gladly with him and were loyal to him.” In this skewed version, their allegiance inspired Genghis to greater feats.
“And when Genghis Khan had gathered so great a multitude of people that they covered the world, and saw that they all obeyed him faithfully and followed him, seeing that fortune so favored him, he proposed to himself to attempt greater things: he said to them that he wished to conquer a great part of the world. And the Tartars answered that it pleased them well, and they would follow him gladly wherever he should go.”
Is this not like saying you know, that Hitler fellow wasn’t so bad. He just went into Poland and France and asked nicely and they said sure, come on in! We know enough about the Mongols now to sneer and roll our eyes at such attempts at revisionism, but even back then those who read his accounts must have been thinking “come on Mr. Polo: pulleth the other one, for it doth contain yon bells!” Or something. What I’m saying is, while this might purport to be the account of a man who had seen (well, heard) it first-hand, I can’t imagine anyone actually believed that a barbarian horde swept peacefully over the Steppe, quietly annexing places they were told it was no problem, work away, sure we don’t want the land, you’d be doing us a favour, mate, and set up a Golden Age Empire that nobody ever tried to topple. Like they say in our age, as if.
But Marco went on. Almost turning his back on his own religion, he summoned the spectre of the non-existent Christian hero Prester John, a legendary (literally; he was just a myth and nothing more) Christian king who was said to rule some undefined kingdom somewhere in the area referred to as “the Orient”, with reports (entirely unreliable and completely unsubstantiated of course) of his being in India, Central Asia and even Ethiopia. Given that the guy did not exist, it was then easy for Marco to weave a story in which the “noble” Khan engaged in furious battle with the legendary Christian, with the Mongol of course winning. Sheer nonsense, but I guess it sold copies of his book when he got back to Italy.
What it does show though was Marco Polo’s changing attitude. He had gone to China initially to discuss, ostensibly, matters both religious and political with the Khan, and had been shocked at the level of paganism and lack of respect for his god which he had been witness to. Now though, as he moved closer to his destination (though still thousands of miles away) he seemed to undergo a change, in which he not only identified with the Mongols more, but saw his own people, his own religion, as wrong, as something to be reviled and recanted, though he never, to my knowledge, converted to any other religion. I suppose it could be said that all of this “bigging up” the Mongols was to curry favour with the Khan when he was finally shown into the august man’s presence, and may indeed have been all a ruse. But the voice of sincerity - if deluded sincerity - rings pretty loud through his accounts, and you definitely get the idea he believed it, or at the very least wanted his readers to believe it.
He did go a little overboard when it came to praising Kublai Khan though:
“All the emperors of the world and all the kings both of Christians and Saracens also, if they were all together, would not have so much power, nor could they do so much as this Kublai Khan could do, who is lord of all the Tartars of this world.” Right Marco, right. Can you get your tongue out from his breeches for a moment, do you think?
He was impressed by the nomadic lifestyle of the Mongols, something he would have had no experience of at home. Everyone lived in houses of some sort, and stayed there. The only nomads, as such, would probably have been the homeless, and there was nothing glorious about them! Sailors sailed, but always came back to their home, which was always in the same place. Which was why the portable nature of the Mongols fascinated him so. dwelled:
“They have their small houses like tents of rods of wood and cover them with felt; and they are round; and they always carry them on four-wheeled wagons wherever they go. For they have the wooden rods tied so well and orderly that they can fit them together like a pack and spread them, take them up, put them down, and carry them wherever they please. And every time they stretch and set up their house the door always opens toward midday.” These structures constituted, in effect, a portable village, and Marco marvels at the Mongols’ life on the fly:
“They have beside this very beautiful carts with only two wheels covered with black felt that is so good and so well-prepared that if it rained all day water would soak nothing that was inside the cart. They have them brought and drawn by horses and by oxen and sometimes by good camels. On these carts they carry their wives and their children and all the things and food that they need. In this way, they go wherever they wish to go, and thus they carry everything that they need.”
The contribution made by women to Mongol society, completely alien to a Venetian, or any Italian, or possibly any European, also struck him favourably.
“The ladies buy and sell and do all the work that is needed for their lords and family and for themselves,” he comments approvingly.
“They are not burdensome for their husbands, and the reason is that they make much gain by their own work.” The more he observed Mongol women at work, the more he admired their diligence and contribution to family life. They are, he says,
“very provident in managing the family and are very careful in preparing food, and do all the other duties of the house with great diligence, so the husbands leave the care of the house to their wives, for they trouble themselves with nothing at all but hunting and feats of battle and hawking and falcons, like gentlemen.”
It would be hard, nay impossible to see this system working in Europe, where not only were women seen as property and second class citizens, but where it was widely believed they had neither the brain nor the stamina for business; where women were all considered weak and stupid, and not one of them to be relied upon, and further, where male ego was such that no man would allow such a thing as his wife be in any way involved in business, which was certainly seen exclusively as the domain of the male. Marco would further scandalise the Europeans - especially, one assumes, the on the surface devout Catholics of his homeland, with his lengthy and fulsome description of the differences between Mongol marriage and that of western Christianity.
“Each [man] can take as many wives as he likes, up to a hundred if he has the power to maintain them; and the men give dowries to the wives and to the mother of their wife to obtain them, nor does the wife give anything to the man for dowry. But you may know too that they always hold the first of their wives for more genuine and for better than the others, and likewise the children who are born of her. And they have more sons than all the other people in the world because they have so many wives, and it is a marvel how many children each man has.” The polygamy extended to relatives. As Marco explains,
“They take their cousins for wife and, what is more, if the father dies, his eldest son takes to wife the wife of the father, if she is not his mother, and all the women who are left by the father except his mother and sisters. He takes also the wife of his own brother if he dies. And when they take a wife they make very great weddings and a great gathering of people.”
Strange indeed, though without question there were European men reading these accounts and thinking, in their secret hearts, how wonderful that would be; not to be confined to live with one women “till death do ye part”, but to be able to have as many wives as you liked, moving between them like some sort of stud among mares, and all approved by the state, such as it was. Doubtless women who read this felt the complete opposite. But while the idea of a polygamous - very polygamous, about as poly as gamous gets really - marriage was a shocking but secretly intriguing one, another custom practiced by the Mongols would be greeted by the genteel Christians of Europe with absolute bewilderment, outrage and horror.
“When there are two men, the one who has a dead male child inquires for another man who may have had a female child suited to him, and she also may be dead before she is married; these two parents make a marriage of the two dead together. They give the dead girl to the dead boy for wife, and they have documents made about it in corroboration of the dowry and marriage.”
This was known as the marriage of dead children, and was very much tied in with the Mongols’ absolute and utter faith in an afterlife. To them, a child who died had been deprived of his or her chance of marriage in this life, so they ensured he or she got it in the next one. Talk about arranged marriages! He detailed what would have been to his readers amazing sights, some of which may have been exaggerated slightly, like the “oxen and cows, big as elephants” - yeah, right - though the nomads who had domesticated deer and rode upon them instead of horses may have been plausible enough, as was his discovery of the origin of Europe’s favourite perfume, musk, which, he reported, came from an egg-shaped abdominal gland in the musk deer. Very deer perfume eh? Sorry. His genteel readership might not have been so fascinated to hear that their scent of choice was in fact the animal’s blood.
He was certainly put off by the custom of the people of the kingdom of Ergiuul to take a wife purely for her beauty, with no regard to her social status. Back home, the ugliest woman who came from a powerful or rich family would still be guaranteed of finding a husband - probably whether she wanted one or not - as women’s say in such matters were so small as to not matter at all, and of course this was not confined to Italy alone. But here, in the wilds of Asia, where people worshipped strange gods and lived differently to what Marco saw as God’s law, men not only took as many wives as they could carry, but went for the lookers rather than the movers and shakers. In this culture, a woman of power who looked like the back end of a yak would be passed over, even by men of a far inferior social standing. With the Mongols, it was all about the surface beauty, and not how many country houses your daddy owned, or who he knew in government circles.
Eventually, after a long journey, and having seen sights both wondrous and shocking, and without question a far more mature man than he had been when they had set out from Venice, Marco Polo found himself standing in the grand place wherein his uncle Rafello and his father Niccolo had previously walked, but which for him was a new and enthralling experience.
They had reached the court of Kublai Khan.