Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [109]
With military control of the entire province, Bayan readied himself for the ultimate conquest, Hangzhou, the richest prize in all of China, or, for that matter, anywhere in the world, and the home of a million and a half people. No other city rivaled Hangzhou for opulence, beauty, or sophistication, or for progressive and generous government.
WITH HIS celebrated concern for the poor and dispossessed and his abundant charity, King Facfur embodied the wealthy city’s altruistic spirit. Exhibiting a newfound appreciation for Facfur, Marco insisted that the good king’s deeds merited a memorial, and that the king’s subjects loved him more than they had loved any previous king of the city, “because of the great mercy and justice of which he was master.”
Facfur championed the cause of children abandoned by their mothers, and he devised an efficient system of welfare and adoption on their behalf. “In that province,” says Marco, “they cast out the child as soon as he is born. The poor women who cannot feed them nor bring them up for poverty do this. The king had them all taken, and caused to be written for each one in what constellation and in what planet he was born. Then he had them brought up in many directions and in many places, for he had nurses in great abundance. When a rich man had no child, he went to the king and had himself given as many as he wished and those who pleased him most.” If an adopted child’s biological parents underwent a change of heart, and wished to have it back, they could, so long as they documented that the child was theirs. Otherwise, the infant remained under the king’s protection until marriage. When the adoptees reached marriageable age, the king performed mass marriages, and generously “gave them [the newlyweds] so much that they could live in comfort.”
Facfur was similarly generous with housing, ensuring that every dwelling, whether it sheltered rich or poor, “was both beautiful and great.” In this beneficent environment, petty crime was unknown, or so Marco claims: “The city was so safe that the doors of the houses and shops and stores full of all the very dear merchandise often stayed open at night as by day and nothing at all was found missing there.” And here, in contrast to so much of the Mongol Empire visited by Marco, “one could go freely through the whole kingdom safe and unmolested by night also by day.”
At the moment, the king and queen of Hangzhou were in residence amid their lavish court, “and there he [Bayan Hundred Eyes] drew up his army in order before it.” Overwhelmed by the might of the Mongol army, Facfur summoned his astrologers to inquire how he could have suffered this overwhelming defeat, and they explained that his adversary bore the name Bayan Hundred Eyes. The prediction had come true.
King Facfur “feared greatly, and he left that city with many people and entered into…a thousand ships loaded with all his goods and wealth and fled into the Ocean Sea, among the impregnable islands of India, leaving the city of Quinsai [Hangzhou] to the care of the queen, with orders to defend herself as well as she could, for, being a woman, she would have no fear of death if she fell into the hands of the enemy.” At that point, to the surprise of everyone, the queen, “who was left in the city with a great people,” displayed her mettle in the face of the Mongol onslaught. She “bestirred herself with her military leaders to defend it as well as she could like the valiant lady she was.”
The queen held her ground until she received a simple but unnerving piece of intelligence from her astrologers: a commander named Hundred Eyes was destined to prevail. When she learned that the general laying siege to the city was known by this name,