Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [111]
Marco claims that the Mongol army accepted the offer and relayed it to Kublai Khan, who endorsed the plan. And he proceeds to show his family out of character, as combat-hardened warriors familiar with the latest Mongol military technology. He depicts the Polo company going to see Kublai Khan—highly unlikely, since the Great Khan was thousands of miles distant—and offering to “find a device and engine that the city would be taken and that it would surrender.” He explains parenthetically that the device was a mangonel, essentially a large and powerful catapult “that would throw into the town stones so great and heavy and from so far that they would confound all they would reach, killing the people and ruining the houses.” In the medieval fashion, Marco refers to the mangonel as an engine, meaning artillery that did not rely on gunpowder. Indeed, the mangonel derived its force from a torsion bundle—a length of rope wrapped around a rotating beam, or epizygis.
At first, Marco says, the Polos’ offer to employ a European-style mangonel baffled the Mongol leaders. “They all wondered greatly because…in all those parts they do not know what mangonels are, nor engines, nor trebuchets [a smaller device relying on a counter-weight rather than a torsion bundle], for they did not use them, nor were accustomed to use them in their armies.” Nevertheless, the Mongols were “very glad and astonished” by the audacious plan.
The technology of which Marco speaks was familiar in Europe; by AD 50, the forces of the Roman Empire deployed similar catapults, known as onagers, to lob rocks over fortress walls; Alexander the Great had also used them in his military campaigns. In medieval Europe, the mangonel served as a mainstay of armies laying siege to fortresses and castles because it could hurl huge stones or fireballs more than a thousand feet, causing considerable damage to otherwise impervious fortress walls. Marco portrays Kublai Khan as eager to use the mangonel in the siege, if only because it was “a new and strange thing.”
The Polo company made preparations with the help of two European assistants (mentioned nowhere else), one identified as a German, the other as a Nestorian, who were “good masters of this work.” Marco claims he ordered them to construct two or three engines capable of throwing large stones, and in only a “few days,” they fashioned three “very great and very fine mangonels according to the orders of the brothers, each of which threw the stones that weigh more than three hundred pounds each, and one saw it fly very far; of which stones there were more than sixty.”
There followed a demonstration of the siege engines for the benefit of Kublai Khan himself, “and others,” who came away mightily impressed. Immediately thereafter, the Great Khan ordered the mangonels “put on boats and carried to his armies, which were at the siege of the city of Siang-yang-fu.” Soon the mangonels were backed up by trebuchets, portable but equally destructive siege engines. Marco alleges, “they seemed to the Tartars the greatest wonder of the world.”
With gusto, he describes the European machinery’s devastating effect on the Chinese fortress. “When the trebuchets were set up before the city of Siang-yang-fu and drawn, each one threw a stone of three hundred pounds into the town. The stone that the mangonel first shot struck into the houses and broke and ruined everything, and made great noise and great tumult.”
Under attack from the strange engines, the inhabitants of Siang-yang-fu panicked. “Every day they threw a very great number of stones, by which many were killed. And when the men of the city saw this misfortune, which they had never seen nor heard [before], they were so dismayed by it and so alarmed that they did not know what they ought to say or do,” Marco gloats, “and they believed that this was done to them by enchantment, for