Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [112]
Marco boasts about the role that he and his family had supposedly played in the Mongol victory: “And that happened by the kindness of Master Niccolò and Master Maffeo and Master Marco Polo, son of Master Niccolò Polo, as you have heard. This solution…increased the fame and credit of these two Venetian brothers in the sight of the Great Khan and all the court.”
The Mongol victory at Siang-yang-fu remains one of the outstanding tales in Marco’s account, but with its departure from the facts as recorded in Chinese annals, its unusually bellicose tone, and its chronological impossibility, it also remains the episode most open to question. Nevertheless, the military contest did occur, and the annals indicate that the Mongols did, in fact, employ “foreign engineers” to lay siege to the city. Marco, however, could not have been among them. To give Marco his due, it is possible that his father and uncle participated in some phase of the siege on their previous trip. Yet at least three early manuscripts of the Travels fail to mention the siege at all. It seems more likely that this stirring episode was added by Rustichello, seeking to aggrandize the role played by the young tax collector and his elders in the making of the Mongol Empire. Even if the romance writer played false with history, he accomplished his literary aims.
AS MARCO veered back toward the east, heading for Hangzhou, he traveled the rivers of China. Although he was familiar with the sight of the canals of Venice teeming with watercraft, nothing had prepared him for the sight of the immense Qiantang River, as it is known today, “pursuing its course…more than a hundred and twenty days’ journey before it enters the sea, into which river enter infinite other rivers, all navigable, which run in different directions and swell and increase their turns to such a size.” The sheer size of the river—actually an estuary—inspired Marco to state, with accuracy, that it flowed through “so many regions, and there are so many cities upon it,” that watercraft traveling along contained cargo “of greater value” than on “all the rivers of Christendom,” and, on further thought, of greater value than on “all their seas.”
He cites a source for his claim: inspectors who “keep account for their lord” told him that more than five thousand watercraft traveled on the river each year, but he did not simply take their word for it. He asserts: “I tell you that I saw there at one time when I was in the city of Singiu fifteen thousand boats at once that all sail by this river, which is so broad that it does not seem to be a river but a sea.” The number referred to vessels in just one city, as difficult as Europeans would find that to believe.
Marco was particularly attentive to waterborne commerce because, it appeared, “the chief merchandise that is carried upon this river is salt, which the merchants load in this city and carry through whatever regions are upon this river, and also inland.” As a tax assessor, he was doing his job, following the salt, but he also noted that boats did a brisk trade in wood, charcoal, hemp, “and many other different wares with which the regions near the seashore are supplied.” The abundance was enough to overwhelm even the most jaded merchant of Venice.
These boats enthralled him—not just their number, but their variety, and their construction. Patrolling the docks, he took advantage of his position to study their construction and fittings at close range, as if plotting his eventual escape from the Mongol Empire aboard one of them. “They are covered with only one deck and have only one mast with one sail, but they are of great tonnage,” he reports. And he describes their rigging with great detail and expertise: