Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [116]
Confirming Marco Polo’s impressions, Vassaf wrote:
For the comfort of this immense population, boats and barks of all kinds circulate continually on the waters in such a great number that imagination cannot conceive an idea of it, and the more so because it would be impossible to calculate their numbers.
A very different visitor, Odoric of Pordenone, a Franciscan friar, arrived forty years after Marco Polo’s time, and, like Marco, cast off all restraint in describing the wonders he experienced there.
It is the greatest city in the whole world. It is a hundred miles around, and in all this great space there is no empty area which is not fully inhabited by people; and there are many houses which have ten families or more; this city has many suburbs and more people than any other city. It has ten principal gates, and adjacent to each of its gates are eight large cities, much larger than the city of Venice; and from these gates to these cities, run continuous roads, so that a man can well go six or eight days and it will seem that he has only gone a little way, because he will always have gone among towns and houses.
Like Marco, Odoric saw Quinsai as the Asian Venice, but bigger and better.
This city is located on a low plain, between lakes, seas and swamps, like the city of Venice. There are more than seven thousand bridges, and at each bridge there are people guarding it on behalf of the Khan.
Odoric estimated that Quinsai was home to 850,000 households, which made for a population of over a million and a half, just as Marco claimed. “Whoever would write of this city would fill a great book,” the friar concluded, unaware that Marco Polo’s chronicle had already fulfilled this prophecy. “But in brief it is the greatest that there is in the world and the most noble.”
The most celebrated traveler in the Muslim world, Ibn Battutah, is said to have arrived in Quinsai in 1340, more than fifty years after Marco. By that time, the City of Heaven had become even larger, with a more visible European population, including prominent Jewish and Muslim communities. “We entered the said city, which is divided into six towns; each has its separate wall, and a great wall circles all of them. In the first town live the guards of the city with their commander,” he wrote.
The next day we entered the second town through a door called the Door of the Jews; this town is inhabited by the Israelites, the Christians, and the Turks, adorers of the sun; they are very numerous. The Emir of this town is Chinese, and we spent the second night in his house. The third day, we made our entry into the third town, and this is occupied by the Moslems. It is beautiful; the markets here are disposed as in the Islamic countries; it contains mosques and muezzins; we heard the latter call the faithful to midday prayer when we entered the town.
The ethnic variety of Quinsai, unremarked by earlier visitors, reflected the ascendancy of the Mongols, who invited “the Israelites, the Christians, and the Turks” to settle and trade in the great city.
THE CITY OF HEAVEN’S celebrated joie de vivre centered on the numerous public bathhouses and their courtesans. The locals, both men and women, availed themselves of the cold-water baths, “recommended for health,” as Marco slyly notes, while foreigners made use of the hot baths, where alluring serving maids offered their clients more than simple hygiene. These women, reeking of “sumptuous perfumes,” he says, “are very clever and practiced in knowing how to flatter and coax with ready words and suited to each kind of person, so that the foreigners who have once indulged themselves with them can never forget them…. It comes to pass that when they return home in front of they say they have been to Quinsai, that is, the City of Heaven, and count the hours until they be able to return there.”
Combining a market and a brothel, Quinsai also had the air of a perpetual