Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [12]
Even a peaceful voyage was remarkably distasteful, uncomfortable, and dangerous. The dank, crowded ships stank of rotting food and human waste. Vermin ran riot, and passengers like the Polos had to coexist with cockroaches, lice, and rats. After a month or more of enduring all these conditions, with sleeplessness and seasickness thrown in to complete their misery, the two Polo brothers arrived safely in Constantinople. In no hurry to risk another grueling voyage, they remained for six years, managing an outpost of their little empire, and trading with merchants from across the globe, especially those from the East.
During their stay, Constantinople sank ever deeper into debt. Baldwin II, the last in a line of Latin emperors, was forced to sell off priceless relics to Venice to liquidate debts and retain his slender grasp on power. Matters became so dire that he pledged a relic supposed to be Jesus’s crown of thorns to Venetian bankers willing to accept it as collateral for their loans. He even pawned his son to the Venetians. Eventually Louis IX of France came to Baldwin’s aid, while a rival, Michael VIII Paleologus, descended from the city’s former Greek emperor, entered into a pact with Genoa to rip Constantinople from the arms of Venice. The unsettled political climate led to rioting in the streets among the Venetians, Genoese, Greeks, and other groups who had coexisted uneasily there after the city’s fall.
NICCOLÒ AND MAFFEO POLO decided to flee the unstable city for Soldaia (now known as Sudak), where the Polo family also maintained an outpost. This was a rugged fortress of a town on the Crimean Peninsula with a spectacular view of the Black Sea. (The name Black Sea, by the way, was something new in the Polos’ era. Before then, this immense inland waterway was known to all who plied its waters simply as “the Sea.”) What little is known of the Polo brothers’ time in Soldaia suggests that they did not prosper.
Early accounts show that the brothers wanted nothing more than to return home to Venice, but travel was too unsafe to permit the journey. On land, murderous thieves patrolled the paths; on water, pirates laid waste to any ship they spied. Given these forbidding conditions, the brothers Polo would not soon be returning to Venice.
TRAVEL AND TRADING conditions to the east were better, thanks to the most unlikely of causes: the Mongols, who had violently conquered most of Asia and a significant part of Europe, all the way to the eastern shore of the Danube. (Mongols were sometimes called “Tartars,” but the Tartars were, in reality, just one of the tribes belonging to the Mongol Empire. Russians originally used the name to describe Mongols, as well as other invaders from the east, and Europeans followed suit.)
By any name, the Mongols were considered Satan’s spawn, among the most lawless, violent, and sinful people on the face of the earth. In 1260, Pope Alexander IV issued a papal bull, Clamat in auribus (the Latin title taken from the opening words), to warn Christendom of the Mongol threat: “There rings in the ears of all, and rouses to a vigilant alertness those who are not befuddled by mental torpor, a terrible trumpet of dire forewarning, which, corroborated by the evidence of events, proclaims with unmistakable sound the wars of universal destruction wherewith the scourge of Heaven’s wrath in the hands of the inhuman Tartars, erupting as it were from the secret confines of Hell, oppresses and crushes the earth.