Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [128]
“You are Christians and we are likewise Christians,” Maffeo and Marco declared. “We advise you to send to the Great Khan and explain to him your state, that he may come to know you and you may be able freely to keep your religion and rule.” The mysterious Christians, although accustomed to living among hostile “idolaters,” followed this bold suggestion and dispatched a delegation of two men to Kublai Khan.
Marco and Maffeo told the men to present themselves to a “certain man who was head of the Christians at the court of the Great Khan.” But the request, rather than smoothing the petitioners’ way to recognition as Christians, inspired masses of Buddhists to claim them as their own. There followed a “great argument in the presence of the lord. Finally, the lord being angry, making all go away, ordered the messengers to come to him, asking them whether they wished to be Christians or idolaters.” The petitioners timidly replied that if the Great Khan would not take offense, they wished to be considered Christians, like their ancestors. Kublai Khan approved, insisting that they all “must be addressed as Christians.”
With that assurance, they made their full strength known. The sect, far from being a small band of spiritual nonconformists, included “more than seven hundred thousand families,” says Marco, all of them now safely assigned to the Christian camp, their identity officially confirmed, and their right to worship guaranteed by Kublai Khan and the might of the Mongol Empire.
Having helped to usher these lost Christians into the Mongol fold, Marco was again left to his own devices, doomed to wander the Silk Road to the end of his days in the service of Kublai Khan—or so it seemed. He could not have imagined what lay in store for him, as events occurring thousands of miles away began to shape his destiny.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Divine Wind
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
OF ALL THE descriptions of places Marco Polo included in his Travels, none prompted more disbelief among Europeans than his fantastic account of “an island that is called Çipingu.”
Reverberating with improbable battles, storms, and sudden reversals of fortune, his portrayal of this remote kingdom appeared to be an elaborate flight of fancy. For all his far-fetched tales about China, the place at least existed in the European consciousness, even if it was largely a blank. But Çipingu, surely, was wholly fictitious; it did not even appear on Western maps. Biblical lands such as Gog and Magog had more credibility in Europe than the strange islands that made up Çipingu—later known as Japan.
The skeptics were not entirely to blame. Although Marco’s words provided his incredulous readers with their first account of the island nation, his rendering was beset by imprecision, for he never visited it. He wrote about the world of the Japanese with such vigor and confidence that it seemed as if he were recounting his firsthand impressions, yet nowhere in his account of Japan did he claim, “I, Marco, saw these things,” as was his custom with China and the Mongols. Instead, he offered intelligence and hearsay of a high order, the authorized Mongol view of its enigmatic, tantalizing, and intimidating rival to the east.
JAPAN SEIZED Marco’s imagination because Kublai Khan, always keen for fresh territories to bring into his realm, proposed to conquer the island nation across the sea. It seemed the unlikeliest of goals. The Mongols, for all their ferocity, were not sailors; they were warriors on