Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [129]
The fall came about quickly. In 1279, when Marco was still in Quinsai, Kublai Khan was at the zenith of his power, his career capped by his conquest of the realm of the Song dynasty, China’s former stronghold. Only two years later, the arc of his reign suddenly altered. His wife Chabi died. Along with Kublai’s mother, Chabi had served as an architect of his career, especially in the early years when he struggled for power. Now that she was gone, Kublai was no longer restrained by her shrewd judgment, and he embarked on one destructive action after another, as if determined to tear his empire apart.
In his grief, Kublai Khan became an alcoholic (not an uncommon affliction among the Mongols), gained an unhealthy amount of weight, and suffered from gout and other, less specific ailments. Entering his dotage, he slowly lost his grip over the empire. In attempting to demonstrate that he remained the Great Khan, he decided to pursue his most reckless scheme, the conquest of Japan. He had become so addicted to empire building that he believed that if the Mongol Empire could not grow, it would die. Marco was the witness and, for centuries, the sole Western source of information about this mysterious conflict with an obscure but mighty island nation.
Kublai failed to consider the immense difficulties posed by attempting to conquer this distant country, so different from the peaceful and often disorganized tribes the Mongols had terrorized and subdued. The Japanese, Marco recognized, were as fierce and as cruel as the Mongols, yet they were a more sophisticated society. Most important of all, they were protected by the sea, with which the Mongols had little expertise, luck, or confidence. Kublai Khan would slowly and painfully learn that the Mongols might be masters of the Steppe, but on the water, they were as vulnerable as their feeblest prey.
“ÇIPINGU is an island to the sunrising that is on the high seas,” Marco begins. “It is an exceedingly great island. The people of it are white, fair-fashioned, and beautiful, and of good manners. They are idolaters”—that is, Buddhists. “They are ruled by their own king and pay tribute to no other, and they have no lordship of any other men but themselves. Moreover, I tell you that they have gold in very great abundance, because gold is found there beyond measure”—so much gold, according to Marco, that “they do not know what to do with it.” Furthermore, “ships are rarely brought there from other regions, for it abounds in all things.”
Marco discusses Japan, the island nation he had never visited, in respectful tones. “According to what the men who know the country say,” he explains, the island’s ruler “has a very great palace that is all covered with sheets of fine gold. Just as we cover houses and churches with lead, so this palace is covered with fine gold,” worth so much that “no one in the world…could redeem it.” He reports that its many rooms are covered with tiles, all of them “two fingers” thick, and made from pure gold. “Large white pearls” reportedly could be found in abundance in Çipingu, and even red ones that had great value and beauty. And they were ubiquitous; it was said that “the mouth of everyone who is buried” contained a large shimmering pearl. No wonder Marco found it difficult to convince listeners that he was reporting the truth.
He was not far off. Japan was immensely wealthy, with abundant pearls and silver (but not gold). If not literally true, Marco’s conviction that Japan possessed more gold than any other place in the world can be understood as an allegory of the island’s cultural, intellectual, and spiritual wealth—the riches of a highly