Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [13]
While the pope was busy denouncing the Mongol threat, the object of his fury had been transformed. Genghis Khan’s quest for an endlessly expanding Mongol Empire had given way to a relatively stable regime under his enlightened grandson Kublai Khan. “Kublai was not a barbarian,” Venetian historian Alvise Zorzi observes. Rather, he was “a monarch pursuing high standards of governance, dedicated to learning and implementing the most efficient means to that end,” which meant that “he was constantly seeking better ways to govern and apply spiritual pressure points that would serve his aim of authority better than force.”
Kublai’s most potent weapon was not the sword or spear, fire or poison, but commerce with the world beyond the borders of his empire. Indeed, the Mongols needed European, Persian, and Arab goods and technology to survive in the new world order they had created. To this end, they reopened a series of trade routes that much later—in the nineteenth century—came to be known as the Silk Road. The routes carried all manner of goods—gems, fabrics, spices, precious metals, weapons—as well as ideas and religions. Buddhist monks and Christian missionaries made use of it, as did Venetian, Genoese, Arab, and Jewish merchants.
To make this exchange of ideas and commerce possible, Kublai Khan imposed on his unruly realm a Pax Mongolica, achieved at the cost of harsh oppression. To Zorzi, the Pax Mongolica was a “peace of smoking ruins.” Yet, as a direct consequence of Mongol tyranny, the Silk Road became safe for commerce, so safe that one traveler claimed “a young woman would have been able to travel with a golden tray on her head with no fear.” And it was safe enough for merchants like the Polos to travel its great length into the heart of Asia and the Mongol Empire.
The Mongols and Venetians had both made the world “flat,” the Venetians traveling over water with their ships, and the Mongols over land by reviving the Silk Road. And in a flat, interactive world, goods and ideas mingled in surprising ways, and empires flourished.
NICCOLÒ AND MAFFEO POLO traveled east along a northern branch of the Silk Road, venturing ever deeper into the Mongol Empire. In his book, Marco offers only scant details of the trek his father and uncle took, but it is likely that they traveled on horseback and by cart.
While traversing what is now Iraq, Marco relates, his father and uncle entered the realm of Barka Khan—another of Genghis’s many grandsons—“who had the reputation of being one of the most liberal and civilized princes among the tribes of the Mongol Empire.” Sometimes known as the Western Khan, Barka received them with “great honor,” which was reciprocated. “The two brothers gave him freely, seeing that they pleased him, all the jewels which they had brought with them from Constantinople,” Marco says. Not wanting to be out-done by his visitors’ generosity, Barka “directed double the value of the jewels to be paid to them,” along with “generous presents.” The merchants of Venice had found a safe haven in the Mongol Empire.
In Barka’s realm, the brothers probably pursued their primary interest: drawing on their store of jewels and coins and fabrics to enrich themselves in dealings with other merchants. They might be compared to a traveling emporium, ready to deal in anything that would bring a profit. Marco frequently notes different types of fabrics being traded—muslin, damask, and of course silk—and it is reasonable to assume that his father and uncle did a brisk business in those items with other traders, the Muslims, Jews, and other Europeans, especially those from Genoa, who were better represented in Asia than Venetians. They may have traded in slaves on a very limited scale and returned to Venice with an Arab indentured servant.
After a year, the brothers had had enough of Mongol hospitality and wished to return home, but by then Barka had become enmeshed in a civil war with another grandson of Genghis Khan, Hülegü, who ruled