Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [141]
Ahmad’s personal effects included bizarre items that gave clues to his inner life and suggested he was not the conventional Muslim that Kublai Khan believed him to be. His closet held a pair of tanned human skins, and the eunuch who had cared for him told an alarming tale: Ahmad would from time to time place them on an altar and mutter mysterious invocations. Equally troubling, he owned a silk scroll depicting a provocative image of mounted soldiers surrounding a large tent and attacking the unseen occupant, perhaps the khan himself. Marco took these items as proof that “Ahmad so bewitched the khan with his spells that the khan gave the greatest belief and attention to all his words, and did all that he [Ahmad] wished him to do.”
Revelations such as these inspired Kublai Khan to purge Muslims from his court, as Marco relates: “When he recalled the cursed sect of Saracens [Muslims], by which every sin has been made lawful to them and that they can kill whoever is not of their law, and that the cursed Ahmad with his sons had not for this reason reckoned that they committed any sin, he despised it much and held it in abomination.” From that time forward, says Marco, Kublai Khan ordered that Muslims must conduct themselves “according to the law of the Tartars, and that they must not cut the throats of animals, as they did, to eat the flesh, but must cut them in the belly.”
Ahmad’s legacy bedeviled Kublai Khan and the Yüan court. Courtiers wondered aloud how such a power-mad schemer could have flourished in their midst for so many years, and questioned why his critics had remained silent until his death suddenly loosened their tongues. There was an outstanding reason for Ahmad’s steady ascent: he brought critical financial and bureaucratic skills to government. He imposed a uniform currency on a fragmented society, formalized taxation to pay for Kublai Khan’s expensive military campaigns, and partly succeeded in his goal of indoctrinating all of China with the revolutionary idea that a central Mongol authority administered the entire country.
One unresolved question about this enigmatic tyrant remains. Did Ahmad plan to carry out a palace coup, or did he expect to prosper indefinitely while remaining subordinate to Kublai Khan? If he had led such a coup, the advent of Muslim rule over China would have dramatically changed the course of Asian history. Not even Marco Polo ventured a guess about that prospect. For Marco, Ahmad’s fall marked a coming of age. He had arrived at the Mongol court as a young man enthralled with the larger-than-life figure of Kublai Khan, whom he regarded with undisguised hero worship. His account makes it seem that he could not believe his good fortune in establishing rapport with the powerful ruler. But the Ahmad affair demonstrated to Marco, and to the Mongol world, that Kublai Khan, for all his military prowess and enlightened domestic policies, was capable of making errors of judgment serious enough to threaten the empire itself.
FOR MORE THAN thirty years, the complementary skills of the warrior khan and the bureaucrat had permitted the Mongol Empire to flourish. The sumptuousness of the Shang-tu summer palace (Xanadu) reflected the tastes of Kublai Khan and the organizational skills of Ahmad. For all its excesses, their collaboration might have lasted even longer, had Ahmad known how to win the affection or respect of the Chinese people whom he ruled, and not just their fear.
Kublai Khan turned to a man whom he believed would be a safe choice to succeed Ahmad. His name was Sanga, and he was a Uighur, a member of a Turkic tribe. But he soon ran into trouble when a jealous rival told Kublai about Sanga’s supposed treachery. Kublai Khan disciplined the errant minister with a Mongol-style beating.
Sanga held his ground, and Kublai turned his wrath on the informant, who insisted that he was simply trying to warn the khan of danger. The khan held an inquiry