Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [142]
“What is all this?” Kublai Khan asked his minister. “You have so many pearls, but refuse to give me even a few. Where did you get these riches?”
Sanga awkwardly explained that he had collected them from Muslims governing provinces throughout China. His answer infuriated the khan.
“Why did they bring me nothing? You bring me trifles and keep the most precious items for yourself.”
“They were given to me,” Sanga insisted, and offered to return them, if his lord and master wished.
Unimpressed, Kublai Khan condemned Sanga to be put to death by having his mouth filled with excrement. The Khan seized the hoard of gems and executed several of Sanga’s Muslim loyalists. Kublai had learned the lesson of the Ahmad uprising only too well. But he had eliminated one threat only to face others, as adversaries crowded him on all sides.
KUBLAI KHAN’S next challenge came from his detested “uncle,” Nayan, who was determined to become the Great Khan, at Kublai’s expense. While still a young man, Marco Polo says, Nayan had become “ruler of many lands and provinces, so that he could easily raise a force of 400,000 horsemen.” Having an army of this size at his disposal inspired dreams of glory: “He resolved that he would be a subject no longer.”
Although Nayan was a Nestorian Christian, as were many of his followers and soldiers, Marco’s sympathies clearly lay with Kublai Khan in this contest. But the conflict between the two warlords was in no sense a religious crusade. Nayan wanted power, and to acquire it he formed an alliance with another insubordinate member of the Mongol royal family, Kublai’s subversive nephew Kaidu, whom Marco describes as the khan’s “bitter enemy” and a perpetual menace to stability in Asia. “I assure you,” he says, “that Kaidu is never at peace with the Great Khan, but maintains constant warfare against him.” Marco despaired at the havoc this troublemaker had wrought over the years. “Kaidu has already fought many battles with the Great Khan’s men,” he says. Even though Kaidu had lost all the battles, he clamored for his share of Kublai Khan’s hard-won victories. To hear Marco tell it, Kublai would have obliged if only Kaidu had promised to appear at Cambulac whenever summoned. But Kaidu was “afraid for his life if he went,” and Kublai Khan maintained 100,000 “horsemen in the field” to contain his adversary.
In 1287, Nayan and Kaidu concocted a plot to attack Kublai simultaneously from opposite directions and force him into submission. “When the Great Khan got word of this plot,” Marco relates, “he was not unduly perturbed; but like a wise man of approved valor he began to marshal his own forces, declaring that he would never wear his crown or hold his land if he did not bring these two false traitors to an evil end.”
Within only twenty-two days, Kublai assembled an army consisting of 260,000 cavalry and 100,000 infantry, but the forces arrayed against him were larger still. “The reason why he confined himself to this number was that these were drawn from the troops in his own immediate neighborhood,” Marco reports. Kublai commanded some twelve additional armies, but they were “so far away on campaigns of conquest in many parts that he could not have got them together at the right time and place.” If he had summoned all his guards on duty in distant parts of his empire, “their numbers would have been past all reckoning or belief.” But such measures would have been too slow and too public; Kublai preferred speed, “the companion of victory,” and secrecy to “forestall Nayan’s preparations and catch him alone.”
CHINESE ANNALS confirm Marco’s account of this matter, and they suggest that Kublai was willing to sacrifice Bayan by sending him on a hazardous intelligence-gathering