Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [144]
Nayan’s troops, nearly equal to the khan’s in number, straggled into their battle formations, to the accompaniment of drums, songs, and martial music produced by a two-stringed instrument. The two sides rode into battle, Kublai Khan’s banners with his sun-and-moon insignia flying, and Nayan’s standard displaying the “Cross of Christ.”
After lengthy delays, “the two armies fell upon each other with bow and sword and club, and a few with lances.” They clashed in a “bloody and bitter battle,” complete with “arrows flying like pelting rain.” Beneath them, “horsemen and horses tumbled dead upon the ground.”
Marco pays tribute to Nayan’s troops, claiming that the men stood ready to die for their leader, “but in the end victory fell to the Great Khan.” Seeing that he had lost the battle and his fiefdom along with it, Nayan tried to flee, but he and his generals were all captured, and they eventually surrendered. Kublai condemned Nayan to death according to Mongol custom. “He was wrapped up tightly in a carpet and then dragged about so violently, this way and that, that he died,” Marco reports. “Their object in choosing this mode of death was so that the blood of the imperial lineage might not be spilt upon the earth, and the sun and the air might not witness it, nor the limbs of Nayan be touched by any animal.”
KUBLAI KHAN received the show of loyalty that was his due. Barons from four provinces arrived to swear obeisance. But instead of submission and unity, Marco relates, ugliness quickly ensued. “Saracens, idolaters, Jews, and many people who do not believe in God made fun of the Christian faith and of the sign of the Holy Cross that Nayan had carried on his banner.”
When word of this blasphemy reached Kublai Khan, “he called to him the chief Saracens and Jews and Christians and spoke evil to those who made fun of it before him and before the Christians, and rebuked them severely, saying to them, ‘If the Cross of Christ has not helped Nayan, it has done reasonably and justly, because he was disloyal and a rebel against his lord.’” For this reason, Kublai Khan said, he deserved to die.
With that, Kublai Khan “called many Christians who were there and began to comfort them, saying that they had no reason or occasion for shame…, for Nayan who came against his lord was both disloyal and treacherous, and so there is great right in that which happened to him.” Although the Christian followers of Nayan remained suspicious of Kublai Khan, they were relieved, and perhaps surprised as well, that he did not “tempt them from their faith, but they stayed quiet and in peace.”
HAVING SECURED his power in China, Kublai Khan stumbled anew when he undertook a series of military skirmishes in Southeast Asia, provoking war where there had been stability and amity. He then repeated the Japanese disaster by attempting to conquer another island stronghold, Java.
Marco relates the Mongol invasion of Java with confidence, once again giving his European readers their first account of political struggle in a land they never knew existed. His account represents a remarkable feat of intelligence gathering on his part; even though his comprehension of events was partial and inevitably colored by the Mongol perspective, he remains generally accurate throughout.
Located south of Malaysia and Sumatra, in the Indian Ocean, Java is so distant from China that Marco probably never reached its shores, but he gathered stories to transmit to the West—the first accounts of this distant kingdom to reach Europe. “According to what the good sailors say who know it well,” he states, “this is the largest island in the world, for it is indeed more than three thousand miles around.” And it abounded in the most valuable commodity in the medieval world: spices. “They have pepper and nutmeg and spikenard and galingale and cubebs and cloves