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By Root 906 0

the ease with which he acquired wives, this privileged king had resorted to an “unfitting” deed to win a “very beautiful woman” who happened to be his brother’s wife. Undaunted, the king “took her from him [his brother] by force and kept her many days for himself. His brother, who was a prudent man and wise, showed no sign but suffered him in peace and made no quarrel with him.” There was an extraordinary reason for his reticence: “He was many times on the point of stirring up war against him because he [the king] had taken his wife from him, but their mother used to show them her breasts and say, ‘If you stir up a quarrel between you, I shall cut off my breasts that nourished you.’ And so the trouble was stayed.”

The king had much else to occupy his thoughts—countless children, for one thing, and a large, fanatically devoted retinue of servants. Coming of age when the legacy of feudalism still retained its power, Marco understood the bond between lords and servants—after all, he had been the vassal of Kublai Khan for nearly two decades—but the ties between this king and his servants were another thing entirely, as Marco relates. “When the king dies and his body is burnt in a great fire, then…many of the company and also of all these barons who were his faithful ones…throw themselves into the fire together with the king of their free will, and are burnt with the king to bear him company in the other world; for they say that since they have been his companions in this world, they ought to be so and to serve their lord in the other, also.” This startling custom afforded Marco his first exposure to suttee, widely practiced through the world he now explored. “When a man is dead and his body is being burnt, his wife throws herself on the fire herself and lets herself burn with her lord,” he marvels, adding that the “ladies who do this are much praised,” while those who refrained from self-immolation invited scorn.

The kingdom’s approach to criminal behavior diverged sharply from Western conventions as well. “When a man has done a crime such that he must die and that the lord wishes to have him killed, then he who must be killed says that he wishes to kill himself for the honor and for the love of such an idol. The king tells him he is quite willing for this.”

Marco depicted the ritual punishment that followed with macabre flourishes: “All the relations and the friends of this one who must kill himself take him and put him on a chair and give him twelve swords or knives well ground and sharp, and tie them round his neck, and carry him through all the city, and go saying and crying, ‘This very valiant man is going to kill himself for the love, honor, and reverence of such an idol.’” When the procession comes to a halt at the appointed place,

“then he who must die takes a knife and cries with a loud voice, ‘I kill myself for the love of such an idol.’ After he has said these words, he strikes himself with the knife in the middle of the belly…. He gives himself so many blows with these knives that he kills himself.” In another version, perhaps even more gruesome, he places the knife “at the back of his head and drawing it violently to him cuts through his own neck, for that knife is very well sharpened, and dies in the very act.”

Having shocked his audience, Marco offhandedly comments, “When he is killed, his relations burn the body with great joy and with great festivity, thinking that he is fortunate.”

Madness, he implied with a stern Venetian squint, resided in the eye of the beholder.

MARCO ALSO ACQUAINTED his audience with the curious ciugi, or yogis, devout Indians distinguished by their “great abstinence” and the “strong and hard life” they led for “love of their idols.”

Their appearance was arresting: “They go naked without wearing anything above so that their natural parts are not covered, nor any member.” Marco says that they worshipped the ox and most of them carried “a little ox of copper or of bronze gilded in the middle of their foreheads.” They burned ox dung, then anointed themselves with the ashes “with