Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [163]
Marco’s exceptionally harsh and racist portrayal of the Zanzibaris raises questions about its authenticity. He may have been conflating tales of nearby East Africa with accounts of Zanzibar, recklessly embellishing as he went. But after venting his spleen, he softens his characterization, as if to make amends, by acknowledging a common interest. “They are great merchants,” he says, “and do great trade.” With this endorsement, he implies that, first impressions notwithstanding, the inhabitants are fully human. To his way of thinking, trading virtually defines their humanity.
Elephants were bred on the island, and the local merchants made “a great trade of the tusks.” Fascinated, Marco includes a graphic account of elephant breeding rites: “When the bull elephant wishes to pair with the female elephant, he hollows out a great pit in the ground until he may put the female elephant there turned over in the manner of a woman because she has the natural parts far toward the belly, and the bull elephant mounts upon her as if he were a man.”
The island’s inhabitants, whom Marco considered “good fighters” and “strong”—though not “in proportion to their size”—relied on the elephants in battle, equipping them with “castles of wood” covered with the “skins of wild beasts and with boards.” Outfitted in this manner, they could hold “sixteen to twenty men with lances and with swords and with stones.” Marco says that to prepare the elephants for battle, the warriors “give them plenty to drink of their wine…so that they make them half tipsy, and they do this because they say that when an elephant has drunk of that drink it goes more willingly and becomes more fierce thereby and more proud and is of much better worth for it in the battle.”
Marco insists, without proof, that the elephants were preyed upon by an even larger beast, the “grifon bird.” Those whom he asked about the strange creature likened the grifons to “immeasurably great” eagles. He reports: “They say it is so great and so strong that one of these birds, without the help of another bird, seizes the elephant with its talons and carries it off high into the air. Then it lets it drop to the ground so that the elephant is all broken to pieces, and then the grifon bird comes down upon the elephant and mounts up on it and tears it and eats it and feeds itself upon it at its will.” It is a sight he would dearly love to see, but the best he can do is convey what he has heard of the improbable spectacle.
ALTHOUGH MARCO did not visit Ethiopia—did not even claim to have done so—the oversight did not stop him from offering a few more nuggets. He speculated that Prester John, the legendary Christian ruler, might live on in this remote African territory. Relying heavily on hearsay, Marco claims, “The greatest king in all the province is Christian and all the other kings of the province are subject to him.”
There were six kingdoms, he reported, three of them Christian, and three Saracen—that is to say, Muslim. “I was told,” he says, “that all the Christian people of this province have three golden marks on their faces in [the] form of a cross that they may be known as more noble by others, that is, one on the forehead, two on the cheeks; and the mark that is on the forehead stretches from the forehead to the middle of the nose, and they have one of them on each cheek. And these marks are made with hot iron, and they make them when they are small, and it is for their second baptism with fire, for when they are baptized in water, then…those marks of which I have told you are made.” He also states that “many Jews” inhabit Ethiopia, “and these also bear like marks on their faces, but Jews have two marks, that is, one long line on each cheek.” As for the Saracens, they have “only one such mark alone, that is, from the forehead to the middle of the nose. And they do it with the hot iron.”
Ethiopian religious customs held special interest for Marco, for the land had been home to his spiritual beacon, “Master Saint Thomas the glorious Apostle.” The saint