Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [165]
Still frustrated, Niccolò, pleaded, as Marco put it, “very sweetly,” for formal permission to quit the kingdom, only to be undone by his family’s longstanding loyalty to the Mongol leader. “The Great Khan loved them so much, was so much pleased with their deeds, and kept them willingly about him, that for nothing in the world did he give them leave.” Only now did the Polos realize that Kublai Khan might consider their departure a sign of his diminishing power; at this volatile point in his reign, he could not afford that challenge.
WHEN IT SEEMED that negotiations had reached a standstill, Kublai Khan, inspired by the unlikeliest of circumstances, the effort to find a successor for a distant queen, devised a solution that saved face for all parties.
As Marco reports, “It happened that the Queen Bolgana, who was wife of Argon, died.” Argon, or Arghun as he was sometimes known, was the “lord of the Levant,” a western kingdom loosely affiliated with the Mongol Empire. At the same time, Argon had been locked in a fierce quarrel with his uncle Acmat Soldan, who had converted to Islam and committed the outrage of stealing his brother’s wives. Argon vowed to avenge this wrong and kill Acmat Soldan, who in turn vowed to kill him, but not before torturing him. The two spent years at war with each other, and eventually Argon won out.
For the sake of maintaining a semblance of stability in the empire, Kublai Khan was prepared to oversee the line of succession in this distant kingdom. Marco explains that on her deathbed, the queen had expressed the wish “that no lady might sit on her throne nor be wife of Argon if she were not of her line.” Then, he continues, “Argon took three of his barons”—Oulatai, Apusca, and Coja by name—and sent them “very grandly as his messengers to the Great Khan with a very great and fair company in order to ask that he should send him a lady who was of the line of the Queen Bolgana…to marry him.”
The three emissaries completed the hazardous mission to Kublai Khan, who “received them most honorably and made joy and feasting for them. Then, since King Argon was his very great friend, [Kublai sent] for a lady who had Cocacin for name, who was of the lineage they desired.” This was the Mongol princess known to history as Kokachin. She was seventeen years old, “very fair and amiable,” and she instantly won the emissaries’ approval. Her name, which meant “blue like Heaven,” has often been taken to indicate that her eyes were blue, which would have been highly unusual among the Mongols. More likely, her eyes were dark, and the name, like many Mongol names, included a color, in this case blue, suggestive of Heaven.
Kublai commanded the three barons, “Take her to Argon your lord, for she is of the family he seeks, so that he may take her safely to wife.”
In Marco’s telling, their journey sounds like a fairy tale, but it is replete with the awkwardness of reality, beginning with a false start. “When all things necessary had been made ready and a great brigade to escort with honor this new bride to King Argon, the envoys, after taking leave of the Great Khan, set out riding for the space of eight months by that same way they were come.” Soon enough, they encountered trouble. “On the journey they found that by a war newly begun between certain kings of the Tartars the roads were closed, and not being able to go forward they were obliged against their will to return again to the court of the Great Khan, to whom they related all that had befallen them.”
The reversal of fortune provided the Polo company with a slender chance to escape the Mongol Empire, as Marco explains. “At the same time the ambassadors were come for that lady, Master Marco returned with a certain embassy from India, who was gone as ambassador of the lord and had been or passed through the kingdom of Argon.” Marco was overflowing with mesmerizing tales as he described “the embassy and the other different things that he had seen on his way and how he had gone through foreign provinces