Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [170]
Early chroniclers of the Yüan dynasty spread Kublai Khan’s fame far and wide. Muslims came to know of this extraordinary man through the writings of Rashid al-Din. Chinese and Korean chroniclers celebrated Kublai Khan’s accomplishments, and Bar Hebraeus wrote warmly of Kublai’s long and momentous reign. For all their scope, none of these chronicles compares with the vivid account left by Kublai’s best-known European chronicler, Marco Polo. He alone had extensive personal experience with his subject, and he still held the paiza, or passport, that the emperor had given him years before, when Marco first left Cambulac. He wrote about the Mongol leader with such passion, tinged with awe, that he single-handedly enlightened the West about one of the most powerful rulers who had ever lived.
MARCO POLO learned of Kublai Khan’s death during his passage home to Venice with his father and uncle. If he always remembered where he was or what he was doing when he heard the momentous news, he did not confide the details to Rustichello. He simply recalled, “While Masters Niccolò, Maffeo, and Marco were making this journey, they learned how the Great Khan was cut off from this life, and this took away from them all hope of being able to return any more to those parts.”
Instead of conferring the liberation that Marco anticipated, Kublai Khan’s demise tolled the death of adventure, and even of hope itself. At the time of their leave-taking, the Polos had employed their negotiating skills to free themselves from privileged servitude. Now that they were beyond the reach of this beneficent tyrant who had controlled their destiny, they could only reflect that they would never see Cambulac again. The splendor and immensity of Asia were lost to them forever. The end of Kublai Khan’s long reign terminated a unique partnership between East and West, a powerful ruler and a small merchant family. The Mongol leader had given the Polo company standing, but more than that, he had imparted to his protégé a sense of purpose. He was the personification of magic and might.
IN THE FINAL CHAPTERS of his chronicle, Marco’s boundless curiosity alights on the largely unexplored land of Russia. In reality, his route home did not take him anywhere near Russia, or any of the other northern lands that suddenly piqued his interest, but his account, a careful summary based on admittedly secondhand information, is memorable for its eloquence and its evocation of a landscape and way of life that other Europeans could scarcely imagine.
The approach to Russia from the east, to hear Marco tell it, could deter even the hardiest merchant. “No horse can go there,” he advises, “because it is a land where there are many lakes and many springs and streams that make that region very marshy, and because of the exceeding cold of that province there is almost always ice so thick that boats cannot pass by there, and yet there is not so much strength in the ice that it can bear heavy carts or heavy animals.” Nevertheless, merchants or trappers trading in fur managed to traverse this wasteland, turning a “great profit” for their trouble, and these hardy souls were his likely source of information for the region.
Marco had heard that travel across this difficult territory could be accomplished in stages lasting thirteen days, known as a “journey,” at the end of which the weary, frozen traveler could count on finding a hamlet consisting of “several houses of timber raised above the ground in which can comfortably live men who bring and receive merchandise.” Commerce again surmounted nearly every obstacle; to Marco, this was more a fact of life than a source of wonder.
“In each of these hamlets,” he continues, “is a house which they call a post where all the messengers of the lord who go through the country lodge.” A cold-weather version of the caravans