Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [199]
Two other maps dating from roughly the same era, those of Giovanni Contarini, published in Venice, and Johann Ruysch, issued in Rome, also incorporated data gleaned from the pages of the Travels. Ruysch remarked that his map contained the features of the interior of East Asia “no longer based on…Marinus of Tyre and Ptolemy…but on more modern reports, especially those of Marco Polo.”
THE MAPMAKERS of the Renaissance expected that legions of other merchants would use their maps to follow in Marco’s footsteps along the Silk Road to Cambulac, but after the death of Kublai Khan, the Mongol Empire rapidly disintegrated. The lesser khans of the domains west of China no longer proclaimed their fealty to the Yüan dynasty and instead embraced Islam. By 1368, Kublai Khan’s descendants were forced to abandon their capital, Cambulac. The end of the Mongol dynasty, and with it the Pax Mongolica, meant that the Silk Road was no longer safe, as it had been in the days when the Polo company had traveled it. The nascent Ming dynasty in China did not share Kublai Khan’s interest in promoting trade with European merchants, nor did the Islamic khans. Trade with the West diminished, and once more China sealed itself off from the rest of the world. The Mongol Empire described by Marco no longer existed; Kublai Khan was gone, and with him the merchants, scientists, and intellectuals he had attracted.
The Mongol population, always sparse, retreated to their original homeland on the arid northern Steppe. Their violent, glorious empire was only a memory set down in Chinese and Mongol annals, and celebrated in The Secret History of the Mongols. Marco had been there at its zenith, and in his Travels he had preserved its fierce leaders, alluring women, military campaigns, and exotic customs like flies in amber.
KUBLAI’S CHOSEN SUCCESSOR, his grandson Temür, died young, in 1307. After his death the Yüan dynasty stumbled to a chaotic conclusion.
Over the next five decades, the Chinese rose, as they always believed they would. Beginning in 1368, the first Ming emperor, Chu Yüan-chang, pushed the Mongol presence back to its original borders in the north. At the same time, the loose federation of Mongol-controlled states stretching across Asia disintegrated, allowing Islam to spread throughout Persia. Without Mongol forces to guarantee safety, the northern branch of the Silk Road fell into disuse. Had Marco returned to Asia in his later years, he would have been bewildered to learn that the protective paiza given to him by Kublai Khan had become an artifact of a bygone era. And he would have been amazed that his Travels outlasted the seemingly invincible Mongol Empire by centuries. Even today, the world is still catching up to Marco Polo.
LONG AFTER the authenticity of Marco Polo’s account seemed settled, questions—some of them quite understandable, others stubbornly perverse—arose to bedevil his reputation. In 1995, Frances Wood teasingly insisted in Did Marco Polo Go to China? that Marco never went farther than Constantinople and that he compiled his Travels from the accounts of more adventurous travelers. Or perhaps he relied on Persian guidebooks for his information.
That hypothesis had been considered years earlier by Herbert Franke, a German scholar, more as a jest than as a statement of fact. By the time Wood, affiliated with the British Library, revived the issue of Marco’s veracity, indignant scholars were ready for the challenge. They pointed out that no “Persian guidebooks” existed. And when Wood wondered why no Chinese sources mention Marco Polo, they recalled that the modern Chinese scholar Yang Chih-chiu had located a reference to the Polos’ mission to Persia to escort the Mongol princess Kokachin.
Still more provocatively, Wood argued that if Marco had reached China, he surely would have discussed the Great Wall, yet the Travels fails to mention it. So, for that matter, do other written accounts