Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [22]
This religious freedom was a source of amazement to young Marco, but the Mongols’ attitude toward Christianity baffled him. “They confess…that Christ is Lord, but they say he is a proud Lord because he will not be with other gods but will be God above all others in the world. And so in some places they have a Christ of gold or silver and keep him hidden in some chest, and say that he is the great Lord supreme of the Christians.”
Marco would have to adapt; the Silk Road was no place for orthodoxy or single-mindedness.
IN TURKEY, Marco gathered tales of Noah’s Ark, said to perch atop Mount Ararat, the tallest peak in the country. Even as he became aware of the multiplicity of religions all around him, he remained eager for this proof of biblical events concerning “the ship of the world.” As he recalled, the Book of Genesis states that “on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.”
In the spirit of innocent belief, Marco searched for the evidence, only to be frustrated. In its unlikely resting place, “this ark is seen from very far because the mountain on which it rests is very high, and there is snow there almost all the year, and in one part there is…a large black thing seen from far amidst those snows; but close by nothing of it is seen.” The tantalizing feature was likely a frozen lava field glimpsed from afar, alternately revealed and concealed by shifting snows, not a ship.
As Marco related the story of the final resting place of the Ark, he lost his enthusiasm for it. He implicitly acknowledged that there was no Ark on Mount Ararat, at least none that he could see—but how wonderful if there were.
MARCO RETURNED to reality when he reached the thriving commercial center of Mosul, on the Tigris River. Here he had his first taste of a desert empire, with its frenzied bazaars and outpouring of goods. Mosul had been under strict Muslim rule until the Mongols conquered the city in 1182, and by the time the Polo company arrived, it was open to various religions, including Christianity. The tomb of the Old Testament prophet Jonah was to be found here, although Marco was unaware of it. As an aspiring merchant, he more likely became familiar with muslin, the strong, densely woven, unbleached fabric that had long been locally produced.
In Mosul, Marco encountered the followers of Nestorius, a fifth-century patriarch of Constantinople who taught that Jesus was divided into two natures, one human and the other divine, loosely bound together in what Nestorians called synapheia, or conjunction. According to the historian Edward Gibbon, Nestorius learned “nicely to discriminate the humanity of his master Christ from the divinity of the Lord Jesus.” But to the Roman Christians of Marco’s time, this notion amounted to heresy, although the issue was more subtle than Gibbon’s offhand remark would suggest. In Nestorian teaching, Mary could be venerated only as the mother of the human Jesus, not as the Mother of God. Rome, in contrast, insisted on the “hypostatic” or fundamental unity of Jesus’ two natures. Intellectuals on all sides of the question debated this subject endlessly, and it is entirely possible that the dispute arose more from varying interpretations of the Greek philosophical terms in which they framed their discussion than from actual differences. Nevertheless, a permanent rift between the Nestorians and Rome remained in place.
Nestorians established their patriarchate at Baghdad, and their influence expanded throughout Syria, Asia Minor, Iraq, Persia, and even China. In 735, they had applied to the emperor of the Tang dynasty to build a church in the imperial capital, Ch’ang-an (now Xi’an). They received permission and made the city into a Nestorian hub, where they taught their adherents both the Old and New Testaments and occasionally converted Chinese and others. They