Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [31]
MARCO WAS NOT the first to travel what came to be called the Silk Road; he had been preceded by generations of Mongols, Turks, Arabs, mercenaries, and monks. Nor was he the first Westerner to describe his adventures in Asia. Nearly a hundred years earlier, Benjamin of Tudela, a rabbi from Navarre, had much the same idea concerning his journey. Benjamin’s travels brought him into contact with local officials, colorful characters, and other merchants. His account described commercial conditions from Barcelona to Constantinople, Baghdad, and points east.
From his vantage point in Baghdad, Benjamin compiled a Book of Travels, covering the years 1160 to 1173. Collecting reliable information about Jews in Palestine, Thebes, Antioch, and Tyre and on Mount Parnassus, he took note of Jewish merchants, dyers, shipowners, peasants, and laborers. He remarked on practices of obscure Jewish sects and wrote an account of a Jewish pseudo-Messiah and mystic in Persia, David Alroy, who had burst into prominence shortly before Benjamin’s excursion. In all, he included the names of 248 leaders of Jewish communities that he encountered throughout the Diaspora.
His curiosity led him to the cult of the Assassins—the same sect that would later alarm Marco Polo. “They fulfill whatever he commands them, whether it be a matter of life or death,” wrote Benjamin of their leader, in words that prefigure the Venetian’s account.
Unlike later merchants, Benjamin of Tudela did not penetrate deeply into Asia. After getting as far east as Baghdad, he returned home safely to Spain by way of Sicily. Nevertheless, he had seen much of the world. Despite his accomplishment, Benjamin of Tudela’s account, written with a collaborator in Hebrew, remained unknown in Europe, except among a handful of Jews. It was not published until 1543, and not translated into other tongues until the seventeenth century.
EUROPE remained in the thrall of legends of Prester John, the Christian leader who supposedly occupied a wealthy empire somewhere in Asia or Africa—no one knew exactly where, but theories abounded. The Church longed to make contact with him in order to fight the infidels inhabiting the gulf between East and West. Prester John was an illusion, but a powerful one, inspiring Christian missionaries to undertake pilgrimages to the East. Beginning in 1235, a series of papal bulls conferred upon missionary friars spiritual powers exceeding those of European bishops. They could, all on their own, undertake to combat heretics, convert infidels, reconcile schismatics—in other words, do whatever it took to bring recognizable, uniform Christianity to those who knew little of Rome, or who belonged to ancient sects that had gone their own way for centuries.
The earliest known missionary to travel to China, pioneering the route that the Polo company would follow, was Giovanni da Pian del Carpini, a Franciscan based in Cologne. Like Buddhist monks, Franciscans combined a vow of strict poverty with strong evangelical tendencies, and like Buddhists, they were suited for the rigors of life along the Silk Road. In 1245, carrying documents from Pope Innocent IV, Carpini and another Franciscan known as Benedict of Poland endured severe privation as they journeyed to an outpost on the bank of the Dnieper River, at the western edge of the Mongol Empire. Then, trekking to another Mongol outpost on the Lower Volga, they underwent the indignity of submitting, or being forced to submit, to a Mongol purification rite involving close proximity to crackling fires.
As they waited for the papal letters to be translated from Latin into Russian, Arabic, and Mongol tongues, they nearly perished from