Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [33]
He warned of the extreme climate conditions awaiting travelers on the Silk Road: “The weather there is astonishingly irregular, for in the middle of the summer, when other places are normally enjoying very great heat, there is fierce thunder and lightning, which cause the death of many men, and at the same time there are very heavy snowfalls.” As if that were not bad enough, “there are also bitterly cold winds, so violent that at times men can ride on horseback only with great effort.” Such was the daunting prospect Marco faced as he made his way slowly to Kublai Khan.
CARPINI’S DATA, gleaned from personal observation, circulated across Europe in manuscript form, and became part of a popular medieval encyclopedia, the Speculum historiale of Vincent of Beauvais.
In its organization, subject matter, and scope, Carpini’s Historia anticipated Marco Polo’s Travels. Although he had not seen Carpini’s account before setting out for China, Marco gave every sign of having become familiar with it by the time he wrote his own, far more elaborate work, and he took significant cues from it. Like Carpini, Marco divided his account into sections discussing aspects of Mongol life, and like Carpini, he wished to humanize this tribe of noble savages. But Marco possessed a far more extravagant and excitable temperament than the dutiful, self-effacing Franciscan friar. He did not just humanize the Mongols, he extolled them. He did not simply describe the Mongol way of life, he lived it.
INSPIRED BY Carpini’s example, other travelers took to the Silk Road and returned to write of the wondrous and appalling things they had seen.
The missionary William of Rubruck, a Franciscan, set out with another Franciscan friar, Bartholomew of Cremona; a slave purchased in Constantinople; an interpreter; and several oxcarts adapted to crossing the Mongolian desert. His unsparing account of their adventures revealed the strangeness and adversity confronting those who dared to travel east. “When we arrived among those barbarians, it seemed to me,” remarked William, “that we were stepping into another world.”
He and his companions learned to bear the constant hunger, thirst, and loneliness of empty stretches of the Silk Road, but not, he wrote, “the wretchedness I endured when we came to inhabited places. I cannot find the words to tell you of the misery we suffered when we came to the encampments.”
To William, the Mongols seemed more interested in drinking and carousing than in wreaking havoc on Christians. They were—and this came as a revelation to Europeans predisposed to regard them as barbarians—thoroughly human. In passages strongly prefiguring Marco Polo’s acute observations, William commented on the makeup worn by the women. “It seemed to me her whole nose had been cut off, so snub-nosed was she,” he wrote of a chieftain’s wife. “She had greased this part of her face with some black unguent, and also her eyebrows, so that she appeared most hideous to us.” He unabashedly conveyed the nature of Mongol domestic arrangements. Men took “as many wives as they would,” and kept female slaves who served as concubines. When a maiden reached the age of marriage, her suitor claimed her by force, often with the help of the young woman’s father.
Accounts such as these fascinated those few scholars, noblemen, and clergy able to read them. William’s descriptions humanized the Mongols. They took care of their own, tolerated strangers, respected other religious beliefs—how different from more “civilized” Europeans they were in that regard—and lived in spiritual harmony with nature,