Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [52]
Several years later, Kaidu mounted a direct challenge to Kublai, riding with tens of thousands of horsemen to the Mongol capital of Karakorum, where a battle took shape, according to Mongol custom: “When the two sides were on the field drawn up and ready, then they were only waiting till they should hear the drums begin to sound loudly, one on each side.” Once the drums sounded, “then they would sing and play their instruments of two strings very sweetly, and make great sport, waiting always for the battle.”
The opposing sides let loose a hail of arrows, and when they drew closer, pummeled each other with clubs. Marco heard reports from those who had been there that “it was one of the most cruel and evil battles that ever was between Tartars…. The noise of people was so great there and the clash of swords and of the clubs that one did not hear God for the thundering of it.” The battle amounted to a tragic waste of life, “for many men died thereby and many ladies were widows thereby and many children were orphans thereby and many other ladies were forever thereby in mourning and in tears—these were the mothers and the sweethearts of men who died there.”
By the first light of dawn, a weary Kaidu surveyed the bloodied battlefield. Spies brought him troubling news: Kublai Khan was already sending a fresh army “to take and assail him.” Kaidu gathered the exhausted remnants of his forces. “They mounted on horseback and set themselves on the way to return to their country,” recounts Marco. Learning of the retreat, Kublai Khan “let them go quietly.” Kaidu’s army did not stop retreating until it reached Central Asia.
Later, Kublai Khan raged and insisted he would have put the rebellious Kaidu “to an evil death”—wrapped in a carpet and trampled by horses—had they not been blood relatives.
MARCO CASTS the Mongol conquests not as the merciless slaughter of thousands but as a fairy tale about the spontaneous emergence of the Mongol presence from the windswept Steppe: “When Genghis Khan saw that he had so great a multitude of most valiant people, he, being of great heart, wished to come out from those deserts and wild places and arrayed his people with bows and with pikes and with their other arms…. I tell you that so great was the fame of his justice and kindness that wherever he went everyone came to submit himself, and happy was he who was able to be in his favor, so that in very little time they conquered eight provinces.”
In Marco’s telling, Genghis Khan’s conquests were marvels of peaceful subjugation: “When he had gained and taken the provinces and cities and villages by force, he let no one be killed or spoiled after the victory; and he put governors in them of such justice that he did them no harm nor took away from them their things.” Moreover, Marco claims, “These people who were conquered, when they saw that he saved and guarded them against all men and that they had taken no harm from him, and they saw the good rule and kindliness of this lord, they went too gladly with him and were loyal to him.” In this skewed version, their allegiance inspired Genghis to greater feats. “And when Genghis Khan had gathered so great a multitude of people that they covered the world, and saw that they all obeyed him faithfully and followed him, seeing that fortune so favored him, he proposed to himself to attempt greater things: he said to them that he wished to conquer a great part of the world. And the Tartars answered that it pleased them well, and they would follow him gladly wherever he should go.”
MARCO’S PORTRAYAL of Genghis Khan’s glorious rise omits disturbing details of the Mongol leader’s murderous thirst for power in favor of an epic, and unreal, battle between the Mongol warrior and the Christian leader of the East, Prester John. (“Prester” is an archaic word meaning “presbyter,” or priest.) But Genghis’s great rival Prester John did not exist, despite the European conviction that he dwelled in Asia, or perhaps Africa, ruling a magical and wealthy Christian outpost. In fact, the tenacious myth of Prester John originated