Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [54]
Once he grew accustomed to life in a ger, Marco noticed an unusual domestic arrangement. “The ladies buy and sell and do all the work that is needed for their lords and family and for themselves,” he comments approvingly. “They are not burdensome for their husbands, and the reason is that they make much gain by their own work.” The more he observed Mongol women at work, the more he admired their diligence and contribution to family life. They are, he says, “very provident in managing the family and are very careful in preparing food, and do all the other duties of the house with great diligence, so the husbands leave the care of the house to their wives, for they trouble themselves with nothing at all but hunting and feats of battle and hawking and falcons, like gentlemen.”
Marco was instinctively drawn to the Mongols’ method of hunting, designed both to find food and to afford sport on the limitless Steppe. “They have the best falcons in the world”—another slap at Europe, where falconry was recognized as the sport of the aristocracy and falcons were a source of pride to the nobility able to afford them—“and likewise dogs”—all of which allowed the Mongols an abundant supply of food. Marco’s inventory of the Mongols’ foods seems calculated to inspire envy in his European readers, who often hovered on the brink of famine: “They feed on flesh and on milk and on game, and also they eat little animals like rabbits, which are called ‘Pharaoh’s rats’”—in reality, these were a species of rodent akin to the prairie dog. “They eat even the flesh of the horses and of dogs and of mares and oxen and camels, provided that they are fat, and gladly drink camel’s and mare’s milk.” Koumiss, the sour fermented beverage made from mare’s milk, was a staple of the Mongol diet, and a bond between all warriors. Drinking it practically defined the Mongol way of life.
Koumiss is of ancient origin. Writing in the fifth century BC, Herodotus states it was known to the ancient Scythians, nomadic precursors to the Mongols, and it may have derived from the name of another ancient Asian tribe, the Kumanes. The action of two organisms, a yeast and a fungus, converted the carbohydrates in mare’s milk into lactic acid and alcohol.
Marco came to enjoy this beverage, or at least tolerate it. At one point, he declares that the koumiss produced by one Mongol family tasted like white wine. He had no choice but to acquire a taste for it, because the Mongols drank little else; even in winter, when milk was scarce, they combined sour curd with hot water, beat the mixture, and imbibed it.
LIFE AMONG THE MONGOLS, for all its hardships, eventually won Marco’s qualified admiration. Unlike the bawdy wives of Kamul, the Mongol women remained faithful to their husbands. “For nothing in the world would one touch the wife of another,” he proclaims, “for if it happened, they would hold it for an evil thing and exceedingly vile.” He proceeds to extol Mongol marital harmony: “The loyalty of husbands towards the wives is a wonderful thing, and a very noble thing the virtue of those women who if they are ten, or twenty, a peace and inestimable unity is among them.” Instead of bickering, the women busied themselves with “selling and buying,…the life of the house and the care of the family and of the children”—all of which won young Marco’s ringing (and, to Christian ears, stinging) endorsement. “In my judgment they are the women who most in the world deserve to be commended by all for their very great virtue.”
Of course, the underpinning of this remarkable domestic concord was more complicated than Marco’s account initially suggests. The women, he eventually reveals, certainly deserved their “praise for virtue and chastity because the men are allowed to be able to take as many wives as they please, to the very great confusion of Christian women. For when