Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [58]
Adhering to this strenuous, frugal lifestyle, Mongol warriors could go for days without eating cooked food or even lighting a fire. For sustenance, “they live on the blood of their horses; for each pricks the vein of his horse and puts his mouth to the vein and drinks of the blood till he is satisfied.” They found other extraordinary uses for the blood of their horses. “They carry the blood with them, and when they wish to eat they…put some of it in water and leave it to dissolve, and then they drink it. And in the same way they have their dried mare’s milk, too, which is solid like paste. It is dried in this way. They boil the milk, and then the cream which floats on top is put in another vessel, and of that, butter is made; because as long as it stays in the milk it could not be dried. Then the milk is put in the sun, and so it is dried. And when they go to war they carry about ten pounds of milk…in a little leather flask.” Mixed with a little water, “this is their breakfast.”
When circumstances permitted, Mongol cuisine featured more variety and subtlety than a warrior’s regime might suggest. Traditional recipes of this period included a medicinal concoction, Borbi Soup (“Reduce thirty or so sheep bones in one bucket of water until it is one-fourth the original amount of water, strain, skim oil from the surface, remove sediment, and eat as much as desired.”); Russian Olive Soup (“Trim and cut up one leg of mutton, add five cardamoms, and shelled chickpeas. Boil, strain, add Russian olives, sliced sheep thorax, and Chinese cabbage or nettle leaf.”); and Butter Skin Yuqba (“Finely cut mutton, sheep’s fat, sheep’s tail, Mandarin orange peel, and sprouting ginger. Add salt, sauce, and spices. Mix everything uniformly. To make skins, blend vegetable oil, rice flour, and white wheat flour.”). Revealing a Turkish influence, noodles had entered the Mongol diet, often in combination with mutton, egg, sprouting ginger, sheep intestines, and mushrooms, the whole served in a clear broth seasoned with pepper, salt, and vinegar. Marco would not have been surprised to encounter noodles in Mongolia; long before his journey, this type of food had spread from Turkey along the Silk Road in both directions. Contrary to myth, Marco Polo did not introduce noodles to Italy; his anonymous predecessors had.
MARCO ACKNOWLEDGED the Mongols as masters of military strategy—on land if not at sea—not because they were brutal, but because they were subtly strategic. It came as a surprise to many Chinese and Europeans to learn that when the Mongols “come to battle with their enemies, in the field they defeat them as much by flight as by pursuit.” The Mongols were not ashamed to be seen fleeing battle, but then they lured their adversaries into a culvert or onto a cliff where they closed in for the kill, felling them with the arrows they had saved for this moment. “When the enemy believe they have discomfited and conquered them [the Mongols] by putting them to flight,” Marco writes, the warriors of the Steppe regroup and let fly arrows tipped with lethal poison, killing the enemy’s horses. At this point the Mongols double back on their befuddled, exhausted adversaries to slaughter them.
Yet even as he wrote, Marco noted with regret that the purity of Mongol warrior life was passing—“now they are much debased”—undermined by the influence of “the customs of the idolaters,” presumably Buddhists, whose influence was spreading rapidly through the region, and by Islam, also spreading quickly.
No matter what the opponents’ faith, Mongol justice was swift, savage, and systematic. “If a man strikes with steel or with a sword, whether he hits or not, or threatens one, he loses his hand,” Marco observes. “He who wounds must receive