Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [64]
TRAVELING all this distance had proved extremely difficult, dangerous, and time-consuming for the Polos, and they felt secure in the khan’s all-encompassing embrace. In time, they would realize that they had wandered unintentionally into a trap as large as Asia, but a trap nonetheless. Kublai Khan presented himself as an invulnerable emperor, practically a deity, but he was, in fact, a vain and vulnerable despot, and the Polo company’s position within his empire was correspondingly precarious. Depending on his goodwill for their personal safety, they could neither renounce him nor flee him, not if they ever wanted to see Venice again. And if anything happened to him, they would be at the mercy of his enemies.
For the moment, Marco was too dazzled by his proximity to the most powerful ruler in the world to be concerned, for he had reached the heart of his story. “I will now tell you,” he promises, “the truly amazing facts about the greatest lord of the lords of all the Tartars, the right noble khan whose name is Kublai.”
FROM HIS privileged standpoint, Marco Polo urged his audience, Venetians especially, to study Kublai Khan’s example of empire-building. His lengthy account can be read as a consideration of the question of how best to rule an empire, and in this way, it is the medieval equivalent of another Italian analysis of statecraft, The Prince, by Machiavelli. Marco found in Kublai Khan a master practitioner of the art—part warrior, part despot, and part sage. To the Venetian, Kublai Khan was a flesh-and-blood person, but also a towering figure on the order of Alexander the Great, a ruler capable of transforming the world and history itself. Kublai Khan was power personified—military, sexual, and spiritual.
“The people remain humble, quiet, and calm for half a mile round the place where the Great Khan may be, out of respect for his Excellency, so that no sound or noise nor voice of anyone who shouts or talks loudly is heard,” Marco says of life in the Mongol palace. “Every baron or noble always carries a vase small and beautiful, into which he spits while he is in the hall, for none would have the courage to spit upon the floor of the hall.”
In keeping with the refined atmosphere of the palace, visitors wore special footwear, “beautiful slippers of white leather that they carry with them.” Marco explains that “when they are arrived at the court, if they wish to go into the hall, supposing that the lord asks for them, they put on these beautiful white slippers and give the others to the servants; and this, so as not to soil the beautiful and cunningly made carpets of silk, both of gold and of other colors.”
And now it was time for the Polo company, clad in this splendid attire, to encounter the embodiment of opulence and authority, the leader of the Mongols, Kublai Khan.
“WHEN THE noble brothers Master Niccolò and Master Maffeo and Marco were come into that great city [Cambulac] in which the khan was, they go off immediately to the chief palace, where they found the Great Khan with a very great company of all his barons. And they knelt before him with great reverence and humbled themselves [until] they were stretching themselves out on the earth.”
Prostrate before the omnipotent Mongol ruler, they waited in respectful but uneasy silence, until “the Great Khan made them rise and stand upright and received them with honor and made great rejoicing and great feasting for them.” Kublai Khan eagerly engaged Niccolò and Maffeo in conversation, questioning them “about their life and how they had conducted it” during the years of their absence from the Mongol court. “The two brothers told him that they had done very