Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [70]
Kublai’s manner of governing increasingly reflected Chinese approaches, especially those formulated by the Confucian scholar Jing Hao, who offered guidance concerning the principles of government. Yet Kublai clung to distinctive Mongol customs. Instead of relying on rigorous civil service examinations to select government officials, as the Confucians urged, he reserved the right to appoint his own choices, so that he would not run the risk of becoming overly dependent on the Chinese for the day-to-day operation of his administration. In this way, Kublai sought to blend his dynasty into the Chinese mainstream while maintaining a distinct Mongol heritage.
Kublai Khan became so adept at juggling these competing demands that he believed he could become all things to all people, the universal sovereign. He never quite achieved his aspiration; in Central Asia, various Mongol strongholds such as Persia and Russia claimed autonomy, although they paid lip service to the Great Khan in the east. Worse, as his reign continued, he presided over the disintegration of the Mongol Empire, even as he strengthened his base—and a very large and prosperous base it was—in China, where he continued his successful “pacification” of the Song, and its wealthy cities, especially the great prize of Hangzhou, located in the Lake District, the most sophisticated and scenic region in all of China.
SUCH WAS THE thriving empire in which Marco found himself. His facility with languages commended him to Kublai, who dispatched him “as a messenger on some important royal business.” Marco’s first stop: a city that he called Caragian, a journey of six months from Cambulac.
The young emissary took pains to prepare for the assignment, and to distinguish himself from other messengers. After their travels through the Mongol kingdom, those messengers returned to Kublai Khan “and were not able to tell him other news of the countries where they were gone.” Marco says that Kublai, in frustration, berated his couriers as “fools and ignorant, and said that he would like better to hear the new things and the customs and the usages of those strange countries than he did to hear those matters for which he had sent them; so Marco, who knew all this well, when he went on that mission, would fix his attention, noting and writing all the novelties and all the strange things that he had heard and seen according to the countries, going and coming, so that he might be able to recount them on his return to satisfy his wish.” With that, Marco Polo the traveler and storyteller was born, and so was the self-promoter and braggart whom other Italians would come to label, with admiration and derision in equal measure, Il Milione, “the Million.”
He saw himself, in contrast, as a conscientious emissary and chronicler: “All things that Master Marco saw and did and with whatever he met of good or bad he put in writing and so told all in order to his lord.” None of these field notes have survived, but it is believed that when he was imprisoned in Genoa he sent for them to assist in the composition of his Travels. Their particulars were etched in his memory.
Marco displayed an unexpected facility for conjuring distant, obscure worlds, making them seem both marvelous and comprehensible to his audience. Kublai was his first assignment editor, his first and most important audience, and ultimately his most compelling subject. Marco describes how the back-and-forth between the two of them worked, revealing, incidentally, how impressed Marco was with himself for pulling off this narrative feat: “When Marco returned from his mission he went before the Great Khan and reported to him all the affair for which he had gone. Then he told him all the novelties and all the