Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [74]
Drawing on his familiarity with Kublai, Marco dared to follow this august personage into the bedroom to glimpse his extraordinary sexual behavior. “Whenever he wishes to lie with any one of these four women, he makes her come to his room, and sometimes he goes to the room of his wife.” As if they were not enough to keep him occupied, the khan had “many other concubines” at his disposal. Marco says that many came from the province of Kungurat, in Afghanistan, the home of a “very handsome and fair-skinned people; these women are very beautiful and adorned with excellent manners.” They moved with uncommon suppleness, altogether feline, seductive, and alluring, and they dressed in a strikingly attention-snaring fashion, wearing a head-piece from which dangled long, glimmering strands of pearls, framing the face, and making the eyebrows into a sharp dark horizontal streak. The pearl headpiece focused their gaze until their dark eyes haunted the dreams of an emperor—or an impressionable young Venetian.
Like so much else in the Mongol court, the process of selecting concubines fit to serve the khan was highly ritualized. Every other year, Marco explains, “The Great Khan sends his messengers to…find him the most beautiful girls according to the standard that he gives them, four hundred, five hundred, more or less, as they think right.”
Once assembled, the girls appeared before “judges deputed for this purpose, who, seeing and considering all the parts of each separately—that is, the hair, the face, and the eyebrows, the mouth, the lips, and the other limbs—that they may be harmonious and proportioned to the body, value some at sixteen carats, others at seventeen, eighteen, twenty.” Only those fortunate girls awarded twenty carats or more were selected and ushered into the presence of Kublai Khan himself, where they submitted to the scrutiny of still more judges. The procedure yielded forty maidens valued at the highest number of carats and, as Marco puts it, “chosen for his own room.”
Even these select girls had to undergo one final intimate inspection before they were deemed fit for Kublai Khan’s bed. Under his direction, the “elder ladies of the palace…make them [the girls] lie with them in one bed to know if she has good breath and sweet, and is clean, and sleeps quietly without snoring, and has no unpleasant scent anywhere, and to know if she is a virgin, and quite sound in all things.”
This description, as explicit as Marco dared to make it, is usually taken to mean that the barons’ wives engaged in sex with the female recruits to break them in and train them in the arts of love. Those who passed this most intimate test of all, who were “good and fair and sound in all their limbs,” were “sent to wait on their lord.”
Every three days, six winners of this Mongol beauty contest were dispatched to Kublai Khan’s quarters, “both in the room and in the bed and for all that he needs; and the Great Khan does with them what he pleases.” When he finished, the exhausted girls departed, only to be replaced by a second shift of six. “And so it goes all the year that every three days and three nights they are changed until the number of those hundred is completed, and they stay for another turn.”
During the orgies, Kublai Khan remained undisturbed by anyone except the young concubines. “If the lord has need of anything extraordinary, as drink or food or other things, the girls who are in the lord’s chamber order those in the other room what they must prepare, and they prepare it immediately. And so the lord is not waited on by other persons, but by the girls.” All the while, girls valued at fewer carats assisted other ladies in waiting, learning to sew and to make gloves, and “other genteel work.”
The khan shared his surplus of women with his barons, earning the goodwill and cementing the loyalty of all his petitioners. “When any gentleman is looking for wives, the Great Khan