Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [77]
According to Marco, anyone planning “some great work”—a trip, a business venture—“will go to find one of these astrologers and say to him, ‘See in your books how the sky stands just now, because I wish to go do such business or trade,’ telling him the year, month, day, hour, and minute of his birth; because everyone as soon as he is born is taught about his nativity.” After finding the planet under which his supplicant was born, the astrologer proceeds to “foretell him everything that will happen to him on that journey in order, and how his proposal will prosper in his doings, whether well or ill.” A merchant such as Marco Polo might be cautioned to postpone his travels until a planet opposing trade moved out of range, or, to avoid its harmful influence, might be advised to leave the city by a gate facing away from the invisible planetary threat.
Marco’s descriptions of “pamphlets” and “books”—although not found in all early manuscripts—confound skeptics of his presence in China who claim he never mentioned them. He was, in fact, aware of printing, but he overlooked the significance of this potent technology. His lapse is understandable because the invention of movable type lay almost two centuries in the future for Europe, and he could not have foreseen its role in disseminating the Bible and other important works. As a merchant, he immediately grasped the significance of paper currency, but books devoted to astrology remained a mere curiosity. For Marco, location was paramount, and no place on earth fascinated him more than Cambulac, the sudden center of Mongol civilization.
“THE PALACE IS square in every way,” says Marco. “First, there is a square circuit of wall, and each face is eight miles long, round which there is a deep moat; and in the middle of each side is a gate by which all the people enter who gather here from every side. Then there is a space of a mile all around; there the soldiers are stationed. After that space is found another circuit of wall, of six miles for a side.” The scale of this city, and its walls, was enough to make Marco’s European audience gasp with astonishment. Instead of the quaint capital they may have imagined, a giant fortress rose as testimony to the strength of the Mongol Empire.
With this centralized capital, Kublai Khan attempted to alter the Mongol tradition, and the course of Mongol history, from nomadic to pastoral. The marvel of Cambulac and Kublai Khan’s great experiment was that it worked. Marco witnessed this metropolis at its zenith, and he recorded a vivid description of Kublai’s palace of the Mongols, a forerunner of the Chinese royal residence that came to be known as the Forbidden City, later built on the same site and incorporating some of the buildings and outdoor spaces that Marco had scrupulously chronicled. “At each angle of this wall, and in the middle of each of the faces, is a beautiful and spacious palace,” Marco continues, “so that all around about the wall are eight palaces, in which are kept the munitions of the Great Khan, that is, one kind of trappings in each; as bridles, saddles, stirrups, and other things which belong to the equipment of horses. And in another bows, strings, quivers, arrows, and other things belonging to archery. In another cuirasses”—armor, especially breastplates—“corselets, and similar things of boiled leather.”
A wall surrounded the entire complex, with “a great gate which is never opened except when the Great Khan comes out of it to make war.” Kublai’s palace, concealed within these walls, “is the greatest and most wonderful ever seen,” a dwelling of unsurpassed luxury, shimmering and dreamlike in Marco’s soaring description. “The walls of the halls and of the rooms are all covered with gold and with silver, and there are portrayed dragons and beasts and birds and fair stories of ladies and knights and other beautiful things and stories of wars, which are on the walls; and