Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [79]
Marco thrilled to the striking of Cambulac’s great “town clock” three times every evening, “so that none may go about the town after it has sounded.” In fact, no one even dared to leave his house “except for the nurses who go for the needs of women in childbirth and physicians who go for the needs of sick men.” And even these caregivers had to bring lanterns with them on their errands of mercy.
Sentries, a thousand of them at every gate, guarded the entire city against the depredations of robbers and marauders. “Besides this,” Marco reports, “the guards always ride through the city by night, by thirty and by forty, searching and inquiring if anyone is going about the city at an unusual hour, that is, after the third sounding of the bell.” The guards immediately arrested and jailed any suspicious person. “In the morning, the officials deputed for this examine him, and if they find him guilty of any offence, they punish him, according to the degree of it, with more or less blows of the rod, by which they sometimes die.” All the while, within his gigantic palace, the khan and his wives, family retainers, and concubines slept in peace, and Marco felt more secure in this strange city than the average citizen did in Venice.
This utopian city planning stood in contrast to Marco’s Venice, where sinuous streets and canals concealed vice and sedition, and where predators hid under bridges and in the shadows of irregular buildings. It is as though Marco were compiling astonishing bulletins from the future for the benefit of his countrymen, mired in the past. The future, he advised, was China.
IN HIS DESIRE to impress Europeans with the grandeur of the Mongol court, Marco told of feasts whose excess far exceeded their European counterparts. “When the Great Khan keeps his table in his hall for any great court and feast and rejoicing that he may wish to hold, he is seated in this way,” Marco explains in three-dimensional detail. “For first the table of the great lord is set before his throne very high above all the others. He sits in the north part of the hall with the shoulders toward the tramontane”—the land beyond the mountains—“so that his face looks toward midday, and his first wife sits beside him on the left side, and on the right side, but at another table which is lower, sit his sons in lordly fashion, and likewise his grandsons, according to their ages, and his kindred and others who are connected by blood,…so low that I tell you their heads come to the feet of the great lord…. And it goes in the same way with the women, that at the feet of the first queen is the table of the other queens and of the younger children of the Great Khan; for all the wives of the sons of the great lord and of his grandsons and of his kindred sit on the left side, namely, of the empress, also more low; and next sit all the wives of the barons and of the knights, and they also sit lower.” The pleasing arrangement means that the “great lord can see all the feasters, and they are always a very great number.”
An incalculable number of revelers participated. At first Marco hesitates to offer an estimate, then he succumbs to temptation: “The greater part of the knights and barons eat in the hall on carpets, because they have not tables. And outside this hall are other halls at the sides; and in these royal banquets there sometimes feed more than forty thousand, besides those who are of the lord’s court, who always come in numbers to sing and to make various sport. And many more times than ten thousand persons eat at the tables that are outside the great hall.” Though sincere, Marco did not expect his readers to believe his figures, but he relished challenging Western ideas of Mongol life.
In the midst of this enormous festive hall stood a “most beautiful structure, large and rich, made in the manner of a square chest.” Decorated with gilded carvings of animals, it contained a “great and valuable vessel in the shape of a great pitcher of fine gold that holds quite as much wine as a common large