Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [82]
ON KUBLAI KHAN’S BIRTHDAY, Marco notes, all the “kings and princes and barons who are subject to his jurisdiction” held feasts and bestowed gifts in his honor. Some bearers requested large favors of the khan, such as a domain to rule. Displaying his usual foresight, Kublai appointed a committee to assign domains to worthy petitioners. Marco again stresses that Kublai Khan’s appeal transcended religious and cultural boundaries, especially on this day, when “all people of whatever faith they are, all the idolaters and all the Christians or the Jews and all the Saracens and all the other races of the Tartar people”—here Marco appears to paraphrase a Mongol formula—“who are subject to the rule of the Great Khan must make great petitions and great assemblies and great prayers, each to the idols and to their God with great chants, great lights, and great incense, that he may be pleased to save and protect them.”
For all its detail, Marco’s offhand account only hints at the actual complexity of the Great Khan’s birthday rites. Despite his immersion in the Mongol lifestyle, Marco inevitably missed many subtleties, or they eluded his memory when the time came to describe them to Rustichello. The section of the Mongol annals known as the “General Ceremonial for the Receptions at the Mongolian Court” relates the full story of Kublai Khan’s extraordinary birthday festival.
“When the day of the reception arrives,” reads the official account,
the aides of ceremonies introduce those invited, starting at daybreak, and conduct them to their assigned places. The “Chiefs of the Guards,” all dressed in their special costumes, enter the great “room of rest.” First, they take in their hand their ivory tablets (which each brought on his way to court) and make the prescribed genuflections. Then the “Informers of the Exterior” and the “Stewards of the Interior” enter and communicate the program that prescribes the formalities that must be observed during the ceremony. They bow, prostrating themselves, and rise. The emperor comes out of his interior apartments and gets onto his imperial chariot. Then cries are heard, together with the whips of the guardians. Three aides make the spectators align themselves left and right, and take them by hand to their places. The “Chiefs of the Guards” open the procession, preceded by heralds carrying hatchets, and they go outside of the “Room of the Great Light.” The “Hatchet-Bearers” place themselves in front of the entrance and remain standing there, facing north, directing the crowd to prostrate itself; then they place themselves in the open apartments, east and west. This done, they conduct the crowd, in sections, outside the wall, to wait.
In the official account, Kublai Khan and his first wife, referred to as the emperor and empress, in Chinese fashion, ascend to their rest couch. At that moment, “cries of joy and lashes of whips are heard. Three arms heralds, carrying hatchets, open a passage through the crowd and return to place themselves east of the ‘Steps of the Dew’”—the stairs leading to the palace.
There followed hours of carefully choreographed praying and bowing, led by the designated functionaries. For sheer size and complexity, nothing like this display existed in any European court of Marco’s day, and he was properly awed. The ritual relied heavily on Chinese models, and sentiment among the Mongols accused Kublai Khan of exchanging basic Mongol ways, especially nomadism, for rarefied and very un-Mongol behavior. That was an exaggeration. Although he mastered the outward forms of Chinese court ceremonies with the help of Chinese advisers, who were imbued with tradition, he remained a Mongol at heart, and on the battlefield.
MARCO PERCEIVED the Mongol hierarchy as one based on performance in war rather than behavior within the confines of the court. Kublai Khan, he relates, “has chosen twelve very great and powerful wise men and barons to watch over whatever questions may arise about