Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [83]
The twelve barons who made up the Great Court served directly under Kublai Khan. They formed a closely knit band, living together in Cambulac in a palace described by Marco as “large and beautiful and rich.” Each of these barons had “for each province under his rule a judge and many writers or notaries under him, who all stay in this palace each in his house by himself.”
MARCO ESTEEMED the same sense of logic and orderliness in the celebrated Mongol post system, a necessity for administering the diverse empire. “The manner of the messengers of the Great Khan is wonderful,” he exults. Displaying even greater attention to detail than usual, he describes the intricate Mongol operation: “I assure you the messengers ride 200 miles in a day, sometimes even 250. Let me explain how it is done. When a messenger wishes to travel at this speed and cover so many miles a day, he carries a tablet with the sign of the falcon as a token that he wishes to ride posthaste. If there are two riders…, they tighten their belts and swathe their heads, and off they go with all the speed they can muster till they reach the next post-house twenty-five miles away.” On arrival, he says, they change horses, and “without a moment’s breathing space,…off they go again.” It was thunder and lightning on the hoof.
Each road leaving Cambulac was named for the province to which it led. At a distance of twenty-five miles, the messengers reached a “post with horses” as well as a “very great palace…where the messengers and envoys of the great lord may lodge with dignity, and these lodgings have very rich beds furnished with rich silk cloths and have all the things that are right for exalted messengers.” Even a king visiting one of these remote palaces would feel comfortable, Marco claims.
The principal function of the post was to stable fresh horses; each had no less than four hundred mounts at the ready, “that they may be able to dismount there, leaving the tired horses, and take fresh ones.”
To Marco’s eye, the complex system, with its many interdependent parts, worked flawlessly, transmitting vital information across great distances, as well as disparate cultures and languages. “In this way it goes through all the principal provinces and realms, cities and places of the great lord up to the borders of the neighboring provinces.” Even off the main road, Kublai Khan had established smaller posts, thirty-five or even forty miles apart in remote areas. Marco claims that ten thousand of these posts, built at the khan’s expense, dotted the landscape, each of them luxuriously furnished and capable of stabling twenty or so horses. These way stations provided safety and shelter for the footmen engaged in the essential task of directing messages to the proper recipients. The occupation called for a distinctive costume. “They wear a great and broad girdle all full round about of great balls, that is, of sounding bells, so that when they go, they may be heard from quite far.”
Marco made a close study of these wonderful little outposts. He reports: “When the king wishes to send a letter by courier, the letter is given to one of the runners, and these go always running at great speed, and they go not more than three miles…. The other who is at the end of the three miles who hears him clearly by the bells coming from afar, stays all ready; and as soon as that one is come he takes the thing that he carries and takes a little ticket that the writer gives him and sets himself running and goes as far as the second three miles, and