Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [85]
WITH TOUCHES LIKE THESE, Marco revealed Kublai Khan’s splendid realm not as a static, remote fantasyland populated by savages, but as a vital state constantly on the alert for danger—an empire that never slept, where swift messengers moved by night if necessary, their way marked by reassuring rows of trees and lit by flickering torchlight. What could Venice do to equal such vigilance? So ran Marco’s unspoken question. Could Venetians muster the same ingenuity, even if their lives depended on it?
The network of posts and messengers and fast horses reaching far and wide throughout the Mongol realm struck Marco as a grand achievement. “The greatest pride and greatest grandeur that any emperor has or might ever have,” he exclaims. “A thing so wonderful and of so great cost that it could hardly be told or written.” So wonderful, in fact, that it inspired Marco to deliver a stinging attack on Christianity.
WITH BLASPHEMOUS GUSTO, Marco explains to his readers that the key to maintaining this network of posts—and, by extension, the Mongol Empire—was the wonderful custom of polygamy. “If anyone were to doubt how there are so many people to do so many duties,” he writes, “it is answered that all the idolaters and Saracens take six, eight, and ten wives each, provided that they can pay the expense, and beget infinite”—infinite!—“sons; and there will be many men of whom each will have more than thirty sons, and all follow him armed; and this is because of the many wives.”
Nor did they starve, even with so many mouths to feed. Marco reports that they freely indulged their appetite for “plenty of victuals”—usually abundant grain combined with “milk or flesh.” They also devoured “macaroni,” a food that, contrary to Polo mythology, was already known in Italy. Their endless need for sustenance kept them busy. “With them, no land that can be ploughed lies fallow; and their animals increase and multiply without end, and when they go to the field, there is not one who does not take with him six, eight, and more horses for himself.”
Christians could only envy the satisfying and fertile ways of these heathens. “With us,” Marco laments, “one has but one wife, and if she is barren, the man will end his life with her and beget no son; therefore we have not so many people as they.” It was now apparent where Marco’s sympathies lay. He had become the most enthusiastic of converts.
Yet he saw the Mongols from a European perspective. Outwardly conventional, Marco subscribed to the medieval assumption that one’s identity in life was determined by religion, place of birth, gender, social station, and birth order. In much the same way, he regarded the Mongol Empire as a fixed hierarchy with Kublai Khan at the top, and the khan’s barons arrayed beneath him in predictable descending ranks. Marco and his collaborator stuck to their familiar categories even when experience strongly suggested otherwise. As nomads, the Mongols were less hierarchical than Marco suggested; their authority derived from their adaptability and their ability to take on the characteristics of the host culture in which they embedded themselves. Even though Marco was observant enough to describe their doing so, he remained at least partially oblivious to some aspects of their way of life. They were not simply the Asian equivalent of European nobility, but a drastically different type of society, living off the land, perpetually on the hoof, disconcertingly egalitarian and heterogeneous.
ON THE STEPPE, where the climate was harsh, and sustenance limited,