Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [86]
Like other aspects of their government, the Mongols’ welfare state was remarkably well organized. The afflicted families reported to officials appointed for this purpose. “Each shows a note of how much was given them in the past year for living, and according to that they [the officials] provide them [for] that year,” Marco explains. “They provide them also with their clothes, because the Great Khan has the tenth of all the wool and silk and hemp of which clothes can be made.” Drawing on a practice whereby all craftsmen were bound to give the khan the fruits of one day’s labor every week, he was able to distribute clothing to the needy in winter and summer.
Marco recognized that among Europeans the Mongols carried a reputation for avoiding charity in any form. “The Tartars,” he admits, “according to their customs, before they knew idol law, did no alms. When some poor man went to them they drove him away with abuse, saying to him, ‘Go with the bad year that God gave thee, for if he had loved thee as he loves me, he would have done some good.’” According to Western beliefs, the Mongols let their hungry, sick, and elderly die—at least until Kublai Khan made public assistance part of his ruling style.
Wherever Marco looked, he found striking instances of Kublai Khan’s innovative charity: “Those who wish to go to the court for the lord’s bread daily can have a hot loaf; it is refused to none, but some is given to all who go, and it is sold to none.” He estimates that twenty or thirty thousand people received their bread, as well as bowls of grain, every single day of the year. Based on this description, one can picture the Mongol indigent lining up at the distribution stations, their faces drawn with hunger, expectation, and anxiety, knowing that the loaf provided by Kublai Khan was all that stood between them and extinction. One can imagine the reverence these people felt for the beneficent ruler on whom their lives depended.
Kublai Khan reaped great loyalty for his good works. Marco asserts: “All the people are so fond of him that they worship him as God.”
DURING MARCO’S TIME in the Mongol Empire, Kublai Khan extended his charity throughout his realm. Each year, he dispatched inspectors to check the grain supply. If an inspector should discover that rain, wind, caterpillars, locusts, or some other calamity has ravaged the crop, “he does not take the tax from them…for that season or that year, but he gives them his own corn from his granaries—as much as they need, that they may have it to sow and eat that year.” In the winter, Kublai Khan “has inquiry made, and if he finds in some province a man whose animals are dead…, he has some of his own animals, which he has from the tithe of other provinces, given to him and sold to him cheaply and has him helped, and has no tax taken from him that year.”
Nor did Kublai Khan’s beneficence end with this gesture. On the largely treeless Steppe inhabited by Mongols and Chinese alike, lightning posed a constant hazard against which there was little defense. “If by accident lightning strikes some flock of ewes or sheep or other animals of whatever kind,” Marco says, “be the flock as large as you like, the Great Khan would not exact tithe for three years. And equally if it happens that lightning