Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [88]
They served as a backdrop for the singular spectacle of Kublai Khan presiding over his court. At feasts, “a great lion is brought before the great lord. As soon as he sees him, the lion throws himself down lying before him and makes signs of great humility, and seems to know him for lord. He is so tame that he stays thus before him, with no chain, lying quietly at the king’s feet like a dog”—a sight that, Marco concedes, “makes one wonder.”
THE PRONE LION before the khan reminded Marco of Kublai’s immense appetite for hunting game in Cambulac during the clear, cold, dry winter months. According to custom, Marco notes, any game caught during this period, “wild-boar and stags and bucks and roe-deer and bears, lions, and other sorts of large wild beasts [must] be brought to him.” These came in the form of entrails displayed on carts, as if to whet Kublai’s appetite for the hunt, for he preferred to conduct his own hunting, employing leopards and lynxes “all trained to beast catching and…very good at the chase.” Marco explains that the Great Khan relied on a “little dog for companion” during these exercises. For safety’s sake, the lions were caged “because they would be too ferocious and ravening in the case of the beasts, nor could they be held. And it is necessary that they should be carried against the wind, because if the animals should perceive the scent, they would flee at once.”
TWO BROTHERS, Bayan and Mingan, served as the khan’s royal dog handlers (“called cuiucci in the Tartar tongue, which means ‘master of the hunt’”), who maintained mastiffs, retrievers, and greyhounds. Each brother commanded an army of ten thousand men devoted solely to the khan’s dogs, the handlers serving one brother dressed in red, and those serving the other in sky blue. “They are very great multitudes,” Marco states. “One of these brothers, with his ten thousand men of one color, and with five thousand dogs (for there are a few who have not dogs), goes on one side of him to the right hand, and the other brother with his own ten thousand of the other color and with their dogs goes on the other side, to the left of him.”
The brothers had to perform to high standards, because, as Marco explains, they were “bound by contract to give to the court of the Great Khan every day beginning from the month of October until the…month of March a thousand head between beasts and birds, excepting quails.” The requirement kept them busy nearly around the clock, and when March arrived, they fell into a profound stupor to recuperate.
KUBLAI KHAN himself hunted on an equally grand scale, accompanied by “ten thousand falconers” and “five hundred gerfalcons, and peregrine falcons and saker falcons and other kinds of birds in very great abundance,” in addition to “goshawks in great quantity to catch birds on rivers.” His falconers were well trained and well equipped for the hunt, so as to reflect well on their lord and master.
Birds belonging to Kublai Khan carried a “little tablet of silver tied to their feet for recognition.” If a bird strayed, it was immediately returned to its master, and the same rigorous policy applied to all the other paraphernalia of the hunt, horses and swords and other equipment. Anyone who found a misplaced item was “held for a thief” unless he promptly returned it to its rightful owner—in most cases a baron. According to Marco, the system, reinforced by drastic penalties, worked efficiently: “No things can be lost that are not soon found and returned.”
Lesser citizens of the Mongol realm were not entitled to own or hunt with birds of prey: “No merchant nor any craftsman nor any citizen or villager nor any person, whoever he might be, dares keep any goshawk, falcon, nor hawking bird nor hunting dog for his pleasure through [out] all the domain of the Great Khan.” Even Mongol barons and knights had to observe limitations set down by the khan. None “dares to hunt or hawk