Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [94]
At the time of Marco Polo’s stay, silk was just beginning to be produced in Italy, more than four thousand years after sericulture appeared in China. During the Second Crusade (1144–1149), two thousand silk weavers had migrated from Constantinople to Europe, and they disseminated trade secrets the Chinese had guarded for millennia. But for young Marco, silk remained an exotic novelty still identified with China.
THE JOURNEY continued to be idyllic until Marco came to a “province much wasted and destroyed,” as he bluntly states, “by the scourge of the Tartars”: Tibet. At this point in his travels, Marco had passed beyond the limits of European experience with Asia, and that is why it is occasionally difficult to determine the modern equivalents for the kingdoms and people he says he encountered. His trip to “Tibet” probably took him to the province of Yunnan in southern China, as well as to Burma, Vietnam, and vaguely defined regions to the north.
“Tibet” both fascinated and repelled Marco. As a merchant, he was intrigued with the spices—ginger and cinnamon, and still others he had never before seen, and failed to name—all growing in abundance. Amber appeared ubiquitous. Silk abounded. Coral, another medium of exchange, caught his attention, too. The locals, he says, “put it on the necks of all their wives and of their idols and hold it for a great jewel.”
The region’s anarchy and rampant superstition troubled Marco greatly, but he found himself succumbing to the spell cast by the powerful astrologer-magicians. He reports: “They do the most rare enchantments in the world, and the greatest marvels to hear and see, and all by devils’ art, which is not good to tell in our book, because the people would be too much surprised.” Once he has whetted his audience’s appetite, Marco proceeds to tell exactly what these demonic astrologers were capable of doing. “They bring on tempests and lightning and thunderbolts whenever they wish and compel them whenever [they wish them] to cease, and do infinite wonders.”
Returning to a subject that both fascinated and repelled him, Marco dramatizes in frightening detail the elaborate manner in which the conjurers attempted to exorcise the vulnerable sick: “When the magicians arrive, they ask about the manner of the sickness; then the sick persons tell them their ills, and the magicians begin to sound their instruments and to dance and leap until one of the magicians falls all on his back on the ground or on the pavement and foams at the mouth and seems dead. They say that the devil is inside his body, and he stays in such a manner that he seems dead. When the other magicians, of whom there were many, see that one of them is fallen in such a way as you have heard, they begin to speak to him and ask him what sickness this sick man has, and why he has it. One answers, ‘Such a spirit has smitten him because he did him some displeasure.’
“The other magicians say to him, ‘We pray thee that thou pardon him and that thou take from him for the restoration of his health those things that thou wishes to have.’”
Marco fearlessly probes the ecstatic spiritual life of these “Tibetans”: “When these magicians have said many words and have prayed, the spirit who is in the body of the magician who has fallen down answers. If it seems the sick man must die, he…says, ‘This sick man has done so much wrong to such a spirit and is so bad a man that the spirit will not be pacified by any sacrifice or pardon him for anything in the world.’ This is the answer for those who must die.
“If the sick man must be healed, then the spirit in the body of the magician says, ‘He has offended much, yet it shall be forgiven him. If the sick man wishes to be healed, let him take two or three sheep, and let him also make ten drinks or more, very dear and good.’…They have the sheep cooked in the house of the sick man, and, if the sick man is to live, so many of these magicians and so many of those ladies…come there. When they are