Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [99]
The hunters risk their lives, Marco explains, for the animals’ medicinal value: “When they have taken it, skinning it immediately, they draw the gall from the belly and sell it very dear. It is much prized because great medicine is made of it, for if a man is bitten by a mad dog, and one gives him a little…to drink in wine,…he is healed immediately. And again, when a lady cannot give birth and has pain and cries aloud, then they give her a little of that serpent’s gall in drink, and then the lady gives birth immediately…. The third virtue is that when one has any eruption like a boil or other worse thing that grows upon the body, then one puts a little of this gall on it, and it is healed in a few days.”
No matter how grotesque the crocodile’s appearance, its meat was prized as a delicacy. “They sell the flesh of this serpent because it is very good to eat and they eat it very gladly,” Marco reports. And the reptile even helped, in its awful way, to protect humans from other predators by devouring the newborn cubs of wolves, lions, and bears “while their parents cannot defend them.”
Through arduous study, Marco came to realize that the crocodile, for all its ferocity, could be an unexpected ally in the daily struggle for survival.
AS AN EMISSARY of Kublai Khan, Marco familiarized himself with the Mongols’ bloody attempts to subdue Karagian. The region was home to various tribes far removed from the refinements of Chinese civilization. Despite their very distinct and insular character, the tribes acknowledged arm’s-length Chinese rule during the Qin (221–206 BC) and Han dynasties, but ultimate power remained in local hands, with tribal chieftains, who lived by their own codes. Chinese inhabitants were few and far between, obvious outsiders in the province.
By the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907), a kingdom known as Nanzhao had emerged as the dominant political and cultural power in the area, and it unified the disparate warlords, bringing a measure of sophistication to this otherwise primitive area. At its peak, just before Marco’s arrival, Nanzhao sheltered artisans who produced elegant fabrics woven from cotton and silk. The kingdom also provided salt—perhaps Marco’s reason for visiting in his capacity as a tax assessor—as well as gold. For a time, China’s policies encouraged Nanzhao to prosper, in part as a buffer against aggressive tribes in neighboring areas, but during the Song dynasty (960–1279), Chinese power declined. By the time Marco presented himself at the Mongol court, Kublai Khan was determined to bring this distant kingdom into line with a strenuously applied Pax Mongolica, but the tenacity of Nanzhao’s warlords promised to make doing so a very difficult task, with the prospect of only partial success.
Although Marco says the inevitable combat occurred in 1272, the date is incorrect, the result either of a faulty manuscript or of his own flawed attempt to convert it from the Mongol lunar calendar to the European Julian system. According to reliable Chinese sources, the events occurred in 1277, just before Marco arrived in the region. In any case, when he came on the scene, memories of the spectacular carnage were still fresh, and it seemed as if the neighing of horses and the thrumming of arrows had only just subsided.
As Marco learned, Kublai Khan’s pacification of the region came at the cost of a series of bloody and spectacular battles. In this varied, often mountainous terrain, the Mongols were out of their element, and they relied on local mercenaries for support. Their forces met with fierce resistance from a local warlord, whom Marco calls the king of Mien—that is, Myanmar, or Burma—and Bengal. This warlord, determined to repel Kublai Khan’s forces, vowed to “put them all to death in such a way that the Great Khan shall never wish to send another army against him.”
IN PREPARATION for battle, the king of Mien and Bengal assembled a force of two thousand “very large” elephants “well armed and prepared for war.” Each carried a “castle