The Travels of Marco Polo 1271–95
At the age of seventeen, Marco Polo left Venice with his father and uncle and travelled along the Silk Route to China. He did not return for seventeen years. His account of his experiences became one of the most influential books published in Europe during the Middle Ages.
The poet James Elroy Flecker had a very English vision of the Orient. He did not like the East very much, even though he served as a diplomat in both Constantinople and Beirut. He preferred his own country and the manners and habits of the Edwardian age in which he lived. But when he died, at the age of thirty from tuberculosis, he left behind some of the most beautiful verses ever written about the world beyond the Eastern Mediterranean and the ancient silk routes that took traders on their long and dangerous journeys:
What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous tales Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest, Where never more the rose of sunset pales And winds and shadows fall towards the West … … And how beguile you? Death has no repose Warmer and deeper than the Orient sand Which hides the beauty and bright faith of those Who made the Golden Journey to Samarkand.
Flecker’s poem, ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand’, written just before the First World War, created an image of the exotic that Europeans had enjoyed for centuries: hot sand, warm breezes, and the ceaseless chink of animal bells as caravans loaded with cloths, spices and precious stones picked their way along valleys and through mountain passes. The city of Samarkand, one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world, stood in a fertile river valley where travellers stopped before the last difficult climb across the mountain ranges into China. ‘It is,’ said a tenth-century Iranian writer, ‘the most fruitful of all the countries of Allah.’ This was the world that Marco Polo wrote about at the end of the thirteenth century. No wonder his account of his travels was one of the bestselling books of the Middle Ages.
An image of the exotic: hot sands, warm breezes and the ceaseless chink of animal bells as caravans picked their way along valleys and through mountain passes.
The use of the term ‘Silk Road’ came into existence in the nineteenth century just before Flecker was writing. It was used to describe the many different overland trading routes that linked the Mediterranean with China from the days of the ancient classical world until the medieval period. Some ran through central Asia, Afghanistan, Kashmir and northern India; others went through Iran and the Caucasus, sometimes passing north of the Caspian and Black Seas. A third journey started in India after the traders had reached it by sea. Silk was not the only merchandise that travelled along these trading channels, but because it was light, beautiful and easy to carry, it was always one of the most highly prized imports from the east into Europe. The Romans are believed to have first seen the splendour of silk in the banners of the Parthians who defeated them at the battle of Carrhae in Turkey in 53 BC. Pliny the Elder, who composed his observations on natural history more than a hundred years later, believed that it came from the leaves of trees that had been soaked in water.
The existence of these long commercial highways had a profound effect on the people who passed through them: ideas, technology, fashion and disease also travelled along their path. Empires grew on their back as warlords decided to exploit their commercial potential. The Khazar Empire, which became a great power in the ninth and tenth centuries, developed from the farming communities on the western shore of the Caspian Sea in what is the modern state of Dagesthan. Today it is still a place of enormous ethnic diversity whose people speak Caucasian, Turkish or Iranian languages. Religions, too, found the converts they wanted. Christianity, Islam and Judaism bred easily in this world of constant exchange, although following the death of Mohammed in 632 AD it was Islam that predominated. Inevitably there were times when trade fell away as wars and power struggles made the overland routes too dangerous. But there were also long periods of comparative peace and prosperity, the last of which coincided with the growth of the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan and his successors. His army sacked and looted Samarkand in 1220 and he then went on to establish control over a huge area of China and Central Asia. It was just after this time that Marco Polo made his famous journey.
Marco Polo went much further and stayed for far longer than anyone before.
Marco Polo was not the first European to penetrate the heart of Asia but he went much further and stayed for far longer than anyone before. Two Franciscan priests, Giovanni di Piano Carpini and Guillaume de Rubrouck, had at separate times in the middle of the thirteenth century travelled to the capital of the Mongol Khan in Karakorum as emissaries from the Pope. Guillaume de Rubrouck described his journey in great detail, recalling at one point how he decided to walk barefoot as was the custom in his order, and how his feet froze as a result. ‘The cold in these regions is most intense,’ he said. In winter the frost never thawed, ‘but with every wind it continued to freeze.’
Marco Polo came from a family of Venetian merchants. When he was six his father and uncle left Venice to set up a trading business on the Black Sea, eventually moving further north to a town on the River Volga. Here they became stranded as a war broke out between rival Mongol clans and they began a detour to the east in order to get home. They were then persuaded that the Great Khan, Kublai, who had never seen any Latin people, would like to meet them and so they went via Samarkand, Kashgar and the Gobi Desert to Kublai’s new capital, in what is today Beijing, arriving there in 1266. This was an historic moment in the history of China. Kublai, grandson of Genghis, had conquered the whole country and founded the Yuan dynasty. Three years later, in 1269, the Polo brothers arrived back in Venice carrying messages from him for the Pope. They stayed for two years before setting off for China once more, this time taking Marco with them.
They decided against the route they had used before. They sailed to the port of Acre on the coast of modern Israel – a city that had already seen one siege in the Crusaders’ attempts to gain control of the Holy Lands and would finally fall to the Saracens twenty years after the Polos were there – and then crossed Syria and Iraq, and went on through Central Asia to Balkh, in today’s northern Afghanistan. From there they crossed the Pamir Mountains, ‘the roof of the world’, where the highest peak is more than 24,500 feet high, and made their way across the Gobi Desert. Marco reported that it was said to be so long ‘that it would take a year to go across it from end to end. There is nothing at all to eat.’ Finally they arrived once more at the court of Kublai Khan. The journey had taken them three and a half years. They had travelled 5,600 miles. Even today such an expedition would be a challenging undertaking, probably impossible for an ordinary family like the Polos, because it goes through so many areas of conflict. Nearly 750 years ago it must have been momentous. Most of it ran through territory completely uncharted by Europeans. Their desire to find things of unique value, to become the traders of treasure the like of which had never been seen before, drove them on.
Their determination yielded their reward. The Polos stayed for seventeen years at the court of Kublai Khan and built up a store of gold and precious stones. Marco’s account of the time he spent there was dictated many years after he returned. Venice went to war with its rival city-state, Genoa, and Marco Polo seems to have been the captain of a galley that was captured by the Genoese. He told the story of his travels to a fellow prisoner who wrote them down and circulated them. They are the observations of a man with a keen eye for business. Describing the city of Kinsay – referring to Hangchow – he claimed that ‘the number and wealth of the merchants, and the amount of wealth that passed through their hands was so enormous that no man could form a just estimate thereof’. With obvious envy he added that they ‘live as nicely and as delicately as if they were kings and queens’. He described the produce in the markets – ‘of duck and geese an infinite quantity; for so many are bred on the Lake that for a Venice groat of silver you can have a couple of geese and two couple of ducks’ – and explained how Kublai Khan raised his revenues.