Chapter III: Marco Polo (1)

A VENETIAN TRAVELLER OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

Et por ce, veul ie que un et autre sachent a tos iors mais les euvres des Veneciens, et qui il furent, et dont il vindrent, et qui il sont, et comment il firent la noble Cite que l'en apele Venise, qui est orendroit la plus bele dou siecle.... La place de Monseignor Saint Marc est orendroit la plus bele place qui soit en tot li monde; que de vers li soleil levant est la plus bele yglise qui soit el monde, c'est l'Yglise de Monseignor Saint Marc. Et de les cele Yglise est li paleis de Monseignor li Dus, grant e biaus a mervoilles.

--MARTINO DA CANALE

And Kinsai [Hangchow] is the greatest city in the whole world, so great indeed that I should scarcely venture to tell of it, but that I have met at Venice people in plenty who have been there.... And if anyone should desire to tell of all the vastness and great marvels of this city, a good quire of paper would not hold the matter, I trow. For 'tis the greatest and noblest city, and the finest for merchandise, that the whole world containeth.

--ODORIC OF PORDENONE

Let us go back in mind--as would that we could go back in body--to the year 1268. It is a year which makes no great stir in the history books, but it will serve us well. In those days, as in our own, Venice lay upon her lagoons, a city (as Cassiodurus long ago saw her[B]) like a sea-bird's nest afloat on the shallow waves, a city like a ship, moored to the land but only at home upon the seas, the proudest city in all the Western world. For only consider her position. Lying at the head of the Adriatic, half-way between East and West, on the one great sea thoroughfare of medieval commerce, a Mediterranean seaport, yet set so far north that she was almost in the heart of Europe, Venice gathered into her harbour all the trade routes overland and overseas, on which pack-horses could travel or ships sail. Merchants bringing silk and spices, camphor and ivory, pearls and scents and carpets from the Levant and from the hot lands beyond it, all came to port in Venice. For whether they came by way of Egypt sailing between the low banks of the Nile and jolting on camels to Alexandria, or whether they came through the rich and pleasant land of Persia and the Syrian desert to Antioch and Tyre, or whether they slowly pushed their way in a long, thin caravan across the highlands of Central Asia, and south of the Caspian Sea to Trebizond, and so sailed through the Black Sea and the Dardanelles, Venice was their natural focus. Only Constantinople might have rivalled her, and Constantinople she conquered. To Venice, therefore, as if drawn by a magnet, came the spoils of the East, and from Venice they went by horse across the Alps by the Brenner and St Gothard passes to Germany and France, or in galleys by way of the Straits of Gibraltar to England and Flanders;[1] and the galleys and pack-horses came back again to Venice, laden with the metals of Germany, the furs of Scandinavia, the fine wools of England, the cloth of Flanders, and the wine of France.

[Footnote B: 'Hic vobis, aquatilium avium more, domus est.']

But if geography gave Venice an unrivalled site, the Venetians did the rest. Through all the early years of their history they defied Constantinople to the east of them, and Pope and Holy Roman Emperor to the west; sometimes turning to one, sometimes to the other, but stubbornly bent all the while upon independence, replying, when invited to become subjects: 'God, Who is our help and protector has saved us to dwell upon these waters. This Venice, which we have raised in the lagoons, is our mighty habitation, no power of emperor or of prince can touch us'; apt, if threatened, to retire to their islands and derisively to fire cannon balls of bread into the mainland force, which sought to starve them out.[2] Always they were conscious that their future lay upon the waters, and in that East, whose colour had crept into their civilization and warmed their blood. They were eastern and western both, the Venetians, hot hearts for loving and conquering, icy heads for scheming and ruling. Bit by bit they secured the ring of mainland behind them, all the while keeping at bay the Saracen and Slav sea rovers, whose ships were the terror of the Mediterranean. Then they descended upon the pirates of Dalmatia, who thus harassed their trading vessels, and took all the Dalmatian coast. The Doge of Venice became Duke of Dalmatia. 'True it is,' says their chronicles, 'that the Adriatic Sea is in the duchy of Venice,'[3] and they called it the 'Gulf of Venice'. Now it was that there was first instituted the magnificent symbolical ceremony of wedding the sea, with the proud words 'Desponsamus te mare in signum veri perpetuique domini'![4]

She was a maiden city, bright and free, No guile seduced, no force could violate, And when she took unto herself a mate She must espouse the everlasting sea.

And truly it seemed as though the very sea had sworn to honour and obey her.

Then came the Crusades, when Europe forgot its differences and threw itself upon the paynim who held the holy places of its faith, when men from all lands marched behind the banner of the Cross and the towers of Jerusalem were more real than the Tower of Babel. Now, at last, Venice saw her dream within her hand. It was Venice who provided galleys and Venice who provided convoys and commissariat and soldiers, at a good round sum; and when time came for the division of the spoil, Venice demanded in every captured town of Palestine and Syria a church, a counting-house and the right to trade without tolls. Her great chance came in the Fourth Crusade, when her old blind Doge Enrico Dandolo (whose blindness had the Nelson touch) upon the pretext that the Crusaders could not pay the transport fees agreed upon, turned the whole Crusade to the use of Venice, and conquered first Zara, which had dared to revolt from her, and then her ancient--her only--rival, the immortal Byzantium itself. It is true that the Pope excommunicated the Venetians when they first turned the armies against Zara, but what matter? They looted Constantinople and brought back the four great gilded horses to St Mark's--St Mark's, which has been compared to a robbers' cave crowded with the booty of the Levant, and which held the sacred body of the saint, stolen from Alexandria by the Venetians, nearly four centuries before, concealed in a tub of pickled pork, in order to elude the Moslems. A Venetian patriarch now said Mass in St Sophia. Venice received the proud title of 'Ruler of a half and a quarter of the Roman Empire,' ('quartæ partis et dimidiæ totius imperii Romaniæ'--the words have a ring of trumpets), and the Doge, buskined in scarlet like the ancient Roman emperors, now ruled supreme over four seas--the Adriatic, the Aegean, the Sea of Marmora, and the Black Sea. Venetian factories studded all the Levantine coasts, in Tripoli and Tyre, Salonica, Adrianople, and Constantinople, in Trebizond on the Black Sea, even at Caffa in the far Crimea, whence ran the mysterious road into Russia. Crete and Rhodes and Cyprus were hers; her galleys swept the pirates from the seas and brooked no rivals; all trade with the East must pass through Venice, and Venice only. The other trading cities of Italy struggled against her, and Genoa came near to rivalling her, but in 1258, and again in 1284, she utterly defeated the Genoese fleet. Not for the city of 'sea without fish, mountains without woods, men without faith, and women without shame' was it to bit the horses on St Mark's.[5] In 1268 Venice seemed supreme. Byzantium was her washpot and over the Levant she had cast her shoe. Truly her chronicler might write of her:

Dalmatia, Albania, Rumania, Greece, Trebizond, Syria, Armenia, Egypt, Cyprus, Candia, Apulia, Sicily, and other countries, kingdoms and islands were the fruitful gardens, the proud castles of our people, where they found again pleasure, profit, and security.... The Venetians went about the sea, here and there and across the sea, and in all places wheresoever water runs, and bought merchandise and brought it to Venice from every side. Then there came to Venice Germans and Bavarians, French and Lombards, Tuscans and Hungarians, and every people that lives by merchandise and they took it to their countries.

Small wonder that (as a later traveller observed) the Venetians were proud of their great rule, and when a son was born to a Venetian were wont to say among themselves, 'A Signor is born into the world.'

Is it not true to say that Venice was the proudest city on earth, _la noble cite que l'en apele Venise, qui est orendroit la plus bele dou siecle_?[6] Life was a fair and splendid thing for those merchant princes, who held the gorgeous East in fee in the year of grace 1268. In that year traders in great stone counting-houses, lapped by the waters of the canals, were checking, book in hand, their sacks of cloves, mace and nutmegs, cinnamon and ginger from the Indies, ebony chessmen from Indo China, ambergris from Madagascar, and musk from Tibet. In that year the dealers in jewels were setting prices upon diamonds from Golconda, rubies and lapis lazuli from Badakhshan, and pearls from the fisheries of Ceylon; and the silk merchants were stacking up bales of silk and muslin and brocade from Bagdad and Yezd and Malabar and China. In that year young gallants on the Rialto (scented gallants, but each, like Shakespeare's Antonio, with a ship venturing into port somewhere in the Levant) rubbed elbows with men of all nations, heard travellers' tales of all lands, and at dawn slipped along the canals in gondolas (not black in those days, but painted and hung with silk), saluting the morning with songs; and the red-haired ladies of Venice whom centuries later Titian loved to paint, went trailing up and down the marble steps of their palaces, with all the brocades of Persia on their backs and all the perfumes of Arabia to sweeten their little hands.

It was in that year, too, that one Martino da Canale, a clerk in the customs house, began to busy himself (like Chaucer after him) less with his accounts than with writing in the delectable French language ('por ce que lengue franceise cort parmi le monde, et est la plus delitable a lire et a oir que nule autre') a chronicle of Venice. It is of the water, watery, Canale's chronicle, like Ariel's dirge; he has indeed, 'that intenseness of feeling which seems to resolve itself into the elements which it contemplates.' Here is nothing indeed, of 'the surge and thunder of the Odyssey', but the lovely words sparkle like the sun on the waters of the Mediterranean, and like a refrain, singing itself in and out of the narrative, the phrase recurs, 'Li tens estoit clers et biaus ... et lors quant il furent en mer, li mariniers drecerent les voiles au vent, et lesserent core a ploine voiles les mes parmi la mer a la force dou vent';[7] for so much of the history of Venice was enacted upon deck. It is a passing proud chronicle, too, for Canale was, and well he knew it, a citizen of no mean city.

'Now would I,' he says, 'that every one and all know for ever
the works of the Venetians, who they were and whence they
came and what they are, and how they made the noble city
which is called Venice, which is this day the fairest in the
world. And I would that all those who are now living and
those who are to come know how the noble city is builded and
how all good things abound in her, and how the sire of the
Venetians, the noble Doge, is powerful, and what nobility is
found therein and the prowess of the Venetian people, and how
they are all perfect in the faith of Jesu Christ and obedient
to holy Church, and how they never disobey the commandment of
holy Church. Within this noble Venice there dares to dwell
neither heretic, nor usurer, murderer, thief nor robber. And
I will tell you the names of all the Doges that have been in
Venice, one after the other, and what they did to the honour
of holy Church and of their noble City. And I will tell you
the names of the noble captains whom the noble Doges sent in
their time to lay low their enemies, and concerning the
victories that they won I will have you know, for it is
fitting.... In the year of the incarnation of our Lord Jesu
Christ MCCLXVII years, in the time of Milord Renier Zeno, the
high Doge of Venice, I laboured and strove until I found the
ancient history of the Venetians, whence they came first and
how they builded the noble city called Venice, which is today
the fairest and the pleasantest in the world, full of beauty
and of all good things. Merchandise flows through this noble
city even as water flows from the fountains, and the salt
water runs through it and round it and in all places save in
the houses and the streets; and when the citizens go abroad
they can return to their houses by land or by water, as they
will. From all parts there come merchandise and merchants,
who buy merchandise as they will and take it back to their
own countries. Within this town is found food in great
plenty, bread and wine, land fowl and river fowl, fresh meat
and salt, and sea fish and river fish.... You may find within
this fair town many men of gentle birth, both old men and
young _damoisaus_ in plenty, and merchants with them, who buy
and sell, and money changers and citizens of all crafts, and
therewith mariners of all sorts, and ships to carry them to
all lands and galleys to lay low their enemies. And in this
fair town is also great plenty of ladies and damsels and
maidens, very richly apparelled.'[8]

It happened that there was a new Doge that year, our year
1268, Lorenzo Tiepolo by name, and a great procession of the
gilds took place before the palace on the Piazza of St Mark
to welcome his accession. Martino da Canale was watching it
and wrote it all down in his chronicle. First came the navy
sailing past in the harbour, fifty galleys and other ships,
with their crews cheering and shouting on deck. Then came the
gilds on foot: first the master smiths, with garlands on
their heads and banners and trumpets; then the furriers
apparelled in samite and scarlet silk, with mantles of ermine
and vair; then the weavers richly bedight, and the ten master
tailors in white with crimson stars. Then the master
clothworkers passed, carrying boughs of olive and wearing
crowns of olive on their heads; then the fustian makers in
furred robes of their own weaving, and the quilt makers with
garlands of gilt beads and white cloaks sewn with
fleurs-de-lis, marching two by two, with little children
singing _chansonettes_ and _cobles_ before them. Then came
the makers of cloth of gold, all in cloth of gold, and their
servants in cloth of gold or of purple, followed by the
mercers in silk and the butchers in scarlet, the fish sellers
robed and furred and garlanded, and the master barbers,
having with them two riders attired as knights-errant, and
four captive damsels, strangely garbed. Then came the
glass-workers in scarlet furred with vair, and gold-fringed
hoods, and rich garlands of pearls, carrying flasks and
goblets of the famous Venetian glass before them, and the
comb and lantern makers, with a lantern full of birds to let
loose in the Doge's presence, and the goldsmiths wearing
wreaths and necklaces of gold and silver beads and sapphires,
emeralds, diamonds, topazes, jacinths, amethysts, rubies,
jasper, and carbuncles. Master and servants alike were
sumptuously clad, and almost all wore gold fringes on their
hoods, and garlands of gilded beads. Each craft was
accompanied by its band of divers instruments, and bore with
it silver cups and flagons of wine, and all marched in fair
order, singing ballads and songs of greeting, and saluted the
Doge and Dogaressa in turn, crying 'Long live our lord, the
noble Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo!' Gild after gild they marched in
their splendour, lovely alike to ear and eye; and a week fled
before the rejoicings were ended and all had passed in
procession. Canale surpasses himself here, for he loved State
ceremonies; he gives a paragraph to the advance of each gild,
its salutation and withdrawal, and the cumulative effect of
all the paragraphs is enchanting, like a prose ballade, with
a repeated refrain at the end of every verse.[9]

What, they lived once thus in Venice, where the merchants were the kings, Where St Mark's is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings?

Listening to the magnificent salutation of the Doge by the
priests of St Mark's, 'Criste, vince, Criste regne, Criste
inpere. Notre signor Laurens Teuples, Des gracie, inclit Dus
de Venise, Dalmace atque Groace, et dominator de la quarte
partie et demi de tot l'enmire de Romanie, sauvement, honor,
vie, et victoire. Saint Marc, tu le aie,'[10] who, hearing,
could have doubted that Venice, defier of Rome and conqueror
of Constantinople, was the finest, richest, most beautiful,
and most powerful city in the world?

But was she? Listen and judge. Thousands of miles away from
Venice, across the lands and seas of Asia, a little south of
the Yangtze River and close to the sea stood the city of
Kinsai or Hangchow, the capital of the Sung emperors, who
ruled Southern China, not yet (in 1268) conquered by the
Tartars.[11] Like Venice, Kinsai stood upon lagoons of water
and was intersected by innumerable canals. It was a hundred
miles in circuit, not counting the suburbs which stretched
round it, and there was not a span of ground which was not
well peopled. It had twelve great gates, and each of the
twelve quarters which lay within the gates was greater than
the whole of Venice. Its main street was two hundred feet
wide, and ran from end to end of the city, broken every four
miles by a great square, lined with houses, gardens, palaces,
and the shops of the artisans, who were ruled by its twelve
great craft gilds. Parallel with the main street was the
chief canal, beside which stood the stone warehouses of the
merchants who traded with India. Twelve thousand stone
bridges spanned its waterways, and those over the principal
canals were high enough to allow ships with their tapering
masts to pass below, while the carts and horses passed
overhead. In its market-places men chaffered for game and
peaches, sea-fish, and wine made of rice and spices; and in
the lower part of the surrounding houses were shops, where
spices and drugs and silk, pearls and every sort of
manufactured article were sold. Up and down the streets of
Kinsai moved lords and merchants clad in silk, and the most
beautiful ladies in the world swayed languidly past in
embroidered litters, with jade pins in their black hair and
jewelled earrings swinging against their smooth cheeks.[12]

On one side of this city lay a beautiful lake (famous in
Chinese history, and still one of the fairest prospects upon
earth), studded with wooded islands, on which stood pavilions
with charming names: 'Lake Prospect', 'Bamboo Chambers', 'The
House of the Eight Genii', and 'Pure Delight'. Here, like the
Venetians, the men of Kinsai came for pleasure parties in
barges, nobly hung and furnished, the cabins painted with
flowers and mountain landscapes, and looking out they saw on
one side the whole expanse of the city, its palaces, temples,
convents, and gardens, and on the other the stretch of clear
water, crowded with coloured pleasure boats, over which came
echoing the high, clear voices and the tinkling instruments
of the revellers. There is no space in which to tell of the
King's palace, with its gardens and orchards, its painted
pavilions, and the groves where the palace ladies coursed the
game with dogs, and, tired of the pastime, flung off their
robes and ran to the lake, where they disported themselves
like a shoal of silver fishes. But a word must be said of the
junks, which came sailing into the harbour four and twenty
miles away, and up the river to the city; and of the great
concourse of ships which came to Zaiton (perhaps the modern
Amoy), the port of the province. Here every year came a
hundred times more pepper than came to the whole of
Christendom through the Levantine ports. Here from Indo China
and the Indies came spices and aloes and sandalwood, nutmegs,
spikenard and ebony, and riches beyond mention. Big junks
laded these things, together with musk from Tibet, and bales
of silk from all the cities of Mansi[C], and sailed away in
and out of the East India Archipelago, with its spice-laden
breezes billowing their sails, to Ceylon. There merchants
from Malabar and the great trading cities of southern India
took aboard their cargoes and sold them in turn to Arab
merchants, who in their turn sold them to the Venetians in
one or other of the Levantine ports. Europeans who saw Zaiton
and the other Chinese seaports in after years were wont to
say that no one, not even a Venetian, could picture to
himself the multitude of trading vessels which sailed upon
those eastern seas and crowded into those Chinese harbours.
They said also with one accord that Kinsai was without doubt
the finest and richest and noblest city in the world. To the
men of Kinsai, Venice would have been a little suburb and the
Levant a backyard. The whole of the east was their trading
field, and their wealth and civilization were already old
when Venice was a handful of mud huts peopled by fishermen.

[Footnote C: Mansi or Manji was southern China and Cathay was
northern China, the boundary between them lying along the
River Hoang-Ho on the east and the southern boundary of
Shensi on the west.]

Nor was Kinsai alone and unmatched in all its wonder and
beauty, for a three days' journey from it stood Sugui, which
today we call Suchow, lying also on the great canal, with its
circumference of twenty miles, its prodigious multitudes
swarming the streets, its physicians, philosophers, and
magicians; Sugui, with the ginger which was so common that
forty pounds of it might be bought for the price of a
Venetian silver groat, the silk which was manufactured in
such vast quantities that all the citizens were dressed in it
and still ships laden with it sailed away; Sugui under whose
jurisdiction were sixteen wealthy cities, where trade and the
arts flourished. If you had not seen Hangchow, you would have
said that there was no city in the world, not Venice nor
Constantinople nor another worthy to be named in the same
breath with Sugui. The Chinese indeed, seeing the riches and
beauty of these two cities, doubted whether even the pleasant
courts of heaven could show their equal and proudly quoted
the proverb:

_Shang yeu t'ien t'ang, Hia yeu Su Hang_.

(There's Paradise above, 'tis true, But here below we've Hang and Su.)[13]

Kinsai seems far enough away in all conscience from Venice in
the year 1268, and Venice was all unwitting of its existence,
far beyond the sunrise. Yet there was in the city of the
lagoons that year, watching the same procession of the gilds
which Canale watched, a boy who was destined to link them for
ever in the minds of men--a lean lad of fourteen, Marco Polo
by name, who was always kicking his heels on the quay and
bothering foreign sailors for tales of distant lands. He
heard all they had to tell him very willingly, storing it up
in that active brain of his, for his curiosity was
insatiable; but always the tales that he heard most willingly
were about the Tartars.

At this time the Tartars were at the height of their power in
the West and the East. Tartars ruled at Peking all over
northern China, Corea, Mongolia, Manchuria, and Tibet, and
took tribute from Indo-China and Java. Tartars were spread
over central Asia, holding sway in Turkestan and Afghanistan.
The Golden Horde ruled the Caucasus, a large part of Russia,
and a piece of Siberia. Tartars held sway in Persia, Georgia,
Armenia, and a part of Asia Minor. When the great Mangu Khan
died in 1259, one empire lay spread across Asia and Europe,
from the Yellow River to the Danube. There had been nothing
like it in the world before, and there was nothing like it
again, until the Russian Empire of modern times. By 1268 it
was beginning to split up into the four kingdoms of China,
central Asia, Russia, and Persia, but still it was one
people. Now, the attitude of the West to the Tartars at this
time was very interesting. At first it feared them as a new
scourge of God, like Attila and his Huns; they overran
Poland, ravaged Hungary, and seemed about to break like a
great flood upon the West, and overwhelm it utterly. Then the
tide rolled back. Gradually the West lost its first
stupefaction and terror and began to look hopefully towards
the Tartars as a possible ally against its age-old foe, the
Moslem. The Christians of the West knew that the Tartars had
laid the Moslem power low through the length and breadth of
Asia, and they knew too, that the Tartars had no very sharply
defined faith and were curious of all beliefs that came their
way. Gradually the West became convinced that the Tartars
might be converted to Christianity, and fight side by side
beneath the Cross against the hated Crescent. There grew up
the strange legend of Prester John, a Christian priest-king,
ruling somewhere in the heart of Asia; and indeed little
groups of Nestorian Christians did still survive in eastern
Asia at this time.[14] Embassies began to pass between Tartar
khans and western monarchs, and there began also a great
series of missions of Franciscan friars to Tartary, men who
were ethnologists and geographers at heart as well as
missionaries, and have left us priceless accounts of the
lands which they visited. In the year of grace 1268, much
was known about central Asia, for in 1245 the Pope had sent
the Italian friar John of Plano Carpini thither, and in 1251
another friar, William of Rubruck, a French Fleming, had been
sent by the saintly Louis, King of France. Both got as far as
Karakorum, the Tartar camp on the borders of northern China,
though they did not enter China itself. They had brought back
innumerable stories about the nomad conquerors, who carried
their tents on carts, and drank fermented mares' milk, about
the greatness of the khan and his welcome to the strangers
from the West, and the interest with which he listened to
their preaching.[15] These tales were common property now,
and Marco Polo must have listened to them.

Marco Polo was always talking of the Tartars, always asking
about them. Indeed, he had reason to be interested in them.
This (as we have said) was the year of grace 1268, and eight
years before (some, indeed, say fifteen years) his father,
Nicolo Polo, and his uncle Maffeo had vanished into Tartary.
They were rich merchants, trading with their own ship to
Constantinople, and there they had decided to go on a
commercial venture into the lands of the Golden Horde, which
lay to the north of the Black Sea. So they had sailed over to
the Crimea, where they had a counting-house at Soldaia, and
taking with them a store of costly jewels, for they were
jewel merchants, they had set off on horseback to visit the
Khan of the West Tartars. So much the Venetians knew, for
word had come back from Soldaia of their venture; but they
had never returned. And so Marco, kicking his heels upon the
quay, caught sailor-men by the sleeve and asked them about
those wild horsemen with their mares' milk and their
magicians and their droves of cattle; and as he asked he
wondered about his father and his uncle, and whether they
were dead and lost for ever in the wilds of Tartary. But even
while he asked and wondered and kicked his heels on the quay,
while the Doge Tiepolo was watching the procession of the
gilds and the clerk Canale was adding up customs dues or
writing the ancient history of the Venetians, at that very
moment the two Polos were slowly and wearily making their way
across the heights of central Asia with a caravan of mules
and camels, drawing near to golden Samarcand with its teeming
bazaars, coming nearer and nearer to the West; and in the
following year, 1269, they reached Acre, and took ship there
for Venice, and so at last came home.

They had a strange story to tell, stranger and better than
anything the lean, inquisitive boy had heard upon the quays.
They had soon disposed of their jewels and they had spent a
year at the camp of the Khan of the Golden Horde of Kipchak
on the mighty River Volga. Then war broke out between that
ruler and the Khan who ruled the Persian Khanate, and it cut
off their way back. But Marco's curiosity was inherited; and
no Venetian was ever averse to seeing strange lands and
seeking out new opportunities for trade; so the Polos decided
to go on and visit the Khan of central Asia or Chagatai, and
perhaps make their way back to Constantinople by some
unfrequented route. They struggled over plains peopled only
by tent-dwelling Tartars and their herds, until at last they
reached the noble city of Bokhara. They must have followed
the line of the Oxus River, and if we reverse the marvellous
description which Matthew Arnold wrote of that river's course
in _Sohrab and Rustum_, we shall have a picture of the
Polos' journey:

But the majestic River floated on, Out of the mist and hum of that low land, Into the frosty starlight, and there moved, Rejoicing, through the hush'd Chorasmian waste Under the solitary moon; he flow'd Right for the Polar Star, past Orgunjè, Brimming and bright and large: then sands begin To hem his watery march, and dam his streams, And split his currents; that for many a league The shorn and parcell'd Oxus strains along Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles-- Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had In his high mountain cradle in Pamere, A foil'd circuitous wanderer:--till at last The long'd-for dash of waves is heard, and wide His luminous home of waters opens, bright And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars Emerge and shine upon the Aral Sea.

For three years the Polos remained at Bokhara, until one day
it happened that an embassy came to the city, on its way back
from the khan in Persia to the great Khan Kublai, who ruled
in far-off China, and to whom all the Tartar rulers owed
allegiance. The chief ambassador was struck with the talents
and charm of the brothers, who had now become proficient in
the Tartar language, and persuaded them to accompany him on
his journey to the presence of the Great Khan, who had never
yet set eyes on a man of the West, and would, he assured
them, receive them honourably. They would not have been
Venetians had they refused such an opportunity, and, taking
their Venetian servants with them, they journeyed for a year
with the Tartar embassy across the heart of Asia, and so
reached the great Kublai Khan. Many years later Marco himself
described their reception, as they had told it to him:

Being introduced to the presence of the Grand Khan Kublai,
the travellers were received by him with the condescension
and affability that belonged to his character, and as they
were the first Latins who had made their appearance in that
country, they were entertained with feasts and honoured with
other marks of distinction. Entering graciously into
conversations with them, he made earnest inquiries on the
subject of the western parts of the world, of the Emperor of
the Romans, and of other Christian kings and princes ... and
above all he questioned them particularly respecting the
Pope, the affairs of the Church, and the religious worship
and doctrine of the Christians. Being well instructed and
discreet men, they gave appropriate answers upon all these
points, and as they were perfectly acquainted with the Tartar
language, they expressed themselves always in becoming terms;
insomuch that the Grand Khan, holding them in high
estimation, frequently commanded their attendance.[16]

The Great Khan finally decided to send these two intelligent strangers back to their own land on a mission from himself to the Pope, asking for a hundred men of learning to be sent to teach and preach to his Tartars, and for some holy oil from the lamp which burned over Christ's sepulchre in Jerusalem. He provided them with a golden tablet of honour, which acted as a passport and secured that they should be entertained and their journey facilitated from city to city in all his dominions, and so they set forth once more upon their homeward journey, But they were delayed by the dangers and difficulties of travel, 'the extreme cold, the snow, the ice, and the flooding of the rivers', and it was three years before they at last reached Acre in the April of 1269, and finding that the Pope had died the year before, and that no election had yet been made, so that they could not immediately accomplish their mission, they decided to visit their home again, and so went back to Venice. There Nicolo found that his wife, who had been with child at his departure, was dead, leaving behind her a son Marco, our young haunter of quays.

This was the marvellous tale which the same Marco drank in from the lips of his new-found father and uncle. But more marvels were to come. For two years the Venetians remained at home, awaiting the election of a Pope in order to deliver the Great Khan's letters; but no election was made, and at last, fearing that Kublai might suspect them of playing him false, they decided to return to the East, and this time they took with them Marco, now a well-grown lad of sixteen or seventeen years with a bright eye that looked everywhere and took in everything, observant and sober beyond his age. But when they got as far as Ayas on the Gulf of Scanderoon, news was brought them of the election of Tebaldo di Piacenza as Pope Gregory X, and as Tebaldo had already interested himself in their mission, they returned with all speed to Acre, and obtained from him letters to the Khan (they had already visited Jerusalem and provided themselves with some of the holy oil), and two Dominican friars, 'men of letters and science as well as profound theologians,' though not the hundred men of learning for whom the Khan had asked; and so they set out again from Acre in November 1271. The Dominicans may have been profound theologians, but they were somewhat chicken-hearted adventurers, and when rumours reached them of wars in the district of Armenia, through which they had to pass, they hastily handed over their letters to the Venetians, put themselves under the protection of the Knights Templars, and scuttled back to the coast and safety as fast as they could go, leaving the Polos, 'undismayed by perils and difficulties, to which they had long been inured,' to proceed alone. Assuredly, St Francis crows over St Dominic somewhere in the courts of Heaven; his friars never feared for their skins, as they travelled blithely into the heat of India and the cold of central Asia; and it is easy to imagine the comments of fat William of Rubruck upon the flight of the profound theologians.

The account of this second journey of the Polos may be read in the wonderful book which Marco afterwards wrote to describe the wonders of the world. They went from Lajazzo through Turcomania, past Mount Ararat, where Marco heard tell that Noah's ark rested, and where he first heard also of the oil wells of Baku and the great inland sea of Caspian. Past Mosul and Bagdad they went, through Persia, where brocades are woven and merchants bring caravan after caravan of treasures, to Hormuz, on the Persian Gulf, into which port put the ships from India, laden with spices, drugs, scented woods, and jewels, gold tissues and elephants' teeth. Here they meant to take ship, but they desisted, perhaps because they feared to trust themselves to the flimsy nailless vessels in which the Arabs braved the dangers of the Indian Ocean. So they turned north again and prepared to make the journey by land. They traversed the salt desert of Kerman, through Balk and Khorassan to Badakhshan, where there are horses bred from Alexander the Great's steed Bucephalus, and ruby mines and lapis lazuli. It is a land of beautiful mountains and wide plains, of trout streams and good hunting, and here the brothers sojourned for nearly a year, for young Marco had fallen ill in the hot plains: a breath of mountain air blows through the page in which he describes how amid the clean winds his health came back to him. When he was well, they went on again, and ascended the upper Oxus to the highlands of Pamir, 'the roof of the world' as it has been called in our own time, a land of icy cold, where Marco saw and described the great horned sheep which hunters and naturalists still call after him the _Ovis Poli_,[17] a land which no traveller (save Benedict Goës, about 1604) described again, until Lieutenant John Wood of the Indian Navy went there in 1838. Thence they descended upon Kashgar, Yarkand, and Khotan, where jade is found, regions which no one visited again until 1860. From Khotan they pushed on to the vicinity of Lake Lob, never to be reached again until a Russian explorer got there in 1871. They halted there to load asses and camels with provisions, and then, with sinking hearts, they began the terrible thirty days' journey across the Gobi Desert. Marco gives a vivid description of its terrors, voices which seem to call the traveller by name, the march of phantom cavalcades, which lures them off the road at night, spirits which fill the air with sounds of music, drums and gongs and the clash of arms--all those illusions which human beings have heard and seen and feared in every desert and in every age.

What might this be? A thousand fantasies Begin to throng into my memory, Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire, And airy tongues that syllable men's names On sands and shores and desert wildernesses.

At last they arrived safely at Tangut in the extreme north-west of China, and, skirting the frontier across the great steppes of Mongolia, they were greeted by the Khan's people, who had been sent forward to meet them at the distance of forty days' journey, and so at last they reached his presence in the May of 1275, having journeyed for three years and a half.

The Great Khan received the Polos kindly, listened attentively to the account which they gave of their mission, commended them for their zeal and fidelity, and received the holy oil and the Pope's gifts with reverence. He then observed the boy Marco, now a 'young gallant' and personable enough, no doubt, and inquired who he was, and Nicolo made answer, 'Sire, this is your servant, and my son,' to which the Khan replied, 'He is welcome, and much it pleases me,' and enrolled Marco among his own attendants. It was the beginning of a long and close association, for Kublai Khan soon found that Marco Polo was both discreet and intelligent, and began to employ him on various missions. Moreover, Marco, for his part, found that the Great Khan was always desirous of learning the manners and customs of the many tribes over whom he ruled. Kublai had to the full that noble curiosity which is the beginning of wisdom, and it irked him exceedingly that his envoys, good conscientious men, followed their noses upon his business, looking neither to right nor to left, and as like as not never even noticed that among the aboriginal hill tribes of the interior called Miaotzu there prevailed the peculiar and entertaining custom of the _couvade_, wherein

Chinese go to bed And lie in, in their ladies' stead.[18]

'The Prince, in consequence,' says Marco, 'held them for no better than fools and dolts and would say, "I had far liever hearken about the strange things and the manners of the different countries you have seen than merely be told of the business you went upon,"'

Very different was the habit of the Venetian, who as a lad, had lent ear so readily to swarthy sailors on the Rialto. He quickly picked up several of the languages current in the Great Khan's empire, and here is his account of his proceedings when on a mission to foreign parts:

Perceiving that the Great Khan took a pleasure in hearing
accounts of whatever was new to him respecting the customs
and manners of people, and the peculiar circumstances of
distant countries, he endeavoured, wherever he went, to
obtain correct information on these subjects and made notes
of all he saw and heard, in order to gratify the curiosity of
his master. In short, during seventeen years that he
continued in his service, he rendered himself so useful, that
he was employed on confidential missions to every part of the
empire and its dependencies; and sometimes also he travelled
on his own private account, but always with the consent and
sanctioned by the authority of the Grand Khan. In such
circumstances it was that Marco Polo had the opportunity of
acquiring a knowledge, either by his own observation or by
what he collected from others, of so many things until his
time unknown, respecting the Eastern parts of the world, and
these he diligently and regularly committed to writing....
And by this means he obtained so much honour that he provoked
the jealousy of other officers of the court.[19]

It is small wonder that when first the lad came back with his reports the Great Khan and his courtiers marvelled and exclaimed, 'If this young man live he will assuredly be a person of great worth and ability.'

It was while on these various public missions that Marco Polo journeyed through the provinces of Shansi, Shensi, and Szechuen, and skirted the edge of Tibet to Yunnan, and entered Northern Burma, lands unknown again to the West until after 1860. For three years he was himself governor of the great city of Yangchow, which had twenty-four towns under its jurisdiction, and was full of traders and makers of arms and military accoutrements.[20] He visited Karakorum in Mongolia, the old Tartar capital, and with his Uncle Maffeo spent three years in Tangut. On another occasion he went on a mission to Cochin China, and by sea to the southern states of India, and he has left a vivid picture of the great trading cities of Malabar. He might indeed have pondered with Ulysses,

I am become a name For always roaming with a hungry heart, Much have I seen and known, cities of men, And manners, climates, countries, governments, Myself not least, but honoured of them all.

He describes the great capital Cambaluc (Peking) in the north, and the beautiful Kinsai (Hangchow) in the south. He describes the Khan's summer palace at Shandu, with its woods and gardens, its marble palace, its bamboo pavilion swung like a tent from two hundred silken cords, its stud of white mares, and its wonder-working magicians. Indeed his description of the summer palace is better known to Englishmen than any other part of his work, for Shandu is Xanadu, which Coleridge saw in a dream after he had been reading Marco's book and wove into wonderful verse:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure dome decree, Where Alph the sacred river ran, Past caverns measureless to man, Down to a sunless sea.

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense bearing tree,
And here were forests, ancient as the hills
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

Nor is it only palaces which Marco Polo describes, for he tells of the great canal and inland river trade of China, the exports and imports at its harbours, the paper money, the system of posts and caravanserais, which linked it together. He gives an unsurpassed picture of that huge, rich, peaceful empire, full of wealth and commerce and learned men and beautiful things, and of its ruler Kublai Khan, one of the noblest monarchs who ever sat upon a throne, who, since 'China is a sea that salts all the rivers that flow into it,'[21] was far more than a barbarous Mongol khan, was in very truth a Chinese emperor, whose house, called by the Chinese the 'Yuan Dynasty', takes its place among the great dynasties of China.

Even more than Marco Polo tells us he must, indeed, have seen. The impersonality of the greater part of the book is its one blemish, for we would fain know more of how he lived in China. There is some evidence that he consorted with the Mongol conquerors rather than with the Chinese, and that Chinese was not one of the languages which he learned. He makes no mention of several characteristic Chinese customs, such as the compressed feet of the women, and fishing with cormorants (both of which are described by Ordoric of Pordenone after him); he travelled through the tea districts of Fo-kien, but he never mentions tea-drinking, and he has no word to say even of the Great Wall.[22] And how typical a European he is, in some ways, for all his keen interest in new and strange things. 'They are,' he says of the peaceful merchants and scholars of Suchow, 'a pusillanimous race and solely occupied with their trade and manufactures. In these indeed they display considerable ability, and if they were as enterprising, manly, and warlike as they are ingenious, so prodigious is their number that they might not only subdue the whole of the province, but carry their rule further still.'[23] Nearly five hundred years later we find the same judgement expressed in different words: 'Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.' The answer is a question: Would you rather be the pusillanimous Chinese, who painted the landscape roll of which a portion is reproduced opposite page 52, or the enterprising, manly, and warlike European of the same period, whose highest achievement in pictorial art is the picture of Marco Polo's embarkation, reproduced opposite page 21? What is civilization and what progress? Yet Marco Polo shows himself throughout his book far from unable to appreciate other standards than those of his own land and religion, for of Sakya-muni Buddha he says that, 'had he been a Christian he would have been a great saint of our Lord Jesus Christ,' and he could honour Kublai as that great Khan deserved.

Nevertheless, although Marco Polo shows less knowledge of the Chinese than one might expect from the extraordinary detail and fidelity of his observation in other directions, he must have known many of these charming and cultivated people, at Kinsai or Cambaluc, or at the city which he governed. Among others, he must have known the great artist who painted the roll mentioned above, Chao Mêng-fu, whom the Chinese called '_Sung ksüeh Tao jen_' or the 'Apostle of Pine Trees and Snow'. He was a lineal descendant of the founder of the Sung dynasty and a hereditary official. When that dynasty at last fell before the Tartars, he and his friend Ch'ien Hsüan, 'the Man of the Jade Pool and Roaring Torrent', retired into private life. But in 1286 Chao Mêng-fu was summoned to court by Kublai Khan, and, to the indignation of his friend, returned and became secretary in the Board of War, occupying his time in this post (what must Marco Polo have thought of him!) in painting his marvellous pictures. He became a great favourite of the Khan and was always about the court, and Marco Polo must have known him well and perhaps have watched him at work painting those matchless landscapes, and those pictures of horses and men for which he was famous. Marco loved horses, as, indeed, he loved all kinds of sport (of which he had plenty, for the Khan was a great hunter and hawker), and he has left a word picture of the white brood mares at Shansi, which may be set beside Chao Mêng-fu's brush picture of the 'Eight Horses in the Park of Kublai Khan'.[24] He knew, too, perhaps Chao Mêng-fu's wife, the Lady Kuan, who painted most exquisitely the graceful bamboo and the peony, so loved by Chinese artists, and of whom it is related that 'she would watch the moving shadows of the sprays thrown by the moon on the paper windows, and transfer the fugitive outlines to paper with a few strokes of her supple brush, so that every smallest scrap of her work was mounted in albums as models for others to copy'.[25] Chao Mêng-fu and the Lady Kuan had a son, Chao Yung, who is of special interest to us, for he painted a picture of a Tangut hunter, and Marco Polo has also given a description of the Tartar horsemen and of the province of Tangut, where he saw and described the musk deer and the yak.

But we must return to the history of the Polos in China. From time to time in Marco's book we hear also of his father and uncle, travelling about the empire, growing rich by trade, and amassing a store of those jewels, in the value of which they were so skilled, even helping the Khan to reduce a rebel town, by constructing siege engines for him on the European model, handy Venetians that they were, who could lay their hands to anything.[27] Without doubt they were proud of their Marco, who from an inquisitive lad had grown to so wise and observant a man, and had risen to so high a position. So for seventeen years the three Polos abode in the Khan's service in China. The long months slipped by; and at last they began to feel upon them a longing to see Venice and the lagoons again, and to hear Mass once more beneath the majestic roof of St Mark's before they died. Moreover, Kublai Khan was growing old himself, and the favour which he had always shown to them had excited some jealousy among his own people, and they feared what might happen when he died. But the old Khan was adamant to all their prayers; wealth and honours were theirs for the asking, but he would not let them go. They might, indeed, have died in China, and we of the West might never have heard of Marco Polo or of Kublai Khan, but for a mere accident, a stroke of fate, which gave them their chance. In 1286 Arghun, the Khan of Persia, lost by death his favourite wife Bolgana, and, according to her dying wish, he sent ambassadors to the Court of Peking to ask for another bride from her own Mongol tribe. Their overland route home again was endangered by a war, and they therefore proposed to return by sea. Just at that moment, Marco Polo happened to return from a voyage on which he had been sent, and spoke with such assurance of the ease with which it had been accomplished, that the three ambassadors conceived a strong desire to take with them all three of these ingenious Venetians, who seemed to know so much about ships. Thus it was that the great Khan was prevailed upon, very reluctantly, to let them go.