101 Lecture 17 April 2 Flashcards
3 Important things happen in 1260
At the eastern end of Asia, dramatic events were unfolding. Great Khan Möngke, Chingis Khan’s grandson who had ruled from Karakorum (*) in the grasslands near the Orhon River, was dead.
Vacant throne
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The grandson of Chingis Khan who was proclaimed emperor in May 1260 in Kai-Ping was, of course, Qubilai (Khubilai) (*). As Marco Polo would explain about the hero of his tale,
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The title Khan means in our language “Great Lord of Lords.” And certainly he has every right to this title; for everyone should know that this Great Khan is the mightiest man, whether in respect of subjects or of territory or of treasure, who is in the world today or who ever has been, from Adam our first parent down to the present moment….He is indeed the greatest lord the world has ever known. [Latham tr., p. 113]
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In 1260, Qubilai was not yet that “greatest lord”–he would first have to fight a civil war against his youngest brother, and his conquest of the rest of China and proclamation of the Yüan Dynasty still lay ahead. Ironically, by the time Marco dictated what I have just quoted, the Mongol Empire already had begun to disintegrate.
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At other end of Asia, other momentous changes taking place.
In 1258, Mongol army led by Chingis Khan’s grandson Hulegu had taken Baghdad.
End of the Abbasid Caliphate.
The death of Mongke also meant end of Mongol westward expansion (as well as a defeat by Egyptian Mamluks)
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Our third important event in 1260 took place in Constantinople (*), when the brothers Niccolo and Maffeo Polo set off into the Black Sea to trade further East. Travelling all the way to China was presumably very far from their minds. Yet their trip was a fateful one, for, without it, we would never have the remarkable book bearing the name of Niccolo’s son, Marco
Mongols
(Loose sheets)
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Marco’s story begins in his home town, Venice.
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Having bid farewell to San Marco and the quadriga, as shown in this manuscript illumination () the Polo brothers arrived in Constantinople where supposedly they were received by the Latin Emperor Baldwin, who owed his throne to the Venetians. The Polos probably would have sailed into the Golden Horn (), one of the great natural harbors of the world. The huge Byzantine walls (*), which had for so long kept invaders at bay, were still largely intact.
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This map (*) shows the world into which the Polos were entering, the empire in fact having four main divisions, the Golden Horde, the Ilkhanids (that is, the territories just conquered by Hülegü), the domains of the Chagataids, descendents of the second son of Chingiz Khan, and, finally, the eastern part of the empire, which had not yet (as of 1260) come to include all of southern China.
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As Marco’s book relates, because of the war which had broken out between the Ilkhanids and the Golden Horde, his father and uncle were unable to return directly to Constantinople. It is entirely possible that the real reason was the fact that in 1261 the Byzantines kicked out the Latin ruler of the city and his Venetian allies, thus at least temporarily blocking any possibility that Venetian merchants could safely pass through the Bosphorus.
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Merchants on the Silk Road were never deterred by such events though, since the normal pattern in any event was to buy a bit, move on to another city, sell some, buy a new consignment, and continue. Thus it was probably no great hardship for them to set out along the trade routes () from the Southern steppes of Russia to Bukhara (), one of the great trading emporia of Central Asia and a major center of Islamic learning.
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From Bukhara, the road led now to Beijing, for the Polos were persuaded to accompany an ambassador Hülegü was sending to Qubilai. While The Book contains substantial descriptive detail of places which they might actually have seen, we cannot be certain of the route they took across Eurasia. Marco Polo’s account is less travelogue than descriptive geography. At times it is hard to tell which information came to him second hand, and there was no real effort to organize the material in chronological sequence.
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In his preface, Marco relates how the brothers were received by the Great Khan and eventually dispatched bearing paidzes, (*) the gold tablets of authority that would authorize them to use the Mongol postal relay system. As Marco indicates, their mission was to deliver letters to the Pope and then return with Western priests and learned men. The Khan’s wish for priests may be the figment of a Christian imagination, although it is not improbable
Religious debate
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What is important here is the fact that the brothers Polo made it all the way back to Venice, picked up Niccolo’s then seventeen-year-old son Marco and returned to China, this time via the Levant. They probably arrived in Beijing in 1275 and remained, somewhat unwillingly it seems, until 1292, when they managed to join an embassy taking a bride to the Ilkhanid ruler in Persia.
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1295 they were back in Venice (*), having been away for nearly a quarter century. Had Marco died then and there, he would have been at most a footnote in history, whose name barely appears in the Venetian records and not at all in the Chinese ones
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the authorship of The Book attributed to Marco Polo is very much in dispute, and some (a distinct minority, and I am not among them) even question whether he went to China. We are quite certain that The Book is the result of a collaboration, when in 1298, apparently having been captured during a sea battle, Marco found himself in a Genoese prison with a professional writer of the equivalent in those days of Harlequin romances
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His collaborator Rusticello put the tale into one of the many versions we now have, reorganizing and embroidering on the material as he did it. Indeed, as we would expect for a literary work of the type Rusticello composed for a living, the verbiage is often formulaic.
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indeed there are inaccuracies in The Book, especially regarding places which we are pretty sure Marco did not visit personally. He does seem to inflate his importance as an official working under Qubilai. The author’s religious biases and credulity are quite evident, although in this regard he is hardly unusual among his contemporaries, and we should certainly not dismiss him simply as an orientalizing westerner. Silences about things we think he should have noted (e.g., footbinding, the Great Wall) are easily explicable, given where he was when and the fact his activity was confined primarily to the circles of the Mongol ruling elite.
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Despite the de facto disintegration of the Empire by the beginning of the fourteenth century and continuing political disorders, we know commodity production and exchange such as that documented by Marco continued, as did the travel of Europeans along the routes to China.
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In fact the Polos had hardly left Beijing when a Franciscan missionary, John of Montecorvino arrived and established there the first Latin rite Christian Church in 1294. By 1305 he reported having “an adequate knowledge of the Tartar language and script,” and that he had “translated into that language and script the whole of the New Testament and the Psalter and have had it written in beautiful characters. And I bear witness to the Law of Christ and read and preach openly and in public”
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Even though Qubilai was gone, Montecorvino was persuaded “that there is no king or prince in the world who can equal the Lord Chan in the extent of his land, and the greatness of the population and wealth.” The Franciscan community grew, and the Church established itself in several of the ports of South China to serve the needs of what seems to have been a burgeoning community of European merchants.
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One of the most famous of these Franciscan monks was Odoric of Pordenone (*), who arrived in China in 1322, two years before Marco Polo’s death back in Venice. Marco’s account of his travels was already becoming well known in various manuscripts, and Odoric’s description of his travels, written on his return to Europe in 1330 would become equally well known, even if it was much more limited in its scope.
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there is much debate over the question of how extensive and valuable the Chinese trade may have been for European merchants and manufacturers. The Italian archives document that Chinese silk was still inexpensive, but often it was not of the highest quality or was damaged in shipment. Its influx seems to have played a key role in the development of an important Italian silk industry.
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We know that as late as 1340 the Florentine merchant Pegolotti would enumerate the abundance of eastern wares in Constantinople (many, of course, from the Near East, not the Far East) and would advise that the trade route all the way from Tana (Azov) at the mouth of the Don River to China “is perfectly safe, whether by day or by night, according to what the merchants say who have used it”
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