101 Lecture 17 April 2

Question 1

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

Answer 1

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Question 2

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,

Answer 2

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Question 3

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]

Answer 3

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Question 4

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.

Answer 4

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Question 5

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)

Answer 5

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Question 6

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)

Answer 6

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Question 7

Marco’s story begins in his home town, Venice.

Answer 7

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Question 8

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.

Answer 8

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Question 9

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.

Answer 9

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Question 10

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.

Answer 10

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Question 11

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.

Answer 11

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Question 12

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.

Answer 12

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Question 13

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

Answer 13

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Question 14

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.

Answer 14

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Question 15

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

Answer 15

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Question 16

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

Answer 16

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Question 17

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.

Answer 17

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Question 18

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.

Answer 18

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Question 19

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.

Answer 19

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Question 20

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”

Answer 20

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Question 21

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.

Answer 21

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Question 22

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.

Answer 22

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Question 23

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.

Answer 23

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Question 24

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”

Answer 24

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Question 25

Ibn Battuta is of interest to us in part because he provides a Muslim perspective on his world; first and foremost he is interested in the Islamic communities in the places he visits. He happened to be in the Golden Horde right at its peak under Khan Özbeg.

Answer 25

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Question 25

Ibn Battuta

Traveling as a citizen of the Dar al-Islam

Think of the anecdote from the Anatolia chapter: lost in snow, goes on ahead, finds a Sikh lodge and not only somone who speaks Arabic, but it’s someone he knows! “the two of us had an acquaintance”

Throughout, he is running in to people he knows. Why and how is this possible? Or better, what does it tell us about the Dar al-Islam and Ibn Battuta’s world?

Answer 25

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Question 26

Ibn Battuta landed in Kaffa and noted that it “is a great city along the sea coast inhabited by Christians.” It had “a wonderful harbor with about two hundred vessels in it, both ships of war and trading vessels, small and large, for it is one of the world’s celebrated ports”

Answer 26

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Question 27

There are remains of rather elaborate mosques built under the Mongols in other locations just north of the Black Sea () and as late as the second half of the fourteenth century, the important trading town of Bulgar, way up the Volga and also part of the Mongol dominions, would boast a very impressive mosque () and, typical for an Islamic city, good baths () with even a relatively sophisticated system of plumbing (). The artifacts found at Bulgar (*) suggest a very extensive network of trade connections in all directions

Answer 27

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Question 28

What makes it possible?
Dar al-Islam: shared discourse, system of cultural and social communication
Trade and status of merchants
Pax Mongolica

Answer 28

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Question 29

How might we characterize Ibn Battuta as a traveller? Why does he travel?

1. To make the Hajj
2. As a man of knowledge and a member of the social class known as Ulema or people of learning
3. Devotee of Sufism, the mystical dimension of Islam
4. Gain employment and generous rewards in the service of Muslim rulers
5. For fun?

Answer 29

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Question 30

“Frontier” areas, new Muslim states like Anatolia, India, or West Africa
Saw value of attracting jurists, professional theologians, and others from the great cities of th center
Legitimized status of rulers as proper Muslim princes

Answer 30

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Question 31

I would like to end this consideration of the Mongols and the Silk Road not with a focus on material objects or political institutions, but rather what this period meant for European ideas about the world.

Answer 31

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Question 32

This then brings us back to Marco Polo’s book. Its copying, translation, and distribution began already in his lifetime. There are some 150 manuscripts dating from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. It was first printed in the late 1470s and by the end of the sixteenth century had been published and republished several dozen times. What explains its appeal?

Answer 32

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Question 33

Some readers might have been titillated but others offended by some of his tales of, to European moralists, the dissolute sexual customs of various peoples he describes. At the end of one such passage, describing how it was important in Tibet that women be able to demonstrate they have sexual experience before marriage, we find one of Marco’s (or is it Rusticello’s) very rare jokes: “Obviously the country is a fine one to visit for a lad from sixteen to twenty-four”

Answer 33

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Question 34

The reader is constantly assaulted with a lot that presumably would have been new, but in a time when familiar legends about the non-European world would likely have had a ready market, Marco disappoints. Despite the fact that the illuminators of his manuscripts added some of the standard repertoire of headless men (*), sciapods (the guys who shade themselves with their single large foot), and other odd creatures, Marco in fact avoids them in his text.

Answer 34

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Question 35

This meant for some competition from another work which appeared in the middle of the fourteenth century, a largely fabricated travel account written allegedly by one Sir John Mandeville, which is known in many more manuscript copies than is Marco’s book and must have appealed precisely because it is a travel fiction, with the full repertoire of the monstrous races, also illustrated in the illuminated manuscripts

Answer 35

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Question 36

while some readers of Marco indeed were sceptical of the truth of his account, more importantly many were not. Most strikingly we can see evidence that he was taken seriously when we examine the evolution of European world maps during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. This was a period in which we move from symbolic representations of the world, generally guided by religious principles, to attempts to depict accurately the geography of the known world.

Answer 36

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Question 37

It is about this time though that we start to get much greater precision in European map-making when mariners, using the compass (which came to Europe from China, via the Arabs) construct navigation charts known as portolans. They tend to show the coastlines often in exquisite and quite accurate detail. One of the most famous examples (*) is in an atlas compiled by a Spanish Jew in 1380, known as the Catalan Atlas

Answer 37

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Question 38

Here you can see its exquisite chart of the heavens and the map of Europe, which is strikingly close to what is familiar to us. The Catalan Atlas also includes Asia.

Answer 38

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Question 39

it is clear from the information that Marco Polo’s account was an important source. And the mapmaker in fact (*) shows the Polos’ caravan traversing the road between Europe and the East.

Answer 39

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Question 40

In the 1450s, a Venetian mapmaker, Fra Mauro (*), made extensive use of Marco’s book, although to our eyes, his embellishment of his China with European images of castles and cities makes it seem rather detached from any reality Marco witnessed. One of Larner’s important points about this history of cartography is that, unlike writers who might conveniently choose to ignore or dismiss Marco, the cartographers ultimately had no choice but to try to make sense of his information and to incorporate it into their maps. The process was a gradual one, with some false starts.

Answer 40

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Question 41

A German globe (*), made in 1492 by Martin Behaim of Nuremberg is the first map of the world to refer to Marco Polo by name, equating him in importance to Ptolemy, who was so revered by the Renaissance scholars.

Answer 41

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Question 42

I wish to conclude with a few comments on Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus. Columbus’s patron, Queen Isabella, owned The Book. So also did Columbus; his copy contains extensive annotations in his own hand. There can be little question but that Columbus’s first voyage was inspired by Marco Polo’s description of the riches of the Far East, although it is just as clear that the image was that of a China ruled by Qubilai Khan, not the China of the late fifteenth-century Ming Dynasty. Columbus’s information was a mere two centuries out of date.

Answer 42

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Question 43

It is very likely that Columbus first came by Marco’s information indirectly–he was told all these things about how close Japan was and about all the riches of the East. “This,” Larner writes, “was the supreme moment of the Book. Though Columbus had not read it before his First Voyage, there was a real sense in which he did not need to; by then its contents were part of the mental climate”

Answer 43

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