A History of the World (38 page)

The Mongol invasions had by now carved out their roads of safe passage between the Mediterranean and China, reconnecting routes that had long been dominated by Muslim traders. From the seventh century onwards, sailors and merchants from Persia, Egypt and Mesopotamia had learned to use the Monsoon winds to get to India. By the 720s Muslim seafarers had arrived as far as coastal China, worrying the local Buddhists. After 750, when the Abbasids moved the capital of the Islamic world to Baghdad, which was connected by river to the Gulf, these trade links grew busier. Under one of the greatest of its dynasties, the Tang, China was unusually open to outside influence. Persian and Arab influence becomes noticeable in Chinese art, and thus in Japanese art too. Meanwhile, the traditional overland Silk Road continued to be used, though this was now complicated by a fresh central Asian rivalry between Islam and Tang China.

As so often, war and trade jolted along together. After the defeat of Chinese soldiers by the Arab armies at the battle of Talas River in today’s Kyrgyzstan in 751, Chinese prisoners taught the Muslims the art of paper-making, at Samarkand, and the technology eventually passed to Europe. (Very slowly, however: the first paper mill there opened, in France, in 1189.
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) The Tang would fall in 907, and political chaos would disrupt the trading system for the next fifty years, but the
next dynasty, the Song, continued to participate in the Muslim market. Indian cotton and dyes went to China. Silk, spices and porcelain went further east. The Chinese wanted gold, slaves and horses as well as ivory and incense from the Arab traders. As one history of world trade colourfully puts it: ‘Within a few centuries of the Prophet’s death, his followers had knitted almost the entirety of the known world into a vast emporium in which African gold, ivory and ostrich feathers could be exchanged for Scandinavian furs, Baltic amber, Chinese silks, Indian pepper, and Persian metal crafts.’
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During the Song era, which lasted from 960 until the final victory of the Mongol Yuan over the south in 1279, the ‘China-ness’ of China became much clearer: a millet- and wine-consuming culture became a rice-eating, tea-drinking one. Under the Song, the highest achievements of Chinese porcelain manufacture, painting and book-making coincided with a busy ocean-going export trade. It was a golden age for Chinese culture, a time of intellectual curiosity and superb writing. The gunpowder-bombs, fire-throwers and giant catapults acquired by Genghis Khan had been Song inventions. This period saw some of the finest scholar-poets and some galloping technological inventiveness, while the celebrated Chinese bureaucracy hummed along busily in the background. But the Song were confronted by a series of more warlike invaders from the north, and in 1127 retreated to re-establish their capital in the south, where they thrived for a century and a half, beating back armies until they finally succumbed to Marco Polo’s patron Kublai Khan. For the Europeans, this titanic battle between civilizations had been well hidden behind the mighty and hostile barrier of Islam, against which Crusaders continued to fling themselves in their unsuccessful holy war. So when the Mongol khanates gave central Asia a century or so of peace, they opened up a window into a centuries-long wall of mutual ignorance between China and the Mediterranean. To the Italians of Marco Polo’s time the Chinese were as mysterious as they had been to the Romans. This other world brought smooth, soft clothing made by some unknown technique, and thin plates and bowls, far finer than anything the Europeans could make, as well as strange tales of mighty kings. But who were these people? It must have been a little like discovering life on the moon, and educated Europeans grew ever more curious and impatient. Marco the storyteller had acquired an insatiable market for information.

Whatever the truth about Marco’s own itinerary, nobody doubts that some years earlier his father and uncle had travelled to the now vanished Mongol capital of Karakorum. They had been trading in the Crimea but had been forced east by a war being waged between two of Genghis’s grandsons, and were among the first Westerners to arrive willingly at the Mongol headquarters. The Venetians had been enticed there by yet another of Genghis’s grandchildren, the greatest of them all, Kublai Khan. He had won a war of succession and was now ruler of what we might call the Chinese end of the family firm. From the 1250s he had been digging deeper into Chinese territory, building his first capital at Shangdu, and from 1266 creating a huge new court complex at Beijing.

Kublai Khan is in many ways even more interesting than his grandfather Genghis, because he turned his back on the political and military tradition of nomad life and instead took over the more impressive Chinese traditions of government. Like Genghis, Kublai was refreshingly open-minded about other men’s religions. He was far more interested in the outside world than later, complacent Chinese rulers. At Karakorum, alongside Persian Muslims were clergymen of the Nestorian and Catholic Christian faiths, a Greek doctor, a Frenchwoman, a Parisian goldsmith, the son of an Englishman called Basil, and many more.
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At Shangdu and Beijing he used many Muslim technicians and advisers as well as native Chinese. Before long, Beijing even had a Catholic cathedral. When Kublai’s armies pushed south to finish off the Song, he certainly used foreigners to design and operate siege machines and giant catapults – though Marco Polo’s claim that he himself helped Kublai as a military adviser is widely disbelieved, not least because the dates do not fit. Kublai’s victory over the Song was helped by generous attitudes to defectors and captives, too.

Kublai, we are told, had been interested enough in foreign religions to want Marco’s father and uncle to take a letter to the pope, asking him to send the Mongol court up to a hundred learned Christians to make the case for conversion, as well as some sacred oil from Jerusalem. The merchants were given safe passage back, with special tablets of gold that operated as Mongol imperial passports. When they reached the Mediterranean, after a three-year journey, however, they found there was a papal vacancy. Clement IV had just died and there would be a long delay before Gregory X was elected to succeed, in
1271. Back in Venice, Polo senior was united with his son, who was then about seventeen. Eventually, the two of them set off for China, without the hundred theologians but carrying expressions of goodwill and presents from Pope Gregory. Marco would be away for virtually a quarter of a century. By his account, after extraordinary journeys, he lived at Kublai Khan’s court as a favoured adviser, and travelled on behalf of the Mongol emperor throughout China and beyond, returning by sea via India, where he had been charged with transporting a princess to a local Mongol ruler. He travelled in a fleet of huge Chinese ships and brought back to Europe, among much other news, the first stories about the wealth of Japan, and about the Buddha, who Marco Polo thought would be considered a great Christian saint at home

Marco Polo’s eventual return was followed by yet another outbreak of war between the Venetian republic and its arch-rival, Genoa. He was captured during a sea battle and imprisoned with the writer Rustichello da Pisa, to whom he recounted his extraordinary stories. Rustichello wrote them down and the rest is – well, not exactly history, but certainly a rattling good read. The book was translated early on, added to, messed about with, mistranslated; then it evolved in different versions for more than two centuries: 143 versions have been identified.
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It was hugely influential, a pre-printing press bestseller of its time. Europe, for all its dynastic wars and greating cathedral-building, felt itself on the edge of alternative civilizations, and this book offered a door to a different future.

Meanwhile, the question nags away. Had Marco Polo really been to China? The case against is quite strong. Yet, if he had
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been there, where had he been for those twenty-four years? And how did he accumulate so much information, some of it accurate? He could have heard other travellers’ tales, or read now-lost books by Muslim merchants. On the other hand, many of us might fail to notice things later historians might find significant. Our memories falter. We embroider stories until we can no longer remember what is real, and what is invention.

Polo’s book is filled with just the kind of commercial and earthy details a greedy Venetian merchant would be interested in – he was very much a man of his city. Venice, which had started as a loose collection of muddy islands used as sanctuaries by refugees during the
late Roman wars, had developed into a vigorous, aggressive republic whose galleys and sailboats were intimately connected with the Muslim-dominated trading world, taking spices, slaves, salt, fur, iron and timber between the Christian kingdoms and the caliphates. From a family of merchants, who traded on the optimism and credulity of investors at home, it is not surprising that Marco Millions was prone to exaggerate his importance, to boast; nor that he failed to notice things that would fascinate later social historians. The news he was bringing was, in essence, very simple: There is a world beyond Europe, of wealth and opportunity, for those brave enough to seize it. This was the message Europeans would devour so greedily through all those translations and editions; and Polo’s book would be followed by other travellers’ tales, with a similar mix of apparent reportage and wild invention. A copy of Polo’s tale was carried by Christopher Columbus on his epic voyage to the Americas: Columbus was particularly entranced by the prospect of ‘Chipangu’ or Japan.

There was, however, a final irony about Marco Polo’s timing. For the wealthy, sophisticated China he described, with its beautiful cities (and it had about six million city-dwellers at the time, far in advance of Europe), its inventions, its luxuries and its superb organization, was actually on the wane. The Song, who had achieved so much, were already vanishing after wars of terrible slaughter and destruction, to the same Kublai Khan that the Polo family so much admired.

Why were the Europeans not quicker to follow in Marco’s footsteps? Was this not the first great opportunity to spread beyond the Mediterranean again, overland towards China? They had long hoped that the Mongol world would be a useful ally against the common Muslim enemy; hence the pope’s enthusiasm for converting Kublai (an aim unfulfilled partly because the Italians failed to demonstrate any exciting miracles to the sceptical Chinese).

Yet the opportunity was not grasped. Europeans continued to enjoy the luxuries and spices – vital for keeping food palatable – that came to them along the Silk Road. But within two years of Marco Polo’s death in 1329, something occurred on the steppes where he had travelled, and in China’s Yangtze valley, that changed everything.

A strange epidemic was killing people in huge numbers. By 1345 it was on the Chinese coast. By 1346 it had arrived in the Crimea, where
Marco’s father and uncle had traded and begun their epic journey. The following year the Black Death, carried on ships and probably by rats, spread into the Mediterranean. By March 1348 Venetians were dying at the rate of six hundred a day. Boatloads of corpses were being ferried to outlying islands for burial. The doctors were mostly already dead. That same interchange of goods, people and stories that had allowed the ruthless maritime republic to rise was now wreaking its revenge. It is estimated that three-fifths of all Venetians died and fifty of her noble families vanished for ever.
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The Black Death is estimated to have killed between a third and a half of Europeans, and it had a similar impact on China. For both civilizations it marked a sudden and savage end to a time of growth and progress, exacerbated by a change in the climate that brought much colder winters and devastated crops.
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In Europe it would have some surprising effects. Famously, because so many of the essential land-working peasantry in western countries like France and England were killed, those who were left were able to negotiate better wages and free themselves a little from the demands of landowners; the beginnings of a more mobile society, no longer quite so tied to noble families’ landownership, emerged from the bacterial slaughter.

Oddly, in Eastern Europe the effect was almost the opposite. Landowners actually increased their power and range, and gradually forced the surviving peasantry into a tighter bondage, known to historians as ‘the second serfdom’. This was possible because the landowners of eastern Europe, which had come to feudalism later, had been slightly more powerful and entrenched before the plague arrived. The cities of today’s Poland, eastern Germany and Hungary were less populous and powerful than the wool-trading, wine-trading mercantile towns of northern Italy and England. The advances in legal rights and the power of the guilds in Western Europe may not have been dramatic by modern standards, but they were enough to tilt the advantage against the nobility when labour was scarce. In the east, the aristocracy was more ruthless and faced less resistance from the scattered peasantry. So a modest difference in the balance of power, suddenly exaggerated by the social disruption of the Black Death, caused wildly divergent changes that would result for centuries in Western Europe being more advanced and socially complicated than the similar-looking land directly to the east.
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France and Holland would influence the entire world; Poland and the Czech lands would influence only the world immediately around them.

These effects were, of course, invisible to those who lived through the ravages of the plague, which would return at intervals for centuries to come. In the first and particularly horrific visitation, cities became ghostly spectres of their once lively selves. Entire villages emptied, leaving their fields to return to weed and woodland. Religious mania and extremism flourished, and a dark view of the end times for Christian people became deeply engrained. Authorities tottered. Crafts and skills declined. The papacy shook. On the other side of Eurasia, the glory of Song China crumbled, and the peasants, there too, revolted. Marco’s message of hope echoed in vain among peoples who were not yet strong enough to reach out and join hands.