Before Orientalism. Kim M. Phillips

In any case, Rubruck’s book bears similarities to Carpini’s as a record of useful information though is markedly different in form. Where Carpini’s book is part ethnography, part history, part military intelligence report, and part itinerary, Rubruck’s is mostly itinerary. Less than 10 percent of his book (chapters 2–8) is given over to direct ethnography; the remainder tells of his journey and personal experiences, with further ethnographic descriptions scattered throughout. Rubruck’s account of the Mongols is more negative than his predecessor’s but still relatively moderate; it could not be called an attempt at demonization. Rubruck’s work has appealed very much to some modern readers of “travel writing” (discussed in Chapter 3) but was little known in the Middle Ages, with only five manuscripts extant and one of those is merely a fourteenth-century copy of the oldest one surviving. These are all in Latin and of English origin and show his audience was primarily educated and monastic, including the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, St. Mary’s Abbey in York, and Simon Bozon, Prior of Norwich Cathedral Priory (1344–52).²⁸

      Furthermore, Roger Bacon interviewed Rubruck in Paris and used his geographical information in the Opus majus. Indeed, Bacon provides justifications for the inclusion of geographical knowledge in his work. It has value for missionary efforts and for eschatological forewarning:

      This knowledge of the places of the world is very necessary to the state of the believers, and for the conversion of unbelievers and for opposing unbelievers and Antichrist and others. … For the most vigorous men sometimes through their ignorance of the places in the world have destroyed themselves and the business interests of Christians, because they have passed through places too hot in the hot seasons and too cold in the cold seasons. They have also met with countless dangers because they did not know when they encountered the regions of believers, or of schismatics, Saracens, Tartars, Tyrants, men of peace, barbarians, or of men with reasonable minds. He who is ignorant of the places in the world lacks a knowledge not only of his destination, but of the course to pursue.²⁹

      On the need to foresee what the end of the Second Age of the world might entail, “the Church should have excellent knowledge of the situation and condition of the ten tribes of the Jews, who will come forth in the days to come.” Alexander the Great found these nations dwelling in Hyrcania on the Caspian Sea and confined them more strictly behind high mountains:

      Since, then, these nations shut up in certain localities of the world will come forth to desolate regions and meet Antichrist, Christians and especially the Roman Church should study carefully the location of places, that it may be able to learn the ferocity of nations of this kind and through them to learn the time and origin of Antichrist; for these races must obey him. … Friar William, moreover, whom the lord king of France sent to the Tartars in the year of our Lord 1253, when he was beyond sea, wrote to the king aforesaid that he crossed with Tartars through the middle of the gates that Alexander constructed.³⁰

      It seems relevant that the copy of Rubruck’s book held by the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds also contains a copy of the “Liber Methodius,” the influential seventh-century Syrian Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius.³¹

      Missionaries and diplomats would continue to be among the chief witnesses in text of Asian civilizations to around 1500, but chronologically the next major contribution came from the son of a Venetian merchant. Marco Polo and his book, Le Divisament dou monde (Description of the World) (c. 1298), are exemplary of the unstable nature of medieval authors and books. There is no single manuscript representing the original text or even a “definitive version,” given the great diversity found among the approximately 150 extant copies, no two of which are exactly alike.³² Moreover, there is no book we can truly say is by an “author” called Marco Polo, given that the original version of our surviving texts was produced in collaboration with a professional romance writer, and the diversity among manuscripts demonstrates that individual scribes and translators often made free with the text, inserting editorial comment and even purportedly informative content without any apparent sense of transgression. It went by various names in medieval manuscripts: Divisament dou monde (in French, Devisement du monde) but also Le Livre des merveilles du monde, Li Livres du Graunt Caam, De mirabilibus mundi, and De condicionibus et consuetudinibus orientalium regionum. The Travels, however, is a postmedieval title.³³ The book is a challenging prospect for editors, to put it mildly, and has prompted a vast array of scholarly studies. Even to attempt to supply a reasonably extensive bibliography would require a book in itself.³⁴ Yet enormous riches await anyone who turns to the Divisament for its depiction of the Asian continent through medieval European eyes.

      Marco (1254–c. 1325) was the son of Niccolò Polo, who with his brothers Marco and Maffeo owned a prominent Venetian family business. The Polos had a trading base at Soldaia (Sudak) on the Crimean Peninsula, and it was from here in c. 1260 that Niccolò and Maffeo set out to trade jewels at Sarai (near present-day Volgograd), seat of Berke Khân, who was then ruler of the Golden Horde. The Polo brothers found themselves forced farther northeast when violent Byzantine reprisals against Venetians followed the Byzantine recapture of Constantinople and fighting broke out between Mongol rulers of Persia and the Golden Horde. After three years in Bukhara (Buxoro) they accepted an invitation from an embassy from Persia to travel to the court of the Great Khân, Khubilai (r. 1260–94), and journeyed far to the north and east to an uncertain location in the Mongolian heartland. Khubilai saw an opportunity to make contact with the West and sent the brothers back to Italy with a letter to the pope requesting one hundred Christians to return east to teach Mongols about Christianity. Delayed by the papal vacancy of 1269–71, the brothers finally returned to Khubilai’s court with the blessing of the new pope, Gregory X, in 1271, accompanied not by one hundred missionaries but by Niccolò’s seventeen-year-old son, Marco. They reached Khubilai at Shangdu, his summer capital in Cathay (northern China), in 1274. They departed probably in 1291, escorting a Mongol princess to Persia, and arrived back in Venice around 1295.

      Marco spent about seventeen years in China and around twenty-four years abroad in total. He left Venice an adolescent and returned a middle-aged man. Details of his life in China remain mysterious. Although he is regularly described as a “merchant” in modern scholarship, it is unclear whether he and the elder Polos engaged in profitable trade so far from home. A number of Venetian and Genoese merchants went to China and India in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries so one must presume some commerce between Italians and Chinese, but such ventures are not described in the Divisament.³⁵ The book claims rather that Khubilai took an instant liking to Marco and engaged him on numerous diplomatic missions throughout his eastern realms. It more dubiously states that Khubilai made him governor of the great city of Yangzhou for three years, that the three Polos played a decisive part in the subjection of Xiangyang, one of the last cities of the Southern Song dynasty to fall to Khubilai’s forces, and that Marco’s diplomatic ventures on behalf of Khubilai provided the initial impetus for his attempts to describe what he had seen.³⁶ Many of the Divisament’s modern readers have scorned these details, citing a lack of contemporary Chinese records substantiating them. The claim of governorship is unlikely to be true, and from chronology alone the military claim is certainly invented as the siege of Xiangyang ended in 1273, two years before the Polos’ arrival.³⁷ A few have gone further and contended that his whole book is a fiction, notably Frances Wood in Did Marco Polo Go to China?³⁸ However, that argument is now discredited. Igor de Rachewiltz shows that numerous details were previously unrecorded in European texts and must have been the result of observation.³⁹ He argues that Marco probably had relatively little to do with Chinese people and did not speak Chinese; rather, he moved among the Mongol, Persian, and Turkic peoples in residence and communicated in the Persian lingua franca of foreign denizens, which helps explain many alleged “omissions,” such as tea drinking and foot-binding. The lack of any description of the Great Wall is accounted for by the fact that the wall as we know it was not built before the sixteenth century. De Rachewiltz further shows that the embassy in which the Polos accompanied Princess Kökechin to Persia to marry the il-khân Arghun (a marriage that did not occur owing to Arghun’s death in the interim) could only have been described as a result of direct experience, as it was not recorded