As he was to assert – with some exaggeration – in his memoirs, ships could not sail to the far south, ‘beyond Madagascar and Zanzibar’, because ‘the currents set so strongly towards the south that they would have little chance of returning’. Marco had heard discouraging tales about the perils of the southern seas of the Indian Ocean, and even less was known about the waters encompassing Africa on its Atlantic side. The Vivaldis had paid with their lives for confronting these mysteries.
Marco’s anecdotes on faraway lands were countless, and fortunately he was to share his two years of imprisonment in Genoa with a companion only too ready to hear them. The man cast by fortune to be Marco’s scribe and literary helpmate was a certain ‘Rustichello of Pisa’, whose slender reputation as a writer rested upon translations of Arthurian romances into Old French. Little is known about Rustichello, why he was in prison, or if he ever came out alive; but he may have travelled earlier in life to Palestine, and even to England, where his patron was reputedly the prince who later became Edward I.
It is thanks to this dauntless scribbler that the fame of his Venetian fellow-prisoner has lived on. The two men were to occupy many idle months in working together on a manuscript, written in Italianate French, which Rustichello boldly entitled A Description of the World.3 Left to himself, Marco might never have written a thing. He came from a family of merchants, joined his father in business at the age of seventeen, and his interests were anything but literary. After parting from Rustichello when he was released by the Genoese, probably in return for ransom money, he lived on for a quarter of a century, without composing another sentence on his travels. (There was, admittedly, scant incentive; before the era of printing an author could hope for few direct rewards.)
Much of what Marco dictated to his scribe about Cathay was well calculated to arouse the envy of other European merchants, as when he describes the port of Zayton:
And I assure you that for one shipload of pepper that goes to Alexandria or elsewhere to be taken to Christian lands, there come a hundred to this port of Zayton. For you must know that it is one of the two great harbours in the world for the amount of its trade. And I assure you that the Great Khan receives enormous revenues from this city and port, for you must know that all the ships that come from India pay ten per cent, namely a tenth part of the value of all the goods, precious stones and pearls they carry. Further, for freight the ships take 30 per cent for light goods, 44 per cent for pepper, and 40 per cent on aloes-wood, sandalwood, and other bulky goods.
And I assure you that if a stranger comes to one of their houses to lodge, the master is exceedingly glad. He orders his wife to do everything the stranger may desire … And the women are beautiful, merry and wanton.’
Such practical information abounds, but is artfully juxtaposed with jocular anecdotes, as when describing his youthful memories of a place in central Asia where husbands offered their wives to guests. The relish with which Rustichello inserted such vignettes into the Description of the World is perceptible, but the raconteur himself remains unmistakably a figure to be viewed with respect.
There was good reason, for although there were many prosperous and well-born Venetian merchants, Marco Polo had always been notably privileged. As a youth of seventeen, in 1270, he had welcomed home his father Nicolo and his uncle Maffeo from their first journey to Cathay. They were bearing a golden tablet of authority from Kubilai Khan, the Mongol ruler. From that moment it counted for a great deal to belong to the Polo family.
Earlier in the thirteenth century, Europe had been terrified of the all-conquering Mongols (generally known as Tartars).4 Opinions of them had changed entirely by the time Marco’s father and uncle arrived in Italy from Cathay with Kubilai Khan’s golden tablet. The Mongols were now seen as potential allies, with whom the lost fervour of the Crusades might be rekindled; since the time of Pope Innocent IV (1243–53) hopes had been nurtured of converting the Mongols to the Catholic teaching, for some already had Christian leanings, albeit of an heretical kind. The Great Khan was a figure of almost mystical significance for Europe’s rulers, and the Polo brothers were honoured to be his chosen emissaries in the latest attempt to forge permanent links between East and West against the common enemy: Islam.
Fifteen years before the Polos arrived back from Cathay, a Flemish friar named William of Rubrouck had been sent to Cathay by Louis IX of France. The friar’s mission had been to offer the Mongol emperor a pact with Christendom, and he returned with remarkable stories about people from Europe who had been swept like dust across the world when the Mongols drew back into Asia.
In remote Karakorum, traditional gathering place of the Mongols, the friar encountered a woman called Paquette, from Metz in Lorraine, who had been taken prisoner in Hungary, but was now happily married to a Ukrainian carpenter, and had three children: ‘She found us out and prepared for us a feast of the best she had.’ Also in Karakorum were the Hungarian-born son of an Englishman, a Greek doctor, and a goldsmith from Paris named Buchier, who had made for the Great Khan a silver tree, with an angel on the top blowing a trumpet and at the base four guardian lions whose mouths spouted mare’s milk, a staple item of the Mongolian diet.
Although Friar William had failed in the main aim of his mission, the auguries for an East-West alliance were more promising when the Polo brothers reached Europe. The Great Khan was asking, among other things, for a hundred learned men of the Christian faith to be escorted back to him by the Polo brothers. It might have seemed too good a chance to miss, but at that crucial moment one Pope died and there was a dispute over who should succeed him. When Gregory X was eventually installed he chose only two scholarly friars to go to Cathay. Even these were not up to the task. After setting off with the Venetian merchants, accompanied now by young Marco Polo, the friars turned back after travelling only as far as Armenia, where a war threatened.
The Polos rode on. They still had to deliver Pope Gregory’s message of good-will to Kubilai Khan, and this gave them, by thirteenth-century standards, a sense of urgency. They decided that the sea route through the Indian Ocean would be quicker than a long, exhausting journey across central Asia’s deserts, whose hazards Nicolo and Maffeo knew only too well. So they travelled first to Baghdad (which the Mongols had sacked a few years earlier, massacring all the Muslims but sparing the Christians). From there they crossed into Persia, then rode south to the great port of Hormuz at the mouth of the Gulf. This was Marco Polo’s first sight of the Indian Ocean, but he was not impressed.
Hormuz had an excellent harbour, and it had taken over much of the trade controlled three centuries earlier by Siraf, birthplace of the story-teller Buzurg ibn Shahriyar. Merchants came to Hormuz from ‘the length and breadth of the world’ to deal in pearls, cloth and dried fruits, spices from Malabar and Ceylon, Chinese ceramics and African ivory. Arabian horses were shipped from here to India: steeds chosen for their strength, powerful enough to bear men in full armour. However, as Marco would remember it many years later, the climate of Hormuz was torrid and unhealthy. Sometimes in summer, winds blew from the deserts lying on every side with such unbearable heat that there was only one way to survive: the local people lived outside the city in summer, beside lakes and waterways, so that when the hot winds approached they could ‘plunge neck-deep into the water to escape’.
With his medieval fondness for the gruesome he goes on to tell a story to illustrate the infernal heat of the place:
As the king of Hormuz had not paid his tribute to the king of Kerman, the latter got ready 1,600 horse and 5,000 foot, sending them across the region of Reobar, to attack the others by surprise. This he did at the time when the people of Hormuz were living outside the city in the country. One day, the assailants, being wrongly guided, were unable to reach the place appointed for passing the night, and rested in a wood not very far from Hormuz. When, on the next morning, they were about to set out again, that wind caught them, and suffocated them all … When the people of Hormuz heard this, they went to bury them in order that all those corpses should not infect the air. But the corpses were so baked by the immense heat, that when they took them by the arms to put them in the pits, the arms part from the bodies. It was hence necessary to make the pits next to the bodies and to throw them in.
The Polos stayed some while in Hormuz. According to Marco the people were ‘black’ – darker, he meant,