Fifty Things You Need to Know About World History. Hugh Williams

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СКАЧАТЬ Polo came from a family of Venetian merchants. When he was six his father and uncle left Venice to set up a trading business on the Black Sea, eventually moving further north to a town on the River Volga. Here they became stranded as a war broke out between rival Mongol clans and they began a detour to the east in order to get home. They were then persuaded that the Great Khan, Kublai, who had never seen any Latin people, would like to meet them and so they went via Samarkand, Kashgar and the Gobi Desert to Kublai’s new capital, in what is today Beijing, arriving there in 1266. This was an historic moment in the history of China. Kublai, grandson of Genghis, had conquered the whole country and founded the Yuan dynasty. Three years later, in 1269, the Polo brothers arrived back in Venice carrying messages from him for the Pope. They stayed for two years before setting off for China once more, this time taking Marco with them.

      They decided against the route they had used before. They sailed to the port of Acre on the coast of modern Israel – a city that had already seen one siege in the Crusaders’ attempts to gain control of the Holy Lands and would finally fall to the Saracens twenty years after the Polos were there – and then crossed Syria and Iraq, and went on through Central Asia to Balkh, in today’s northern Afghanistan. From there they crossed the Pamir Mountains, ‘the roof of the world’, where the highest peak is more than 24,500 feet high, and made their way across the Gobi Desert. Marco reported that it was said to be so long ‘that it would take a year to go across it from end to end. There is nothing at all to eat.’ Finally they arrived once more at the court of Kublai Khan. The journey had taken them three and a half years. They had travelled 5,600 miles. Even today such an expedition would be a challenging undertaking, probably impossible for an ordinary family like the Polos, because it goes through so many areas of conflict. Nearly 750 years ago it must have been momentous. Most of it ran through territory completely uncharted by Europeans. Their desire to find things of unique value, to become the traders of treasure the like of which had never been seen before, drove them on.

      Their determination yielded their reward. The Polos stayed for seventeen years at the court of Kublai Khan and built up a store of gold and precious stones. Marco’s account of the time he spent there was dictated many years after he returned. Venice went to war with its rival city-state, Genoa, and Marco Polo seems to have been the captain of a galley that was captured by the Genoese. He told the story of his travels to a fellow prisoner who wrote them down and circulated them. They are the observations of a man with a keen eye for business. Describing the city of Kinsay – referring to Hangchow – he claimed that ‘the number and wealth of the merchants, and the amount of wealth that passed through their hands was so enormous that no man could form a just estimate thereof’. With obvious envy he added that they ‘live as nicely and as delicately as if they were kings and queens’. He described the produce in the markets – ‘of duck and geese an infinite quantity; for so many are bred on the Lake that for a Venice groat of silver you can have a couple of geese and two couple of ducks’ – and explained how Kublai Khan raised his revenues. Marco Polo obviously enjoyed the detail of commerce and ‘heard it stated by one of the Great Khan’s officers of customs that the quantity of pepper introduced daily for consumption into the city of Kinsay amounted to 43 loads, each load being equal to 223 pounds’.

       The journey had taken three and a half years; they had travelled 5,600 miles.

      It is not surprising that it fell to a Venetian to find and report all these things. The Venetians had gradually built up a maritime empire that extended all over the Adriatic. Their links with the Eastern Mediterranean meant that they also controlled most of Europe’s trade in luxury goods such as spices, cloths and porcelain. During Marco Polo’s lifetime his native city adopted a constitution that gave the adult males in about two hundred families the hereditary right to make and manage state policy. This limited the power of the Doge, the ruler of Venice, and reduced the chances of the inter-family squabbling that bedevilled many other places, like the imaginary Montagues and Capulets in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Stable government allowed the powerful group of ruling families to run things according to their own economic interests. Although the travels of Marco Polo were important as journeys of exploration, and greatly influenced Christopher Columbus when he was planning his voyage to the New World, they were prompted by a desire to improve and expand trade. Marco himself always argued that Europe could expand its trading links and grow richer through an economic relationship with China. ‘Both in their commercial dealings and in their manufactures,’ he said of the Chinese, ‘they are thoroughly honest and truthful. They treat foreigners who visit them with great politeness and entertain them in the most winning manner, offering them advice on their business.’

      Marco Polo’s stories of his journey to the court of the Great Khan and the time he spent in China were read eagerly and gained a wide circulation even though printing had not yet arrived in Europe. Not only were his descriptions of an unknown land exciting, they also hinted at the possibility of lucrative opportunities and, perhaps, at an alliance with the Mongols against the Islamic religion which had taken deep root in the countries of the East. This was the age of the Crusades, and Catholic warriors were always looking for allies in their holy war. In the end it was religion rather than commerce that flourished. In 1291 a Franciscan friar, Giovanni da Montecorvino, was sent by the Pope as a missionary to the Chinese capital and in 1307 made Archbishop of Peking. But this spate of activity did not last long. The Yuan dynasty created by the Mongols, although the first to rule over the whole of China, began to decline in the face of economic hardship and famine. By the middle of the fourteenth century it was facing revolt, and in 1368 was driven out to be replaced by the Ming dynasty. The Ming ruled China for nearly three hundred years, creating a highly centralised government that towards the end moved towards isolation from the rest of the world. It began by expelling all Christians from China. Opportunities for trade fell away. The road down which Marco Polo had wandered so successfully was blocked once more.

      Many people chose not to believe Marco Polo’s stories and some today are still inclined to think that he made up a lot of it, or took it from others that he met. In the end, however, the weight of evidence is on his side. He provided too much accurate description for his travels to have been pure invention. He died in about 1324 in Venice, a prosperous merchant and the father of three daughters. We have no contemporary picture of him, and his tomb, which was probably in the church of Sam Lorenzo, no longer exists. He has disappeared, as he did in his own lifetime, and we only have his stories as witness of what he did. Those tales tell us a great deal about the Silk Route and the life and adventures of those who journeyed along it.

      In recent times, China has tried to resurrect the ancient trading routes that once linked it with the West. During the last thirty years of the twentieth century it began to open up to the markets of the world. When from 1991 onwards the old Soviet empire began to disintegrate into separate nations, China looked to the new neighbours that emerged on its western borders as opportunities for commercial expansion. The city of Horgos in the mountainous province of Xinjiang was identified as a place ripe for growth. The Chinese improved the road that links it with Shanghai in the east of the country, and built new gas and oil pipelines as well as a railway. Horgos lies about 750 miles north-east of Samarkand, on the other side of the forbidding mountains of the Kyrgyz republic. It is a landlocked world. The capital of Xinjing, Urumqi, is said to be farther from a seaport than any other large city in the world. The whole area is as large as Europe, and as ethnically diverse. In 2009, riots between Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese, who form the majority population in the province, forced Chinese troops to intervene. The people are poor, and the struggle for survival a continuous battle. Border crossings, corrupt officials and impenetrable bureaucracy make everyday commerce difficult to pursue. It is a world that in many respects would have been familiar to Marco Polo and his family. They understood the value of the trade routes of the Silk Road, one of the main pathways to prosperity for the people who lived in the vast lands that separate China from Asia Minor and the beginnings of the European continent. Those routes have never completely died. As the modern world shrinks in pursuit of greater wealth, they may enjoy a full life again.

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