THE CULTURAL WORLDS of MARCO POLO Thomas T

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Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxxi:3 (Winter, 2001), 375–383. THE CULTURAL WORLDS OF MARCO POLO Thomas T. Allsen The Cultural Worlds of Marco Polo

Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World. By John Larner (New Ha- ven, Yale University Press, 1999) 250 pp. $29.95 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/31/3/375/1694761/002219500551578.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 Polo is one of the few historical ªgures of medieval Europe to achieve worldwide fame. His status and visibility are such that he still “gets press.” Whenever his veracity is challenged, or claims are made that other Europeans reached China before him, news- paper articles and letters to the editor soon follow. Even scholarly books on the Venetian occasionally do well. Popular and scholarly interest in Polo has a long history, one that can be traced back to the fourteenth century. Although this intense fascination with his sojourn in the East assuredly began in the West, it spread in later centuries to other parts of the globe, particularly Japan and China, where there are many Polo specialists. Larner’s volume is the most recent in a long line of scholarly works trying to come to grips with Polo and his depiction of Eur- asia in the age of the Mongols. Unlike many of his predecessors, Larner is not a student of Asian history but of European literature. His perspective is fresh, informative, and should be welcomed by all in the ªeld, however diverse the pathways of their engagement with Polo. He begins properly with the basics about Polo and the texts associated with his name. Larner, I think it is fair to say, subscribes, for the most part, to the current consensus that Polo related his experiences to Rustichello, a Pisan writer of romances, while the two shared a cellina Genoese prison in 1298/99. The originaltext was in French or in Franco-Italian, the language of the earliest known manuscript. Larner’s major contribution is his discussion of the na- ture of this text and its early readership. For him, this work of col- laboration, now generally called The Description of the World, is Thomas T. Allsen is Professor of History, The College of New Jersey. He is the author of Commodity and Exchange in the Mongol Empire: A Cultural History of Islamic Textiles (Cam- bridge, 1997); Mongol Imperialism: The Policies of the Grand Qan Möngke in China, Russia, and the Islamic Lands, 1251–1259 (Berkeley, 1987). © 2000 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 376 | THOMAS T. ALLSEN basically a geography or, better yet, an ethnographical geography, not a merchants’ handbook or, as is most commonly assumed, a book of travels.1 In light of this conclusion, attempts to reconstruct Polo’s itineraries from data in the Description are bound to be difªcult, if not futile.2 Judging from the number of early manuscripts, translations,

and printed editions, the Description had a wide readership that in- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/31/3/375/1694761/002219500551578.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 cluded nobles, patricians, merchants, missionaries, humanists and, of course, Christopher Columbus. Columbus, Larner argues, was in all likelihood inspired indirectly by Polo’s travels, but only read and annotated his copy of the Venetian’s work after the ªrst voy- age. Thus, Columbus, who persisted in his belief that he had reached Asia, used Polo’s account to make sense of his data. This tendency to view New World geography, ethnography, and history through the ªlter of Polo’s perceptions of Asia was by no means limited to Columbus and is a phenomenon worthy of further study.3 While Larner stresses the important issue of how Polo’s information was used and understood by his readers, he also addresses the perennial questions concerning the sources and reliability of his information about the East and whether the Venetian was ever really in China. Indeed, Polo studies have long thrived on the ten- sion created by recurrent doubts about his honesty and deter- mined efforts at vindication. For his supporters, the ªrst line of defense was a search for his name in the sources produced under the Mongoldynasty in China, the Yuan (1271–1368). Starting in the nineteenth century, several scholars convinced themselves that they had done so. The name in question, transcribed into Chinese characters as Bo-lo, was borne by an individual who served Qubilai in the 1270s and early 1280s—the very time that Polo claimed to be at the Yuan court. Pelliot, however, repeatedly demonstrated that Bo-lo was not Polo but a Mongolian ofªcial

1 Polo (trans. Paul Pelliot and A. C. Moule), The Description of the World (London, 1938), 2 v. (one of translations and one of original texts). 2 Attempts to reconstruct Polo’s itineraries still survive in historical atlases. See Albert Herrmann, An Historical Atlas of China (Chicago, 1966), 42–43; Rand McNally, Atlas of World History (Chicago, 1992), 62–63, map 31. 3 On Polo and Columbus, see Abbas Hamdani, “Columbus and the Discovery of Jerusa- lem,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, IC (1979), 41–48 ff; Berthold Laufer, “Columbus and Cathay, and the Meaning of America to the Orientalist,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, LI (1931), 89–96. THE CULTURAL WORLDS OF MARCO POLO | 377 named Bolad. Despite the efforts of the noted French scholar, this false identiªcation persisted well into the twentieth century and is still perpetuated in some reprinted editions of Polo’s work.4 Although certainly wrong, this equation brought to light for the ªrst time a ªgure of centralimportance in East–West ex - change; Bolad, after long service in China, was posted to Iran in

1285, where he entered into a productive intellectual and political Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/31/3/375/1694761/002219500551578.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 partnership with Rashid al-Din (1247–1318), the famed Persian scholar and minister. Because Bolad was an intimate of Qubilai and headed severalhigh ofªces in the Yuan bureaucracy, includ - ing the Ofªce of the Grand Supervisor of Agriculture (Da sinung si), he was able to inform his Persian colleague about court politics and Chinese culture. Bolad’s hand can be detected in many of Rashid al-Din’s writings, which extended from agriculture to his- toriography. Unexpectedly, this obscure Mongolian tribesman, mistaken by an earlier generation of scholars for Polo, must now be counted as the main conduit of the extensive cultural trafªc between China and the Muslim world.5 The second line of defense, a careful check of the Description against indigenous sources to test its accuracy, was undertaken by a number of scholars—Yule, Pelliot, Moule, etc.—whose labors are nicely outlined by Larner (177–182).6 These works took the form of extensive commentaries on the Description, elucidating place names, foreign words, and all references to institutions, events, and naturalphenomena. Most of them concentrated on China and Inner Asia, but a similar, if smaller, literature treats the Middle East, one recent example of which offers a line-by-line discussion of Polo’s Persian “itinerary.”7 This imbalance is due, not to differing views of the text’s authenticity, but to the fact that historians of the Middle East tend to see Polo’s brief account of their region as a supplementary source of information. Sinologists, by contrast,

4 See, for example, Pelliot, “Christiens d’Asie centrale et d’Extreme-Orient,” T’oung-pao, XV (1914), 638–640. 5 Allsen, “Biography of a Cultural Broker: Bolad Ch’eng-hsiang in China and Iran,” Oxford Studies in Islamic Art, XII (1996), 7–22. 6 Henry Yule (ed. Henri Cordier), The Travels of Marco Polo (New York, 1993), 2 v.; Pelliot, Notes on Marco Polo (Paris, 1959–1973) 3 v.; Moule, Quinsai, with Other Notes on Marco Polo (Cambridge, 1957). 7 See Alfons Gabriel, Marco Polo in Persien (Vienna, 1963), 112–115, for his treatment of the city of Iasd/Yazd. 378 | THOMAS T. ALLSEN often consider his work as a vitalcomponent of research on thir - teenth-century China.8 These scholarly endeavors have yielded much valuable data concerning the cultural consequences of the Mongolian con- quests. Polo not only records the commodities circulating across Eurasia but notes the many peoples and individuals that he en-

countered who were “out of place.” The list includes Alan sol- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/31/3/375/1694761/002219500551578.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 diers from North Caucasia stationed in centralChina, sherbet makers and textile workers from Samarqand, sugar makers from Mesopotamia, and physicians from the Middle East, all of whom served the Yuan court. Their presence in China at this time, which has been fully veriªed by the learned commentators, testiªes to one of the specialcharacteristics of the MongolianEm - pire. Throughout the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Chinggisid courts across Eurasia systematically identiªed people of talent—scientists, artisans, entertainers, ritual specialists, etc.—and transported many of them to other cultural zones of the empire as a means of “sharing out” the riches of the domain among the imperial family. Interestingly, one group of specialist coveted by the Mongolian elite were multilingual individuals with commercial backgrounds, people like Polo. Mongolian princes attracted, en- ticed, recruited, co-opted, and coerced untold numbers of profes- sionalmerchants to serve as their personalªnancialagents and help them administer and exploit conquered lands.9 In short, the Polos of Venice had every reason to expect a warm reception in the Em- pire of the Great Mongols. The commentaries on the Description, mounted to prove the text’s veracity and the author’s truthfulness, have now fallen out of favor. Larner calls Pelliot’s Notes on Marco Polo “unvital” (181). Though easy to deprecate as old-fashioned, or worse, as Oriental- ism, these efforts have undeniably produced much useful information about medievalEurasia and are stillinvokedto defend against new attacks on Polo. The most recent challenge, that by Woods, advances the thesis that Polo never traveled farther East than his

8 For the contrasts between scholars of the Middle East and China, see Ilya P. Petrushevskii, Zemledelie i agrarnye otnosheniia v Irane, XIII–XIV vekov (Moscow, 1960), 19; Jacques Gernet, Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250–1276 (Stanford, 1962), 19, 28–29, 47– 48, 53–54, 149, 151, 175. 9 Allsen, “Mongolian Princes and Their Merchant Partners,” Asia Major, II (1989), 83–125. THE CULTURAL WORLDS OF MARCO POLO | 379 family’s trading posts in the Black Sea region.10 Her position has been ªrmly rejected by many scholars who cite extensive evidence to the contrary: the Venetian’s detailed knowledge of China, his description of Qubilai’s embassy to the Mongolian court of Iran—which is fully sustained by Chinese and Persian sources—and equally compelling, Venetian court records that

conªrm Polo’s actual possession of the three tablets of authority Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/31/3/375/1694761/002219500551578.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 (paiza) allegedly given to him by the Grand Qan when he re- turned to the West.11 Wood’s further conjecture that Polo obtained most of his information from a hypothetical“Persian Baedeker,” now lost, hardly advances the discussion. Using this technique, the authenticity and originality of any work can be called into question without adducing actualevidence. In this particularinstance, there is no evidence, hypotheticalor otherwise, that the Description is de- rivative, based upon a pre-existing literary model. The very ab- sence of a plausible prototype only afªrms the work’s originality. For Larner, and for me, the available evidence is persuasive: Polo traveled to China, and the resulting Description is a valuable source about thirteenth-century Eurasia. But the full value of this work is not evident without a closer look at its larger cultural con- text. To what extent does the Description record, reºect, and re- fract the many cultural crosscurrents generated by the Mongols’ quest for universalempire? Beyond the quest for authentication is a historicalenterprise of far greater weight, the quest for a better understanding of the cultural dynamics of long-distance exchange and of sudden, unexpected transcontinentalconfrontations. No culture reveals itself fully to outsiders; more to the point, not everything that is revealed is understood. The traveler from afar who sees all and apprehends all is suspect, since observers of foreign cultures typically lack depth perception, seeing only sur- face features. In Polo’s case, he encountered, and made oblique reference to, two Chinese innovations—alcohol distillation and printing—without comprehending their underlying technology. In the ªrst instance, he described a “very clear” Chinese wine that

10 Frances Wood, Did Marco Polo Go to China? (London, 1995). 11 Igor de Rachewiltz, “Marco Polo Went to China,” Zentralasiatische Studien, XXVII (1997), 34–92; Jean-Pierre Voiret, “China, ‘Objektiv’ Gesehen: Marco Polo als Berichterstatter,” Asiatische Studien, LI (1997), 817–819. 380 | THOMAS T. ALLSEN “makes a man become drunken sooner than any other wine because it is very hot stuff.”12 His perplexity is occasioned by the fact that in China, distilled alcohol had become a social drink by the thirteenth century, whereas in Europe, it was still a medicine produced by alchemists and apothecaries. Only in later centuries did aqua vita become whiskey.13 Since Polo did not have a cultural cat-

egory for distilled alcohol, it would have been astounding if he Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/31/3/375/1694761/002219500551578.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 had deduced its true properties and technology. The same holds true for printing. The complaint that Polo knew nothing of this pivotalinvention is patentlyunfair. He not only knew and described the paper money (chao) of Yuan China; much less appreciated, he also encountered printing in another form, and in another medium. When he described the small pam- phlets, “called tacuini,” that astrologers of the Yuan sold to those who wished to determine auspicious days, he was unwittingly re- ferring to booklets printed in alphabetic languages.14 These tacuini—from the Arabic taqwim, “calendar” or “almanac”—were issued in large numbers during the Yuan; most were in Chinese, but many thousands were printed in Mongolian and in the “Mus- lim [Huihui] language,” which, in this case, was certainly Persian.15 It is hardly surprising that Polo again failed to grasp the essentials. New technologies are rarely, if ever, apprehended com- pletely at ªrst exposure and only incrementally, after lengthy peri- ods of “interrogation.” Polo’s innocent misunderstanding in this instance is reassurance that he was really in China; such “mistakes” are impossible to fabricate. Broader questions of cultural perspective and ªltering are also at issue. As Larner notes on several occasions, Polo left Venice at age seventeen, and he spent an equivalent amount of time in Asia. Can he be considered an uncontaminated, unadulterated repre- sentative of European, Latin Christian culture? His Description pro- vides much evidence for rejecting this notion. Polo’s expectations for East Asia, his geographicalnomenclature,and his manner of organizing space all bear a clear Muslim, if not distinctly Persian,

12 Polo, Description, I, 299. 13 The best introduction to alcohol distillation East and West is Lu Gwei-Djen, Joseph Needham, and Dorothy Needham, “The Coming of Ardent Water,” Ambix, XIX (1972), 69–112. 14 Polo, Description, I, 252. 15 Yuanshi (Peking, 1978), 2219, 2404. THE CULTURAL WORLDS OF MARCO POLO | 381 imprint, which is only to be expected, since he approached China through Islamic lands. But Polo was also well aware of the excel- lence of Muslim navigational charts and sailing directions, and he mentioned them repeatedly.16 This Muslim geographical and cartographical ªlter had an equally pronounced inºuence on those in the East looking westward. Because the Yuan rulers accumu-

lated Muslim astronomers, cosmographers, and mathematicians; Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/31/3/375/1694761/002219500551578.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 collected their charts and maps; and appropriated their techniques and terminology,17 the Chinese viewed Africa and the Mediterra- nean through the same “Arabo-Persian spectacles.”18 But Muslim technical skill was not the only cultural ªlter that Polo acquired in the course of his travels. He was greatly im- pressed by the Chinggisids’ imperial venture, clearly regarding Qubilai as the most powerful and majestic ruler in the world. For Polo, the Chinese were a subject people, and the very size and richness of Qubilai’s Chinese holdings served only to further vali- date the Mongols’ greatness.19 Almost every page of his book afªrms his acceptance of the Mongols’ own valuation of their world. Even in religious questions, Polo, the good Christian, often viewed matters “through a Mongolian screen.”20 The empire fashioned by the Chinggisids was incomparably vast. At its height in the thirteenth century, it was easily the largest polity of its day, far outdistancing any of its fabled predecessors, such as the Roman or Sassanian. Just over nine million square miles, it was slightly larger than Russia/the Soviet Union and only surpassed by the British empire of 1920, which encompassed about thirteen million square miles. By itself, the Yuan realm was perhaps the eighth largest state in history.21

16 Polo, Description, I, 235, 243, 319, 434. 17 L. Carrington Goodrich, “The Connections between the NauticalCharts of the Arabs and Those of the Chinese before the Days of the Portuguese Navigators,” Isis, XLIV (1953), 99–100; Jørgen Jensen, “The World’s Most Diligent Observer,” Asiatische Studien, LI (1997), 723–724. 18 Paul Wheatley, “Analecta Sino-Africana Recensa,” in H. Neville Chittick and Robert I. Rotberg (eds.), East Africa and the Orient: Cultural Synthesis in Pre-Colonial Times (New York, 1975), 113–114. 19 John Critchley, Marco Polo’s Book (Aldershot, 1992), 114–129, examines at some length Polo’s attitudes toward the Mongols and the Chinese. 20 Paul Demièville, “La situation religieuse en Chine au temps de Marco Polo,” in Oriente Poliano (Rome, 1957), 223–226. 21 Rein Taagepera, “Size and Duration of Empires: Systematics of Size,” Social Science Re- search, VII (1978), 126. 382 | THOMAS T. ALLSEN What initially attracted the Polos to the East were the Mongols, and what they discovered there was a dazzling and care- fully staged display of Mongolian majesty and might. In this sense, Polo did not go to “China”; he went to see the Great Qan, who at that time of year happened to reside in Cambulac, later known as Peking. The very nomenclature that Polo used for the city—

Cambulac, which goes back to Qanbaliq, Turkish for “City of the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/31/3/375/1694761/002219500551578.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 Qan”—neatly summarizes differing perceptions. We automati- cally think of this great metropolis as the capitol of China, but Polo thought of it, correctly, as the winter residence of the Mon- golian Grand Qan. Polo clearly carried European and Christian cultural baggage to the East, but the new baggage that he acquired along the way is what makes the Description so challenging. Merely deconstructing his Christian worldview will not sufªce, because he was also inºuenced by the Muslim and Mongolian cultures during his for- mative years. Modern critics sometimes detach Polo from the complex cultural milieu in which he operated, thereby reducing his experience to a simple, and satisfying, confrontation between the Christian West and the Orientalother. The same cultural currents that inºuenced the young Vene- tian also had a pronounced effect on the Mongols. Indeed, Polo is among the ªrst to comment on this phenomenon. He tells us that those Mongols who remained in the steppe “[kept] up the true Tartar law and customs,” while those who settled in China and the Middle East “[were] much debased and [had] forsaken some of [their] customs.”22 These observations anticipate, albeit in a crude way, Ibn Khaldun’s much more extended and sophisticated analy- sis of the stresses that can beset an expansive nomadic state. Ac- cording to this Arab historiographer (1332–1406), by the third or fourth generation, nomadic conquerors lose their group feeling (asabiyah) and increasingly fall prey to the allures of urban life. Their dynasty inevitably weakens and collapses, eventually to be replaced by a fresh and uncorrupted group of nomads.23 Notwithstanding their elements of truth, the Chinese and Is- lamic models do not fully engage the predicaments faced by nomadic empires. Nor is this the only difªculty. Our inherited

22 Polo, Description, I, 174–175, 469. 23 Ibn Khaldun (trans. Franz Rosenthal), The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History (New York, 1958), I, 278–282, 343–351. THE CULTURAL WORLDS OF MARCO POLO | 383 methods for analyzing contact generally focus on “two sphere” situations in which a politically and militarily dominant society, typically European, transmits its own culture to subjugated “na- tives.” What occurred under Mongolian auspices is a more com- plicated “three or four sphere problem.” The Mongols, though militarily dominant, did not so much export their own ethnic cul-

ture as appropriate and “share out” that of their diverse subjects— Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/31/3/375/1694761/002219500551578.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 Chinese, Persian, Turks, Tibetans, and others. Political-military dominance can be accompanied by, even accomplished through, cultural dependence. Polo’s account of his time in the East mirrors a complex cultural world, and Larner’s success in identifying new layers of meaning within his text greatly increases our understanding of the era. Moreover, the Mongolian empire, which set off so many cultural collisions, was itself a prelude and impulse to an even more dramatic and traumatic collision, that produced by European mar- itime expansion.