Book review – Marco Polo- from Venice to Xanadu

Marco Polo - From Venice to Vanadu by Laurence Bergreen

In this age of an avoidance of corporate responsibility it is salutary to learn that after the defeat of the Venetian navy by the Genoese fleet off Curzola in 1298 the Venetian admiral, Andrea Dandolo, felt it appropriate to lash himself to the mast of his flagship and beat his head against the hardened wood until his skull fractured.

Of equal interest is the fate of one of his commanders, the returned world traveller Marco Polo, who was carried off with the better class of captives to languish in the Palazzo di San Georgio in Genoa.

It was during the years of captivity that Marco Polo, wearied by constant repetition of his tales of travels to Cambulac, Samarkand, the gold and silver roofed city of Pagan and the then largest city in the world the utterly unknown Quinsai (Hangzhou) allowed Rustichello of Pisa to take down some of his amazing tales – initially in demotic French – and publish the first edition of what is without doubt one of the most influential books in the history of the world – a work called “Description of the World” and known now to all as Marco Polo’s “Travels”.

Laurence Bergreen has written, in “Marco Polo – From Venice to Xanadu” the best and most readably account of the life of the Venetian merchant, traveller, linguist, theological student, diplomat, ambassador, military commander who left his home in 1271 as a teenage boy to accompany his father and uncle on a journey that was motivated by the honest avarice of the trader but which took them not only to the very limits of the worlds as known to Europeans but far beyond to lands unknown.

Bergreen is as captivating a writer as Polo was a talker and the narrative of the journeys – spiritual and geographical – made by his hero is constantly diverted into technical discussions of the molecular structure of silk, the Jewish Diaspora, the encouragement given to sexual relationships between women in the City of Heaven, the first sight of coal, moveable type, gunpowder and the origins of paper currency. Even the bare bones of the Polos journeys within the Mongol Empire make for exhausting reading but when the whole twenty-plus years are experienced in the deepening shadows of the decline in the physical, mental and political strength of the Great Khan, the grandson of the world-conquering Genghis and the figure around whom the book really turns – Kublai Khan.

Niccolo and Maffeo Polo – father and uncle of Marco – spent sixteen years journeying to and from the Court of the Great Khan before they returned with the seventeen year old Marco and it is a small regret that we learn so little of them except as the companions of the great Venetian who is still known in his native city as Il Millione.

Speaking Uighir and all the Mongol dialects and languages the Polos made themselves indispensable to the man who was then by far the greatest ruler on earth and they ranged far across the Empire from the Silk Road south through China, Burma, Vietnam,Indonesia,Sumatra and on to Ceylon, India, Zanzibar, Aden and even to the borders of Russia. The Mongol invasion of Japan is well detailed as is the fact that Japan and Korea were completely unknown to the European world.

It is impossible to begin to describe the breadth of this book and I felt as though I too had returned from an exhausting journey when I finished it. Exhausted – but with my brain buzzing with new visions that are as potent as was Coleridge’s poem.

The Polos manage to escape from the rapidly disintegrating Mongol Empire as escorts of the Mongol princess Kokachin to her betrothed Argon, Lord of the Levant. They finally returned to Venice, just as the eighty year old Kublai Khan died and his Empire disaggregated, with their Mongol robes stuffed in the seams with jewels and, rather depressingly, entered into the claustrophobic politics of the city state. Marco himself- finally freed by the Genoese – became a querulous and litigious old man who must surely on occasion have raised his eyes from his account books to search the horizon for a view of the near airless Pamirs that he had crossed as a young man or allowed himself to remember how he had first entered the vast Mongol court of Cambulac and stepped into a world so strange, exhilarating and alien that even a writer as good as Laurence Bergreen can only begin to describe it.