A Criminal History of Mankind (50 page)

He was warring against the Mongols’ former allies, the Sung, and it was altogether more difficult than overthrowing the Chin in the north. The terrain consisted mainly of flooded rice fields, which made cavalry useless. The hot, damp climate was hard on the Mongols. But they made good use of the great siege catapults they had used to destroy the Kharismian Empire - some required a hundred men to work them - and in less than twenty years, the last of the Sung emperors had flung himself in despair from a high cliff into the sea. Kubla Khan was master of China.

In the year Kubla Khan became leader of the Mongols, Marco Polo’s father and uncle set out from Venice and sailed to Constantinople. (It was still in the hands of the Latins - since the siege by the crusaders - but would become Greek again the following year.) Marco himself was only six at the time, and so too young to travel. The two men journeyed overland to Bokhara, and there met envoys who had been sent by Kubla to Hulagu, no doubt to tell him of Mangu’s death and the struggle for succession. The envoys pressed them to return with them to Cathay (which was the nearest Europeans could get to pronouncing Khitai - China) to meet the khan, and the Polos allowed themselves to be persuaded. It was fortunate that they knew the language of the Tartars, and so did Kubla Khan. When they arrived (presumably at Karakoram) the great khan received them affably and engaged them in long conversations. He liked them so much that he asked them to go back to the pope and ask him to send a hundred scholars to come and teach western ways to the Mongols. They returned to Europe, where they discovered that the pope had just died - as had Polo’s wife - leaving a fifteen-year-old boy, Marco; they decided to return to ‘Cathay’ with Marco. They went through Cilicia and Armenia to Persia, then over the Pamirs to Kashgar, and so by stages on to Kubla’s capital, Peking. Kubla Khan again received them graciously, was much taken with the bright young man who spoke Tartar so fluently, and sent him on various diplomatic missions. All this is described by Marco Polo in the famous
Milione
, one of our most remarkable and vivid glimpses into past history.

No doubt one of Kubla’s reasons for welcoming the Polos was that he himself was a far from welcome guest in China. The Chinese saw the Mongols as something rather like Tolkien’s Ores - filthy, smelly creatures with no manners, no morals and a revolting taste in food and drink. (The Chinese would not have dreamed of drinking milk; they still prefer lemon in their tea.) But, then, in Europe - even Venice - in the thirteenth century no one bothered about washing more than once a week.

For seventeen years Marco remained in the service of Kubla Khan and travelled all over the empire, to realms as distant as Burma and Japan (and possibly to India). For three years he was the governor of the city of Yang-Chow. Whenever he returned from his travels, he told Kubla stories about the people he had seen, and the khan made notes; he was endlessly curious. When the Polos finally intimated their desire to return, he was sad and reluctant; but finally he gave them leave to accompany a princess who was to wed the khan of Persia. The Polos delivered her safely and at last made their way back to Venice. They were so ragged and dusty on their return that they were refused admittance to their own house. Later, they invited all their friends to a banquet, then had their dirty old clothes brought in and cut open the seams to extract rubies, sapphires and diamonds. And so the Polos lived - more-or-less - happily ever after (except for Marco’s brief period in a Genoa prison). Their benefactor Kubla Khan - the man Coleridge made the subject of a famous dream-poem - had died in the year before they reached Venice.

Kubla Khan had done his best to live up to the vision of his grandfather. He pressed on south into the Vietnam peninsula and sent armies into Burma, but his soldiers found the tropical heat and the flies too much for them. He even tried to conquer Japan; this required fleets, and the Mongols had never seen the sea before they came to China. The first warships disembarked their troops at Hakata Bay, in North Kyushu, in 1274, but Samurai warriors proved too much for the sea-sick Mongols who had not yet regained their land legs. Seven years later, an immense force of 140,000 Mongols made the mistake of landing in the same bay. But the Japanese had used the interval to build a considerable wall around the bay, and they kept the Mongols penned in until a typhoon blew up and destroyed half the fleet and the Mongol morale. The soldiers who could make it scrambled back to their ships and sailed for home; the Japanese picked off the rest at their leisure. Less than half the force returned to China.

In a sense, the defeat was the end of the Mongol Empire. The formidable Kubla continued to administrate China until his death thirteen years later. But his ‘Yuan dynasty’ (it meant ‘new beginning’) had no real chance of establishing itself in China; it was too much hated. When Kubla’s heirs fell to quarrelling amongst themselves, it was clear their days were numbered. The country was divided by civil wars; then the Chinese rose up, took the Mongols by the scruff of the neck, and firmly ejected them. This was a mere seventy-four years alter Kubla’s death. And then, like a corpse, Genghis Khan’s great empire decayed and fell apart.

TRAVELLERS AND ADVENTURERS

There was one chapter of Marco Polo’s travels - the forty-sixth of Part Two - that caused immediate and intense excitement all over Italy. There he speaks of the Tartars of the steppe ‘who had no sovereign of their own, and were tributary to a powerful prince who... was named in their language Unc Can, by some thought to have the same signification as Prester John in ours.’ But in subsequent chapters he refers to this leader simply as Prester John - undoubtedly encouraged by his amanuensis, Rusticiano, who realised what a sensation these comments would cause. For more than a century, the legend of Prester John - the Christian priest (hence the name) who ruled a country in India - had been as famous in Europe as that of King Arthur’s magician Merlin.

It had all started around the year 1165, with the appearance in Italy of a mysterious
Letter of Prester John
, describing his remote and exotic kingdom - a kind of twelfth-century Shangri-La. Like the story of Merlin - concocted at about the same time by a notorious romancer called Geoffrey of Monmouth in his history of Britain - the legend of Prester John made an enormous appeal to the romance-starved imaginations of the Middle Ages. Pope Alexander III took the Prester John letter so seriously that he wrote a long reply in 1177, and despatched his personal physician, ‘Master Philip’, to deliver it somewhere vaguely in the direction of India. No one knows what became of Master Philip, but a copy of the pope’s letter survives.

Prester John tells in his
Letter
how he lives in a magnificent palace, with gates of sardonyx that give some kind of warning if anyone tries to introduce poison. He has a magic mirror that can show him what is going on anywhere in the land, and a fountain whose waters have the property of the Elixir of Life, and can keep a man looking thirty for ever. Prester John has a ring containing a precious stone that can make him invisible, and there follow descriptions of many other marvels: a sea of sand in which there are various edible fish, a river made of rolling stones, and worms called salamanders who can only live in fire - Prester John has robes made of their skin, and they can only be cleaned by holding them in fire. The country itself has no crime, falsehood or poverty - although, oddly enough, Prester John still feels it necessary to make war.

So it was understandable that Rusticiano became very excited when Marco Polo told him about a Christian potentate called Unc Can, which signified Prester John. Any fragment of gossip about Prester John guaranteed that a book would reach a wide audience.

Polo’s account sent many romantic travellers on the road to Samarkand and Kashgar in the century that followed publication of the travels. They never, of course, found Prester John. But this was not because Prester John never existed. Polo’s account of Prester John is, indeed, inaccurate - for example, he makes him Genghis Khan’s enemy and kills him off in a battle for the hand of a beautiful princess. In fact, Prester John was Genghis Khan’s closest friend and ally - Torghril, khan of the Kereits. The Kereits were Nestorian Christians, members of that heretical sect who believed that Christ was first and foremost a man, and who had been driven eastward into Asia in the early days of the established church.

The legends of Merlin and King Arthur, blown up to grotesque proportions by Geoffrey of Monmouth - a Welsh bishop - were largely responsible for that tradition of chivalry, of knights in armour wearing their lady’s kerchief on their helmets, that we regard as so typical of the Middle Ages. And the legend of Prester John, blowing like a spring breeze into that stagnating waxworks, was as important as the crusades in stirring the minds of men and making them dream of distant horizons. For once again, we must make an attempt to grasp an almost impossible concept: that there was a time when a man took it for granted that he would die in the same hovel in which he was born, and in which his great-great-grandfathers had died, and in which his great-great-grandsons would die in their turn. It was not that people had no ambition to better themselves; it was that they believed that the world was a perfectly stable and static place which would never change. Life was hard - but then, it was supposed to be, for man was expelled from Eden for Adam’s sin. Now, at least, that problem was solved; the Church would take care of everybody’s salvation, and guarantee an eternity of blissful relaxation. Meanwhile, reminders of death and mortality were everywhere. Beggars exhibited their deformities outside churches, lepers walked the streets in processions, sounding their rattles, criminals were gibbeted and burned in public, and rats waddled through the refuse in the street like pet cats and dogs. Every church had its tableau of the Dance of Death with its grim reaper. One result of all this was the famous ‘anonymity’ of medieval craftsmen. It strikes us as strange, and rather admirable, that there should be no signature on a beautiful rood screen or statue of the virgin and child; historians tell us that this is because the work was done solely for the greater glory of God, and we are suitably impressed. But everyone in the small community knew exactly who the craftsman was, and would be happy to mention his name to any visitor who happened to enquire. What they were
not
much concerned about was a visitor in a hundred years time, for ‘posterity’ was a concept that did not really exist. These people lived in the present; they knew practically nothing about yesterday. (Herodotus was not even translated into Latin until 1452.) Their apparent humility was simply another outcome of the waxworks mentality.

And it was at this point - say, around 1150 - that people began to whisper that the return of King Arthur was about to take place or that the pope had received a letter from an emperor called John the Priest, who could make himself invisible, and who possessed a magic mirror that could show him distant places - he might even be looking at them at this very moment, informed by spirits that he was being talked about... And the result must have been a frisson that was only partly superstitious terror; for the idea brought an intimation that interesting changes were in the air, like the first smell of spring. What no one could guess was that the changes, when they came, would be brought by hordes of trained killers who would leave behind deserted cities and headless corpses.

It was undoubtedly fortunate for Europe that Genghis Khan’s forces never reached farther than Poland. China and Russia were ravaged by the Mongols, eastern Europe by the Turks, then the Mongols. The Arabs - one of the most promising civilisations in the western world - were also devastated by Turks and Mongols. (Their own caliphs had a desire for wealth and display that was just as ruinous.) They had been the inventors of banking; but since Islam forbade usury, this was taken over by Christians and Jews. (And, as Christians began to look with increasing disfavour on usury, more and more by the Jews.) But after the Vikings had settled down, northern Europe was enviably stable. When the Mongols opened up the roads from Germany to China, it was the merchants and explorers of Europe who reaped the benefit. And the lure was romance as much as commerce - as late as 1488, Bartolomeu Dias set out to look for Prester John, and ended by discovering that it was possible to sail around the Cape of Good Hope.

The Church, as usual, remained blissfully unaware of these tremendous changes until too late. We can see, in retrospect, that ever since it became a political power, the Church had suffered from an exaggerated idea of its own importance. Instead of quietly trying to suffuse the people with its own ideas, like all the other great religions, it wanted to rule and give orders - that episode when St Ambrose had bullied the emperor Theodosius into public repentance for having seven thousand people killed in the circus had made every pope dream of humiliating earthly kings. The papacy’s two most spectacular successes were when Gregory VII excommunicated Henry IV of Germany and made him wait in the snow for three days to beg forgiveness, and when Innocent III - the greatest medieval pope - placed all England under interdict in 1209 and finally bullied King John - under threat of a crusade against him - to hand over England as a papal fief. (But all the pope’s objections to Magna Carta later failed to destroy it.) The execution of the boy Conradin, the last of the Staufer emperors, in 1268, seemed to prove that the Church could win any battle in the end. (It must have given the pope additional satisfaction that it took place in the square at Naples, where Frederick II, the ‘wonder of the world’, had founded a university to try to undermine the power of medieval superstition.)

In the year the Polos were making their way back from Cathay, a new pope was elected. Boniface VIII was a big, florid extrovert who was vain about his good looks and enjoyed drinking in low company; he preferred the dress of an emperor to papal vestments because he found it more becoming. Boniface enjoyed giving orders, and in 1290, before he was pope, told the assembled university of Paris that its teachings were trivial and poisonous, and that they were all forbidden to discuss such inflammatory subjects as the mendicant orders (like the Franciscans) in public or in private. To us it seems absurd to forbid anyone to discuss something in private; to the future Boniface VIII it came naturally.