In Xanadu (15 page)

My copy of Yule is in two volumes, and weighs over a stone. Both volumes are bound in buckram and have bottle-green leather spines. They are full of beautifully printed woodcuts in the style of David Roberts, and contain a large full-face portrait of Polo and an even larger one of Sir Henry. (He has a long beard and is shown at his desk, pen in hand, writing his manuscript on vast quarto leaves: the very picture of a Victorian explorer.) Both volumes are full of inserted plates - a facsimile of Polo's will, a large copperplate dedication to 'Her Royal Highness MARGHERITA [very big letters). Princess of Piedmont', and a three-foot-long reduced facsimile of the celebrated Chinese Inscription of Singanfu, in Chinese and Syriac characters' - but it is the maps which always please me most. I have wasted hours poring over them, following across Asia the dots, dashes and crosses representing the different journeys of the Polos. During the expedition, on arrival at a new town the first thing I would do would be to consult the Grand Master Map to see how far along the dashes we had got.

Sivas was not marked on the GMM, but did appear on the first of the smaller maps, a little circle with 'Savast' written beside it. According to the map, after leaving Ayas, Polo had crossed into the territory of the Seljuk Turks. I knew a little about the Seljuks, having met them the previous year when following the First Crusade. They were the greatest of all the waves of nomadic peoples that swept down out of the steppes and headed for the warm south. They conquered Persia in the early eleventh century, and had appeared on the Byzantine border by the late 1050s. Their leader was Alp Arslan (The Conquering Lion'), a giant of a man, whose stature was increased by his habitual top hat, and whose moustaches were so iong that they had to be knotted behind his head before he went into battle. Against such opposition Byzantium mimbled. At the battle of Manziken in 1071 the Seljuks shattered the Greek army, captured the Emperor, Romanus IV Diogenese, and swept into Asia Minor. Neither the Byzantines nor the crusaders ever managed to win back the lands for Christendom. Over the following century the Seljuks gradually settled in the old towns and villages, creating a powerful state, a flourishing economy and an impressive and original culture.

Reading Yule in my hotel bedroom, it was clear that Polo had failed to distinguish between the Seljuks and their great enemies, the still-nomadic Turcomen, ancestors of the Yuniks we saw at Sis. He lumps them together as inhabitants of a province he calls Turcomania and claims, rather snootily: These are rude people with an uncouth language of their own. They dwell among mountains and downs where they find good pasture, for their occupation is cattle keeping.' The only civilized inhabitants of Turcomania' were the surviving Christians, the Armenians and the Greeks who:

. . . live mixt the former in the towns and villages, occupying themselves with trade and handicrafts. They weave the finest and handsomest carpets in the world, and also a great quantity of fine and rich silks of cramoisy and other colours, and plenty of other stuffs. Their chief cities are Conia, Savast (where the glorious Messer Saint Blaise suffered martyrdom) and Casaria....

Considering that Turkey was a country Italian merchants knew well, and in which they had much trade. Polo's account is surprisingly inaccurate and I thought it odd that Yule did not comment on this in his voluminous footnotes. Although in the late thirteenth century the Seljuk state had been disrupted by the Mongol invasions, their civilization was still at its zenith. Caravanserais were being built along the trade routes, hospitals and mosques were springing up everywhere, and sophisticated Turkish merchants dominated the trade of their country. Particularly surprising are Polo's remarks about silk and carpet production. Both these trades were Turkish introductions into Asia Minor, both were produced by Turks, and in Turkish styles. The Greeks and the Armenians did contribute to the trade, but they never controlled it.

Nowhere would this have been more true than in Sivas, which in 1271 was in its golden age. Before the Mongol invasions Sivas, though important enough to have been the burial site of one of the greatest of the Seljuk sultans, Keykavus I, was always secondary to the capital at Konya. With the political decline of the latter which followed the Mongol victory over the Seljuks at Kuzadag in 1241, the position was reversed.

Perhaps inspired by a desire to preserve their culture, now threatened by the latest eruption from Central Asia, the Seljuk warrior aristocracy responded to the Mongol invasions with a
wave
of patronage. The year Polo came to Sivas, 1271, no fewer than three new colleges had been commissioned for its university, and the town shot to fame as one of the great centres of learning in Islam, rivalling even the great school at Amassya. Sivas was renowned especially for the Shifaiye
medresse,
the great medical school and mental hospital.

The money which financed these foundations came not from war or farming, but from trade. The opening of the trans-Arabian trade routes which followed the establishment of the Mongol empire made Sivas an important junction of roads leading east from Ayas and the Black Sea ports. Surviving trade registers both from Europe and Asia emphasize the importance of Sivas as the commercial centre of the Seljuk Empire. In 1280, Genoese notaries were drawing up accounts in the
funduq
of a Sivas merchant called Kamal al-Din. Pegolotti in his
Pratka della Mercatura
says that by 1300 the Genoese had established a permanent consulate in the town and that police guarded the road: merchants bound for Sivas had been pillaged both at sea, by pirates, and by robbers in the hills between Sivas and the coast. Big bazaars, robbers, groupings of merchants - these are just the sort of thing that Polo normally comments on. Yet for once he is silent on commercial matters, and singles out Sivas not as a trading centre, but as the site of the martyrdom of the 'glorious Messer Saint Blaise'.

According to Yule almost nothing is known about the historical St Blaise, except that he was bishop of Sebaste (Roman Sivas) and was martyred during the persecutions of Diocletian. However, lack of facts never stopped mediaeval hagiographers from assembling impressively detailed saints' lives. According to the late, apocryphal, and apparently completely fictional
Acts of Saint Blaise,
the bishop 'dwelt in a cave where he was fed by birds and wild animals who came to visit him in crowds and would not depart until he extended his hand in blessing and healed any that were ailing'. This curious ministry continued until the saint was discovered by a party of hunters searching for animals to be killed in the Sebaste amphitheatre (Christians had run out). Blaise was promptly arrested and taken back to Sivas with them. It was an eventful journey. Blaise not only persuaded a wolf to return a pig he had stolen from a penniless widow, but also saved a boy fatally choking from a fishbone in his throat. Sentenced to death, his 'flesh was torn by iron combs such as are used to card wool' and as a result Blaise became the patron saint not only of wild animals, pigs and sore throats, but also of wool merchants.

When Yule was writing, the tomb of St Blaise was still venerated in Sivas and, inspired by my reading, I finally dragged myself out of bed to go and search for it. It was surprisingly chilly outside. It had been a high, clear cloudless day and now the sun was sinking low the temperature was dropping rapidly. Sivas is one of the coldest towns in Turkey and in winter its streets are permanently covered in thick snow. Occasionally, as a framed photograph in the hotel showed, the snow could rise to cover the gables of the houses. Even now, in high summer, those women who were not in sacking were wrapped up in warm cotton doublets, swathing kerchiefs and thick pleated Kashmiri-style trousers.

I wandered around the slopes of the citadel in the centre of the town where Yule says the tomb used to be, but there did not seem to be any sign of it. Even the old men in the
cay
shops could not help. In a way this was hardly surprising. Blaise was never an important saint in his own town; his fame was greater further away. In the early Middle Ages his cull had spread fast, collecting further legends as it went. By the eighth century churches were dedicated to him in both Milan and Genoa. By the ninth, 'Blas' had become a popular saint in Germany, and the abbey of Metz claimed to possess a bit of his skull ('remarkably thick, brown in colour and about eleven
centimetres
in size'). He remained popular among Germans ever after, except with the sailors. Blas in German means wind. Even in the nineteenth century 'mariners avoided pronouncing the name of this [saint's] feast... and looked upon winds blowing on that day as prognostic of tempests blowing throughout the year'.

The British knew better. Blaise did not mean wind. It meant fire. According to a seventeenth-century dictionary, St Blaise's day was when'... country women goe about and make goode chcere and if they find any of their neighbor women a spinning, they burne and make a blaze of fire of the distaffs, and thereof called St Blaise his day'. To this day, most Catholic churches in Britain mark the third of February with the ceremony of the Blessing of the Throats, when two unlighted candles are held against the necks of the faithful. In Ireland the church has ruled that this useful precaution against sore throats may also be administered to dairy cattle.

Which is, perhaps, one reason why the old men gave me sue h odd looks when I asked them about Blaise. At any rate I got bored with asking directions to something no one had ever heard of, so instead climbed the citadel and sat in a cafe. It was a beautiful evening. Only when you looked down on Sivas from above did you realize that it was an island. From the cafe you could see that it was a solitary green oasis, alone in the northern Anatolian plateau, separated from the arid flatlands around it by a rim of ash-coloured mountains. You could see neither the old men nor the gangster cars, nor the traps nor the horses, only an expanse of poplars and cypress, irregularly broken by the roofs of the old stone houses, the double brick minarets of the
medresse
(Islamic college), and the domes of the
hammam
(baths).

I got out the logbook and began scribbling. But it was cold and getting colder, and after a couple of pages I gave up and went out into the dusk to explore the town's Seljuk remains.

The Ulu Jami, the oldest mosque in Sivas, lay near the bottom of the citadel mount. It was a small, low-slung building with a corrugated iron roof and a tottering minaret. Prayers had just finished and the old men were hobbling out in order of seniority, which made for a very slow exit. As they left the prayer hall they fumbled around on the floor to try and find their shoes. But it was dark and they were old. Long after the senior mullah had crossed the road and the crowd dispersed, three men remained in the porch with five odd shoes. At the other end of the courtyard the ablution fountain provided another focus of activity. Half of Sivas seemed to have converged around its taps, the women filling water bottles, scrubbing and cleaning, while their children played and the Geordies combed their beards.

Inside, the Ulu Jami was dark and cavernous. Like the crypt of a romanesque cathedral, it seemed built to bear an enormous weight. Its walls sloped inwards, and the great rectangular plinths, each as wide as a fully grown camel, sloped out. Built of massive blocks of dark, lead-grey stone, un-ornamented and without a break at the capitals, they rose into huge monolothic vaults. Threadbare carpets were spread out along the avenues of arches, and the mihrab, which was almost invisible, was hung with heavy crimson velvet.

Only in one corner, that nearest the porch, was there any noise. There a mullah was holding a Koran class. A crowd of little boys were kneeling in front of miniature wooden mosque desks, reciting from the strange calligraphy of classical Arabic with the speed and fluency of rote-learned multiplication tables. They were barefoot, and uniformed in white embroidered mosque caps, and as they recited they rocked backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, in time with their chant. Slowly the pitch rose from the low hum of a chant to the wailing song of the muezzin. It was a strange and beautiful sound, and I drew nearer and leant against a plinth, listening.