In Xanadu (2 page)

'I thought these lamps were miraculous. They're supposed to be eternal flames.'

'That's what they say,' said Brother Fabian, now struggling with the wick of one of the lamps. 'But you try and change the oil without them going out. Take it from me. It's absolutely impossible. Damn it! This wick's finished. Pass me up the string.'

He pointed to the tray of surgical instruments. I found a ball of string and passed it to him. 'So there is nothing miraculous about these lamps?' 'Nothing at all. Pass the scissors.'

'What about the oil itself? Is it chrism? Olive oil from the Mount of Olives?'

'No it's ordinary sunflower oil. Comes from a box in the sacristy. Damn this lamp! We'll have to have a new float. Pass one up will you?'

Float?'

One of those cork things.'

I passed him a spare from the tray.

'Where's the girl?' asked Fabian from the ladder.

'I don't know. Probably asleep.'

'Is she your... friend?'

"What do you mean?'

Fabian winked at me.
'You know_ '

'She's not my girlfriend, if that's what you mean.' 'And who's this Italian you were looking for?' 'Polo?'

That's the one.' 'He's... different.'

'And he told you this oil was miraculous?'

'I suppose he did, indirectly.'

'Well you can tell him from me it's quite ordinary.'

That would be a little difficult.'

Fabian let this pass.

‘You say he took this oil east with him?' he continued.

‘Yes’

'What did he carry it in?' I don't know. A goatskin flask, perhaps.'

'He'd be a bit old fashioned then.' 'A bit.'

Fabian put the finishing touches to his new wick, put it back in the oil then lit it from the one remaining ungunered lamp. 'You still want some of this oil?' Please.'

I handed him a small plastic phial. 'Not goatskin.'

'No. It comes from the Body Shop in Covent Garden.'

Fabian took the bottle, removed the top, and carefully dipped it in the sump of the fourth lamp. It filled, slowly. Then he handed it back to me.

'Good luck finding your friend.'

Marco Polo came to the Holy Sepulchre in the autumn of 1271. Jerusalem had finally been lost to Islam thirty years previously, and the Sepulchre would have been semi-derelict when Polo saw it. The Turks who captured Jerusalem in 1244 had butchered the priests inside, desecrated the tombs of the Kings of Jerusalem, and burned the church to the ground.

Since then, the city had passed into the hands of the Mameluke Sultan, Baibars I, an upwardly mobile ex-slave who had once been returned to the market place by a dissatisfied buyer on account of his excessive ugliness. By the time Polo came to the Levant ten years later he had made himself the most feared and most powerful figure in the Middle East, defeating the Mongols and driving them back east of the Euphrates.

At the same time Baibars was slowly and methodically evicting the crusaders from their last toe-hold on the coast of Palestine. As I passed through the St Stephen's Gate on my way back to Sheik Jarrah I saw an emblem of Baibars' placed high above the portal. It must have been newly carved when Polo arrived in Jerusalem. The symbol was a pair of lions rampant about to attack a small rat. The lions, which were shown with powerful haunches, long claws and magnificent heraldic tails, represented Mameluke Egypt; the cornered rat, the crusaders. It was a sadly accurate picture: in 1263 Baibars had sacked Nazareth and burned the outskirts of Acre. The following year the crusader fortresses of Caesarea, Arsuf and Athlit all fell before his siege engines. In 1268 Antioch was captured by Baibars after a siege of only four days. But it was in the spring of 1271 that the crusaders received their greatest shock. Krak des Chevaliers, the headquarters of the Knights Hospitallers, was considered by all sides to be impregnable; in 1188 it had defied even Saladin. But on March the third Mameluke troops appeared unexpectedly below the castle, and soon the fortress was invested. Despite heavy spring rains arbalesters were brought up the hill from the valley bottom and after a short bombardment the Egyptians broke into the lower ward. The depleted garrison of three hundred fought on for another month until, on April the eighth, they surrendered, having received a forged order to do so, purporting to come from the Grand Master of the Hospitallers in Tripoli.

The loss of Krak was as great a boon to the prestige of Baibars as it was a blow to that of the Franks. Yet Acre, the capital of the Crusader Kingdom since the fall of Jerusalem, was at this critical point in a state of vigorous civil war. None of the crusaders was taking an even remotely responsible attitude to the survival of the Kingdom: this was left to the Papal Legate, Theobald of Piacenza. Theobald was a man of great severity and dignity, a friend of St Thomas Aquinas and a confidant of the kings of England and France. Appointed Archdeacon of Liege, he left his position and retired to the Holy Land after disagreements with his bishop who was attempting to turn the Liege episcopal palace into a bordello. In Acre Theobald succeeded in negotiating a temporary truce between the Genoese and Venetians, and persuading the local nobility to cooperate with Prince Edward of England who had just arrived at the head of an English crusade. But he lacked the authority or the power to do anything more radical to save the Kingdom. Then, in the late August of that year, Theobald was elected to the papacy. He heard of his appointment in early September and took the name Gregory X.

Gregory realized that the only possible hope for the crusaders was to make some sort of pact with the Mongols with whom they shared a common Egyptian enemy. Not only did this make good strategic sense, there were growing indications that Kubla Khan was considering embracing Christianity. This was not as unlikely a proposition as it sounded. There were many Eastern Christians among the Mongol ranks and already there had been military cooperation between Bohemond, the crusader Prince of Antioch, and Hulagu, the Mongol Prince of Persia. But Gregory had conceived a more daring and ambitious plan than simple cooperation. He wished to convert the Mongols to Christianity and to turn the Great Khan Kubla into the spiritual son of the Roman Pontiff. The Mongol Empire ranged from the Euphrates to the Pacific; it was the largest empire the world had ever seen. Gregory understood that if it could be turned into a Christian empire, the days of Islam would be numbered and the Crusader Kingdom saved.

Gregory's first action as Pope was thus to recall to Acre a

Venetian galley that had just arrived at Ayas in Asia Minor. On board were two Venetian brothers, Niccolo and Maffeo Polo along with Niccolo's seventeen-year-old son, Marco. Two years previously, in the spring of 1269, the two elder Polos had suddenly appeared in Acre. They said they had just returned from Xanadu, the summer palace of Kubla Khan on the Mongolian steppe. They were the first Europeans ever to claim to have travelled so far east, and their tale appeared to be true. When they were brought before Gregory (then still Papal Legate) they told him their remarkable story and showed him the Tablets of Gold given to them by Kubla Khan. On these were inscribed orders that the Polos should be 'supplied with everything needful in all the countries through which they should pass - with horses, with escorts, and, in short, with whatever they should require'. According to the brothers, Kubla Khan was a man of rather different temperament to his grandfather Ghengis. He had shown great interest in Christianity and had given them a letter in which he asked the Pope to send him 'a hundred persons of the Christian faith; intelligent men, acquainted with the Seven Arts, and able clearly to prove to idolaters and other kinds of folk, that the Law of Christ was best, and that all other religions were false and nought'. The brothers said that if they could prove this. Kubla Khan and all his subjects would become Christians. The Khan had also asked the brothers to bring back to him what he had heard was the most sacred of Christian relics, a sample of oil from the famous lamps which burned in the Holy Sepulchre.

The Legate realized that this was a crucial chance for Christendom. But in 1269 there was no Pope, as Clement IV had just died and the cardinals had yet to summon the energy to meet and choose his successor. The Polos had no choice but to go to Venice and wait until a Pope was elected. By the spring of 1271, despite mounting public indignation, the cardinals appeared to be no nearer reaching a decision. Seeing this, the Polos decided to return to Acre, this time with Marco. There they announced to the Legate that Pope or no Pope they were going to return to the Khan 'for we have already tarried long and there has been more than enough delay'. They set off east in the last days of August.

Meanwhile in Viterbo the papal election had turned into an international scandal. In order to speed a decision, the civic authorities had locked the cardinals in the Papal Palace, threatened a starvation diet and removed the roof to allow the divine influences to descend more freely on their counsels'. This unusual approach to the workings of the Holy Spirit proved a surprising success. The cardinals delegated the decision to a committee of six who, anxious to get away, elected Theobald that same day. A week later news of the decision reached Acre and the Polos were recalled. The new Pope immediately gave them permission to go to Jerusalem to fetch the Holy Oil. He also provided the expedition with, if not one hundred, then at least with two intelligent men of the Christian faith. Friar Nicolas of Vicenza and Friar William of Tripoli, the two most senior friars in the Holy Land. Pope Gregory gave to the friars extraordinary powers of ordination and absolution, and to the Polos letters and presents for the Great Khan. The party, now five strong - the two elder Polos, Marco, and the two friars - finally departed in early November.

At my primary school we knew all about Marco Polo. He wore a turban, a stripy robe a bit like a dressing gown and he rode a camel with only one hump. The Ladybird book which had this picture on the cover was the most heavily thumbed book on the school bookshelf. One day, my friends and I put some biscuits in a handkerchief, tied the handkerchief to a stick and set off to China. It was an exhausting walk as there were no camels in Scotland, and by tea time we had eaten all our biscuits. There was also the problem that we were not absolutely sure where China was. It was beyond England, of that we were certain, but then we were not absolutely sure where England was either. Nonetheless we strode off manfully towards Haddington where there was a shop. We could ask there, we said. But when it began to get dark we turned around and went home for supper. After consultation we decided to put the plan on the shelf for a while. China could wait.

In fact, no one had ever been much more successful than us in following Marco Polo. Many had, like us, set off in his tracks but no one had ever managed to complete the journey. In the nineteenth century Afghanistan was too dangerous; in the twentieth, first Sinkiang, then the whole of China was closed to foreigners. By the time China began opening up in the early eighties, Afghanistan was closed again, this time because of the Soviet invasion. Now, while the Soviets are withdrawing, Iran and Syria have both closed their borders. But in the spring of 1986 the opening of the Karakoram Highway, the mountain road which links Pakistan with China, made it possible for the first time, perhaps since the thirteenth century, to plan an overland route between Jerusalem and Xanadu and to attempt to carry a phial of Holy Oil from one to the other. The war in Afghanistan prevented the whole of Polo's journey being followed but in principle it was now possible to follow almost all of it, and to complete the journey. It was my then girlfriend Louisa who spotted the small article in the
New York Herald Tribune
which announced the opening of the highway and together we decided to mount an expedition to follow in the Venetian's footsteps. The previous summer I had walked from Edinburgh to Jerusalem following the route of the First Crusade. That journey had ended at the Holy Sepulchre; Marco Polo's journey began where the other finished. It was the obvious sequel.