Welcome back to the series of lectures, this is History 1122, the second half of Western
Civilization.
The last time we were here, I tried to make the connection between the Mongol Empire,
the Venetian merchant and explorer – Marco Polo, and Christopher Columbus.
We talked about the great significance of the Mongol Empire, not so much that their
military prowess – although that is impressive – but the fact that the Mongols were able
to unify large portions of Eurasia.
The creation of this elaborate horse trail system, with its stations and its passports,
allows for safe travels for missionaries and merchants and others.
And of course, the most famous European who took advantage of the Mongol system was the
Venetian merchant, Marco Polo.
I mentioned his book and it has more than one title.
Let’s face it; the book was published what, in the late 13th century or so, maybe the
early 14th century.
The Description of the World – Polo claims to have lived and worked for the Great Khan,
this of course, is Kublai Khan, who we talked about last time.
Kublai Khan is the Mongol ruler over the Juan Dynasty in China; Kublai Khan, of course,
the grandson of the infamous Genghis Khan.
Now I read a book some years ago, I can’t remember the name of the author off the top
of my head – if you’re interested, I can look it up and find it for you – and the
author made the argument that there’s evidence that perhaps Polo exaggerated his travels,
that perhaps he actually did not go to China.
I’m going to just take a few minutes and talk about this because it’s interesting
and it tends to complicate our view of Columbus and the founding of the Western hemisphere,
at least by the Europeans.
I read Columbus’, I read Polo’s book many years ago.
I don’t know if I mentioned this, but I used to keep it on my bed stand, and if I
had insomnia I’d pick it up and open to whatever page and begin to read, and within
a few minutes I’d be asleep.
There are parts of Polo’s book that are interesting, his discussion of the Great Khan
and of the court there in Beijing, or Peking, the hunt, the falcon hunts, and the harems,
and all this stuff is interesting, but Polo goes on and on and on about trade items and
sort of a descript of landscapes, and a lot of the book is tiresome.
But at any rate, after reading Polo’s book, I read this other scholarly work that made
the argument that Polo may not have gone to China.
So I want to talk about some of the things that Polo omitted from his book.
Now remember, Polo had returned to Italy and he’d gotten involved in a sort of civil
wars between the Italian city-states, and I believe he was taken POW and landed in jail,
and it was in jail that he met a writer and they began to put together what we now call,
The Description of the World.
What was left out?
Now, if you’re an Italian, or European, like Polo, and you’re writing a book about
China for a European audience, what would you include in it?
Would you include those things that are peculiar to China?
I would.
Chopsticks, for instance, Europeans do not eat with chopsticks.
They do in China, yet chopsticks are not mentioned.
Foot binding, among elite Chinese women foot binding is a common tradition there.
This process begins when the girl is an infant.
The toes are turned under, heavily wrapped, the foot often is broken to create, by the
time the girl reaches her sexual maturity, she doesn’t really have a foot anymore;
she has a little hoof, and this of course, is a distinctive cultural marking.
What it says, of course, is that this woman with bound feet, she is among the elite; she
is a kept woman.
She probably lives at court.
She is probably wealthy.
Let's face it, 99.9 percent of Chinese women have feet just like yours, but that small
elite group who practice foot binding, is quite different from the rest of the population,
and these of course, are the very people that Polo says he was hanging out with.
Polo is not living with peasants and working in the rice paddies; he’s living at court
with the world’s most powerful man, Kublai Khan – among these women, presumably, who
had bound feet.
Yet, Polo doesn’t mention this in his book.
The historian, of course, also has to ask the question, why?
Why is this a tradition in China?
And there are a couple of reasons.
One, the cultural marker of wealth and high status, but apparently foot binding or small
feet are a sexual fetish in China.
I admit, this goes over my head, to each their own in this regard, but these bound feet strike
me as an odd sexual fetish, at the very least.
But the important part is obviously that Polo doesn’t mention it.
Now elite Chinese men quite often will grow their fingernails very long, and you’ve
probably seen pictures of this.
We’ll provide images for you.
This again, is a cultural marker of elite status, and again, these are the very people
that Polo is rubbing shoulders with.
But he doesn’t mention this either, in his book.
A common method of fishing in China, of course, is cormorant.
The cormorant is a river bird who dives into the water and catches fish.
Cormorants have presumably been doing this for millennia.
Chinese fishermen will tether one of the cormorant’s legs to a pole and then they’ll take a pliable
piece of metal, maybe something like pewter or brass, and tighten it around the cormorant’s
neck – not enough to hurt the bird, but enough to keep him from swallowing the fish
– and then the Chinese fisherman on his bamboo raft out in the river or the lake,
will cast the cormorant.
The cormorant will dive into the water, catch the fish, bring it back to the fisherman.
The metal here – the ring – keeps them from swallowing, so the fisherman simply removes
the fish, puts it in his basket, and casts the cormorant again.
This is a unique way of fishing and we don’t do this in the West.
It’s quite common in China and presumably Polo saw it probably many times in his seventeen
years there.
But he doesn’t mention it.
Chinese script looks nothing like the Western script.
Polo doesn’t talk about it.
Maybe these things became commonplace to him, he didn’t think they were interesting after
all those years there.
But remember, we’re writing for a European audience, these are the very type of things
that presumably a European audience would be interested to hear.
Now I’ve heard it said – I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I’ve heard it
said – there’s one man-made object that you can see from orbit.
Of course, the Great Wall of China.
The Great Wall is just north of Beijing, a day or two ride by horseback, you can’t
miss it.
Yet Polo does not mention it.
Again, strange, these cultural oddities of China that Polo skips.
Now of course, Chinese are the inventors of paper and because of this Chinese governments
have tended to be large.
If you give a bureaucrat something to write on, they’ll find things to write down.
This is a boon for Chinese historians because you have very detailed records going back
for millennia, and the various dynasty’s in China are well detailed in the archives.
So if you want to investigate the Tang, or the Sui, or the Ming, or the Yuan Dynasties,
you can do so.
It has records of wars and of famine and of uprisings and trade and various things.
Yet in the archives of the Yuan Dynasty, there’s no mention of Marco Polo.
There’s no papal recognition of Polo’s feat, nor is there any Venetian recognition,
and of course, Venice is where he’s from.
This is interesting because in the next century, after Polo’s book is published, a similar
book is published; it’s called, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville.
Mandeville is an English knight.
He traveled across North Africa, I believe, the Middle East, all the way to China.
His book is very similar to Polo’s.
If you read Polo’s book, you’d probably read Mandeville’s as well.
It was in the genre of travel literature, I suppose.
We found out, I believe in the 19th century, that Sir John Mandeville and his travels were
entirely fictitious, simply made up.
Apparently a French priest who lived near a large library, simply used materials from
the library and cobbled up this fictitious adventurer, and put it together in a book
called, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville.
It begs the question, doesn’t it, if Mandeville’s fictitious, or at least his travels, perhaps
Polo’s travels are exaggerated as well.
Let me read a brief quote here because it will take us into our next lecture.
Polo writes, quote – The Great Khan, Kublai Khan, begged that the Pope would send as many
as a hundred persons of our Christian faith, well qualified to enter into controversy and
able to clearly prove by force of argument to idolaters, that the law of Christ is best
and that all other religions are false, and that if they would prove this, he and all
under him would become Christians.
Keep this in mind as we talk about Columbus’ pitch in our next lecture.
Let me end here by simply saying that – and I think I mentioned this earlier – that
Columbus had two books onboard his ship when he set sail to China in 1492, the Bible and
Marco Polo’s Description of the World.
It’s interesting to think that Columbus may have been inspired by a book that may
have been highly exaggerated.
Nevertheless, it was an inspiration to him, and in our next lecture we will talk about
the arguments that Columbus presented to try to get financial backing for his journey to
China.
Thank you very much.