Welcome back, this is History 1122, the second half of Western Civilization.
This is sort of the first formal lecture.
I call it the Mongols, Marco Polo, and Christopher Columbus.
Now I want to emphasize that this course is taught in every college and every university
in this country, and most teachers will begin around 1500 with Columbus.
Columbus is viewed as sort of the decisive breaking point in history, whereby globalization
begins; eastern and western hemispheres begin to comingle; diseases and culture and technology;
domesticated plants and animals – all these things are now going to be exchanged after
Columbus.
This dramatically and fundamentally changes human history.
So that is where this course generally starts, with Columbus.
I’m going to back it up a bit though, and make it a little more complicated – in my
mind, make it a little more interesting.
We think we know some things about Columbus.
It’s remarkable all that we don’t know or understand about him.
So what I want to do is to have you form a link in your mind between these three things
– the Mongol Empire; Marco Polo; and Christopher Columbus.
I’m going to link these three things together and it’s going to complicate the beginning
of our course.
We’re going to start with European exploration and with Columbus, but this is going to make
it a little more complex.
Let’s start with the Mongols; let’s briefly characterize them – a nomadic people, a
horse-bound people, raised on horseback from childhood moving from place to place.
They don’t have cities; their entire villages can be packed up and moved in search of fresh
grazing land and fresh water.
The Mongols establish a vast circuit of horse trails throughout Eurasia.
The Mongols themselves, generally if you wanted to find a homeland for them, it would be on
the step lands of Central Asia.
The step is a short band of pasture that extends all the way from Manchuria in the East to
Hungary in the West.
So this is thousands of miles of pasture, and the Mongols use this, of course, to subsist
their livestock – horses; goats; and sheep.
So the Mongols are in constant motion back and forth across the step, and then on occasion
they will venture southward to the old sedentary, established, cosmopolitan civilizations in
China and India and Persia, Mesopotamia; later in even Europe.
This elaborate horse-trail system is called the Yam; it’s just a transliteration of
the Mongol word, spelled Y-A-M, just like our potato.
So the Mongols are a nomadic people with this Yam, with this sort of medieval interstate
highway system.
The Mongols managed to overrun much of Eurasia in the 13th and 14th centuries; they overrun
China, India, Persia, parts of Mesopotamia.
They extend deep into the Middle East before finally being defeated.
They extend into Poland and Hungary in Europe before withdrawing.
They overrun the early Russian state as well.
So the Mongol Empire – probably the largest land empire in history – patrolled by the
Mongol horsemen on the Yam.
This is significant because it allows for safe passage.
Traders and merchants and missionaries and diplomats and travelers can move relatively
safely and quickly across Eurasia on the Mongol system.
There are stations every twenty-five or thirty miles on the Yam – fresh water, fresh horses,
and hay, a place to rest, food, things like that.
So it’s significant because it allows the East and West to comingle.
It allows these cultures to mix.
It allows for a vast trading circuit.
You’ve heard of the Silk Road, the ancient trading route between China and Rome, well
this sort of revives it and extends it.
It’s not only East and West, but it’s North and South.
Now Marco Polo is part of a Venetian-merchant family.
As a young man he accompanies his father and uncle to China.
As an adult he will return and he claims to have spent I think about seventeen years in
China.
Now the ruler of China – and whether you know anything about Chinese history or not,
you probably are aware that China divides its political history up into dynasties – the
Sui Dynasty, the Tang Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty, on and on and on.
Well China, at the time of Marco Polo, is governed by the Mongols who have overrun China.
The Mongol ruler over China is Kublai Khan.
You may have heard of Kublai Khan – he’s quite famous; his grandfather is even more
famous, Genghis Khan, most people have heard of him.
So Kublai Khan is the Mongol ruler over China.
This dynasty is called the Yuan Dynasty, Y-U-A-N, and this is the man for whom Polo claims to
have worked for, for almost two decades, at a high level; he’s a sort of a diplomat
for the great Khan, he carries out economic missions and diplomatic missions for the great
Khan.
Now Polo – after spending about seventeen years in China – will return finally, to
Venice, in what today we call Italy and while there he gets involved in a dispute, a conflict
between the various Italian city-states.
He ends up a POW and is thrown in jail.
While in jail he meets a man who is a writer.
They begin to talk and the writer discovers that Marco Polo has seen more of the world
that probably anybody, traveling all the way across the Eurasian continent and then back,
traveling over land to and then by sea on his return.
So Polo has seen everything and is full of stories and the writer suggests that perhaps
they could collaborate and write a book.
I mean, they’ve got nothing to lose, right?
They’re in jail.
And indeed, this is what they do.
This book has a number of different titles.
I like the title, The Description of the World.
Can you imagine writing your autobiography and calling it The Description of the World?
So Polo indeed claims to have seen many wonders across Eurasia.
Of course, this book is still available in every library, every book store, every university.
You can read it today.
What’s curious about all this is that in 1492, when Christopher Columbus is preparing
his voyage to go back to China to shake hands with the Great Khan that he’s read about
in Polo’s book, Columbus has two books aboard his ship, the Bible – Columbus, of course,
is a devout Catholic and he uses the Bible for more than just faith, he uses it for information;
he has Polo’s book as well, The Description of the World – I think we still have the
copy, Columbus’ copy of Polo’s book.
I believe it’s in a museum in Seville, under glass.
I can imagine the pages would disintegrate if they were exposed to the air now.
But you can actually see Columbus’ notations in the margins and at the bottom of the page
as he makes his calculations.
Of course, Marco Polo spends a great deal of time talking about the wealth of the East
and spices and silks and so on and so forth.
So we have Columbus being inspired to go back to China by Polo’s book.
Polo, of course, claims to have worked for the Great Khan for nearly two decades.
This is the link that I want you to make – this book by Polo, it fires Columbus’ imagination;
he sees himself becoming a wealthy and powerful man as a result of his project to go to the
East.
When we get back we’ll talk about Columbus’ pitch, that is, how he convinces the King
and Queen of Spain to financially support his project.
We’ll talk about Columbus’ maps and we’ll try to get inside the great admiral’s head
to understand what the world looked like to him, because I can assure it looked very different
to him than it does to us today.
We’ll talk about those things that Columbus wants, those things that he desires in the
East, the gold and the spices and the Christian converts and things like that.
And then we’ll finish up Columbus with the Columbian Exchange, we’ll talk about that
great exchange of culture and disease and ideas and technology and food and domesticated
plants and animals and on and on and on, that sort of fundamentally change human history.
So that’s what’s in front of us and we’ll pick it up next time.
Thank you.