Oyaging overland through Persia and the Gobi Desert with his father, Marco Polo arrived at the court of Kublai Khan in 1275. For the next seventeen years he acted as Kublai's envoy, traveling on fact-finding expeditions as far afield as Burma and southern China and possibly even acting as governor of the northern city of Yangzhou.
Polo returned to Venice in 1295, voyaging via Champa (present-day Vietnam), Sumatra, Ceylon, and India. With him he brought not only a fortune in precious stones but a series of notebooks in which he had recorded detailed observations of all he had seeniind reports of lands as distant as Zanzibar and Japan. Later, during a brief imprisonment by the Genoese, he dictated the story of his travels to a fellow prisoner. After his release, it was published as Divi-sament dou Monde, “A Description of the World." The prologue claimed that Polo had traveled more extensively than any man since Creation; indeed, he revealed a world that was almost wholly unknown to Western Christendom, and some parts of his route would not be traveled by Europeans for another 600 years.
The wonders that he described captured the imagination of the masses, and the book was reprinted many times. From one fourteenth-century version came the picture shown at left, above, depicting the khan's men exchanging paper money— then an unknown commodity in the West— for bullion. The idea of paper being valued as much as silver seemed fantastic to many Westerners, as did such other reports as that of rocks—coal—being burned for fuel. Indeed, it is related that Polo was asked on his deathbed, in 1324, to retract his invented fables. His reply was that he had barely told half of what he had seen.
The rise of Timur signaled the end of the Mongol Empire proper. By the dawn of the fifteenth century, the conquerors from the steppes had become so integrated with the conquered that they ceased to exist as a separate race. In Russia, they had merged with Turks, Slavs, and Finns to create a new Turkish-speaking race loosely known as Tartars. In central Asia, they had become indistinguishable from the masses, predominantly Turkic or Persian in origin. The destructive force unleashed by Genghis Khan in 1207 had swept across Eurasia and finally worn itself out.
At its height in 1260, the Mongol Empire stretched from the Pacific Ocean in the east to Russia's Dnieper River in the west, from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Strait of Malacca in the south. In their conquests of Persia and China, the Mongols had gained control of the two most advanced civilizations in the world. Yet in carving out this colossal realm, they themselves contributed nothing to methods of organized government or the advancement of arts and sciences. Indeed, they had nothing to give their conquered peoples apart from a keener appreciation of the methods of war.
As military conquerors, however, the Mongols were catalysts for many changes, among which was the alteration in strength and distribution of the world's leading religions—Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism. Under the Mongols, Buddhism took a far stronger hold in eastern Asia, especially in China, where it was viewed sympathetically by Kublai and his descendants. Islam suffered a shattering blow with the sack of Baghdad, only to flourish anew with the Cairo of the Mamiuks as its new capital. Meanwhile, under the aegis of a flourishing Persian culture, the Muslim religion was adopted by a majority of the Mongols, and it spread far and wide in their western territories. And although this expansion represented a lost opportunity for Christianity, the western half of Christendom had escaped Mongol conquest. With its natural development undisturbed, the West was eventually able to flourish, whereas the Mongol-influenced East was held back by a heritage of tyranny.
In addition, the vastness of the Mongol Empire allowed, for the first time, an intercontinental traffic in goods, knowledge, and ideas. For a while in the midthirteenth century, the main arteries of Asia and Europe were thrown open by the so-called Pax Mongolica, a terror-enforced peace so effective that merchants and missionaries under the nominal protection of the great khan could journey east and west in relative safety. Thus, at its zenith, the empire oversaw international intercourse on an unprecedented scale. Representatives of all nations and faiths were received at the great khan's court in Karakoram. And in Kublai Khan's Dadu, there was a comingling of papal envoys from Rome and Buddhist priests from India, of artisans from France, Italy, and China, of merchants from Persia, java, and Ceylon.
Asia was crisscrossed by caravan routes, and China was thrown open to the world by both land and sea. Each year, so Marco Polo recorded, 20,000 cargo ships sailed up the Yangtze River, bringing diamonds and pearls from India; ginger, cotton, and muslin from Ceylon; black pepper, white walnuts, and cloves from Java. More significant, the gradual westward flow of eastern artifacts, knowledge, and expertise worked in favor of a Europe that was far behind China in the arts and sciences.
Ultimately, the barbarian rule of China led to a backlash of xenophobia. Under the fiercely nationalistic Ming, China became more isolated than ever. By then, also, the great trans-Asian trade routes had been closed by political upheavals during the decline of the Mongol Empire. But no matter. The wonders and wealth of the Far East were no longer secret, and the West would not be denied them forever.
World History
