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  “These people have such a custom,” he confides. “If a stranger comes to his house to lodge, [a man] is too much delighted at it, and receives him with great joy, and labors to do everything to please,” instructing his “daughters, sisters, and other relations to do all that the stranger wishes,” even to the point of leaving his house for several days while “the stranger stays with his wife in the house and does as he likes and lies with her in a bed just as if she were his wife, and they continue in great enjoyment. All the men of this city and province are thus cuckolded by their wives; but they are not the least ashamed of it. And the women are beautiful and vivacious and always ready to oblige.” And one more thing can be assumed: they were ready to oblige young Marco Polo, just coming into manhood.

  Yes, he admits, it could be said that this licentious behavior dishonored the women and men of Kamul, “but I tell you that because of the general custom which is in all that province; and is very pleasing to their idols when they give so good a reception to wayfarers in need of rest.” Even more remarkable, the family unit remained intact: “All the women are very fair and gay and very wanton and most obedient to their husbands’ order, and greatly enjoy this custom.”

  Although his description seems more fanciful than real, more ironic parable than reliable reportage, Marco is discussing a well-established custom of the region and an exception to “village endogamy,” in which the people of the same community intermarry to preserve assets and bloodlines. Endogamy brings with it the hazard of incest and birth defects. Exogamy, or marriage outside the clan, refreshes a depleted gene pool. If the outsiders were nomadic, as Marco suggests, the replenishing of the gene pool would be accomplished without challenging the existing order. Lonely wayfarers like him would deposit their seed and move on.

  THERE WERE, however, repercussions from the world beyond the isolated hamlets through which Marco and the other travelers were passing. The reach of the bloodthirsty Mongols, about whom Marco had heard dire reports, extended even to this remote mountain region. He repeats a disturbing account of the behavior of the area’s former ruler, Möngke Khan, concerning exogamy, which in this part of the world took the form of inviting strangers to bed the wives of others.

  As Marco reminds his readers, Möngke Khan, one of the grandchildren of Genghis Khan, had come to power in 1250, a little more than twenty years before Marco entered the lands controlled by the Mongols. During his brief reign, Möngke attempted to establish a reliable postal system, essential for the administration of a great empire. He restrained the military campaigns that had once wreaked havoc across thousands of miles of Steppe and mountainous regions alike. And he respected local customs. In the emerging Mongol society, women had more independence than their Western and Islamic counterparts. They served in the military, remaining hidden during combat but joining the fight if an emergency made that necessary. Under Möngke, all worshipped as they chose, and variations of Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity flourished.

  But the khan’s tolerance did not extend to the women of Kamul. The women’s lustful behavior occasioned opprobrium rather than the incredulity and mirth that Marco displayed. Once Möngke learned of it, he levied “great penalties to prevent it.” Wayfarers such as the Polos would have to stay in “public lodgings,” not private homes, to prevent the “shaming” of the householders’ wives.

  Möngke had his way for three years, although the inhabitants of Kamul remained resentful. Matters worsened when their crops failed and sickness visited one household after another—misfortunes they took to mean they had to restore their customs if prosperity and health were to return. “They sent their ambassadors,” Marco reports, “who took a great and beautiful present and carry it to Möngke and pray him that so great a wrong with so great loss to them, and danger, should not be done.”

  Möngke “joyfully” received the ambassadors of Kamul; he listened carefully to their plea and even appeared sympathetic to their plight. And then the khan spoke: “For my part I have done my duty; but since you wish your shame and contempt so much, then you may have it. Go and live according to your customs, and make your wives charitable gifts to travelers.” With that, Marco says, “he revoked the order.”

  The ambassadors returned to Kamul “with the greatest joy of the whole people, and from that time till now they have always kept up and still keep up that custom.”

  MARCO TOOK PAINS to describe Möngke Khan as a wise and compassionate ruler, but in the historical record the khan emerges as an emotional and brutal martinet.

  On one occasion, Möngke decided to punish seventy officers who he believed had plotted against him. The method of execution was traditionally Mongol: forcing stones into their mouths. In 1252, he sat in judgment on another group of subversives. One princess in particular, Ogul Gaimish, incurred his wrath when she refused to declare her loyalty to him. He ordered her hands and legs to be sewn up in a leather bag. He then stripped her naked to cross-examine her while she protested that no man except for a king had ever seen her in that condition. He declared both Ogul Gaimish and her mother guilty of trying to kill him by means of magic spells. As soon as he had pronounced his judgment, he ordered the two women rolled up in rugs and drowned. He also directed that Ogul Gaimish’s two chief counselors be put to death.

  SIXTEEN DAYS’ march from Kamul across a “little desert,” the Polo company came upon a natural wonder in the form of asbestos, which, like so much else in China, was scarcely known in the West. Nowadays, airborne asbestos fibers are notorious for their association with serious respiratory illness, including cancer, but in Marco’s day, fabrics woven of asbestos were held in high regard as the equal of gold and fit for the burial shrouds of Eastern kings. Following the convention of the era, Marco called the substance “salamander,” after the tiny, lizard-like animal that was supposedly impervious to fire. He immediately grasped the military implications of a fireproof material.

  “In this mountain is found a good vein from which salamander is made that cannot be burnt if it is thrown into the fire,” he reports. The salamander is neither beast nor serpent, he explains, and “it is not true that those clothes are of the hair of an animal that lives in fire, as they say in our country.”

  Marco tries to dispel the tenacious European belief that the salamander cloth had such a fantastic origin, explaining that he had become acquainted with a Turkish merchant named Çulficar, “who was very knowing in my judgment and trustworthy,” and who had for three years supervised production of salamander—or asbestos—from these mountainside mines for the khan himself. To demonstrate just how far asbestos was from being the byproduct of a supernatural creature, Marco furnishes a careful description of its manufacture. “When one has dug from the mountains some of that vein,” he writes, “it is twisted together and makes thread like wool. And therefore when one has this vein he has it dried in the sun, and then when it is dry has it pounded in a great copper mortar,” washed with water, “and only that thread like wool of which I told you stays on top of the water, and all the earth clinging there, which is worthless, falls off.” The resulting thread was spun into cloth and towels. “When the towels are made I tell you that they are not at all white, and they are brown when they are taken from the loom. But when they wish to make them white they put them in the fire and leave them to stay there a space of an hour, and when it is taken out the towel becomes very white, like snow.”

  Expecting to be disbelieved, he insists, “I have seen it with my eyes put into the fire and come back very white.” No fire-dwelling serpent is involved, and all the popular tales to that effect are nothing but “lies and fables.” With such statements, Marco demonstrates that he could demolish old myths as readily as he generated new ones.

  IN CAMPçIO, yet another ill-defined stop along the Silk Road, the Polo company rested once again. The usually expansive Marco furnishes only this cryptic note concerning the extended interlude: “Master Niccolò and Master Maffeo and Master Marco stayed about one year in this city f
or their business, which is not worth mentioning.”

  By the time they mounted their camels and donkeys again, it was 1274, according to the Christian calendar. Marco was turning twenty. The Polos had been traveling the Sericulture Superhighway for three years, and they were still more than two thousand miles from their destination, the court of Kublai Khan.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Secret History of the Mongols

  In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

  A stately pleasure dome decree:

  Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

  Through caverns measureless to man….

  WITH EVERY MILE that Marco Polo traveled along the Silk Road, he became ever more aware of the grandeur of the Mongol Empire, and the mystique surrounding the founder of the Mongol dynasty, Genghis Khan, reviled throughout Europe. Yet he has this to say concerning the ruthless warrior: “Genghis Khan was a man very upright: eloquent, and of great valor and of great wisdom and of great prowess.” Continuing in this boldly revisionist vein, Marco insists: “I tell you that when this man was chosen for king he ruled with such justice and moderation that he was loved by all and reverenced not as lord but almost as God, so that when his good fame spread through many lands, all the Tartars of the world who were scattered through those strange countries willingly held him with reverence and obedience for lord.”

  Marco had seen for himself the havoc wreaked by the armies of Genghis Khan in Badakhshan and elsewhere—the cities lying in ruins, the houses burned to their foundations, the displaced populace living in exile while the Mongol invaders fed on their riches and infrastructure. But after three long years on the Silk Road, Marco had to express his hard-won admiration for the founder of the Mongol dynasty. To the young Venetian, only Alexander the Great approached Genghis in accomplishment.

  Temüjin—Genghis’s original name—was born in about 1162 into one of Mongolia’s ruling clans, and came of age amid feuding tribes. Rivals poisoned his father, and Temüjin became an orphan at the age of nine. As he matured, he familiarized himself with Mongol military tactics, such as raiding camps and stealing horses. He learned to wield patronage, and recruited allies known as nökhör to join him in his quest for power. To become a nökhör was a serious matter, for it meant renouncing allegiance to all tribes and kin in favor of a chosen leader. In a culture rife with betrayal, Temüjin’s nökhör served him loyally.

  By 1206, Temüjin’s success in building alliances and in tribal warfare led to his becoming Ruler of All the Mongols, holding the title Genghis Khan. “Genghis” is said to derive from the Turkic word tengiz, which meant “the ocean,” as if to suggest breadth and depth. And “Khan” simply means “emperor.” A near contemporary, the Persian historian Vassaf al-Hazrat, whose name meant “the court panegyrist,” ecstatically greeted the enthronement of Genghis as the Great Khan: “Ruby-lipped cupbearers poured wine in golden goblets and ravishing young ladies with glossy ringlets stood like statues by the throne of the Khan in tight and slinky dresses. Slaves with tulip cheeks knelt before the throne waiting on the dignitaries who performed the hand-kissing ceremony. A week of blissful feast and immense delight followed thus.”

  Genghis came of age amid a stark landscape of grassy Steppe and soaring mountains, frigid lakes, and the arid reaches of the immense Gobi Desert. He was surrounded by herds of cattle, and by sheep, camels, goats, and horses. Twice a year, the nomadic Mongols packed up and moved, on rolling carts by day, resting in portable tents by night, following their herds in search of grass and developing their hunting prowess.

  As he matured, Genghis drew strength from his belief that the Mongol sky god, Mönke Tenggeri, had given him the superhuman task of unifying these disparate Mongol tribes and conquering other nations. In conquest, the Mongols acquired the customs of those they had subdued until it became unclear who had the upper hand. Although they were fierce warriors and skilled horsemen, and were brilliantly adaptable, the Mongols were few in number; yet they controlled populations ten, twenty, or thirty times greater. Ultimately the overextended Mongols could not rule their empire for long, but during their brief ascendancy they spread their culture and beliefs far and wide.

  Genghis established Tenggerrism—the worship of Heaven—as the official religion of the Mongol Empire and appointed himself its chief representative. For the Mongols, the sky took precedence over all. It was greater than the mountains, greater than the rivers, greater, even, than the Steppe itself. It was life, it was spirit, and it was the source of universal power. Tenggerism was, above all, a unifying credo, inspiring the Mongols to conquer everything under Heaven—which meant, in practice, every corner of the world. In the process of carrying out their mandate, the Mongols became early practitioners of globalization, seeking to connect the entire world. They were conquerors and marauders, but more than that, they were unifiers.

  Fired by his elaborate sense of destiny, and emboldened by his genius for military strategy, Genghis pursued a longstanding Mongol aspiration, the conquest of China, the Mongols’ much larger and more powerful neighbor to the south and east. In his insatiable quest for more land to add to his empire, he subdued potential rivals—and there were many—among the Mongols, and built alliances with distant warlords. He then exploited the internal politics of China, playing one clique against another, using a mixture of diplomacy and war. The Chinese, who had seemed invulnerable, quickly fell before Genghis Khan’s cunning generalship. He mastered the art of siege warfare, learning to take cities by any means, no matter how savage. His troops burned or starved out inhabitants. They employed giant slingshots or catapults such as mangonels and trebuchets, capable of hurling stones or flaming naphtha or even diseased corpses over the walls into the midst of terrified city dwellers trapped by their own defenses. “Sometimes they even take the fat of the people they kill and, melting it, throw it onto the houses,” Carpini wrote, “and wherever the fire falls on this fat it is almost inextinguishable”—unless doused with wine, which few victims had the presence of mind to employ. “If it falls on flesh”—an even more horrifying possibility—Carpini calmly advised that “it can be put out by being rubbed with the hand”—a technique that escaped Marco Polo’s notice.

  Ill-equipped to repulse the determined Mongol adversaries, China became resigned to the Mongols’ unifying influence and tried to make the best of the inevitable. In words that Genghis would have approved, Vassaf remarked, “As the rumors of his just rule spread to the horizons, the happy people of China and beyond, up to the Egyptian coasts and the far western territories, were honored to submit to his just rule.” The bitterest of ironies informed this assessment.

  Genghis Khan knew when to hold his strength in check, and he took pains to respect Chinese customs and religion. Where he was received relatively peacefully, he ordered his generals to proclaim religious freedom and to forbid wholesale slaughter. In the process, the Mongol invaders took on as many traits from the conquered as they imposed. They adopted Chinese dietary practices, clothing, legal procedures, and religious observances.

  IN 1227, as his vision of China unified under Mongol rule neared fulfillment, Genghis Khan died at the age of sixty-five, leaving his immense empire to his son Ögödei, along with a trove of lore unique in the world’s literature.

  The year after Genghis’s death, a group of Mongol scribes produced The Secret History of the Mongols, an extraordinary compilation of Mongol history, ritual, folklore, and customs recorded in a mixture of Mongol and Uighur tongues. (The Uighurs are a Turkic people dwelling in Central Asia.) There were three to five major revisions of the work between 1228 and 1240, when a final compilation was produced. The original has been lost; an abridged Chinese transcript became the basis of subsequent versions of the Secret History.

  Why secret? It contained stories about Genghis that the Mongols preferred to keep private, along with recommendations about governing best left to the powers that be. Even though the Mongols wanted to shield it from outsiders, they were all familiar with its laws and co
ncepts, and among them it was known, simply, as their History.

  Written in poetry and prose, the epic emerged from a shamanistic mind-set, connecting Heaven and earth, human and animal. The story begins: “Chinggis”—a more accurate transcription of the Mongol leader’s name, which probably meant “strong”—“Qahan was born with his destiny ordained by Heaven above. He was descended from Boerte Chino, whose name means ‘grayish white wolf,’ and Qo’ ai Maral, the wolf’s spouse, whose name means ‘beautiful doe,’ who crossed the lake and settled at the source of the Onon River.”

  The narrative goes on to recount the elemental Mongol way of life, beginning twenty-two generations before Genghis. Of one hardy precursor, the Secret History records: “He saw a young female hawk catch and eat a black pheasant”—just the kind of spectacle Marco Polo later witnessed. “Using the tail hairs of his off-white, mangy-tailed, sore-ridden horse, with the blacked-striped back as a snare, he captured the hawk and reared it. When he was without food, he would lie in wait and kill wild beasts that wolves had cornered at the foot of the cliffs and shoot and kill them. Together with the hawk, he would pick up and eat what the wolves had left behind. So as the year passed, he nourished both his own gullet and the hawk’s.”

  At times, the Secret History unfolds as if it were a saga of the American West, with its tales of horse rustling, sharp bargaining, and sudden displays of cunning and heroism, all set in the midst of a primeval landscape. But every incident and topic, from horses to hawking, struck a chord in the Mongol psyche, as the Secret History preserved the lifestyle embodied and codified by the warrior Genghis Khan.