Yes We Khan

A brief update from the damps of February. This week I considered writing something about romance (not Romance), or Forty Seven Medieval Ways to Neck a Bottle of Wine, but today is a special anniversary for two very special people. That’s right: on this day in respectively 1294 and 1405, Kublai Khan and Timur the Lame both died. Two out of three favourite medieval warlords rate today as the best day to die!

It is a bit weak to talk of the ‘achievements’ of men who ruled over substantial parts of Asia, oversaw vast construction projects and whose empires could scarcely survive them. In part it is a question of scale and ambition. Both men seem to have modelled themselves on Genghis, with all the ruthlessness and brutality that entailed. In another part, they simply feel unreal as historical figures.

Bro, do you even pillage?

What I know of these men I know primarily from European sources. Specifically, from the Livre des Merveilles du Monde of Marco Polo and Kit Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great. In many ways, this is like exploring medieval history using only the Arts and Crafts movement and Game of Thrones – or, precisely how most people explore medieval history.

The mythic quality of the historical figures easily spills into depictions of them. Rustichello’s Kublai is a King of Kings, with vast wealth, vast lands and a vast court, a latter-day Cyrus whose historical truth is more than a little tainted by legends of Prester John. Marlowe’s far later creation is an orgulous tyrant, crushing rivals and burning cities in scene after scene. Handel’s Tamerlano is pretty dreadful, with its three hours of da capo arias. Netflix’s Marco Polo is almost worse. Somehow, every one of them has a ring of truth.

The moral: enjoy your warlords in moderation.

Going Places

Birthdays are good for you. Statistics show that the people who have the most live the longest.

Birthdays are the most selfish day of the year. They are for many people ‘all about me’, and whether one forces others to do shots and dance or sits and wallows in a piteous remembrance of ever-approaching death, they impart a brief, mythic importance to the celebrant. And the things we do for our friends, relatives and colleagues, however ordinary, take on the same mythic importance. A round bought in a pub? No big deal. A round bought FOR YOUR BIG DAY, WOOOO? Stressful. A four-hour train journey would most days be an inconvenience, but when it’s on the way to see The Birthday Girl it becomes worse than treading on Lego. But we do things that irk us for the people we love. I love Marco Polo, and today he is 760.

Details of the man’s life are well-known because extraordinary – a Venetian merchant at the court of Kublai Khan – and because they are briefly recounted in his phenomenally popular Livre des merveilles du monde, written while in prison in collaboration with the romance author Rustichello of Pisa. The veracity of his account of the Far East has been a matter of academic debate for generations, but it is generally accepted that he must have lived amongst the Mongols for some time. His journeys through Asia by land and by sea have been estimated at around fifteen thousand miles.

Polo gave accounts of lives in the cities and amongst the rulers of central Asia. We read about household shrines, the Tartars’ colossal units of horsemen, wine made from rice that ‘intoxicates more speedily than any other wine’. He records the names and relative scales of their measurements, describes the burning of coal, and attempts to explain the intricacies of the lunar calendar. He goes into particular detail concerning Kublai himself: his military victories, his harem, what colour liveries his retinue wear; his descent from Genghis is set as a matter of great importance. Genghis was probably known to his European readers, but so was the mythical figure Prester John, whom Polo attempts to associate with the historical warlord Ong-Khan.

I bet Francisco López de Gómara doesn’t have his own game…

Throughout the Middle Ages, Polo’s book was linked to and in competition with The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the fourteenth-century travelogue that combines reliable descriptions of Jerusalem with the more lively legends about the East and even Polo’s own material on the lifestyle of the Khans. A particularly beautiful manuscript made in the 1410s for John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, contains both books alongside accounts of the East by the Franciscan Odoric of Pordenone, the layman William of Boldenseele, and the Dominican Ricoldo of Monte Croce. These three, like Polo, almost certainly did travel to the places they describe – as missionaries or papal envoys – and the Mandeville author’s appearance in their midst casts him as the ultimate interloper in a genre that frequently fell prey to a European thirst for the thrillingly weird. The Mandeville author wrote about giants and griffons; Polo knew that real crocodiles have curves.

Marco Polo was by no means the greatest traveller of the Middle Ages: this was undoubtedly the fourteenth-century Moroccan Ibn Battuta. But it isn’t Ibn Battuta’s birthday. So how best to celebrate the great man? Heading to the pub and attempting to buy horse milk with cowrie shells.