THE PSALTER MAP OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY.
[(see list of maps)]
Though Rubruquis is well called the most brilliant and literary of the mediæval travellers, his mission was fruitless, and the interest of his work lay rather in recording custom and myth—in sociology—than in adding anything definite to the geographical knowledge of the West. John de Plano had already been over the ground to Caracorum, and recorded all the main characteristics of the lands west of the Gobi Desert. The further advance, east to China, south to India, was yet to come.
But while Rubruquis was still among the Tartars, Nicolo and Matteo Polo, the uncles of the more famous Marco, were trading (1255-65) to the Crimea and the districts of southern Russia that were now under the Western Horde,—and soon after, following the caravans to Bokhara, they were drawn on to the court of Kublai Khan, then somewhere near the wall of China. After a most friendly reception they were sent back to Europe with presents and a letter to Pope Clement IV., offering a welcome and maintenance to Christian teachers. Kublai "had often questioned the Polos of the Western lands," and now he asked for one hundred "Latins, to shew him the Christian faith, for Christ he held to be the only God." Furnished with the imperial passport of the Golden Tablet, our merchants made their way back to Acre in April, 1269.
They found the old pope dead, Gregory X. in his place, and he shewed a coolness in answering the Khan's requests, but in 1271 they set out on their second journey to the furthest East, taking with them two friar preachers and their nephew Marco, now nineteen years of age.
In Armenia the friars took alarm at the troubled state of the nearer East and turned back, just as Augustine of Canterbury tried to find a way out of the mission to the English that Pope Gregory I. laid upon him in 597. For the Church it was perhaps as momentous a time now as then; the thirteenth century, if it had ended in the Christianising of the Mongol Empire, would have turned the Catholic victory of the fourth and sixth centuries in the West, the victory that had been worked out in the next seven hundred years to fuller and fuller realisation, into a world empire,—which did come at last for European civilisation, but not for Christendom.
The Polos however kept on their way north-east for more than "one thousand days," three years and a half, till they stood in the presence of Kublai Khan; beyond Gobi and the Great Wall and the mountain barriers of China, in Cambaluc or Pekin, "princess encrowned of cities capital."
Their journey was first through Armenia Lesser and Greater, then through Mosul (Nineveh) to Bagdad, where the last "Caliph and Pope of the Saracens" had been butchered by Holgalu and his Tartars, sewn in a sack and thrown into the Tigris by one account, walled up alive by another, in 1258. But though the stories in Marco's journal are a main interest of his work, as a summary and reflection of the science and history and general culture of the Christian world of his time, we must not here look outside his geography. And his first place-note of value is on the Caspian, "which containeth in circuit twenty-eight hundred miles and is like a lake, having no union with other seas and in which are many islands, cities, and castles." The extent of the Nestorian missions, "through all parts of India and to Cairo and Bagdad, and wherever Christians dwell," strikes him even now at the beginning of his travels—much more when he finds their churches on the Hoang Ho and the Yang-Tse-Kiang—declining indeed, but still living to witness to the part which that great heresy had played as an intermediary between the further and the nearer East—a part which history has never yet worked out. Entering Persia as traders, the Polos went naturally to Ormuz, already the great mart of Islam for the Indian trade, where Europeans really entered the third, and, to them, unknown belt of the world, after passing from a zone of known home-land through one of enemies' country, known and only known as such. Failing to take the sea route at Ormuz for China, as they had hoped, our Italians were obliged to strike back north-east, through Persia and the Pamir, the Kashgar district and the Gobi steppes, to Cathay and the pleasure domes of Kublai, visiting Caracorum and the Altai country on the way, by a turn due north. In 1275 they were in Shang-tu, the Xanadu[25] of Coleridge—the summer capital of Kublai Khan—and not till 1292 did they get leave to turn their faces to the West once more.
Here the Polos became what may be called consulting engineers to the Mongol Court; Marco was even made in 1277 a commissioner of the Imperial Council, and soon after sent upon government missions to Yunnan in extreme south-west China and to Yangchow city.
The greater part of Marco's own memoirs is taken up with his account of the thirty-four provinces of the Tartar Empire that centred round the "six parts of Cathay and the nine parts of Mangi," the districts of northern and southern China as we know them,—an account of the roads, rivers, and towns, the trade, the Court and the Imperial Ports, the customs and manner of life among the subject peoples in that Empire, perhaps the largest ever known. Especially do the travellers dwell on the public roads from Pekin or Cambaluc through all the provinces, the ten thousand Royal inns upon the highways, the two hundred thousand horses kept for the public service, the wonderful speed of transit in the Great Khan's embassages, "so that they could go from Pekin to the wall of China in two days."
But scarcely less is said about the great rivers—the arteries of Chinese commerce, even more than the caravan routes,—above all, the Yang-Tse-Kiang, "the greatest stream in the world, like an arm of the sea, flowing above one hundred days' journey from its source into the ocean, and into which flow countless others, making it so great that incredible quantities of merchandise are brought by this river. It flows," exclaims Marco, "through sixteen provinces, past the quays of two hundred cities, at one of which I saw at one time five thousand vessels, and there are other marts that have more."