Beginnings of the American People

by Carl L. Becker

The discovery of Asia in the thirteenth century was the direct result of the Mongol conquest. Before the death of Jenghis Khan in 1227, the Tartar rule was established in northern China or Cathay, and in central Asia from India to the Caspian; while within half a century the successors of the first emperor were dominant to the Euphrates and the Dniester on the west, and as far south as Delhi, Burma, and Cochin China. The earlier conquests were conducted with incredible ferocity; but the influence of Chinese civilization moderated the temper of the later Khans, who exhibited a genial and condescending curiosity in the people of Christendom. Diplomatic relations were established between Tartar and Christian princes. In the Paris archives may still be seen letters written from Tabriz to the kings of France bearing official Chinese seals of the thirteenth century. For the first time Europeans were welcome beyond the Great Wall. Kublai Khan sent presents to the Pope and requested Christian missionaries for the instruction of his people. Traders and travelers were hospitably received, clever adventurers were taken into favor and loaded with benefits and high office.

It was in 1271 that two prosperous Italian merchants, Maffeo and Nicolo Polo, at the invitation of Kublai Khan, left Venice, taking with them Nicolo's son, the young Marco, destined to be the most famous of mediæval travelers. Going out by way of the Tigris River to Hormos, they turned eastward, and after many weary months journeying across Persia and China arrived at the city of Cambulac, now known as Peking. Here they remained for twenty years, favored guests or honored servants at the court of the Grand Khan. Henceforth Maffeo and Nicolo retire into the background; we catch occasional glimpses of them, shrewd Venetians, unobtrusively putting money in their purses, while the young Marco occupies the center of the stage as royal favorite, member of the Privy Council, or trusted ambassador to every part of the emperor's wide domains. A happy chance enabled them to return at last; and by a route no European had yet taken: from Peking to Zaiton; thence by sea through the famous Malacca Straits to Ceylon and India; up to Hormos and across to Tabriz and Trebizond; and so, by way of the Bosphorus, home to Venice, with a tale of experiences rivaling the Arabian Nights, and a fortune stitched up in the seams of their clothes.

The fortune, in "rubies, sapphires, carbuncles, diamonds, and emeralds," was straightway turned out before the admiring gaze of friends; while the story was told, to friends and enemies alike, many times over, and presently, in a Genoese prison, set down in French—The Book of Ser Marco Polo the Venetian concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East. It was only one of many books of that age describing the countries of the Orient, for Marco Polo was only the most famous of the travelers of his time. Diplomatic agents, such as Carpini, the legate of Innocent IV, or William de Rubruquis, the ambassador of St. Louis; missionaries, such as John de Corvino, Jordanus de Severac, or Friar Beatus Oderic, laboring to establish the faith in India and China; merchants, such as Pegalotti and Schiltberger, seeking advantage in the way of trade:—these, and many more besides, penetrated into every part of Asia and recorded in letters, in dry and precise merchant hand-books, in naïve and fascinating narrative accounts, a wealth of information about this old world now first discovered to Europeans.

For the revelations of the travelers amounted to a discovery of Asia. In the age before printing news spread from mouth to mouth. Reading had not yet replaced conversation, and a narrative of events was alike the duty and the privilege of every chance visitor from far or near. What a celebrity, then, was the Asiatic voyager, returning home after many years! It is said of Marco Polo that even in Genoa, where he was held a prisoner, "when his rare qualities and marvelous travels became known there, the whole city gathered to see him. At all hours of the day he was visited by the noblest gentlemen of the city, and was continually receiving presents of every useful kind. Messer Marco, finding himself in this position, and witnessing the general eagerness to hear all about Cathay and the Grand Chan, which indeed compelled him daily to repeat his story till he was weary, was advised to put the matter in writing." And certainly those voluble Italians were not men to remain silent. Thousands, who never read the book of Ser Marco or the charming narratives of Rubruquis or Friar Oderic, must have heard many of their wonderful stories as they were carried by the merchants and priests, students, minstrels, and high diplomatic agents who went up and down the highways of Europe in the fourteenth century.

And the tale was marvelous, indeed, to the unaccustomed ears of Europe,—a tale of innumerable populous cities and great rivers, a tale of industry and thrift and glutted markets, above all a tale of treasure. What was doubtless heard most eagerly and told again with most verve were the accounts of cities with "walles of silver and bulwarkes or towers of golde," palaces "entirely roofed with fine gold," lakes full of pearls, of Indian princes wearing on their arms "gold and gems worth a city's ransom." In that country, says Rubruquis, "whoever wanteth golde, diggeth till he hath found some quantitie." Oderic tells of a "most brave and sumptuous pallace" in Java, "one stayre being of silver, and another of golde, throughout the whole building"; the rooms were "paved all over with silver and gold, and all the wals upon the inner side sealed over with plates of beaten gold; the roof of the palace was of pure gold." As for the Grand Khan, he had, according to Marco Polo, "such a quantity of plate, and of gold and silver in other shapes, as no one ever before saw or heard tell of, or could believe." And so freely did the returned traveler discourse of Kublai Khan's millions of saggi of revenue, that he was ever after known in Italy as Ser Marco Milioni.

In contrast with this country, how small and inferior is Europe! Such is the most general impression conveyed by the accounts of the travelers. Do you think you have some powerful kings here?—they have always the air of asking—some great rivers, populous and thriving cities? But I tell you Europe is nothing. "The city of Quinsay," says Oderic, "hath twelve principall gates; and about the distance of eight miles, on the highway unto each one of the said gates, standeth a city as big by estimation as Venice and Padua." And this trade of the Levant, profitable as you think it, is but a small affair. On a single river in China, the greatest in the world, "there is more wealth and merchandise than on all the rivers and all the seas of Christendom put together." Of that great wealth, very little, indeed, ever comes to the Levant: "for one ship load of pepper that goes to Alexandria or elsewhere, destined for Christendom, there come a hundred, aye and more too, to this haven of Zaiton"; while the diamonds "that are brought to our part of the world are only the refuse of the finer and larger stones; for the flower of the diamonds, as well as of the larger pearls, are all carried to the Grand Khan or other princes of these regions: in truth, they possess all the great treasures of the world."

What a reversal of values for that introspective mind of Christendom, so long occupied with its own soul! And what an opportunity,—all the great treasures of the world possessed by people who welcome merchants but "hate to see soldiers"; being themselves "no soldiers at all, only accomplished traders and most skillful artisans." Here was the promised land for Europeans, wretchedly poor, but good soldiers enough. Here was Eldorado, symbol of all external and objective values which so fired the imagination in that age of discovery; presenting a concrete and visualized goal, a summum bonum, attainable, not by contemplation, but by active endeavor; fascinating alike to the merchant dreaming of profits, to the statesman intent on conquest, to the priest in search of martyrdom, to the adventurer in, search of gold.

III

And who was not in search of gold? "Gold is excellent; gold is treasure, and he who possesses it does all that he wishes to in this world, and succeeds in helping souls into paradise." So thought Columbus, expressing in a phrase the motto of many men, and conveniently revealing to us an essential secret of European history. For gold, so abundant in the East, was scarce in the West. The mines of Europe have never been adequate to the needs of an expanding industrial civilization. Importation of expensive Eastern luxuries, normally overbalancing exports, produces a drain of specie to the Orient, that reservoir to which the precious metals seem naturally to flow, and from which they do not readily return; so that to maintain the gold supply and prevent a fatal appreciation of money value has been a serious problem in both ancient and modern times. During the Roman Republic the supply of gold was maintained at Rome by the systematic exploitation of Syria and Asia Minor. But after Augustus reformed the government of the provinces, the accumulated treasure of the West began to return to the Orient: the annual exportation of 200,000,000 sesterces in payment for the silks and spices of India and Arabia, of Syria and Egypt, was one of the causes of economic exhaustion and the collapse of imperial power. "So dear," says Pliny, "do pleasures and women cost us."

During the age of feudal isolation, this ever-recurring problem did not exist; and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it seems not to have been pressing. Imports from the Orient were nearly balanced by exports to Syria, for which the crusading movements and the Kingdom of Jerusalem created an abnormal demand. The rise of trade in the West was accompanied by an expansion of the credit system centering in the banking houses of Florence; while the supply of metals was more than maintained by the plunder of Asiatic cities, paid over by crusaders in return for supplies and munitions of war, or brought home by returning princes and nobles, by priests and merchants, by Knights of St. John or of the Temple. Between 1252 and 1284, the ducat and the florin and the famous gold crowns of St. Louis made their appearance,—the sure sign of an increased gold supply, rising prices, and flourishing trade.