Muslims, Mongols and Crusaders

Dr Gerald Hawting

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136027260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Ethnische Studien

The period from about 1100 to 1350 in the Middle East was marked by continued interaction between the local Muslim rulers and two groups of non-Muslim invaders: the Frankish crusaders from Western Europe and the Mongols from northeastern Asia. In deflecting the threat those invaders presented, a major role was played by the Mamluk state which arose in Egypt and Syria in 1250. The Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies has, from 1917 onwards, published several articles pertaining to the history of this period by leading historians of the region, and this volume reprints some of the most important and interesting of them for the convenience of students and scholars.

MARCO POLO AND HIS ‘TRAVELS’¹

BY PETER JACKSON

The year 1998 marks the seven-hundredth anniversary of the initial composition of the book associated with Marco Polo, Le devisament dou monde. As the first European to claim that he had been to China and back (not to mention that he had travelled extensively elsewhere in Asia), Polo has become a household name. He has been credited with the introduction of noodles into Italy and of spaghetti into China. With perhaps greater warrant, he has been cited as an authority on—inter alia—the capital of the Mongol Great Khan Qubilai, on the Mongol postal relay system, on the trade in horses across the Arabian Sea, and on political conditions on the north-west frontier of India in the mid thirteenth century. The Marco Polo bibliography published in 1986 contained over 2,300 items in European languages alone.²

But Marco Polo’s reliability has been a matter of dispute from the beginning. It has recently been proposed that the incredulity he met with on his return to Venice sprang from an unwillingness to accept his depiction of a highly organized and hospitable Mongol empire that ran counter to the traditional Western Christian view of the ‘barbarian’ and especially the view of the barbarian Mongols that had obtained since the 1240s.³ Polo has also met with scepticism from modern commentators. A few years ago, the approach of the rather fine book by Dr John Critchley was that the Polo account is a more valuable source for the minds of late thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Western Europeans than for contemporary conditions in Asia. For Critchley, therefore, the question of the authenticity of the Polo material is very much a secondary consideration.⁴ More recently, Dr Frances Wood has queried whether Polo was ever in China. She concludes that the famous Venetian probably never got much further than Constantinople or the Black Sea.⁵ The argument tends to be based (1) on omissions which would supposedly not have been made by anyone who had genuinely visited the country: Polo’s failure to mention foot-binding, tea-drinking, or the Great Wall, for instance; (2) on the fact that Polo’s name has so far not come to light in any Chinese source; and (3) on what can only be regarded as deliberate falsehood, such as the alleged participation of the Polos in the siege and capture of a Chinese city which is known to have been over one year prior to their arrival. Of these objections, the failure to mention the Great Wall carries little weight, given that we can be fairly certain it had not yet been built: walls there certainly were, but not the continuous and impressive structure we see today, which apparently dates from the sixteenth century, the era of the Ming dynasty.⁶

In fact, the authenticity of Polo’s stay in ‘Cathay’ was first challenged years ago, partly for such reasons as these but also on the grounds that the Chinese section contains remarkably little in the way of personal reminiscence and that the accounts of Chinese cities are frequently vague (not to say bland) and hardly compare with the vivid descriptions of life in the Mongolian steppe.⁷ Indeed, one could find further grounds for challenging Polo’s firsthand familiarity with the Middle Kingdom: that the book neglects, for instance, to mention finger-printing, a technique with a long history in China.⁸ It seems to me, however, that to consider the visit to China in isolation is to set about it the wrong way: we need, rather, to take the work as a whole. In this paper I want to address the following questions. What is the book we associate with Polo’s name? With what purpose was it written? What claims does it make for itself? To what extent does it purport to represent Polo’s own experiences? Just where did Polo go? This last question is particularly central to my paper.

Asia in the era of Marco Polo

First, it is necessary to put the travels in context.⁹ The voyages of the three Venetians, Marco Polo, his father Niccolo and his uncle Maffeo, date from an era when much of Asia lay under the rule of the Mongols; although even as the elder Polos set off on their first journey in the early 1260s the unitary Mongol empire was dissolving into a number of rival khanates, of which those of the Golden Horde (in the steppes of southern Russia) and of Persia were closest to the territories of the Catholic West. Only the Mongol rulers of Persia, the so-called Īl-khāns, acknowledged the Great Khan (qaghari) Qubilai, whose dominions lay in the east and who was able to compensate himself for the hostility of many of his relatives by completing the conquest of southern China in 1279. For all the book’s protestations, the mighty ruler of Cathay immortalized by Polo (and later by Coleridge) was in fact the first qaghan not recognized throughout the Mongol empire.¹⁰

The subjection of much of Asia under a single government had greatly facilitated the opportunities for both merchants and missionaries to travel from western Europe across the continent, opportunities which were not appreciably reduced by the empire’s disintegration into a number of constituent states.¹¹ In the eastern Mediterranean, Italian and other Latin merchants were active in ports like Ayas (Ajaccio) in the kingdom of Lesser Armenia, lying at the terminus of one of the overland trade routes through the Mongol empire. From the mid thirteenth century merchants from the great Italian commercial cities, Venice, Genoa and Pisa, were beginning to travel at least in Persia and the lands of the Golden Horde.¹² The appearance of rival Mongol khanates further gave rise to promising diplomatic contacts. After the Muslim khan of the Golden Horde reached an understanding with the Mamluk government at Cairo in 1262, negotiations (ultimately fruitless) began between the Pope and various Western monarchs on the one hand and the Īl-khāns on the other regarding the possibility of military collaboration against Egypt, as the principal bastion of Muslim power.¹³ But the shadows were already closing in on the Latin states in Syria and Palestine. When Marco Polo accompanied his father and uncle on their second journey in 1271 the great port of Acre was still in Christian hands; but by the time the Polos came back, the fragile Western settlements had been overwhelmed by the Egyptians (1291).

Authors and copyists

Who wrote the book? There has been widespread agreement that the original language was a form of Old French strongly influenced by Italian. The style is consonant with the story given in the Prologue to what is possibly the earliest surviving MS (the Paris MS fr. 1116, known as F), that Polo dictated his experiences in a Genoese prison in 1298 to a fellow-captive, the Pisan romance-writer Rusticello.¹⁴ But other versions, in other Western languages, were already being made in the early years of the fourteenth century. It has been proposed that Rusticello had a hand only in the production of one version and that subsequently Polo had other co-authors.¹⁵ One hundred and twenty MSS survive in total. Many contain material not found in others. It seems that F itself is the result of abridgement, and hence that some of these other versions represent MS traditions which are in fact older than F; in other words, that F is not the closest in content to the original.¹⁶ The most important traditions, apart from F, are: T, MSS of a Tuscan version, known as l’Ottimo, ‘the Best’, made by Niccolò degli Ormanni, who died as early as 1309;¹⁷ P, a Latin translation made by the Dominican Friar Francesco Pipino of Bologna from a text in the Venetian dialect, at some time between 1310 and 1314 (and now represented by the largest single group of MSS); Z, another Latin version (but quite independent of P), represented primarily by a Toledo MS of the fifteenth century; and R, the MS used by Ramusio in the mid sixteenth century as the basis for his printed edition and now lost (the edition contains a great many, though not all, of the passages otherwise found only in Z, as well as passages not found in any other extant version).

Many phrases in different MSS may reflect embellishments and accretions due to particular copyists, working in some cases very soon afterwards but in others, perhaps, up to a century and a half later. But the discovery of the fifteenth-century MS Z in Toledo in 1932 revolutionized scholarly thinking on the subject: the fact that so many passages hitherto found only in Ramusio’s edition were encountered also in Z obviously tended to make the Ramusio text appear far more dependable.¹⁸ And since much of the material found in Z, but not present in F, would have been too interesting simply to have been omitted, it is conceivable that these earlier accretions represent supplementary oral information from Marco Polo himself.¹⁹ This had happened with two previous visitors to the Mongols, both Franciscan friars, the papal ambassador John of Piano Carpini and the missionary William of Rubruck. Carpini, returning to the West in 1247, had been in great demand as a dinner guest, and we know at least that the Italian Salimbene de Adam obtained further information from him which is not found in his report.²⁰ Rubruck, an unofficial visitor to the Mongol empire, was nevertheless contacted in Paris a few years after his return by the English Franciscan Roger Bacon, who exploited the opportunity to check particular details in the Flemish friar’s Itinerarium before incorporating them in his own work.²¹

If I have spent so long on the issue of Polo MS traditions, it is in order to make two important and related points at the outset. First, the book—in any of the forms that have come down to us—is not by Marco Polo. We simply cannot be certain what was in the work originally drafted by Rusticello on the basis of Polo’s reminiscences in a Genoese prison. Even if we possessed that original, Polo’s own perspective on late thirteenth-century Asia would be refracted for us through the prism of Rusticello’s prose. And secondly, this means that we cannot afford to lay too much stress on matters that the book does not mention. Given the kind of material found only in Z, for instance, but omitted in other texts because some copyist did not find it sufficiently interesting, we are hardly in a position to claim that Polo was never in China because he failed to refer to foot-binding or tea-drinking. They might have been mentioned in some MS (or group of MSS) now lost. (In fact, it has been overlooked that Z does mention the fact that Chinese women take very small steps, but gives a somewhat arcane explanation for it (I, 305), on which I do no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction1
• A Qaṣīda on the Destruction of Baghdād by the Mongols
• Notes on the Arabic Materials for the History of the Early Crusades
• The Influence of Chingiz-Khān’s Yāsa upon the General Organization of the Mamlūk State
• Studies on the Structure of the Mamluk Army1—I
• Studies on the Structure of the Mamluk Army—II
• Studies on the Structure of the Mamluk Army—III
• Saladin and the Assassins
• The Position and Power of the Mamlūk Sultan
• Cassiodorus and Rashīd Al-Dīn On Barbarian Rule in Italy and Persia1
• The Treaties of the Early Mamluk Sultans With the Frankish States
• The Mongol Empire: A Review Article
• Saladin and his Admirers: A Biographical Reassessment1
• Some Observations on the ‘Abbāsid Caliphate of Cairo
• The ‘Great Yāsā of Chingiz Khān’ and Mongol Law in the īlkhānate
• The Īlkhān Aḥmad’s Embassies to Qalāwūn: Two Contemporary Accounts
• The Crusades of 1239–41 and their Aftermath
• The Secret History of the Mongols: Some Fresh Revelations
• Ghazan, Islam And Mongol Tradition: A View From The Mamluk Sultanate1
• Marco Polo and his ‘Travels’1
• Index