Professor Sharon Kinoshita
Appearances
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
Right. Okay, the postal system. Yeah. And so your American listeners would recognize this as a medieval model for the Pony Express. But actually, yeah, the Mongol system was called the Yam. And it had many precedents in the ancient and medieval worlds, China, Persia, and elsewhere. But of course, the Mongol Empire was vaster than any of those.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
So the distances we're talking about were much greater. Okay. Horses, or sometimes just runners, depending on the terrain, would be posted at stations every, we don't know, maybe three miles or so. And, you know, by relaying like this, they could cover, let's say, 10 days journey for normal travelers in a day and a night, Marco tells us.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
So obviously such networks were intended most of all to transmit political and military intel with lightning speed, but they had other uses as well, such as, you know, bringing fresh fruit to the con from far-flung places just in time for snack time, right? Fresh fruit. Right.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
And actually, one of Kublai Khan's predecessors, he boasts about having regularised a lot of this postal service, but we need to send out inspectors to make sure bureaucrats are not abusing the system by using it for their personal travel.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
Yeah, I think those messengers were not oral messengers, but rather would have had a written text to deliver. And we have anecdotes of, especially the runners were equipped with bells. So if you were in the station, you know, waiting to... receive the baton, you would hear that guy coming and you would get prepared to run your leg or to do your leg of the journey. Yeah.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
Oh, no. I mean, paper... Really? You know, the euro was a huge advance for those of us that are old enough, because before, you know, if you crossed from France to Germany to Italy, you'd have to be changing all your money, right? So in Europe, even more fragmented in Marco Polo's time, each city had its own currency. So the idea that you had... Each city.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So the idea that you had money that was good, you know, over the vast stretch of empire is just mind blowing. But also mind blowing is the idea that anyone would look at a piece of paper and think that you could buy anything with it, that, you know, it had any worth at all.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
Apparently, some of the early examples of the paper recorded their value and other information in several languages so that it could circulate. And interestingly, Marco tells us that the paper was made from the bark of the mulberry tree. This is distinctive because, you know, the mulberry tree is also the tree grown to feed silkworms.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
I think she was pretty close. So Marco Polo tells us... Marco Polo tells us about the way diamonds were collected in the province of Motopalli on the east coast of India. So the diamonds were located in the mountains, so you let the rain wash them to the surface. Then in the dry season, you can go in and collect them in the gorges and the caverns. So on the one hand, you can just pick them up.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
But on the other hand, in the caverns, there are poisonous snakes there that function as a deterrent. But more interestingly, they took pieces of meat into the cavern and they threw them in so the diamonds would stick to the meat. Then eagles come and grab the meat.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
So you can either chase the eagles off and grab the diamond-studded meat, or if the eagles had already eaten the meat, just wait for the diamonds to come out the other end.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
Well, you know, Marco surprisingly often waxes lyrical about a region's animal life. And in the Pamir Mountains, the highest place in the world, he finds very large wild sheep with huge horns from which, as he tells us, shepherds made big bowls that they eat from. So today these sheep are drawing the attention both of big game hunters on the one hand and environmentalists on the other.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
And we know them as Marco Polo sheep.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
Yeah, deer and oxen, I guess. And it's no accident that Marco Polo really pays attention to these because the Polos seem to have traded in musk. And after they returned to Venice, a good part of their increased fortune, we think, came from their trafficking in musk. So an animal secretion, again, valued in the making of perfume products.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
So he is careful to tell us everywhere these animals are found. And at one point, he tells us way more than we need to know about how to extract it from the dead animal.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
That's a great guess. Yeah, he describes a couple of regions in Tibet. In one, he tells us no man would marry a virgin. So when visitors pass through, just what you said, Ria, mothers would bring their daughters to sleep with them. And afterwards, they demanded a little token that the daughter could wear around her neck as proof of her experience.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
And it was those women that, you know, had a necklace of 20 or more of these tokens that were really prized as wives and held in high esteem.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
So Kublai's great nephew, who is the Ilkhan, the sub-Khan of Persia, sent a request to uncle saying, you know, my chief wife has died. I would like another bride from her same tribe. Can you send me one? So Kublai assembled a huge escort wedding party. And we can just imagine the Polos jumping forward to ask to be included in this imperial party because this was a chance for them to,
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
to sail back in the direction of Venice anyway, after so many years with the Great Khan. So they ended up as part of the retinue of this young princess, Kukucin. Now, sadly, by the time they arrived in Persia, after taking the maritime route, the sea route around the Pacific and Indian Oceans, the groom had died. So the bride was given instead. to his son.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
But the Polos, you know, having gotten that far all the way back to Persia, were able to continue on their way back to Venice, where they arrived in 1295, so about 24 years after they had first left.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
I hope they got a warm welcome at home. Yeah. But in fact, you know, Marco stepped very quickly into Venice's political conflicts, et cetera, all around the Mediterranean. So we're not really sure what happened when he got home. But within four years, he was in jail in Genoa. So they're the great rivals of the Venetians. And so, yeah, he found himself in the year 1298 in
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
cooped up with other prisoners, and this is when and how the book got first written down.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
Yeah, from Pisa, because Pisa was another one of Genoa's trade rivals. And we know of Rustichello because he wrote In Arthurian Romance. And so the two teamed up. Actually, in the book, when you have I or we, it's often Rustichello talking, not Marco. Are they co-authors?
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
We would call them co-authors, and I guess we would be tempted to call Rustichello a kind of ghostwriter, but unlike modern ghostwriters, he doesn't disappear into the background. He's like front and center, saying, you know, I, Rustichello of Pisa, got Marco to tell me these stories, and I'm writing them down. Yeah.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
You know, I have to continue my research because I haven't been able to unearth the foundational document for the swimming pool game.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
Well, he was born in 1254, that much we're pretty sure of, so mid-13th century China. into a merchant family of Venice. But we don't know very much about his childhood. But to be fair, in the Middle Ages, even future kings leave little to no trace in the historical record.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
OK, thanks, Greg. What I'd like to emphasise, I think, is how surprising Marco Polo's book is on so many levels. So we've already touched on the point that it was written not as a travel narrative and that despite being authored by two Italians, it was composed in, not in Italian, but in French. But in his own time, Marco Polo was a real myth buster.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
One spectacular example is when he tells his readers that, now hang on, unicorns are not at all as they are described in contemporary bestiaries and encyclopedias, but along with that single horn protruding from their forehead, they, as he says, have hair like buffaloes and feet like elephants.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
What he's describing, of course, is a rhinoceros which, as he emphasizes, decidedly does not let itself be captured by a virgin. At least as wondrous, I think, is the way Marco identifies the many sites across South, Southeast, and East Asia that are sources of the spices, especially pepper, but also cloves, nutmeg, galangal, and other exotic commodities that European merchants like himself
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
would previously have accessed only at mediterranean ports such as acre or alexandria what might read to us like that tedious repetition would have held the fascination of secret intel i think for his compatriots
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
Now, for modern readers, it's often astonishing to see Marco recount customs like polygamy, cremation, even anthropophagy with equanimity, even though they would have been unspeakably shocking to Latin Christians back home.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
His book lacks any divisions of the world and its peoples into capital E East or capital W West, and he makes no mention of the old world continents, Asia, Africa, and Europe, that are the staple of Latin European cartography of the time. His quote-unquote idolaters lumps together peoples we would today identify as Buddhists, Confucians, Hindus, animists, and so forth.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
But they are not bad unless they attack merchants. So these are just some surprising aspects of Marco Polo's book, but I think we need to recognize that this was a voice in the Middle Ages that can strike us as surprisingly modern. And that's why I think Marco Polo is just such a wonderful subject for rediscovery. Thank you.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
Thanks, Greg. I had a great time.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
Well, that's fantastic, Ria. Yeah, the Marsh era, indeed. Venice, in fact, was founded several centuries before by refugees who were fleeing those Germanic invasions. And, you know, they came across a bunch of marshy little islands, and they figured the barbarians are not going to follow us here. They just built a city across a bunch of little marshy islands, who would have thought?
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
But by the 13th century, Venice was a really big, important maritime republic, making its fortune from traveling the seas and bringing luxury stuff back to Venice and funneling through Venice to the rest of the world. So it's, of course, striking for its canals, and they were probably even more numerous islands
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
then than they are now because a lot of the little streets in present-day Venice are just little waterways that have been filled in. But its most famous buildings, like the Basilica of San Marco, was there in Marco Polo's day. But the other things that modern tourists might know, the Doge's Palace, the Rialto Bridge, they didn't yet exist.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
And they took their present form in later centuries thanks to the enormous wealth generated by all those merchants of Venice.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
And, you know, Venice really got its start with the First Crusade in 1099, and they developed a kind of transport business, shipping people back and forth to the Holy Land, knights and their horses, and, you know, along with all that merchandise, the silk, spices, the good things like that.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
We don't know too much about the family of his generation yet, although we know a lot, well, we know a relative a lot about his father, Niccolo, and his uncle, Maffeo, because they took off to the east and they actually traveled to the court of the Mongols. a decade before Marco went with them.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
So we know about them, and then the little we know about his family comes from contracts that survive in the archives. They're quite a litigious family, so they were, well... Like all merchants, they were drawing up contracts, but they were also writing wills. They had a few family disputes in there. So that's what we know about the larger family.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
When Marco set out, the Polos were, you know, a merchant family, but they were certainly not part of that upper crust that furnished the dynasties of doges and so forth. So all we know about them really is what Marco and his co-author tell us in the... the first 19 chapters of their book.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
Well, it depends on what time of year you're talking about, because remember, the Mongols are nomads. So even though they've been conquering everything in sight, and they will, by the time Marco gets there, Kublai Khan will have set out constructing his big capital, which has various names, but basically it's modern Beijing.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
But, you know, they're nomads, and so it's hard to give up that traveling life, right? And they especially organize their year around hunting expeditions because hunting is not only fun. As I tell my students, it's the medieval equivalent of golf for privileged males.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
But, you know, they want to be out on the steppe in the middle of what we would consider the middle of nowhere, as well as, you know, establishing a big capital city in someplace like Beijing. So we don't know exactly where Marco and the Polos would have first arrived.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
encountered Kublai Khan, but one of the capitals is in Chinese called Shangdu, and this will give us Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Xanadu several centuries later. You have to be multilingual in Marco Polo's world, so Dadu is... Dadu is the Chinese name. It's basically, I think, big capital. Marco calls it Khanbalik, which is a Turkish word meaning kind of head city, you know, the city of the Khan.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
And then we call it Beijing, which, as I understand in modern Chinese means northern capital. So yeah, we have all of these different names.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
He definitely went to China. Okay, case closed. Yeah, yeah. You know, there was a theory that he actually faked his book by cribbing from other writings, especially in Persian. But you know, the things he describes in Asia and in China totally correspond with what People who study the Asian end of things know about their material.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
But on the other hand, I should say, Greg, that if you asked Marco, had he been to China, he might have looked at you with puzzlement for a split second, because I think For Marco and his family, they were traveling not to China, but to the court of the great Khan. So they were traveling in the Mongol Empire.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
When the Polos first arrived there, the Mongols ruled what we would consider now northern China, because they had conquered that region. from the dynasty, the previous dynasty ruling it.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
And it wasn't until the Polos had been at the court of the Great Khan for half a decade or so, that Kublai completed his conquest of what we would now call Southern China, which was the empire of the Southern Song. So this had the effect of uniting the territories.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
that hadn't been unified, you know, under single rule for a few centuries there, but which basically corresponds to our modern nation state of China. So the Polos were actually on the scene for this big turning point in world history.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
Thanks, Greg. I'm delighted to be here.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
Well, he tells us basically zero.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
Well, I mean, we know his book today generally as Marco Polo's Travels. When you see that travels on the title, you know, what are you expecting? You're expecting to hear about somebody's travels. But actually, the first versions of Marco's book were called not the travels, but the description of the world.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
So, of course, that title puts emphasis not on Marco the traveler, but the world that he came to know. So, The book consists of 233 chapters, some of them really short, some of them longer, but only 19 of those 233 chapters are devoted to a kind of overview of first the dad and uncle, and then all three of them going to Asia and back.
You're Dead to Me
Marco Polo: history’s most famous travel writer?
The rest of the chapters are really about the places, sometimes in kind of, well, formulaic and kind of tedious fashion of just, there's this place, and then three days journey later, there's this place, and then five days after that, there's this place. You know, sometimes modern readers who pick up the book are a little bit surprised and maybe just a tad disappointed.