As papal envoys, the Polos tried to convert Kublai to Catholicism, but his heterodoxy was impregnable.* Yet Marco was delighted by Kublai’s jovial grandeur. While the older Polos traded, Kublai sent Marco on international missions, though he exaggerated his importance. The truth was extraordinary enough: no westerner ever got so close to Kublai. Polo claimed he was appointed a governor; more likely he operated as a tax collector, among many other exploits during his seventeen years serving Kublai. If the khagan was curious about the Polos’ stories and jewels, he was now most interested in the conquest of Song China. Marco claimed that his father and uncle advised on developing his cannon to breach the walls of Song cities. The Mongols had brought Chinese gunpowder weaponry to Europe, but no technology spreads so fast, nor is improvised faster, than the technology of killing. Europeans were already improving Chinese designs. It is likely that Kublai was manufacturing the first iron cannon,* and this was the first full gunpowder war.
Kublai sent his generals Bayan (nicknamed Hundred Eyes) and Achu (grandson of Subotai) with huge Chinese and Mongol armies to take the great cities of the Song heartland. After Achu had failed to advance, Kublai asked his cousins in Iraq to send him Arab engineers to build trebuchets, copied from Frankish designs, that he combined with Chinese thundercrash bombs; the Song fired back. The fighting was slow and ferocious, on land, in sieges and by river. In 1275, Hundred Eyes slaughtered all the 250,000 inhabitants of Changzhou; the next year the entire population of Changsha committed suicide; finally, after fifty years of war, the capital Linan (Hangzhou) surrendered. It was the first time a nomadic invader had conquered all China and the first time, since the downfall of the Tang, that all of China was united under one ruler. Now Kublai, khagan of all the Golden realms,* and founder of the Yuan dynasty of China, ruled the greatest empire in span and population, the largest that would ever exist. Seeing himself as Universal Emperor, it was just a matter of conquering the last independent powers of Asia.
KUBLAI’S INVASION OF JAPAN
‘We think all countries belong to our family,’ Kublai told the Japanese regent menacingly. ‘No one would want to resort to war.’ Tibet* and Korea had been subjugated, leading Kublai to reach fifty miles across the sea to Japan, still ruled from Kyoto by nominal emperors directed by hereditary regents. The regent rejected his demand for submission.
In 1274, Kublai sent 150 ships to conquer Japan, landing in Hakata, where they were to their surprise repelled by a tiny Japanese army. But this was just one of Kublai’s multi-front wars. In the south, he turned to the kingdoms of the Indosphere, sending Marco Polo on delegations to Burma and Vietnam. His son Toghon invaded Annam then Champa (northern and southern Vietnam), but the Vietnamese, using guerrilla warfare, defeated him and, thus humiliated, he found himself rejected by his father: Mongols don’t lose. Angkor, further inland, avoided submission, but Burma, based in its red-pagodaed capital Pagan, and the two Thai kingdoms, Chiangmai and Sukhothai, were obliged to yield. With south-east Asia secured, Kublai’s fleet landed 30,000 men in Java and smashed the Indianized trading empire of Singhasari with the help of a Javanese ally, Raden Wijaya, who then double-crossed and expelled the Mongols.*
The failure in Japan rankled. In 1281, the sixty-five-year-old Kublai commissioned two armadas at breakneck speed and sent 45,000 Mongols and 120,000 Chinese-Koreans, accompanied by thousands of horses and armed with firebombs, to invade Japan. The fleets failed to meet as planned. But in August 1281 Kublai’s southern fleet landed at Kyushu, where Japanese nobles used small fireships to create havoc among the gargantuan Mongol vessels and defeated the invaders, aided by the Sacred Wind (kamikaze) of a fortuitous typhoon. Shipwrecked Mongol vessels, discovered by naufragiologists, were enormous – one was 230 feet long with watertight compartments and colossal anchors – but their shoddy workmanship explains their failure. The loss of life was eyewatering, perhaps the most lethal day of naval warfare ever.
As the obese Kublai, in his mid-seventies, deteriorated, gorging on immortality elixirs and food, his heir died of the family disease – booze – and even old Hundred Eyes who sat with him reminiscing about their triumphs could not cheer him up. The three Polos were still at court, twenty-five years older and considerably richer, but Kublai refused to let them go home – the problem with befriending capricious autocrats. They begged to leave.
‘Why do you wish to die on the road?’ asked Kublai. ‘Tell me. If you need gold, I’ll give you more.’
Niccolò Polo fell to his knees. ‘I have a wife at home and I can’t forsake her in our Christian faith.’
