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THE POLOS ESCAPE AND THE IL -KHANS’ HISTORIAN
In 1291, Kublai was sending a young Golden bride, Kököchin (Blue Like Heaven), to marry his great-nephew, Arghun, Il-Khan of Persia. Kököchin needed an experienced traveller as her guardian and her retainers suggested the thirty-eight-year-old Marco Million. After a touching goodbye in which they received jewels and agreed ‘one day’ to return, Kublai ordered the Polos to accompany her, giving them letters to all the kings of Christendom. The bride, aged seventeen, was ‘very pretty and amiable’, wearing a bejewelled
Arghun, grandson of Hulagu, was negotiating with the pope to lead a crusade against the Mamluks of Egypt, an enterprise just agreed when he started to sicken. Arghun sent a Genoese envoy westwards to offer Jerusalem to Edward I of England and Philippe of France in return for Frankish help.* But they were too late. In apocalyptic scenes, Acre fell to the Mamluks.
Arghun, already an alcoholic addicted to immortality elixirs, was about to marry Kököchin when he overdosed. Most Il-Khans died so young of booze and drugs that no royal death was complete without accusations of a poisoning. The Polos were detained. Kököchin did not want Marco to leave, but fortunately Arghun’s son, Il-Khan Ghazan, married her instead. She too died young – either by poison or the plague.
Diminutive and ‘uglier than the ugliest trooper in his army’, Ghazan, secretive, cunning and cultured, speaking Arabic, Persian, Hindi, Tibetan, Frankish and Chinese, was an authority on Mongol history, a ferocious commander and a maestro of bloody intrigues. Raised in a mixture of Christianity, Buddhism and Tengrism, he converted to Islam to link the dynasty to his people. He was soon therefore persecuting Buddhists, Christians and Jews, but he continued to seek a joint offensive with Christian powers against the Mamluks. In 1300, his cavalry and his Armenian allies took Damascus and Israel, galloping through the unwalled Jerusalem to reach Gaza. The outstanding personality of the Il-Khanate was Ghazan’s vizier, his Persian-Jewish doctor Rashid el-Din, son of Arghun’s apothecary, who, after converting to Islam, ruled for almost twenty years. Ghazan commissioned him to write his
After nine months in Tabriz, the Il-Khan capital, the three Polos finally escaped. As they approached Venice, they heard that their patron Kublai had died. The Polos fascinated Venetians with their stories, their Mongol slave Peter, their Chinese inventions – paper money, eyeglasses and a fortune that paid for their palazzo. At a dinner, the three sported their shabby Mongol fur coats, then suddenly cut open the lining, out of which flowed hidden jewels.
SUNDIATA THE LION KING: THE
Marco now became embroiled in the bloody rivalry of Genoa and Venice as they fought for the prizes of trade in spices and slaves from Black Sea to Atlantic shores. The maritime cities also traded wool from England, which was often treated and finished by an inland city, Florence, that was thriving as a leather-manufacturing, textile-processing and banking centre, propelled by its own gold currency the florin and its pioneering use of bills of exchange and joint-stock companies.
