The World полностью

Marco Million had never fought, but Venice and Genoa were now at war. Marco fitted out his own galley and joined the fleet commanded by Andrea Dandola, the doge’s son and descendant of the blind conqueror of Constantinople. But in September 1298 it was routed off Dalmatia; Venice lost eighty-three of ninety-five ships and over 5,000 sailors (many of them galley slaves), Dandolo dashed out his brains against a mast, and Marco was captured. Imprisoned in Genoa, Marco was soon recounting his exploits to captivated jailers and prisoners including a writer of Arthurian romances, Rustichello, who decided to write Marco’s over-egged but delicious Travels, which were now read by everyone and introduced China, India and Persia to people who had never left their home towns. When he was released, Marco finally married, but he had developed into a rich, mean-spirited and litigious oligarch. In the streets, children called out, ‘Tell us another lie, Marco!’ but he always kept a copy of the Travels in his pocket to read out. As he was dying in 1324, the contents of his will – manumitting his Mongol slave Peter and leaving Kököchin’s headdress and Kublai’s paiza to his daughters – revealed that Xanadu was always on his mind.

Polo and Ibn Battuta were unicorns of adventure. Although most people stayed in their towns and villages, more were travelling or connecting to different worlds and much of this was due to the Mongolsphere of the Golden Family, whose armies and connections had linked east and west more than ever before. But that could be a mixed blessing: the plague would accelerate their downfall as it mutated into a much more contagious pneumatic strain.

In 1347, the swollen and decaying bodies of dead soldiers started to rain down on the besieged Genoese slave-trading merchants of Kaffa.

THE DESTRUCTIVE DEATH: FOUR WRITERS IN THE GREAT MORTALITY

Janibeg, the khan of the Golden Horde, ruler of Russia, ordered plague-ridden bodies to be catapulted into Kaffa to accelerate its surrender. Often cited as the moment when the plague transferred from the Mongolian empire to western Europe, it is more likely the pathogens were already over the walls.

Just as the plague had travelled west, it had simultaneously travelled east, starting in the centre: Nestorian gravestones near Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan mention the plague in 1338–9. As Kublai’s feckless descendants fought for power, natural disasters – flood and famines – combined with a wave of peasant rebellions to spread the disease through China and undermined the dynasty. China’s population of 120 million may have halved. It also travelled west along the Mongol trade routes to the Il-Khanate, now ruled by the young Abu Said, described by Ibn Battuta as ‘the most beautiful of God’s creatures’. But the Il-Khan was at war with his cousin, Özbeg, khan of the Golden Horde, who in 1335 invaded the Caucasus. Abu Said, thirty years old, rushed to repel Özbeg, but died of the plague with six of his sons. The sudden deaths led to the disintegration of the Il-Khanate, the second Golden kingdom to be ravaged.

Somewhere during their clashes, the pathogen was transferred to the third khanate. Özbeg had expanded into Europe, attacking Thrace and forcing Emperor Andronikos III to give him a daughter as a wife. In Russia, he murdered at least four Rurikovichi and promoted as chief Mongol enforcer Yuri of Moscow, to whom he married his sister. Moscow became so rich that Yuri’s son was nicknamed Ivan Moneybags.^* In Crimea, Özbeg confirmed Kaffa as Genoese and Tana as Venetian, but in 1343, after his death, it was the Genoese killing of a Muslim that provoked his son Janibeg to besiege Kaffa. In 1346, as Janibeg returned with forces including his Muscovite allies, the plague struck his camp; ultimately 25 per cent of the population of the Golden Horde would die – and whether or not he fired infected bodies into Kaffa, the Genoese caught the disease.

Janibeg broke camp, his troops thus spreading the disease through Russia and Scandinavia. A Genoese slave ship sailing from Crimea to Alexandria was struck so badly that, of 300 passengers, only forty-five were alive when it docked, and they all died too. In October 1347, twelve Genoese ships docked at Messina in Sicily with a gruesome cargo: dead and dying people, covered in black, blood-filled, egg-sized, pus-seeping swellings. As we have seen, the fleas of marmots, delicacy of nomadic horsemen, then of rats, lurking in the fetid camps of armies, the alleyways of docks and the holds of ships, proved relentlessly efficient vectors of death. Europe was already weakened by a great famine: malnutrition diminishes resistance to illness. The best way to grasp the course of the pandemic – the Great Mortality – is through four of the most refined men of their age, writers in different worlds who, faced with the utterly unbearable and unthinkable, did what writers do: write.