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It is extraordinary to think that when George Macartney visited China at the end of the eighteenth century, London, the stinking city and burgeoning hub of a great world empire, home to his king, George III, was still not as big, and perhaps not as well ordered, as the ancient city of Chang’an. China had shut its doors by then. Foreigners could no longer enjoy places like the great cosmopolitan crossroads where the Tang poet Lu Zhaolin had once described the progress of an imperial procession: ‘Chang’an’s broad avenues link up with narrow lanes, where one sees black oxen and white horses, coaches made of seven fragrant woods the dragon biting the jewelled canopy catches the morning sun, the phoenix disgorging dangling fringes is draped with evening clouds.’
As Chang’an died, so China’s wealth became all its own. In the centuries that followed, the empires of the west – Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch and British – would grow rich from unashamed mercantilism. But China stayed behind its chosen boundaries, secure in its own customs and traditions, a parallel place of riches protected from the prying activities of the world beyond.
CHAPTER 3
The Travels of Marco Polo 1271–95
At the age of seventeen, Marco Polo left Venice with his father and uncle and travelled along the Silk Route to China. He did not return for seventeen years. His account of his experiences became one of the most influential books published in Europe during the Middle Ages.
The poet James Elroy Flecker had a very English vision of the Orient. He did not like the East very much, even though he served as a diplomat in both Constantinople and Beirut. He preferred his own country and the manners and habits of the Edwardian age in which he lived. But when he died, at the age of thirty from tuberculosis, he left behind some of the most beautiful verses ever written about the world beyond the Eastern Mediterranean and the ancient silk routes that took traders on their long and dangerous journeys:
What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous tales Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest, Where never more the rose of sunset pales And winds and shadows fall towards the West … … And how beguile you? Death has no repose Warmer and deeper than the Orient sand Which hides the beauty and bright faith of those Who made the Golden Journey to Samarkand.
Flecker’s poem, ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand’, written just before the First World War, created an image of the exotic that Europeans had enjoyed for centuries: hot sand, warm breezes, and the ceaseless chink of animal bells as caravans loaded with cloths, spices and precious stones picked their way along valleys and through mountain passes. The city of Samarkand, one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world, stood in a fertile river valley where travellers stopped before the last difficult climb across the mountain ranges into China. ‘It is,’ said a tenth-century Iranian writer, ‘the most fruitful of all the countries of Allah.’ This was the world that Marco Polo wrote about at the end of the thirteenth century. No wonder his account of his travels was one of the bestselling books of the Middle Ages.
An image of the exotic: hot sands, warm breezes and the ceaseless chink of animal bells as caravans picked their way along valleys and through mountain passes.
The use of the term ‘Silk Road’ came into existence in the nineteenth century just before Flecker was writing. It was used to describe the many different overland trading routes that linked the Mediterranean with China from the days of the ancient classical world until the medieval period. Some ran through central Asia, Afghanistan, Kashmir and northern India; others went through Iran and the Caucasus, sometimes passing north of the Caspian and Black Seas. A third journey started in India after the traders had reached it by sea. Silk was not the only merchandise that travelled along these trading channels, but because it was light, beautiful and easy to carry, it was always one of the most highly prized imports from the east into Europe. The Romans are believed to have first seen the splendour of silk in the banners of the Parthians who defeated them at the battle of Carrhae in Turkey in 53 BC. Pliny the Elder, who composed his observations on natural history more than a hundred years later, believed that it came from the leaves of trees that had been soaked in water.
The existence of these long commercial highways had a profound effect on the people who passed through them: ideas, technology, fashion and disease also travelled along their path. Empires grew on their back as warlords decided to exploit their commercial potential. The Khazar Empire, which became a great power in the ninth and tenth centuries, developed from the farming communities on the western shore of the Caspian Sea in what is the modern state of Dagesthan. Today it is still a place of enormous ethnic diversity whose people speak Caucasian, Turkish or Iranian languages. Religions, too, found the converts they wanted. Christianity, Islam and Judaism bred easily in this world of constant exchange, although following the death of Mohammed in 632 AD it was Islam that predominated. Inevitably there were times when trade fell away as wars and power struggles made the overland routes too dangerous. But there were also long periods of comparative peace and prosperity, the last of which coincided with the growth of the Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan and his successors. His army sacked and looted Samarkand in 1220 and he then went on to establish control over a huge area of China and Central Asia. It was just after this time that Marco Polo made his famous journey.
Marco Polo went much further and stayed for far longer than anyone before.
Marco Polo was not the first European to penetrate the heart of Asia but he went much further and stayed for far longer than anyone before. Two Franciscan priests, Giovanni di Piano Carpini and Guillaume de Rubrouck, had at separate times in the middle of the thirteenth century travelled to the capital of the Mongol Khan in Karakorum as emissaries from the Pope. Guillaume de Rubrouck described his journey in great detail, recalling at one point how he decided to walk barefoot as was the custom in his order, and how his feet froze as a result. ‘The cold in these regions is most intense,’ he said. In winter the frost never thawed, ‘but with every wind it continued to freeze.’
Marco Polo came from a family of Venetian merchants. When he was six his father and uncle left Venice to set up a trading business on the Black Sea, eventually moving further north to a town on the River Volga. Here they became stranded as a war broke out between rival Mongol clans and they began a detour to the east in order to get home. They were then persuaded that the Great Khan, Kublai, who had never seen any Latin people, would like to meet them and so they went via Samarkand, Kashgar and the Gobi Desert to Kublai’s new capital, in what is today Beijing, arriving there in 1266. This was an historic moment in the history of China. Kublai, grandson of Genghis, had conquered the whole country and founded the Yuan dynasty. Three years later, in 1269, the Polo brothers arrived back in Venice carrying messages from him for the Pope. They stayed for two years before setting off for China once more, this time taking Marco with them.
They decided against the route they had used before. They sailed to the port of Acre on the coast of modern Israel – a city that had already seen one siege in the Crusaders’ attempts to gain control of the Holy Lands and would finally fall to the Saracens twenty years after the Polos were there – and then crossed Syria and Iraq, and went on through Central Asia to Balkh, in today’s northern Afghanistan. From there they crossed the Pamir Mountains, ‘the roof of the world’, where the highest peak is more than 24,500 feet high, and made their way across the Gobi Desert. Marco reported that it was said to be so long ‘that it would take a year to go across it from end to end. There is nothing at all to eat.’ Finally they arrived once more at the court of Kublai Khan. The journey had taken them three and a half years. They had travelled 5,600 miles. Even today such an expedition would be a challenging undertaking, probably impossible for an ordinary family like the Polos, because it goes through so many areas of conflict. Nearly 750 years ago it must have been momentous. Most of it ran through territory completely uncharted by Europeans. Their desire to find things of unique value, to become the traders of treasure the like of which had never been seen before, drove them on.
Their determination yielded their reward. The Polos stayed for seventeen years at the court of Kublai Khan and built up a store of gold and precious stones. Marco’s account of the time he spent there was dictated many years after he returned. Venice went to war with its rival city-state, Genoa, and Marco Polo seems to have been the captain of a galley that was captured by the Genoese. He told the story of his travels to a fellow prisoner who wrote them down and circulated them. They are the observations of a man with a keen eye for business. Describing the city of Kinsay – referring to Hangchow – he claimed that ‘the number and wealth of the merchants, and the amount of wealth that passed through their hands was so enormous that no man could form a just estimate thereof’. With obvious envy he added that they ‘live as nicely and as delicately as if they were kings and queens’. He described the produce in the markets – ‘of duck and geese an infinite quantity; for so many are bred on the Lake that for a Venice groat of silver you can have a couple of geese and two couple of ducks’ – and explained how Kublai Khan raised his revenues. Marco Polo obviously enjoyed the detail of commerce and ‘heard it stated by one of the Great Khan’s officers of customs that the quantity of pepper introduced daily for consumption into the city of Kinsay amounted to 43 loads, each load being equal to 223 pounds’.
The journey had taken three and a half years; they had travelled 5,600 miles.
It is not surprising that it fell to a Venetian to find and report all these things. The Venetians had gradually built up a maritime empire that extended all over the Adriatic. Their links with the Eastern Mediterranean meant that they also controlled most of Europe’s trade in luxury goods such as spices, cloths and porcelain. During Marco Polo’s lifetime his native city adopted a constitution that gave the adult males in about two hundred families the hereditary right to make and manage state policy. This limited the power of the Doge, the ruler of Venice, and reduced the chances of the inter-family squabbling that bedevilled many other places, like the imaginary Montagues and Capulets in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Stable government allowed the powerful group of ruling families to run things according to their own economic interests. Although the travels of Marco Polo were important as journeys of exploration, and greatly influenced Christopher Columbus when he was planning his voyage to the New World, they were prompted by a desire to improve and expand trade. Marco himself always argued that Europe could expand its trading links and grow richer through an economic relationship with China. ‘Both in their commercial dealings and in their manufactures,’ he said of the Chinese, ‘they are thoroughly honest and truthful. They treat foreigners who visit them with great politeness and entertain them in the most winning manner, offering them advice on their business.’
Marco Polo’s stories of his journey to the court of the Great Khan and the time he spent in China were read eagerly and gained a wide circulation even though printing had not yet arrived in Europe. Not only were his descriptions of an unknown land exciting, they also hinted at the possibility of lucrative opportunities and, perhaps, at an alliance with the Mongols against the Islamic religion which had taken deep root in the countries of the East. This was the age of the Crusades, and Catholic warriors were always looking for allies in their holy war. In the end it was religion rather than commerce that flourished. In 1291 a Franciscan friar, Giovanni da Montecorvino, was sent by the Pope as a missionary to the Chinese capital and in 1307 made Archbishop of Peking. But this spate of activity did not last long. The Yuan dynasty created by the Mongols, although the first to rule over the whole of China, began to decline in the face of economic hardship and famine. By the middle of the fourteenth century it was facing revolt, and in 1368 was driven out to be replaced by the Ming dynasty. The Ming ruled China for nearly three hundred years, creating a highly centralised government that towards the end moved towards isolation from the rest of the world. It began by expelling all Christians from China. Opportunities for trade fell away. The road down which Marco Polo had wandered so successfully was blocked once more.
Many people chose not to believe Marco Polo’s stories and some today are still inclined to think that he made up a lot of it, or took it from others that he met. In the end, however, the weight of evidence is on his side. He provided too much accurate description for his travels to have been pure invention. He died in about 1324 in Venice, a prosperous merchant and the father of three daughters. We have no contemporary picture of him, and his tomb, which was probably in the church of Sam Lorenzo, no longer exists. He has disappeared, as he did in his own lifetime, and we only have his stories as witness of what he did. Those tales tell us a great deal about the Silk Route and the life and adventures of those who journeyed along it.
In recent times, China has tried to resurrect the ancient trading routes that once linked it with the West. During the last thirty years of the twentieth century it began to open up to the markets of the world. When from 1991 onwards the old Soviet empire began to disintegrate into separate nations, China looked to the new neighbours that emerged on its western borders as opportunities for commercial expansion. The city of Horgos in the mountainous province of Xinjiang was identified as a place ripe for growth. The Chinese improved the road that links it with Shanghai in the east of the country, and built new gas and oil pipelines as well as a railway. Horgos lies about 750 miles north-east of Samarkand, on the other side of the forbidding mountains of the Kyrgyz republic. It is a landlocked world. The capital of Xinjing, Urumqi, is said to be farther from a seaport than any other large city in the world. The whole area is as large as Europe, and as ethnically diverse. In 2009, riots between Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese, who form the majority population in the province, forced Chinese troops to intervene. The people are poor, and the struggle for survival a continuous battle. Border crossings, corrupt officials and impenetrable bureaucracy make everyday commerce difficult to pursue. It is a world that in many respects would have been familiar to Marco Polo and his family. They understood the value of the trade routes of the Silk Road, one of the main pathways to prosperity for the people who lived in the vast lands that separate China from Asia Minor and the beginnings of the European continent. Those routes have never completely died. As the modern world shrinks in pursuit of greater wealth, they may enjoy a full life again.
CHAPTER 4
The Black Death 1348–50
The Black Death was the name given to a pandemic of different types of plague that swept across Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century killing millions of people. Its social and economic consequences were devastating.
In October 1347 a Genoese ship entered the port of Messina in Sicily carrying a deadly cargo. Its crew was infected with the plague and within a short space of time the disease spread throughout the town. The ship was ordered to leave immediately, but it was too late: the damage had been done. ‘Soon men hated each other so much,’ said a contemporary account, ‘that if a son was attacked by the disease his father would not tend him.’ As more and more people died, ‘many desired to confess their sins to the priests and draw up their last will and testament. But ecclesiastics, lawyers and notaries refused to enter the houses of the deceased.’ The Black Death had arrived in Western Europe.
The ship had come from Caffa, a port belonging to Genoa on the Black Sea. The Genoese had bought the town from its Mongol owners at the end of the thirteenth century and built it into a prosperous commercial centre that dominated Black Sea trade. It was also the home of a big slave market. In 1347 the Mongols tried to capture it back, but their siege withered as their army was reduced by plague. In a last desperate attempt at victory they catapulted dead infected bodies over Caffa’s walls and then withdrew. Their siege might have been a failure, but they left behind forces of destruction far greater than they ever imagined. By the beginning of 1348 the Black Death had reached Genoa itself. From there it crossed northern Italy into France. In 1349 it entered Britain and a year later spread through Scandinavia and the Baltic. It is difficult to be precise about how many people it killed across Europe. Thirty million is not an unreasonable estimate.
‘Soon men hated each other so much that if a son was attacked by the disease his father would not tend him.’
This number, in a population the size of medieval Europe’s, is a huge proportion – possibly a quarter of the total. The disease that brought such destruction had three variants. The most common was bubonic plague, carried by fleas hosted by black rats. The other two were septicaemic plague, which affects the blood, and pneumonic plague, which is a disease of the lungs. Other illnesses doubtless played their part as well – typhus and smallpox were both common – adding to the general feeling of overwhelming catastrophe. Bubonic plague is particularly horrifying. In medieval Europe black rats lived in houses and other inhabited areas, breeding profusely and never travelling far from their nests. Humans caught the disease from flea bites, or from bites from the rats themselves. Once a person had been bitten by a diseased creature the skin around the infected area grew dark and the body carried the germ to its nearest lymph node, the usual place for filtering foreign particles out of its system. The areas around the groin, armpit or behind the ear began to swell and became intolerably painful; this was followed by internal haemorrhaging. One of the clearest accounts of the plague was written by Gabriele de Mussis, a lawyer from Piacenza in Italy, who described how people died:
They felt a tingling sensation as if they were being pricked by the points of arrows. The next stage was a fearsome attack that took the form of an extremely hard, solid boil … As it grew more solid, its burning heat caused its patients to fall into an acute and putrid fever with severe headaches. In some cases it gave rise to an intolerable stench. In others it brought vomiting of blood … The majority died between the third and fifth day.
With no medical knowledge to explain the causes of this rampant slaughter in their midst, the people of medieval Europe turned to heaven and hell for their answers. The clergy in fact were particularly badly hit because they inevitably became infected if they tried to minister to those who were ill. In England their numbers were reduced by nearly a half. Saint Sebastian was declared the patron of plague sufferers because his body full of arrows seemed to represent the onset of the disease. Many pictures of him began to decorate churches and cathedrals: one of the most famous was painted by Giovanni del Biondo for the cathedral in Florence just after the Black Death in the early 1350s. Charitable foundations sprang up as people looked for new ways to expiate the holy anger that had visited such death on the world. There were also scapegoats, particularly Jews. Thousands of them were massacred in Germany as people looked for someone to blame for the disaster. God had to be appeased, but as piety increased so did cruelty towards heretics. But the real effect of the Black Death was felt not in the bitter blows of flagellants as they tried to thrash evil spirits from their bodies, or in the exhortations of priests who claimed that the disease was part of ‘God’s command’, but in the economic life of the people of Europe.
The people turned to heaven and hell for their answers.
The commercial activity of Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century was prosperous, conservative and confined. Its trading routes had reached a limit beyond which they would not significantly expand until Christopher Columbus sailed to America 150 years later. To the south, the Italian city-states controlled the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. To the north the German ports of the Hanseatic League, particularly Lubeck, dominated the Baltic. European towns tended to be run by powerful merchants’ guilds that kept a tight rein on the activities of their craftsmen and artisans. The countryside was still in the grip of the nobility who expected service from their peasants in return for providing them with land to cultivate. It was a carefully protected, feudal world that had developed just enough to introduce the first fruits of capitalist enterprise into its system. But it was also an age of dreadful calamity, the worst of which was the Black Death, and it was this that brought about or accelerated a process of change. In the early part of the century there was a terrible famine. The European population had been growing steadily but a series of poor summers and hard winters destroyed crops and brought about mass starvation in the years 1315–17. The Hundred Years’ War between England and France exhausted the energies and drained the resources of both countries. Edward III’s victory over the French at the Battle of Crécy at which his son, the Black Prince, fought heroically and ‘won his spurs’, took place only two years before the Black Death carried all before it.
Thousands of Jews were massacred as people looked for someone to blame for the disaster.
Disease, war and famine began to corrode Europe’s social structure. In the towns, craftsmen rebelled against the restrictions imposed on them. In Flanders between 1323 and 1328, city workers and peasants rose up and challenged the authority of their masters. In France the depredations of disbanded mercenaries from the French army who roamed around trying to live off the land contributed to a rebellion in the Ile de France in 1357. In England, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was the most serious challenge to the authority of the Crown and the ruling nobility throughout the whole of the Middle Ages. All these uprisings were crushed with rapid brutality. Europe in the fourteenth century did not succumb to revolution, but it did not escape from upheaval altogether. A catastrophe like the Black Death so reduced the total labour force that those who were left behind felt themselves to be in a stronger position than they had been before; a scarce labour force is always a valuable one.
Although manufacturing and trade were very important, land remained Europe’s principal source of wealth. Land belonged to the Crown, the Church and the nobility. In this organisation the nobility furnished the monarch with military support in return for being given valuable estates which the peasants farmed in return for the service they gave to their lords and masters. By the middle of the fourteenth century, however, the nature of the relationship between landowner and peasant had begun to change. The old system of labourers being tied to the manor by bonds of duty and obligation had developed into one that was more similar to a straightforward relationship between landlord and tenant. With labour scarce the tenants had more bargaining power and in some cases were able to move from one manor to another in search of work. Some estates broke up as their owners decided to lease the land to peasant farmers rather than own and manage it all themselves. A nation’s wealth, once the exclusive preserve of a small ennobled governing class, began to be shared more widely. This was a gradual but significant process. The Flemish, French and English peasants who marched in anger and desperation against those who ruled them won no immediate victories, but the underlying causes of their grievances began a slow transformation that would ultimately move Europe out of feudalism and into the modern world.
The plague remained a constant feature of European life after the Black Death of 1348–50 finally died out. It has been estimated that Europe suffered an outbreak somewhere every eleven years in the hundred years that followed. It continued after that: its last great manifestation was the Plague of London in 1665 which killed about twenty percent of the city’s population. In the middle of the seventeenth century people were rather more organised about coping with an outbreak of disease than they had been three hundred years earlier, but they still had no idea what caused it. The author Daniel Defoe wrote an imaginary diary of the London Plague more than fifty years after it happened. It was based on parish records and the recollections of citizens who had been there at the time: ‘So the Plague defied all medicines; the very physicians were seized with it, with their preservatives in their mouths; and men went about prescribing to others and telling them what to do till the tokens were upon them, and they dropped down dead, destroyed by that very enemy they directed others to oppose.’
Man cannot fight the things he does not understand. His greatest achievements can be destroyed by the unexpected. The Black Death terrified Europe, descending like a threatening cloud that brought it to a halt and left it groping for a new direction. Its effects were devastating. The population in many places declined by as much as thirty or forty percent – and stayed there, failing to recover even when the epidemic had long passed. The population of Toulouse, for instance, stood at 30,000 in the early fourteenth century: a hundred years later it was only 8,000. The Italian poet and author Boccaccio witnessed the effects of the disease in Florence and wrote about it in his book, The Decameron. He described the mass burials and claimed that some women developed loose morals because of the need to ‘expose’ their bodies as they investigated their illness. ‘The authority of human and divine laws almost disappeared,’ he wrote. ‘Every man was able to do as he pleased.’ The Black Death fundamentally changed people’s attitudes towards wealth, and left behind a world very different from the one upon which it inflicted such horror.
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