Trade and Romance

MICHAEL MURRIN is the Raymond W. and Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, the Department of Comparative Literature, and the Divinity School at the University of Chicago.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2014 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2014.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-07157-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-07160-2 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226071602.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Murrin, Michael.

Trade and romance / Michael Murrin.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-07157-2 (cloth : alkaline paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-07160-2 (e-book)

1. Romances—History and criticism.   2. Commerce—History—Medieval, 500–1500.   3. Asia—In literature.   4. Polo, Marco, 1254–1323? Travels of Marco Polo.   5. Huon de Bordeaux.   6. Chaucer, Geoffrey,–1400. Squire’s tale.   7. Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 1440 or 1441–1494. Orlando innamorato.   8. Camões, Luís de, 1524?–1580. Lusíadas.   9. Spenser, Edmund, 1552?–1599. Faerie queene.   10. Milton, John, 1608–1674. Paradise lost.   I. Title.

PN682.o75M87 2013

809'.9332—dc23

2013027388

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Trade and Romance

Michael Murrin

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Asian Trade and Heroic Narrative from Marco Polo to Milton

PART 1. The Mongols

1. Marco Polo and the Marvelous Real

2. A Paradise for Killers: Marco Polo and the Garden of the Assassins

3. The Squire’s Tale: Romance as Mask

4. Morgana and Manodante: Boiardo and the Aristocratic Response to Mercantilism

PART 2. The Portuguese

5. Huon at the Castle of Adamant

6. First Encounter: The Christian-Hindu Confusion When the Portuguese Reached India

7. Camões and the Discovery of India: The Negative Side

8. Surviving Enchantment: Vasco da Gama’s First Voyage in Os Lusíadas—The Interplay between Experience and Classical Models

PART 3. The English

9. Spenser, Marlowe, and the English Search for Asian Silk

10. The Audience of The Faerie Queene

11. Waning of a Dream: A Brief History of Moscovia and Paradise Lost

12. A Wood in the Desert

Appendix 1: The Devaluation of the Squire and His Tale

Appendix 2: Henry’s Search for Spices

Appendix 3: Vergil in Camões

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ABBREVIATIONS

GDG: Genealogie deorum gentilium

GL: Gerusalemme liberata

L: Os Lusíadas

OF: Orlando furioso

O I: Orlando innamorato

PL: Paradise Lost

PR: Paradise Regained

SQT: The Squire’s Tale

TFQ: The Fairie Queene

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people have helped me compose and complete Trade and Romance. First I thank my colleagues at the University of Chicago who read and critiqued my chapters as I wrote them. Bradin Cormack and Joshua Scodel read all of the chapters and made detailed comments. Richard Strier and Christina von Nolcken read specific chapters and gave me valuable advice. Hélio Alves helpfully reviewed my Portuguese and made a number of important corrections. When I finally had what I considered a complete text, I took it over to the University of Chicago Press, where I have published all of my books. Alan Thomas, who had looked after my previous book History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic, gently explained to me that I needed to provide a proper format for this book and suggested Meg Cox as one who could do it for me. She did a wonderful job, and the book was sent out to readers. The first reader, who has since identified himself to me, David Quint, gave not only a general overview of the book but detailed comments on every chapter. The anonymous second reader also made many useful comments, which I incorporated into the text. Kathryn Gohl then put everything together in its final form and especially saved me from many confusions in my footnotes. Micah T. Fehrenbacher is the book’s promotions manager, Siobhan Drummond put together the index, and Michael Koplow was my contact with the press in the late stages of editing. I thank Claudia Wenger at the Hotel Edelweiss in Mürren, Switzerland, who handled my correspondence with the press. Finally, I owe a special debt to Randolph Petilos, who has seen Trade and Romance through every stage at the press with kindness and patience while I was trying to finish all the requirements during a very busy quarter of teaching and reading files for a medieval search. My thanks to them all.

.   .   .

The following chapters were previously published; all have been revised for this volume, some extensively. Chapter 1 was first published as The Marvelous Real: Marco Polo’s Romance, in Tableau, Spring/Summer 2007. Chapter 4 was published as Trade and Fortune: Morgana and Manodante, in a set of book chapters, Fortune and Romance: Boiardo in America, edited by Jo Ann Cavallo and Charles Ross (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998). Chapter 5 was published as Huon at the Castle of Adamant, in Modern Philology 100, no. 4 (May 2003). Chapter 6 was published as First Encounter: The Christian-Hindu Confusion When the Portuguese Reached India, in another set of conference papers, Post-Imperial Camões, Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies 9 (2003). The first section of chapter 9 was originally published in Arthuriana 21, no. 1 (Spring 2011), for a conference held in my honor and that of James Nohrnberg. Chapter 10 was published as "The Audience of The Faerie Queene," in Explorations in Renaissance Culture 23 (1997).

INTRODUCTION

Asian Trade and Heroic Narrative from Marco Polo to Milton

This book has three aims. The first concerns the role of Farther Asia in creating a new trend in western European heroic literature that eventually spanned four hundred years.¹ By Farther Asia, I mean, roughly, from Iran and the Caspian Sea, going east all the way to the Pacific. Intertwined with this first concern is the role of the mercantile class and its interest in aristocratic romance. The third aim is the role of geography, or the actualities behind what seem to be fantasies. First, however, one needs a brief outline of the book, and then a discussion of methodology. After that, I return to the three aims just summarized and discuss each in turn.

.   .   .

This book has three parts, each of four chapters. The first part covers the Mongol period, from the mid-thirteenth to the late fifteenth centuries. The principal reporter here is Marco Polo. The first chapter in part 1, Marco Polo and the Marvelous Real, concerns Polo’s travels through the Mongol khanates, especially that of Khubilai Khan, and the wonders he saw. The second chapter covers the Assassins or Nizari Isma’ilis in Iran. Polo also traveled extensively in Persia on his way to China and upon his return. At the time, Persia was the center of the realm of the Il-Khans, who also ruled Mesopotamia and much of Anatolia, founded by Khubilai’s brother. Polo’s political reading of the Nizari Isma’ilis cast a long shadow in the following centuries. In this way, I cover Polo’s reports on both ends of Farther Asia. The effects of such reports show up in the next two chapters. Chapter 3, "The Squire’s Tale: Romance as Mask, provides an example of the composite romance," a new kind of heroic narrative that developed in response to travels into Asia, demonstrating that merchants—not knights—were the real heroes behind such stories. Then, in chapter 4, Morgana and Manodante: Boiardo and the Aristocratic Response to Mercantilism, I turn to the Italian poet who, more than anyone, invented the Renaissance version of heroic romance and had in mind the last phase of Mongol activity, that of Tamerlane and his successors, who brought central Asia once again to the attention of Westerners. Boiardo, an aristocrat and one well aware of the commercial side of traveling, attacked it.

Part 2 concerns the Portuguese, who sailed around Africa to India and set up a commercial system that extended as far as China and Japan. The reporters in this section are mainly Álvaro Velho, who kept a journal of Vasco da Gama’s first voyage; Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, who knew Velho’s journal and had, himself, visited the East; and João de Barros, who, while he did not visit Asia himself, constructed his chronicle from diverse sources. I begin part 2, however, with Huon at the Castle of Adamant, a cycle originally developed in response to stories brought back by world travelers like Polo. As I mentioned, these stories revealed exotic wonders in a new kind of composite romance, as exemplified by Geoffrey Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale. The prose redaction published in 1454 and in English in the 1530s was even more influential than the verse version and runs like a glittering thread all the way to the end of this book. The second story, Esclarmonde, speculates on what the Portuguese were doing as they explored coasts of Africa and guesses at the result. In the cycle, Huon first sails to the Indian Ocean. In later sections, he travels through central Asia, finding, of all things, Arthur and the knights of this period and those of Charlemagne. Chapter 6, First Encounter, shows how befuddled both Hindus and Christians were when the Portuguese traveled to Calicut and why similar confusions occurred later. The Hindus thought the Christians were Hindus—and vice versa.

Chapters 7 and 8 discuss Luís de Camões, who made an epic out of Gama’s first voyage. Chapter 7 explains how Camões and other Portuguese writers, Fernão Mendes Pinto and Diogo do Couto among them, expressed doubts about the way the Portuguese system in Asia had developed. This chapter also discusses Camões’ great seventeenth-century commentator, Faria e Sousa, who showed what a strain commerce caused for the epic genre. Chapter 8, Surviving Enchantment, puts Camões in dialogue with classical authors, especially Vergil. Like Odysseus and Aeneas, Gama experiences a range of phenomena on the ocean, especially a monster storm that dwarfs those found in the Odyssey and Aeneid.

The last part—or English phase—involves an elaborate trade route rivaling that of the Portuguese. Chapter 9, Spenser, Marlowe, and the English Search for Asian Silk, describes this system that ran across the Arctic to the White Sea, then down rivers in Russia and across the Caspian Sea to Iran. Chapter 10 looks at the audience for the Faerie Queene and shows that Spenser appealed to the same double audience as did Chaucer. This audience eventually split, however, with the elite claiming Spenser for themselves after his death. Chapter 11 demonstrates how the young John Milton in his Moscovia responded to the same activities of the English as had Spenser and Marlowe, but with a further emphasis on later Russian exploration in Siberia and the overland route to Beijing. By the time Milton composed Paradise Lost, however, and under the influence of Camões, he became skeptical, even critical, of what Europeans were doing in Asia. The last chapter is titled A Wood in the Desert and discusses the inevitable misunderstandings made even by conscientious readers of reports from the East. Both Boiardo and Milton (in Paradise Regained) tried to get their geography right but unintentionally created forests where there were, at the time, deserts. At the same time, while knowledge of Asia’s coasts and islands grew, inner Asia gradually disappeared from the consciousness of most European writers, not to reappear until the days of the Great Game and the archaeological explorers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

A word about methodology: in the first place, I take a strictly historical view of this material, that is, what people thought and said then, rather than what we might think and say now. Postcolonial approaches, for example, initially developed by Edward Said for the study of later periods, are not required for the four hundred years covered in this book. The merchants and clerics who traveled east in the Mongol period discussed in part 1, and the English agents of the Muscovy Company discussed in part 3, similarly had no designs for conquest. Even the Portuguese do not need such a methodology, since writers like Camões and Pinto provide all the criticism necessary.

Second, I am concerned here with reports and literary works that had a demonstrably wide influence in western Europe. There are other texts, of course, but one must at some point chose among them, or one will end up with multiple volumes. Some of the reports and works come from people whose names may still be familiar today: Polo, Chaucer, Camões, Marlowe, Spenser, and Milton. Matteo Maria Boiardo, the author of Orlando innamorato, while known to Europeans and Renaissance scholars, is far from a household name among Anglo-American readers. Still other writers remain anonymous and yet had a wide influence at the time. The authors of the Huon poetic cycle, for example, centered on Bordeaux of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and the editor who transformed the cycle into prose in 1454 remain unknown. Yet the prose version especially influenced later writers, particularly in France and then in England through Berners’ 1534 translation. Nearly 140 years later, the first story in the Huon series had a profound effect on Milton and the writing of Paradise Regained.

.   .   .

Now to the three aims mentioned at the start of this introduction: the role of Asia in Europe; knights and merchants; and geography. First, Marco Polo saw in Asia real places, objects, and things in nature that exceeded the wonders of the Celtic fantasies that marked the stories of King Arthur in western Europe. Hangzhou, the old capital of the southern Song dynasty, for example, with its canals and lake, reminded Polo of his native Venice, but his city was but a tiny mirror held up to the giant, affluent one he describes. There were wondrous objects, like asbestos(!), and in nature, mountains and deserts that dwarfed anything in Polo’s experience. There were also literary exchanges. The original Arabian Nights, for example, came west later in the thirteenth century and added its marvels to those already in circulation, creating the new composite romance genre I’ve mentioned (see also chaps. 3 and 5). With the Portuguese, the wonder was for nature, the great monsoon system that still much surpasses any other storm pattern in the world. As Camões claimed at the beginning of Os Lusíadas (esp. 1.3 and 1.11), the realities there surpassed even the fantasies in classical and Renaissance romance. The English, in their turn, faced the perils of the Arctic Ocean, met strange people like the Samoyeds (with their odd reindeer sleds), and endured Caspian storms. They also heard stories of Siberia, the strange lakes and temples there, and a great wall, far to the east.

Second, concerning knights and merchants: while a few diplomats and some clerics and nobles made the journey east in the Mongol period, the great majority of the travelers were merchants. They were the ones who traversed the vast distances, suffered from cold and heat, and, at times, risked their lives. Nonetheless, romancers in western Europe continued to portray knights as the heroes in their tales, and merchants saw in these tales reflections of what they knew or experienced firsthand. As a result, romance appealed to a double audience, a situation that still helped Spenser attract readers in the Renaissance. The Portuguese, in contrast, were even more commercial, because monarchs and nobles also engaged in trade.

The third aim is geography. The reporters who created the views of Farther Asia that most affected Western writers likewise require checking. For this purpose, it is important to see the places as they are today: the ruins, cities, and landscapes. To this end, I have traveled one version of the Silk Road, from the Black Sea to Chang’an (modern Xi’an), and followed Polo’s route to Hangzhou and Yunnan. And since I begin the story with the Mongols, I have also traveled across Mongolia. For background on the Portuguese route, I have visited as many sites mentioned in writings as I could, and also in Iran, so important to Polo and the English, and have toured both the standard sites and also seen Alamut and the Caspian.

Now, geography involves both geology and history. As the glaciers melt, the inner Asia one sees now is considerably drier than it was during the time of the action described in this book. It has been made considerably drier still with the planting of cotton since the time of Polo. Some rivers and lakes have already disappeared, and other rivers have changed course. Historically, tribes like the original Uighurs used to move around, and languages like Sogdian have since died. Yet archaeologists have recovered much that has been lost and continue to do so. We now know, for example, more about the human history of the region, the buildings and artworks, than we ever had before.

There is also a relation between geographical distance and fantasy. The far away has an undeniable allure and can seem dreamlike to those who lack the opportunity to travel. They can, however, read about distant places and, in this fashion, bring these places home. One example: the complex tale of the fisherman and the demon in the original Arabian Nights turns this relation itself into a story. At the tale’s climax, the fisherman and his king find a land next door that they had never known existed, a land with magic. The king goes off on his own to explore the place further, comes to a palace, and finds the palace’s owner, the young prince, paralyzed under an evil enchantment. The king eventually saves the prince and invites him to his home. The youth smiles and tells him that his home is not a half day off but a year’s journey away.²

.   .   .

I close with a disclaimer: I am not a traveler in the heroic mode, like Colin Thubron and others, whose works I have consulted. Mine has been an academic survey, courtesy (mostly) of Archaeological Tours in New York. On these trips, there were lecturers, often archaeologists, who could get us into places less often visited and into museums for special visits. Such trips, while costly on my salary, have nonetheless been invaluable because they allowed me to develop an in-depth historical sense for each zone, not just Goa and the ports of Kerala, but also Vijayanagar and much of the interior of the Indian peninsula; not just Bukhara (Boiardo’s Albracca), but also Sogdian sites, some of which I had not known existed when I began researching this topic, as well as the Uzbek developments after Europeans stopped traveling there.

And now we are ready to begin.

1

The Mongols

CHAPTER 1

Marco Polo and the Marvelous Real

Around the middle of the thirteenth century Europe discovered that it was but a peninsula of Asia.¹ The Mongol Eurasian system of khanates, by then nearly stabilized after the wars of conquest,² enabled exploration and travel across Asia. Not long after, the nature of heroic narrative began to change in the West, as Arthurian romance gave way to the composite romance, a form that had an inexhaustible appetite for marvels,³ and the chansons de geste similarly took over traits of Arthurianism. The interplay between travelers’ accounts and the new narratives produced a different kind of wonder, that quintessential ingredient for heroic stories, a kind that I call the marvelous real as opposed to the Celtic fantastic. The new heroic narrative with Eastern settings and wonders depended upon real places that could be found on a map but real places that were very, very far away. In this vast new world, travelers had found things quite as marvelous for Europeans as those in traditional fantasy, and the real itself became marvelous. These new wonders gave Western heroic stories a hard material edge but, as we shall see, did not displace the older marvels. The result was a series of stories filled with many more wonders than their predecessors.

For the period I am discussing, the late thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries, however, one must not think that all the authors or even the majority responded to the call of Farther Asia. Dante, for example, ignored the common locations for the Earthly Paradise, either at the sources of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers or at the ocean shore of East Asia, and put his own garden in the Southern Hemisphere. Others, like Jehan d’Arras in his Melusine (1478), were content with the Levant for parts of their stories, a zone familiar to Western authors since the First Crusade.

From the many travelers to the East I stress Marco Polo, who left for inner Asia in 1271 and only returned to Venice in 1295. His Le divisament dou monde or Description of the World opened up Asia to a broad readership in western Europe. Marco did not produce merely another travel account, though he was the first European explorer who crossed all Asia, from one end to another.⁴ Rather, relying on his travels and on informants whom he trusted, Marco composed a geography.⁵ His amanuensis, Rustichello of Pisa, begins the Divisament by saying that the book is written for all who wish to know the diverse generations of human beings and the diversities of the various regions there (Divisament, 1.305–6). Marco’s work was an immediate success, the first vernacular text composed by an Italian that attracted a readership outside Italy.⁶ It was translated many times, several of them made while Marco was still alive.⁷ And it affected European maps. Marco himself had a Chinese map and marked out on it his journeys.⁸ His geographic work in turn caused changes in the famous Catalan map of 1375,⁹ and its scientific value grew in the following century. Finally, Marco profoundly affected European ambitions and dreams. Henry the Navigator may have used the Divisament, and Columbus had a copy when he sailed west to reach Asia, hence the adage: Alive, Marco Polo discovered China; after his death, America.¹⁰ In fact, he created the myth of the faraway, a myth which is still with us.¹¹

For the fiction I draw some of my examples from the cycle of Huon of Bordeaux. The author, who lived near Arras, perhaps in Saint-Omer, a place he stresses, composed the original romance in the early 1260s, before Marco left for central and East Asia.¹² The sequels followed between 1291 and 1311. An anonymous poet from the same area composed most of them, and the cycle itself diagrams the changes that affected European fiction, the difference between the original Huon and its first sequel, named after the hero’s wife, Esclarmonde.¹³

I emphasize, however, what followed—the matter that concerns much of this book: what happened in the fifteenth century, when another northerner turned the Huon cycle into prose (1454), which became a best seller in the age of print. Soon after this event the poet Matteo Maria Boiardo composed the Orlando innamorato or Roland in Love (1483, 1495), another best seller that spawned multiple continuations, the most famous being Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. Boiardo set the new standards for Renaissance heroic narrative, which continued to presuppose the Silk Road on the eve of the voyages of Columbus, Gama, and Magellan.

A HUGE WORLD REPLACES A SMALL

Chrétien’s romances in the twelfth century well illustrate the smaller spatial sense that Europeans had prior to the Mongols. In the Perceval or Conte du Graal, the Grail king lives in a forest wilderness, yet a town like Belrepeire is but forty leagues or a day’s journey on horseback away.¹⁴ Other romances show the somewhat wider Mediterranean world opened up by the Crusaders. When he reworked Chrétien’s Perceval, Wolfram von Eschenbach sent the hero’s father to Cairo and North Africa, and the author of the Vulgate Queste del Saint Graal (c. 1220) had the Grail return to Syria. This extension was as nothing, however, to what became possible once the Mongols had established their system. For the first time Asia knew no frontiers.¹⁵ Before the mid-thirteenth century Friar Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, the first papal ambassador to the Great Khan (1245–47), had opened to Europe the long routes of Asia, and after the Polos Europeans and Mongol emissaries could go from one end of Eurasia to the other.¹⁶ The scholar Jean-Paul Roux aptly remarks that medieval explorers opened the door unwittingly to the limitless.¹⁷

Quinsai or Hangzhou, a city near modern Shanghai and the old capital of the southern Song,¹⁸ provides a good example for the new, wider world. It is roughly 5,600 miles from the Atlantic coast of France by direct flight. One can surmise how much longer the distance would be overland. Such vast distances had an immediate effect on romance. Der jungere Titurel (c. 1275) sent the Grail not to Syria but to India, then a vague geographic term for the lands at the limits or beyond the reach of Alexander’s campaigns.

The Mongol system lasted about a century (mid-thirteenth to mid-fourteenth century). The collapse of the Il khanate in Iran after Abu Sa’id’s death in 1336 and then the continuing war between the Ming and the Mongols after 1368 effectively ended travel to East Asia.¹⁹ Yet what remained still far surpassed the world known to the first romancers. Chaucer’s Squire still envisages a large world for his tale (1390s). He begins it at Saraï on the Volga, considered then to be part of Asia, and its khan receives gifts from the kyng of Arabe and of Inde (SqT, 110). Some Chaucerians have accordingly talked of the vast background of space the poet presupposes, though it was actually a much smaller world than the one Marco Polo knew.²⁰ In the next century Boiardo would have Angelica say she lived in Albracca, two hundred days’ journey beyond the River Tana or Don (OI, 1.1.26),²¹ far away in inner Asia.

Distance creates a new dimension and a new problematic. Getting there becomes as much an adventure as being there. Carpine admits all he feared, and yet the trip was more difficult than he had thought.²² The journey, nevertheless, was reasonably safe later, after the initial explorations, according to Francesco Balducci Pegolotti, an employee of the Bardi Bank, who in 1340 described the way stations on the north or steppe route.²³ Mongol infighting, though it might disrupt, never really stopped the trade.²⁴ Security, however, did not protect the traveler from long, fatiguing days, extremes of temperature, and all the difficulties and frustrations that attend a journey through a constantly changing alien environment. Not that getting there had been without incident in the earlier romances. One thinks of Lancelot’s journey to Gore with its series of duels, mysterious cemetery, and sword bridge, but as often Arthur’s heroes were not concerned with travel to a specific place so much as proving themselves or learning the lessons of chivalry, which could be done just as well by wandering through the countryside, as Yvain and Perceval do in Chrétien. The East, in contrast, gave romancers definite geographic goals and, therefore, not only new distances but a set of itineraries and endpoints toward which action is newly driven. Wandering became travel, and the narratives gave specific routes, much like the travel brochures we look at today.

Most of these routes then went through the lands we loosely call central or inner Asia. Here was a zone of adventure, wonder, fear, and great difficulty, which Europeans coming from the West and Mongols and Chinese coming from the East experienced. In fact, much of our knowledge of the routes prior to the thirteenth century comes from the Chinese, who crossed the zone much earlier, between the fifth and seventh centuries.²⁵ In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a traveler could choose any of three routes across this zone: the steppe route to the north, which was followed by Carpine and by William of Rubruck and Bartholomew of Cremona (1253–55), and the two routes farther south, which constituted different versions of the Silk Road, the routes normally used by merchants and that crossed a series of deserts and mountains. Actually, diverse combinations of these routes were possible, depending on one’s destination. William of Rubruck had to cross the steppes to reach Karakorum, the old Mongol capital. If one’s destination was Khan-balik (modern Beijing), one could follow some version of the Silk Road throughout.

Romancers accordingly had a set of itineraries across Asia, and the narration acquired geographical specificity. Boiardo’s heroes follow standard routes between Europe and Asia.²⁶ Rinaldo takes the steppe route back to western Europe (OI, 2.14.9–10),²⁷ whereas Orlando and Angelica follow the more southerly version through Iran (2.19.51–52).²⁸ On the way out Orlando, as well as Astolfo, mixes the two routes, as had the elder Polos, Marco’s father and uncle, who had gone east on an earlier journey before they returned to Venice and picked up Marco for another such trek. Beyond the River Tana or Don, both heroes, Orlando and Astolfo, traveling separately, turn south through Circassia and so pass below rather than above the Caspian.²⁹

Of the three routes, the northern one, that across the steppe, was the quickest and probably the easiest, since it had no significant obstacles. The Mongols themselves favored it.³⁰ Yet even this route gave travelers stories to tell. The Mongols did not mind winter travel. One slept under the snow, when one could not find hard ground or make an igloo, and many Europeans and Muslims, not brought up like Tatars, died.³¹ Bartholomew of Cremona became so hungry he cried and lost the memory of ever having eaten.³²

The other two routes, those that constitute the Silk Road proper, share similar difficulties—those of the mountains and those of the deserts—so I treat the two routes together. I begin with the mountains, the Pamirs or, for Marco, the areas of Badakshan and the Vakhan. Chinese pilgrims and Marco had many of the same experiences in this zone. Mostly travelers noted the great heights. Marco complained that in Badakshan he spent an entire day climbing what seemed to be a mountain and then discovered he had reached a plateau.³³ Of the Pamirs he said they were so high and cold that birds did not come there (Divisament, 50.365).³⁴ Now great heights bring altitude and weather problems. The Chinese blamed altitude sickness on the local onions, hence their name for the Pamirs: Tsung-ling or Onion Mountains.³⁵ They also complained about vertigo. The Buddhist pilgrim Sung-yun (518) said of the highest point of the Pamirs: From this point as a centre, looking downwards, it seems just as though one was poised in mid-air. He also has a moving description of the bridges in the Karakoram, which were suspended on iron chains. Looking down, one cannot see the bottom, yet there are no side rails, and one dare not cross in high winds. A slip, and one could fall 10,000 fathoms.³⁶

The weather caused still more problems. One could cross the Pamirs only in summer and yet could experience terrible conditions, including snow.³⁷ The Chinese explained the weather supernaturally. Faxian (AD 400) blamed dragons: Moreover there are poison-dragons, who when evil-purposed spit poison, winds, rain, snow, drifting sand, and gravel-stones; not one of ten thousand meeting these calamities, escapes.³⁸ In the following century Sungyun said that if the traveler pays some religious service to the dragon, he has less trouble.³⁹ Xuanzang, the last of these pilgrims (seventh century), gave the same advice but blamed wicked spirits, just as Rubruck later would connect demons with snowy weather.⁴⁰

The desert zone offered its own set of problems, both the Taklimakan in Xinjiang, which travelers skirted, and the Ghashun Gobi, which they had to cross between Lop Nur and Dunhuang.⁴¹ Both areas really make a continuous desert, one of the driest in Asia, mostly because it is so far from the ocean, partially because mountains such as the Himalayas block rain-bearing clouds.⁴² Travelers worried about losing their way, but mostly they feared death by thirst and also starvation.⁴³ The area between Lop Nur and Dunhuang still lacks a modern road, and it seems appropriate that the Chinese after World War II used Lop Nur for nuclear tests.⁴⁴

Such long and arduous journeys made sense only if the destination justified the effort and time of the European travelers. China certainly did in the form of goods, of course, but also for its wondrous cities themselves. Marco’s reaction to Quinsai or Hangzhou,⁴⁵ the old capital of the southern Song, well illustrates this fact. It was a city unlike any he had seen in Asia, and he kept adding to his initial description during his later life.

Marco saw the city shortly after it surrendered to the Mongols. There had been no looting, and the city was still the real center of China. Marco himself had grown up in an important urban center and loved cities, especially those of South China.⁴⁶ Quinsai has the description in Marco’s book, which he puts at its exact center.⁴⁷ It exceeds in detail all his other descriptions.⁴⁸ For it he drew on three sources, the first being his own experience. Ramusio says Marco was in the city frequently and took pains to learn everything about it, writing down the whole in his notes.⁴⁹ Second, he drew information from texts. According to a Latin translation, he used among others the official account sent to Bayan, the conqueror of the city, as he approached.⁵⁰ Third, he drew on oral report from knowledgeable people. A very old, rich merchant who had been a familiar of the Song emperor guided him through the palace, and he talked to a customs officer about the daily supply of pepper.⁵¹ In his presentation Marco stresses architecture, which was then the dominant artistic interest in Venice.⁵² One can compare his descriptions to a whole set of them in Chinese: three literary ones, not, however, composed by Mandarins, and three great monographs on the city, which represent the official views.⁵³

Marco says that the whole city is on water and surrounded by water (Divisament, 152.513). A river links Quinsai with its port twenty-five miles away, and the river is navigable well beyond the city (516).⁵⁴ On its east side it has a channel to take the flood waters of the river, which also serves as a huge water moat.⁵⁵ On its other side, the city has West Lake, and within, it is laced with canals, the main canal serving as the end of the transport system.⁵⁶

A city of canals surrounded by water, of course, suggested Marco’s own Venice. In fact, the Venetian version of Marco’s text, the earliest surviving manuscript of which goes back to the early fourteenth century, makes the comparison explicit. Marco is talking of the many bridges in Quinsai and says: "And let no one be surprised if there are so many bridges, because I tell you that this town is all situated [MS Z] in water of lagoons as Venese is [MS VA]."⁵⁷ Other things strengthened the parallel. The only way into the Chinese province is by a causeway with water on either side (Divisament, 141.501), and in the city the tide cleans out the canals.⁵⁸ The scholar Renouard accordingly suggests that Quinsai moved Marco so much because it recalled to him his homeland.⁵⁹ Yet this parallel works only so far.

First of all, the scale was so different. Quinsai was the greatest city in East Asia.⁶⁰ Marco called it the most noble and best city in the world (Divisament, 152.513), an opinion shared by other travelers.⁶¹ Population estimates tell the story. A sober modern estimate gives Quinsai between a million and a million and a half people.⁶² Venice then had about 120,000.⁶³ By the lowest estimates Hangzhou was ten times the size of Venice; by the high estimates, forty times.

At Quinsai Marco may have felt the similarities between this city and his home, as did later travelers, but his own description shows how great was the difference in scale. Venice then was at best a tiny mirror to this gigantic city. In other words, Quinsai was a marvel. In the next section I focus on the category of the marvelous at the border between the new geography and the new kind of romance.

THE MARVELOUS REAL

The huge Asian world affected romancers and the composers of chansons de geste. Already with the Crusades poets had looked east, but by the later thirteenth century many authors moved well-known chivalric heroes east. The poet of Huon de Bordeaux sent his hero to Palestine and transposed the steppe zone south so Huon could meet the Kumans (Huon, 22.2913–22). Similarly, the Paduan cleric who composed the Franco-Italian Entrée d’Espagne (mid-fourteenth century) sent Roland east in part 2, where he wooed a Saracen princess.⁶⁴ Not only Roland, but Ogier and Charlemagne and other knights all went east.⁶⁵ At about the same time as Marco traveled in Asia, Girart d’Amiens, one of the writers who set the models for the composite romance, located his Méliacin in Asia.⁶⁶ The new direct trade links across Asia allowed the romancers, moreover, to send their heroes well inland and not just to Palestine or Anatolia. As I said earlier, Chaucer has his Squire in The Canterbury Tales locate his tale at Saraï on the Volga, then on the Asian steppe route. More spectacular are the fifteenth-century romances. In the prose Huon (1454) the hero goes to Momur, capital of Auberon, the fairy king, situated near Hyrcania and the Alburz Mountains (Boke of Duke Huon, 595). Arthur and Morgan the Fay also come to Momur, and Auberon gives Arthur, among many other gifts, power among the fairies of Tatary, that is, the steppe zone of the lower Volga that extended into central Asia. Morgan has married Ogier the Dane (601), a knight of Charlemagne’s court, whom we learned earlier had been journeying to India (489). Boiardo similarly has Angelica endure a siege in Albracca, an Italian form of the name Bukhara, which the poet correctly locates beyond the Caspian (OI, 1.6.42), and where he sends heroes like Orlando or Roland. In effect, writers regularly moved famous characters of previous heroic narrative east and set them down in inner Asia.

In this vast world the traveler came upon many things and places the reality of which defeated the imagination. They seemed marvelous, and the Divisament promises that its readers will find in it les grandismes mervoilles (the greatest marvels) (1.305). Much later Torquato Tasso would develop a theory of what he called the verisimilar marvelous, which with some modifications provides us with a useful guide. He distinguishes two kinds, the philosophical and the popular,⁶⁷ but it is the philosophical which concerns us here. For Tasso this category applies to events that seem marvelous because their causes are hidden from us.⁶⁸ We can further break this down into two subcategories: the natural, which is rare in romance, and the artificial, which romance favors.

The natural marvelous, in turn, takes three forms: objects, fauna, and the landscape itself. Marco provides a whole list of objects that would seem marvelous to his readers. Among them is asbestos, for which he gives a detailed description (Divisament, 60.376–77), showing it to be a silicate and correcting the Western misunderstanding that connected it to a salamander.⁶⁹ He describes its mining and manufacture along with the precise observation that it becomes white when thrown in fire but protects one as long as there is no tear in the material.⁷⁰ Romancers had difficulty responding to such things in Marco’s narrative, though his account of asbestos may help to explain the way some knights were protected. A good instance would be a duel early in the Orlando innamorato. Argalia, the brother of Angelica, is fighting Feraguto and tells him to desist, since he wears enchanted armor. Feraguto replies that he wears armor only for show because his body is charmed in all but one part (OI,