The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

His object was Africa, and the gateway was Syria and Palestine. It looked as if nothing would prevent conquest of the whole north coast of Africa; there were no armies strong enough to oppose him except those of Baybars, sultan of Egypt. He took Aleppo in 1258, and moved on Egypt. But at this point he received word of the death of his brother Mangu; and this was serious news. For Hulagu’s elder brother Kubla was the next in line for succession, and he and the youngest brother were in strong disagreement on a vital matter – whether the Mongols should remain horsemen of the steppes or move into a more civilised country. Arigboge, the youngest, agreed with Genghis Khan that the Mongols should remain nomads – civilisation would soften and corrupt them. Hulagu agreed with Kubla that corruption could be enjoyable, and was inevitable in any case. Now Kubla needed his support in the argument, for Arigboge had strong supporters. And so, to the relief of all the Mediterranean, Hulagu turned his army homeward.

But Baybars was unwilling to allow him to escape so easily. His army caught up with the Mongols at Ain Jalut, near the Sea of Galilee, in September 1260, and the Mongols sustained their first real defeat. The main body of the army was put to flight, although, with the injustice of history, the Mongols managed to avoid massacre. And Hulagu, nursing his wounds, hurried back to Mongolia.

His intervention was timely. Arigboge lost the argument when he was seized and thrown into prison, where he died. Kubla Khan became the Great Khan in 1260. He decided that his chief task was to complete the conquest of China and start a new dynasty. And in the next thirty-four years, this is precisely what he did.

He was warring against the Mongols’ former allies, the Sung, and it was altogether more difficult than overthrowing the Chin in the north. The terrain consisted mainly of flooded rice fields, which made cavalry useless. The hot, damp climate was hard on the Mongols. But they made good use of the great siege catapults they had used to destroy the Kharismian Empire – some required a hundred men to work them – and in less than twenty years, the last of the Sung emperors had flung himself in despair from a high cliff into the sea. Kubla Khan was master of China.

In the year Kubla Khan became leader of the Mongols, Marco Polo’s father and uncle set out from Venice and sailed to Constantinople. (It was still in the hands of the Latins – since the siege by the crusaders – but would become Greek again the following year.) Marco himself was only six at the time, and so too young to travel. The two men journeyed overland to Bokhara, and there met envoys who had been sent by Kubla to Hulagu, no doubt to tell him of Mangu’s death and the struggle for succession. The envoys pressed them to return with them to Cathay (which was the nearest Europeans could get to pronouncing Khitai – China) to meet the khan, and the Polos allowed themselves to be persuaded. It was fortunate that they knew the language of the Tartars, and so did Kubla Khan. When they arrived (presumably at Karakoram) the great khan received them affably and engaged them in long conversations. He liked them so much that he asked them to go back to the pope and ask him to send a hundred scholars to come and teach western ways to the Mongols. They returned to Europe, where they discovered that the pope had just died – as had Polo’s wife – leaving a fifteen-year-old boy, Marco; they decided to return to ‘Cathay’ with Marco. They went through Cilicia and Armenia to Persia, then over the Pamirs to Kashgar, and so by stages on to Kubla’s capital, Peking. Kubla Khan again received them graciously, was much taken with the bright young man who spoke Tartar so fluently, and sent him on various diplomatic missions. All this is described by Marco Polo in the famous Milione, one of our most remarkable and vivid glimpses into past history.

No doubt one of Kubla’s reasons for welcoming the Polos was that he himself was a far from welcome guest in China. The Chinese saw the Mongols as something rather like Tolkien’s Ores – filthy, smelly creatures with no manners, no morals and a revolting taste in food and drink. (The Chinese would not have dreamed of drinking milk; they still prefer lemon in their tea.) But, then, in Europe – even Venice – in the thirteenth century no one bothered about washing more than once a week.

For seventeen years Marco remained in the service of Kubla Khan and travelled all over the empire, to realms as distant as Burma and Japan (and possibly to India). For three years he was the governor of the city of Yang-Chow. Whenever he returned from his travels, he told Kubla stories about the people he had seen, and the khan made notes; he was endlessly curious. When the Polos finally intimated their desire to return, he was sad and reluctant; but finally he gave them leave to accompany a princess who was to wed the khan of Persia. The Polos delivered her safely and at last made their way back to Venice. They were so ragged and dusty on their return that they were refused admittance to their own house. Later, they invited all their friends to a banquet, then had their dirty old clothes brought in and cut open the seams to extract rubies, sapphires and diamonds. And so the Polos lived – more-or-less – happily ever after (except for Marco’s brief period in a Genoa prison). Their benefactor Kubla Khan – the man Coleridge made the subject of a famous dream-poem – had died in the year before they reached Venice.

Kubla Khan had done his best to live up to the vision of his grandfather. He pressed on south into the Vietnam peninsula and sent armies into Burma, but his soldiers found the tropical heat and the flies too much for them. He even tried to conquer Japan; this required fleets, and the Mongols had never seen the sea before they came to China. The first warships disembarked their troops at Hakata Bay, in North Kyushu, in 1274, but Samurai warriors proved too much for the sea-sick Mongols who had not yet regained their land legs. Seven years later, an immense force of 140,000 Mongols made the mistake of landing in the same bay. But the Japanese had used the interval to build a considerable wall around the bay, and they kept the Mongols penned in until a typhoon blew up and destroyed half the fleet and the Mongol morale. The soldiers who could make it scrambled back to their ships and sailed for home; the Japanese picked off the rest at their leisure. Less than half the force returned to China.

In a sense, the defeat was the end of the Mongol Empire. The formidable Kubla continued to administrate China until his death thirteen years later. But his ‘Yuan dynasty’ (it meant ‘new beginning’) had no real chance of establishing itself in China; it was too much hated. When Kubla’s heirs fell to quarrelling amongst themselves, it was clear their days were numbered. The country was divided by civil wars; then the Chinese rose up, took the Mongols by the scruff of the neck, and firmly ejected them. This was a mere seventy-four years alter Kubla’s death. And then, like a corpse, Genghis Khan’s great empire decayed and fell apart.

TRAVELLERS AND ADVENTURERS

There was one chapter of Marco Polo’s travels – the forty-sixth of Part Two – that caused immediate and intense excitement all over Italy. There he speaks of the Tartars of the steppe ‘who had no sovereign of their own, and were tributary to a powerful prince who… was named in their language Unc Can, by some thought to have the same signification as Prester John in ours.’ But in subsequent chapters he refers to this leader simply as Prester John – undoubtedly encouraged by his amanuensis, Rusticiano, who realised what a sensation these comments would cause. For more than a century, the legend of Prester John – the Christian priest (hence the name) who ruled a country in India – had been as famous in Europe as that of King Arthur’s magician Merlin.

It had all started around the year 1165, with the appearance in Italy of a mysterious Letter of Prester John, describing his remote and exotic kingdom – a kind of twelfth-century Shangri-La. Like the story of Merlin – concocted at about the same time by a notorious romancer called Geoffrey of Monmouth in his history of Britain – the legend of Prester John made an enormous appeal to the romance-starved imaginations of the Middle Ages. Pope Alexander III took the Prester John letter so seriously that he wrote a long reply in 1177, and despatched his personal physician, ‘Master Philip’, to deliver it somewhere vaguely in the direction of India. No one knows what became of Master Philip, but a copy of the pope’s letter survives.