In Xanadu (11 page)

'Sir, I am a student of tourism at Mersin University. Permit me to ask you a few questions in connection with studies I am engaging.'

He was off. For thirty-five minutes I lay on the beach, trussed up in my sleeping bag while the Turk fired an endless series of questions, noting down my replies on his form. Had I been to Turkey before? For how long? Where did I go? Where was I going this time? Sir, please forgive the question, why was I going to Iran? Didn't I know about the modem tourist facilities available in western Turkey? Didn't I know about the beat h resorts at Bodrum, Canakkale and Antalya? Every modern convenience a tourist could dream of was available. Sunbathing, windsurfing, sailing, modern hotels with luxury

fittings, casinos. Didn't I know about the new facility in Ayas?
A motel with a flushing toilet in every chalet    

He came to the end of his questionnaire, wished me 'happy tourism', and strutted off towards the town with the boy-scout air of a job well done. I had forgotten how boring Turks could be. I got up and went for a swim.

It was early morning and the water was completely still and clear. The sun had just risen over the Syrian Jebel and the mountains stretched out at a right angle to the Turkish shore, a solid ridge leading down towards Beirut, Tyre and Sidon. There was a slight haze over the water. I swam out to sea.

Turning and looking behind me, I saw the old harbour. For the century following the Mongol invasions, Ayas had been the busiest port in the entire Mediterranean. The long overland trade routes which stretched through Turkey and Iran to China, India and Samarkand terminated here, and it was to Ayas that merchants from Italy, Egypt and all over the Mediterranean came to buy the merchandise of the East. Polo describes it as 'a city upon the sea ... at which there is great trade. For you must know that all the spicery, and the cloths of silk and gold, and the other valuable wares which come from the interior, are brought to that city. And the merchants of Venice and Genoa, come hither to sell their goods, and to buy what they lack.'

There was now little left to indicate its former prosperity. It was a small, ramshackle place, not the 'wretched village of fifteen huts' described by Yule at the end of the last century, but not much grander either. The harbour was formed of two moles, one ancient and half-sunk, the other modern and topped by a sea wall. Around the shoreline stood the ruins of the sea gate and sea walls, crumbling masonry towers now used by the fishermen for storing their creels, nets and harpoons. Further back, but still within the mediaeval walls, stood a few later buildings: wooden merchants' houses with latticed windows and carved balconies, a domed Ottoman mosque, some fishermen's cottages, flat-roofed and dung-walled. Debris and flotsam lay scattered around, piles of discarded tackle, troughs for sheep and fodder for cows, an upturned dinghy, a billy goat picking among old fish boxes. On a nearby tower, a pair of storks with scarlet walking-stick legs had made a nest of driftwood, and beneath it fishermen were mending their nets and untangling their lines.

The younger men were thuggish-looking, muscular creatures, their faces tanned and tough, sitting about half-naked on fallen pillars, smoking. Their fathers kept to the sea wall, two hundred yards away. From the waist up they
looked
like Geordies. They wore tweed jackets, shirts with large collars, fine clipped moustaches and on their heads dirty tweed flat caps. Given a pint of brown ale their top halves could have comfortably fitted into any Jarrow pub; only their flapping
charwal
trousers betrayed their true provenance. They looked amiable and slightly senile, very far from the brutal despots or the blushing homosexuals described by nineteenth-century travellers in Asia Minor, who inspired Byron's remark:

I see not much difference between ourselves and the Turks, save that we have foreskins and they have none, that they have long dresses and we short, and that we talk much and they little. In England the vices in fashion are whoring and drinking, in Turkey sodomy and smoking, we prefer a girl and a bottle, they a pipe and a pathic. They are sensible people.

But in Polo's day, Ayas was not under Turkish control. In the eleventh century Armenian refugees from the Caucasus had fled to the southern shore and captured Ayas and a string of hilltop fortresses. Here they settled down to a curiously pointless existence. Summers were reserved for futile campaigns against their Turkish neighbours, or spent indulging in long, torturous vendettas, raiding each other's castles, carrying off cattle, sheep and women. The winters were given over to devising sadistic means of killing off their prisoners (a Byzantine bishop was put into a sack with his dog, rashly named Armenian, and left until the beast devoured his master), while the women were left to dream up even uglier names for their children (Ablgharib, Kogh. Dgha and Mleh were all popular favourites for the boys). There was no more unpleasant race in Asia, and the Armenians were renowned as such throughout the civilized world. In the
Directorium ad passagium faciendum
a Dominican who had travelled in Cilicia wrote to warn the Pope of the horrors he came across on the southern shore.

The leopard cannot change his spots, nor the Ethiopian his skin wrote the Friar]. The Armenians simply partake of every error known in the east.... Their king had nine children, and all, sons and daughters alike, have come to a violent end, except one daughter and no one knows what her end will be. One brother killed another with a sword; another poisoned his brother; another strangled his brother in prison, so that they all murdered one another till only the last was left and he was poisoned and died miserably.

Doubtless, Cilician Armenia would have continued in such a manner, had not a new and powerful force pulled it firmly onto the world stage.

In 1241 the Mongols appeared at the borders of Persia and defeated the Seljuk Turks, the Armenians' greatest enemies. The Mongols were uneducated tribesmen who believed in enjoying life's simpler pleasures. Ghengis Khan expressed their philosophy most succinctly. 'Happiness,' he is recorded to have said, lies in conquering one's enemies, driving them in front of oneself, in taking their property, in savouring their despair, in outraging their wives and daughters.'

These were unmistakeably men with whom the Armenians could do business.

In 1253 the Armenian king, Hethoum, set off on the long journey to the Mongol capital of Karakoram. His embassy was a complete success. He got on excellently with the new Great Khan, Mongka, and returned laden with presents and promises of a Mongol-Christian alliance to win back lost Armenian territory and liberate the Holy Land from the Muslims. During the next decade Armenian troops fought beside the Mongols when they swept into Palestine, and in March 1260 Hethoum rode down the streets of the Arab capital of Damascus with the
Mongol general, Kitbogha.

The Mongol alliance did not just
bring
stability to the Armenian Kingdom; it also brought enormous wealth (something always close to Armenian hearts). The Mongols encouraged merchants to venture the long overland route from China, through Turkestan to Ayas, and the
Pax Mongolica
established in the vast empire led to a boom in the spice and silk trade, with Ayas as the main port of exchange. The Armenians were quick to exploit the new opportunities. Their merchants made easy fortunes acting as middlemen between Chinese, Persian and Italian merchants, and the royal coffers bulged as the Kingdom taxed every transaction that took place in its bazaars. The presence of so many merchants also brought new markets for the local produce of the fertile coastal plain and the timber of the Taurus forests. It was this that caused the general prosperity that Polo witnessed. 'The country has numerous towns and villages,' he wrote, 'and has everything in plenty.' He was less impressed with the Armenians themselves. 'In days of old the nobles there were valiant men, and did doughty deeds of arms; but nowadays they are poor creatures, and good at nought, unless it be at boozing; they are great at that.'

But the position of Cilician Armenia at the edge of the Mongol world also brought its dangers. When the Muslims counter-attacked under Sultan Baibars, defeating a Mongol army at Ain Jalud and advancing into Palestine, it left the Armenians in an uncomfortable frontline position. In 1266 Baibars took advantage of King Hethoum's absence to rout a small Armenian force near the Syrian Gates. He burned Ayas and the capital of Sis, and retired to Aleppo with great caravans of booty. The Kingdom recovered, but was badly shaken.

Polo arrived at Ayas only five years later in late November 1271. Sometime soon after his arrival a rumour spread that Baibars had set off northwards from Damascus with a large force, and panic swept the port. The two friars who had been sent with the Polos to help convert Kubla Khan fled back to Acre with the Master of the Templars; the Polos alone remained

As I swam back to land (watching, as I did so, a cluster of little boys hiding behind a rock on the seashore, tittering as Laura rose from her sleeping bag and began to change), I wondered what were the Polos' motives for continuing on their expedition when Kubla Khan's instructions to bring 'one hundred men well versed in religion' had become impossible to fulfil and the risks to the expedition were increasing. Looking at Ayas from the sea, it was easy to appreciate the panic. The town lies on the shore under a slight dip of land. Its land walls still stand in some places to their original height, and were clearly never very substantial. Had Baibars decided to attack the port again, there would have been no hope of resisting him. Why then did the Polos decide not to join the friars in making their escape to the relative safety of Acre?

Polo has been extravagantly praised over the years. Tim Severin has called him 'a genius', Eileen Power thought it was impossible to exaggerate the extent of his accomplishments' and that his 'curiosity was insatiable'; Elizabeth Longford believed he possessed 'enthusiasm and a photographic memory'. Hotels have been named after him, designer jeans shops, Chinese restaurants, and Eastern-style Soho strip joints. His book ('the greatest travel book ever written', according to John Masefield) has been turned into a strip cartoon, a one-man show at the Edinburgh Festival, even a million-dollar television drama, broadcast across Europe and Asia, starring Burt Lancaster as the Pope, and Leonard Nimmoy (Mr Spock) as Kubla Khan.

Yet the book is surprisingly dull. Polo did not set out to write an account of his travels, despite the name by which it has always been known, nor did he write a description of a diplomatic expedition originally launched to try to save the Crusader Kingdom. It is not even a general account of the lands he passed through. He says nothing about the sights he saw (he does not even mention the Great Wall of China), and includes very little about Asian social mores (which might have made really interesting reading). Instead he wrote a dry, factual guide to commerce in the East, a book by a merchant for other merchants, containing mainly lists of the merchandise available for sale on the caravan routes, as well as advice on how to overcome the difficulties that might be met along the way: where to stock up with provisions, where to keep an eyi? out for robbers, and how to cross a desert. It is not a romance, nor a book of wonders, nor a history of the world in the manner of Herodotus. For all Rustichello's elaborations, Polo's book was written as an ordinary merchant's manual, and was essentially very similar to other manuals of the time, such as the
Pratka delta Mercatura
of the Florentine, Francesco Pewlotti. Indeed, of its type it is a very fine example. For all its overlay of romance. Polo's
The Travels
contained more accurate and detailed information about the place of origin of the luxury Eastern goods and the Silk Road than was available at trK* time from any other source, in either the Islamic or the Christian world.

Polo was not the romantic gallant that legend has made him out to be; he was a hard-headed merchant's son taking a calculated risk on a potentially lucrative expedition. The Venetians were always lukewarm about the concept of crusading and the Polos seem to have soon forgotten the original purpose of their journey. One can only judge Polo from the evidence of
The Travels
and in the light of this his motive for continuing east from Ayas was simple: profit. Nor was he heading into the unknown. The elder Polos, like, no doubt, many before them, had already made the journey to China, and knew that the risks were not too great; indeed once out of Cilician Armenia and the reach of the armies of Sultan Baibars, the journey would probably be relatively easy. The Mongols had built caravanserai along the length of the trading routes and had made safe the roads.
Pax Mongolica
ruled. They also had the additional boon of the Gold Tablet from Kubla Khan, a safe conduct from the Supreme Khan himself. There were seme dangers certainly - a party of Frankish merchants had been pillaged near Amassya only a few years before. But the mediaeval merchant had always to take risks, and travel within the Mongol empire was probably considerably safer than in Europe. Fifteen years later when they returned to Venice they were rich men (so much so that in 1362, nearly one hundred years later. Polo's descendants were still arguing over the ownership of the palace which had been acquired with the profits of their forefather's China expedition). The Polos certainly took a gamble when they watched their friars flee back to Acre, and loaded up their caravan for the long land journey to Xanadu, but it was a calculated gamble - and it paid off.