Abstract
In verse 71 of his Masnavi, the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Jalal al-Din Rumi recounts the tale of “The Elephant in the Dark.”
Some Hindus had brought an elephant for exhibition and placed it in a dark house. Crowds of people were going into that dark place to see the beast. Finding that ocular inspection was impossible, each visitor felt it with his palm in the darkness.
The palm of one fell on the trunk.
“This creature is like a water-spout,” he said.
The hand of another lighted on the elephant’s ear. To him the beast was evidently like a fan.
Another rubbed against its leg.
“I found the elephant’s shape is like a pillar,” he said.
Another laid his hand on its back.
“Certainly this elephant was like a throne,” he said.
This chapter resituates The Travels of Marco Polo in the context of Mongol-ruled Asia and its many forms of cosmopolitanism, reorienting it from the Western genres and perspectives usually invoked.
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Notes
Arthur John Arberry, Tales from the Masnavi (Surrey: Curzon Press, 1993). pp. 207–8. Rumi’s telling compresses a longer version found in al-Ghazali’ Revival of Religious Sciences and Sana’i’s Garden of Mystical Truth, dedicated in 1131 to the Ghaznavid ruler Bahram Shah (Arberry, p. 16).
For example, see Michael Calabrese in “Between Despair and Ecstasy: Marco Polo’s Life of the Buddha,” Exemplaria 9.1 (1997): 189–229, who focuses on the text’s alleged construction of “Oriental sexual and spiritual difference,”
and Gabriele Schwab, who in “Traveling Literature, Traveling Theory: Literature and Cultural Contact between East and West,” Studie in the Humanities 29.1 (June 2002): 5–13, takes it as “a founding text of the genre of imaginary ethnographies.”
Janet Abu-Lughod in Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (Oxford University Press, 1989).
On Franco-Italian, see Simon Gaunt, “Translating the Diversity of the Middle Ages: Marco Polo and John Mandeville as ‘French’ Writers,” Australian Journal of French Studies 46.3 (2009): 235–48.
On the complexities of Franco-Italian and of the literary commerce between French and Italian, see Alison Cornish, Vernacular Translation in Dante’s Italy: Illiterate Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), esp. Chapter 3, “Cultural Ricochet: French to Italian and Back Again,” pp. 70–100.
The “world empire of letters” riffs on the title of Pascale Casanova’s République mondiale des lettres, which takes the sixteenth century as its point of departure. See The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). For my critique of Casanova, see “Worlding Medieval French Literature,” in French Global: A New Approach to Literary History, ed. Susan Suleiman and Christie McDonald (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 3–20 (at 3–4). On the complexities of the textual tradition and publication history, and the importance of the Franco-Italian BNF fr. 1116 manuscript, see Simon Gaunt, Marco Polo’s Le Devisement du monde: Narrative Voice, Language and Diversity, Gallica(Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, forthcoming 2013), Introduction.
cAta-Malik Juvayni, The History of the World Conqueror, 2 vols., trans. J. A. Boyle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 2:607, cited in Thomas T. Allsen, “The Rasûlid Hexaglot in Its Eurasian Cultural Context,” in The King’s Dictionary. The Rasûlid Hexaglot: Fourteenth Century Vocabularies in Arabic, Persian, Turkic, Greek, Armenian and Mongol, ed. Peter B. Golden (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 25–48.
Marco Polo, Le divisament dou monde. Il Milione nelle redazioni toscana e franco-italiana, ed. Gabriella Ronchi (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1982). In-text references to the Italian (“Milione”) and Franco-Italian (“Devisament”) manuscripts (pp. 2–302 and 305–661, respectively, of Ronchi’s edition) reflect section and line numbers.
Cited in Allsen, “The Rasûlid Hexaglot,” p. 29. Rashid al-Din’s monumental work—“the first systematic and comprehensive history of Eurasia”—was itself enabled by his unprecedented access (in original or in translation) to sources in Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Turkic, Mongolian, Latin, and various Indian languages available to him at the Ilkhan’s court (Allsen, “The Rasûlid Hexaglot,” pp. 32–33). It was compiled in the early fourteenth century. Ilkhan (“subservient” khan) and corresponding forms refer to Qubilai’s brother Hülegü (who overthrew the last cAbbasid caliph in 1258) and his descendents, the Mongol rulers of Persia. On the origins of the term, see Thomas T. Allsen, Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia, Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 21–22.
Ronald Latham, Introduction, in The Travels of Marco Polo, trans. Ronald Latham (London: Penguin Books, 1958), p. 28n. Qubilai’s own knowledge of the language is uncertain: his modern biographer Morris Rossabi at one point calls his command of Chinese “rudimentary,” but elsewhere says that he could understand and speak the language, “though he probably did not read and write it.” In any case, his dealings with his Chinese advisors were mediated by a corps of Uighur military advisors, translators, and interpreters. Morris Rossabi, Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 15, 162.
The Qipchaqs were a confederation of Turkic, Mongol, and Iranian elements. Among those sharing their lingua franca were Crimean Armenian and Karaite Jewish communities. Peter B. Golden, “Codex Cumanicus,” in Central Asian Monuments, ed. H. B. Paksoy (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1992), p. 3. Mongol remained the state and chancellery language of the Golden Horde.
Peter B. Golden, “Migrations, Ethnogenesis,” in The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age, Nicola di Cosmo, Allen J. Frank, and Peter B. Golden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 109–19 (at 114).
On Persian as a trade vernacular, see Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, trans. J. R. Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 374.
Steven A. Epstein, Purity Lost: Transgressing Boundaries in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1000–1400 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), pp. 59–60.
For the text, see Vladimir Drimba, Codex Comanicus: Edition Diplomatique avec Fac-similés (Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedica, 2000). The Genoese established a colony at Caffa (just east of the Venetian settlement at Sudaq/Soldaia) in the late 1260s; it was burned by the khan of the Qipchaq Turks in 1308 and rebuilt in 1316.
Steven A. Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 958–1528 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 143, 184. Late-thirteenth-century Caffa was a very multicultural place, where, amid “Armenians, Greeks, Italians, ProvenÇals, Catalans, Jews, Russians, Circassians, Cumans, Tartars, Lazi, Abkhazians, Georgians, Alans, and others,” the minority Genoese population would have had “an experience that had almost nothing in common with the typical life of the Genoese back home” (Epstein, Purity Lost, pp. 56–57).
The classic study is Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980). On the cravenness of the formerly valiant Cilician Armenian nobility (Devisament, 20.6) and on the contrast between the boldness of merchants and the timorousness of the friars accompanying them (Devisament, 13.9–10),
see Sharon Kinoshita, “Marco Polo’s Le Devisement dou Monde and the Tributary East,” in Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and West, ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Amilcare A. Iannucci (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), pp. 60–86 (at pp. 79–80).
Thomas Aquinas, Political Writings, ed. and trans. R. W. Dyson, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 50–51. Books I and II are attributed to Aquinas, the rest to his disciple Tolomeo of Lucca. This section is adapted from my essay, “‘Noi siamo mercatanti cipriani’: How to Do Things in the Medieval Mediterranean,” in The Age of Philippe de Mézières: Fourteenth-Century Piety and Politics between France, Venice, and Cyprus, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Kiril Petkov, The Medieval Mediterranean (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 41–60 (at 42–43).
See also Lianna Farber, An Anatomy of Trade in Medieval Writing: Value, Consent, and Community (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).
Robert Dankoff, Introduction, in Yusuf Khass Hajib, Wisdom of Royal Glory (Kutadgu Bilig). A Turko-Islamic Mirror for Princes, trans. Robert Dankoff, Publications of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies 16 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 1–35 (at 1–2, 28).
Jonathan Tucker, The Silk Road: Art and History (Chicago, IL: Art Media Resources, 2003), p. 163.
The French translation omits the mention of animals and birds; see Marco Polo, Le Devisement du monde, vol. 1, ed. Marie-Luce Chênerie, Michèle Guéret-Laferté and Philippe Ménard, Textes Littéraires Français (Geneva: Droz, 2001), §24.13–17. The Italian translation (Milione 24:6–8) omits the designations nassit, nac, and cremosi.
Cloth-of-gold figures among the booty extracted from Ganja (in Transcaucasia) and from the Uighurs of Turfan. Allsen, Commodity and Exchange, pp. 27–28. In the late twelfth century, a port official in southern China noted that some 40,000 families in the city of Meï-lu-ku—somewhere in the vicinity of the Seljuk sultanate of Rum (Lu-meï)—were engaged in the production of “brocades with alternating stripes of gold and silk. Chau Ju-kua, His Work on the Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Entitled Chu-fan-chï ed. and trans. Friedrich Hirth and W. W. Rockhill (Amsterdam: Oriental Press, 1966), §34:19–22. We will meet Chau Ju-kua again below. On the Chinese production of gold brocade (chin) from the T’ang era on, see Allsen, Commodity and Exchange, p. 95.
David Jacoby, “Oriental Silks Go West: A Declining Trade in the Later Middle Ages,” in Islamic Artefacts in the Mediterranean World: Trade, Gift Exchange and Artistic Transfer, ed. Catarina Schmidt Arcangeli and Gerhard Wolf (Venice: Marsilio, 2010), pp. 71–88 (at 71). Jacoby notes that the term can also include plain or patterned silks, varying in technical features and decoration.
Allsen, Commodity and Exchange, p. 29, with the second quotation from Rashid al-Din, Jamic al-tavarikh, ed. B. Karimi (Tehran: Eqbal, 1959), 2 vols., 1:364. The traffic was two-way: less than a year after its conquest, a visitor to Samarcand found a community of Chinese craftsmen settled there. Allsen, Commodity and Exchange, p. 35.
Allsen, Commodity and Exchange, p. 97. The Devisement describes Tenduc in eastern Inner Mongolia, identified as the land of Prester John, as a site of production of nascisi fin and nac (Devisament, 74.14). On the problems of this association with Prester John, see Marco Polo, Le Devisement du monde, vol. 2, ed. Jeanne-Marie Boivin, Laurence Harf-Lancner, and Laurence Mathey-Maille, Textes Littéraires Français (Geneva: Droz, 2003), p. 76n.
Consider the name for volume 6 of the Cambridge History of China, Alien Regimes and Border States, 907–1368, ed. Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Recent scholarship has begun to challenge this picture, exemplified in the shift from the title of Thomas J. Barfield’s 1989 study, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989), already noteworthy in recasting the history of China from its margins, to that of Valerie Hansen’s 2000 work, The Open Empire: A History of China to 1600 (New York: Norton, 2000).
Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Cambridge Illustrated History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 173.
Jewelry from their wives’ tombs is of very mixed provenance. James C. Y. Watt, Introduction, in The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty, ed. James C. Y. Watt (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2010), pp. 3–38 (at 14–15).
Zhou Mi, Record of Clouds and Mist Passing Before One’s Eyes, trans. Ankeney Weitz, Sinica Leidensia 54 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), p. 23.
Paul D. Buell and Eugene N. Anderson, A Soup for the Qan: Chinese Dietary Medicine of the Mongol Era as Seen in Hu Szu-Hui’s Yin-Shan Cheng-Yao, The Sir Henry Wellcome Asian Series (London: Kegan Paul, 2000), p. 8.
Balkh had previously been a center of Buddhism—one of the other traditions in which the elephant parable is told. The Mongols sacked the city in 1220. Annemarie Schimmel, The Triumphal Sun: A Study of the Works of Jalaloddin Rumi, Persian Study Series 8 (New York: Fine Books, 1978), pp. 13–14. On the Khwarazmshah state, see Peter B. Golden, “Inner Asia c. 1200,” in di Cosmo et al., Inner Asia, pp. 9–25 (at 14–15).
See Sharon Kinoshita, “Medieval Mediterranean Literature,” PMLA 124.2 (2009): 600–08 (at 604). See also “Re-Viewing the Eastern Mediterranean,” postmedieval 2.3 (2011): 369–85. Meanwhile, the Byzantine emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos, who reconquered Constantinople in 1261 (the year after the elder Polos had set out from that city), immediately set about normalizing relations with his Mongol neighbors, offering daughters (albeit illegitimate ones) in marriage to the khans of the Golden Horde and Ilkhanid Persia.
A. C. S. Peacock, “Georgia and the Anatolian Turks in the 12th and 13th Centuries,” Anatolian Studies 56 (2006): 127–46 (at 138, 140–41, 143). On the Byzantine portrait, reported by Rumi’s fourteenth-century biographer, Shams al-Din Ahmad Aflaki, see Schimmel, The Triumphal Sun, p. 32. Kayseri is the Central Anatolian city of Caesaria (mentioned as “Casserie” in Devisament 21.7).
Consider “The Story of a Dispute between the Greeks and Chinese on the Art of Painting and Drawing,” in which Sufi spirituality is metaphorized by the simplicity and purity of Greek art, over and against the “hundred colors” of Chinese painting that rob the observer of his mind and understanding. See Rumi, Spiritual Verses, trans. Alan Williams (London: Penguin, 2006), pp. 319–21.
Except for noting that a male elephant mounts his female partner, on her back, “as if he were a man” (192:13–14; com [s’]il fust ome)! On elephants in the Latin West, see, for example, Sharon Kinoshita, “Animals and the Medieval Culture of Empire,” in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2012), pp. 37–65 (at 45–46 and 53–54), as well as Matthew Paris’s famous mention and drawing of the elephant that Henry III of England received from his brother-in-law Louis IX of France, who brought it back from crusade.
See Suzanne Lewis, The Art of Matthew Paris in the Chronica Majora (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 282 and 213. Thanks to Shayne Legassie for this reference.
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Kinoshita, S. (2013). Reorientations: The Worlding of Marco Polo. In: Ganim, J.M., Legassie, S.A. (eds) Cosmopolitanism and the Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137045096_3
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