Marco Polo

 We live in a globalized world, where our household goods and even much of our food may come from North and South America, Europe, or Asia (less likely Africa, though that's also a possibility).  Medieval Europe was never as globalized as we are (no shoes imported from China or blueberries from Peru), but there were always trade networks that stretched far beyond Europe's boundaries.

Accompanying the trade were travelers' tales of the bizarre people and creatures one might find in foreign climes, everything from elephants to people with faces on their stomachs instead of on their heads.  But sometimes Europeans followed the trade routes (goods usually changed hands multiple times) to see for themselves.  One such person was Marco Polo (depicted below, in a later mosaic from Genoa).

 In 1271 he set out from Venice, his home, along with his father and uncle on a  trip that would take them across Asia to China and eventually home again, twenty-four years and over 15,000 miles later.  He was only seventeen at the time they set out, but the attention always goes to him, rather than the older men, because he wrote up the journey after it was over.  In fact, his father and uncle, Venetian traders named Niccolò and Maffeo Polo, deserve more credit than they usually get, for they had already taken a six-year journey into  Asia and come back to tell about it.

In 1271 the family started by ship, sailing from Venice to the eastern end of the Mediterranean, stopping by Jerusalem for some holy oil which, at least according to Marco, the emperor Kubla Khan had requested when Niccolò and Maffeo had visited him on their earlier trip.  From Jerusalem Marco and his older relatives traveled by land through the Middle East, where he marveled at what he saw in Persia, before heading off in a camel caravan through central Asia.

All through the trip, Marco kept looking at things with a merchant's eye, for his account is full of bazaars, tapestries and jewels, swords and spices and elephant tusks, objects that would bring a very high price in Europe, as well as recording marvels such as the supposed tombs of the Three Wise Men in Persia.

After many adventures they reached what was then the capital of China, Shangdu (also known as Zanadu or Cathay).  Here ruled the Mongol emperor Kubla Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, who ruled an empire stretching from China to Russia and what is now Iraq.  According to Marco, they were highly favored by the emperor, even though Niccolò and Maffeo had failed to bring the 100 learned Christian teachers they had promised when there earlier.

They ended up staying in China for seventeen years.  Marco became an agent and ambassador for the emperor, traveling as far as Indonesia.  There have been doubts expressed over the centuries whether he could have actually gone to all these places, but his descriptions of places and practices seem remarkably accurate.  Finally the three Venetians were given the task of escorting a princess from China to the Mongol ruler of Persia, which they did, continuing on to Constantinople and then safely home to Venice in 1295.

As was often the case in medieval Italy, various city states were at war with each other, in this case Venice and Genoa.  Marco became involved in the war and was captured, then locked up for many months in a Genoese prison.  This gave him the time to start writing his book of his travels, partly dictating it, partly, it seems, basing it on notes he had taken over the years.  The book was immediately famous, and hundreds of copies were made (this is still pre-printing press).  (Genoa is proud of its role in his book, which is why it has a mosaic to honor him.)

One sometimes hears that Marco Polo brought spaghetti back to Italy from China, but this is not true; the story in fact was invented in the twentieth century.  Italians had long eaten spaghetti.  Marco said that the Chinese he visited ate little bread but lots of vermicelli instead.  He would not have called twisty noodles vermicelli if he hadn't known his audience would at once recognize the word used (even today) for twisty noodles; literally the term means little worms.

More important than spaghetti or noodles, however, is the evidence of long distance trade across Eurasia and the possibility of personal relationships between people as different as a Mongol emperor of China and a family of Venetian merchants.  And it reminds us how tough our ancestors must have been, to take journeys like this by ship, horseback, camel, or on foot, with no maps, no GPS or ways to communicate with people back home, probably not knowing the languages half the time, going through hostile territory, not knowing where they'd find food, and yet somehow making it home again.  And remember the senior Polos did the trip twice.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on medieval travel and trade, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Silk

 Medieval people valued silk cloth.  It was smooth next to the skin (unlike homespun wool), it took colors well, it was lustrous due to the structure of its fibers, it didn't fade, it was very strong for its weight, and moths wouldn't eat it.  (Clothes moths have been a perennial issue for people and their clothes--there are clothes moths in the Bible, where heaven is described among other things as a place where moths will not crawl around and chew holes.)

But the early medieval West did not have silk worms.  In fact, the general belief was that silk was spun from some special stone, found in the fabled East.  The Obviously False slur of silk coming from some worm was roundly rejected.

Now in fact silk does come from worms, raised in China for for at least the past four thousand years.  The worms graze on mulberry leaves, then spin cocoons, which can be carefully unwound to produce the filament, after boiling up the cocoons to kill the pupae.  They would emerge as a moth (not a clothes moth! which eats wool, not mulberry leaves) if they lived.  In fact, so-called raw silk or wild silk is made from cocoons where the moth has emerged, breaking through the cocoon and breaking a lot of the filaments, so the result is a less smooth texture.

Silk was extremely valuable in medieval Europe.  One of the things that Charlemagne ordered the overseers of his manors to do each year was count up how many lengths of silk cloth they had, as recorded in his "Capitulare de villis."  The epics and romances showed how luxurious their heroes and heroines were by insisting that they wore silk, slept under silk blankets, and had silk tents.

 

The above is a nice piece of silk from eleventh-century Egypt, revered for many years at Cadouin as a Holy Hanky (see more on the Hanky here).

A big part of the expense was getting the silk over thousands of miles from China.  The Silk Road (not really a road, a network of routes) led from China across central Asia and ended up eventually at the eastern end of the Mediterranean.  There in the Middle Ages it was picked up by Italian trading ships and taken to Italy.  From there it was sold throughout Europe.

The Near East was also where spices from southeast Asia were bought by Italian merchants.  The spices had not come via the Silk Road, however.  Instead they had come on Arabic dhows, across the Indian Ocean.  But in the medieval mind, silk and spices both came from the mystic East, which was why Columbus was distraught when the "Indians" he encountered seemed to have neither silk nor spices.

Understandably, the medieval West was eager to find the secret of silk production.  Silk worms appear to have reached Byzantium in the sixth century AD, smuggled there probably from India.  By the twelfth century some Italian cities had figured out about the worms and were raising them in secret, while still putting out the story of the special, magical stone.

 © C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on medieval clothing, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Beads

Nobody these days thinks much about beads.  Beading (or making simple jewelry from them) can be fun, but it is not something we think of in terms of trade routes and great expense.  In the early Middle Ages, things were different.

Beads were considered a fine form of decoration for women and, to a somewhat lesser extent, to men.  In the late Roman Empire those in the West who could afford it wore necklaces of beads made from semi-precious stones.  Beads could also be made from amber, from non-precious stones, even from horn.  (Plastic was centuries in the future.)  But the most important kind of material was glass.

This changed in the seventh century.  With the rise of Islam and the resultant breakdown of Mediterranean trade routes, it became hard for the West to get glass.  Beads found in graves from that period tended to be made instead from bone, horn, even fired clay.

This changed with the Vikings.  As I have noted before, they established long-distance overland trade routes that reached all the way from Scandinavia to Byzantium.  One of the most important things that they brought to the west was glass.

A lot of the glass was already in the shape of beads.  Other glass could be melted down and shaped into beads (most commonly short tiny cylinders in shape, rather than the round form we take for granted).  The glass came in all sorts of different colors.

The Vikings, who set up trade colonies in the West by the ninth century, once the fun of constant raiding wore off (and they realized that one could make consistent money year after year through trade, whereas a raid usually couldn't be repeated), traded beads.  Beads made excellent trade goods, because everyone wanted some, they were (relatively) inexpensive per unit, so everyone could afford at least some, and they were fairly lightweight, making them easier to transport than say metal or stone.

Big heaps of early medieval glass beads have been found in Scandinavian harbors, presumably from a box being loaded that broke loose and dumped.  It would not have been worth it at the time to send divers down into the murky, icy waters to try to pick up beads one by one.

Do you find it hard to picture a Viking warrior wearing a necklace of glass beads?  Readjust your thinking.

Some of the ideas in this post were inspired by the work of Matthew Delvaux of Boston College.

© C. Dale Brittain 2017

For more on Vikings, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.