Manuscripts of the tales of Marco Polo’s travels began to circulate in the early 1300s. And it must have been so exciting for people, and especially for young people, to read these tales and to marvel at the adventure of seeing the rest of the world someday. And also importantly, it was at this time that Dante Alighieri was exiled from Florence, in 1302. And perhaps because of this exile, over the next 20 years he would travel and write his ‘Divine’ Commedia – his soul’s travels through inferno, purgatory and heaven.
To read this book, must also been so fascinating for these same young people at that time, and to try to grasp Dante’s wandering through life and after-life. And to read it, in what some day would become the language of Italian.
And my feathered friend chirped, that it would have been wonderful if these two, Marco and Dante, had one day actually met and compared stories!
Ahhh …. well, I don’t know, but it is known for certain that in 1321, Dante did visit Venice, as an envoy of the lord of Ravenna, but on his return from Venice, he caught malaria - that caused his death. And a few years after, Marco Polo would die in 1324.
Still, it must have been such an exciting time to be alive – until some twenty years later when the black death – the bubonic plague – arrived in 1346!!! But how did the plague come to Italy, and to Europe during such a time?
Years earlier, tensions arose between the Genoese and Venetians, and the Kipchak Khanate under Oz Beg, who had converted to Islam. The strife was also over the Crimean slave trade, where slaves were sold to be used as soldiers. This ‘white’ slave trade had started over the earlier centuries, when the Vikings sold their slaves at the Crimean ports on the Black Sea – ports that later became trading posts (and slave trading posts) that Genoa and Venice had established at Kaffa and Tana, in Crimea.
Oz Beg’s son, Jani Beg besieged Kaffa and Tana in 1345, until an outbreak of plague struck the Mongol camp causing so many deaths to his troops, that he was forced to totally abandon the siege. But then, according to an account, written by Gabrielem de Mussis of Piacenza, in 1348, he tells of how the plague spread:
“The dying Tartars, stunned and stupefied by the immensity of the disaster brought about by the disease, and realizing that they had no hope of escape, lost interest in the siege. But they ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in the hope that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside.
What seemed like mountains of dead were thrown into the city, and the Christians could not hide or flee or escape from them, although they dumped as many of the bodies as they could in the sea. And soon the rotting corpses tainted the air and poisoned the water supply, and the stench was so overwhelming that hardly one in several thousand was in a position to flee the remains of the Tartar army. Moreover one infected man could carry the poison to others, and infect people and places with the disease by look alone. No one knew, or could discover, a means of defense.
… As it happened, among those who escaped from Caffa by boat were a few sailors who had been infected with the poisonous disease. Some boats were bound for Genoa, others went to Venice and to other Christian areas. When the sailors reached these places and mixed with the people there, it was as if they had brought evil spirits with them: every city, every settlement, every place was poisoned by the contagious pestilence, and their inhabitants, both men and women, died suddenly. And when one person had contracted the illness, he poisoned his whole family even as he fell and died, so that those preparing to bury his body were seized by death in the same way. Thus death entered through the windows, and as cities and towns were depopulated their inhabitants mourned their dead neighbours.”
[this English translation of De Mussi’s account, is from ‘The Black Death’ by Rosemary Horrox]
And so, this has become the story of how the black death came to the towns of Italy, and then to the rest of Europe - by way of their trading ships - and how it spread through the Mongol khanates too, along their trading routes, as the plague swept through the un-hygienic streets of the looted populations, killing an estimated one-third (or more) of the European population, and an estimated one-third (or more) of the Persian, Mongolian and Chinese populations.
But, over the following decades, while the world was being overwhelmed by the black death, the last Yuan (Mongol) emperor would flee north, from the winter capital at Khanbaliq [Dadu], to the summer capital at Shangdu [Xanadu], and the rebel leader Zhu Yuanzhang, would raze Khanbaliq and rename it Beiping [today’s Beijing] and he would become Hongwu, the first Ming Emperor of China in 1368.
Perhaps, this story may remind some people of how the Japanese Imperial Army, bombed the people of China, with fleas carrying bubonic plague, in Ningbo in 1940 and in Changde in 1941, before its army was defeated, and Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China in 1949! And of how, after that war, that Japanese Unit 731 was brought out of Japan and into NATO, and how bio-warfare labs were set up near Crimea, in Ukraine, in that same area where that plague of the 14th century started!!!
And I’m sure that after the black death, many people stopped reading, not just reading Marco and Dante, but they stopped reading altogether, after acquiring that plague of hopelessness!!! But also, I’m sure that some people decided that this was reason to read all the more, with a hope to make a future that could be free of such calamities.
And this story reminded me once again of Mary Shelley’s book ‘The Last Man’, and of the siege of Constantinople and the beginnings of the spread of the plague there, that ravished all of Europe, until there was only one person who was left alive, but who realized that he wasn’t the last man, but hopefully that he could be the first man!
And I think that there must be a new generation that wants to read Marco Polo again! Because I read a story about the many young people who are travelling to China, like modern Marco Polos, in order to see for themselves the wonders of the new China - “Inspirations that 'Marco Bloggers' bring to our time”, and also because this year is being celebrated as the 700th anniversary of Marco Polo’s death.
And as Mark Twain once said - ‘history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes’.