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Fifty Things You Need to Know About World History. Hugh Williams
Читать онлайн.Название Fifty Things You Need to Know About World History
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007411115
Автор произведения Hugh Williams
Издательство HarperCollins
The journey had taken three and a half years; they had travelled 5,600 miles.
It is not surprising that it fell to a Venetian to find and report all these things. The Venetians had gradually built up a maritime empire that extended all over the Adriatic. Their links with the Eastern Mediterranean meant that they also controlled most of Europe’s trade in luxury goods such as spices, cloths and porcelain. During Marco Polo’s lifetime his native city adopted a constitution that gave the adult males in about two hundred families the hereditary right to make and manage state policy. This limited the power of the Doge, the ruler of Venice, and reduced the chances of the inter-family squabbling that bedevilled many other places, like the imaginary Montagues and Capulets in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Stable government allowed the powerful group of ruling families to run things according to their own economic interests. Although the travels of Marco Polo were important as journeys of exploration, and greatly influenced Christopher Columbus when he was planning his voyage to the New World, they were prompted by a desire to improve and expand trade. Marco himself always argued that Europe could expand its trading links and grow richer through an economic relationship with China. ‘Both in their commercial dealings and in their manufactures,’ he said of the Chinese, ‘they are thoroughly honest and truthful. They treat foreigners who visit them with great politeness and entertain them in the most winning manner, offering them advice on their business.’
Marco Polo’s stories of his journey to the court of the Great Khan and the time he spent in China were read eagerly and gained a wide circulation even though printing had not yet arrived in Europe. Not only were his descriptions of an unknown land exciting, they also hinted at the possibility of lucrative opportunities and, perhaps, at an alliance with the Mongols against the Islamic religion which had taken deep root in the countries of the East. This was the age of the Crusades, and Catholic warriors were always looking for allies in their holy war. In the end it was religion rather than commerce that flourished. In 1291 a Franciscan friar, Giovanni da Montecorvino, was sent by the Pope as a missionary to the Chinese capital and in 1307 made Archbishop of Peking. But this spate of activity did not last long. The Yuan dynasty created by the Mongols, although the first to rule over the whole of China, began to decline in the face of economic hardship and famine. By the middle of the fourteenth century it was facing revolt, and in 1368 was driven out to be replaced by the Ming dynasty. The Ming ruled China for nearly three hundred years, creating a highly centralised government that towards the end moved towards isolation from the rest of the world. It began by expelling all Christians from China. Opportunities for trade fell away. The road down which Marco Polo had wandered so successfully was blocked once more.
Many people chose not to believe Marco Polo’s stories and some today are still inclined to think that he made up a lot of it, or took it from others that he met. In the end, however, the weight of evidence is on his side. He provided too much accurate description for his travels to have been pure invention. He died in about 1324 in Venice, a prosperous merchant and the father of three daughters. We have no contemporary picture of him, and his tomb, which was probably in the church of Sam Lorenzo, no longer exists. He has disappeared, as he did in his own lifetime, and we only have his stories as witness of what he did. Those tales tell us a great deal about the Silk Route and the life and adventures of those who journeyed along it.
In recent times, China has tried to resurrect the ancient trading routes that once linked it with the West. During the last thirty years of the twentieth century it began to open up to the markets of the world. When from 1991 onwards the old Soviet empire began to disintegrate into separate nations, China looked to the new neighbours that emerged on its western borders as opportunities for commercial expansion. The city of Horgos in the mountainous province of Xinjiang was identified as a place ripe for growth. The Chinese improved the road that links it with Shanghai in the east of the country, and built new gas and oil pipelines as well as a railway. Horgos lies about 750 miles north-east of Samarkand, on the other side of the forbidding mountains of the Kyrgyz republic. It is a landlocked world. The capital of Xinjing, Urumqi, is said to be farther from a seaport than any other large city in the world. The whole area is as large as Europe, and as ethnically diverse. In 2009, riots between Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese, who form the majority population in the province, forced Chinese troops to intervene. The people are poor, and the struggle for survival a continuous battle. Border crossings, corrupt officials and impenetrable bureaucracy make everyday commerce difficult to pursue. It is a world that in many respects would have been familiar to Marco Polo and his family. They understood the value of the trade routes of the Silk Road, one of the main pathways to prosperity for the people who lived in the vast lands that separate China from Asia Minor and the beginnings of the European continent. Those routes have never completely died. As the modern world shrinks in pursuit of greater wealth, they may enjoy a full life again.
The Black Death was the name given to a pandemic of different types of plague that swept across Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century killing millions of people. Its social and economic consequences were devastating.
In October 1347 a Genoese ship entered the port of Messina in Sicily carrying a deadly cargo. Its crew was infected with the plague and within a short space of time the disease spread throughout the town. The ship was ordered to leave immediately, but it was too late: the damage had been done. ‘Soon men hated each other so much,’ said a contemporary account, ‘that if a son was attacked by the disease his father would not tend him.’ As more and more people died, ‘many desired to confess their sins to the priests and draw up their last will and testament. But ecclesiastics, lawyers and notaries refused to enter the houses of the deceased.’ The Black Death had arrived in Western Europe.
The ship had come from Caffa, a port belonging to Genoa on the Black Sea. The Genoese had bought the town from its Mongol owners at the end of the thirteenth century and built it into a prosperous commercial centre that dominated Black Sea trade. It was also the home of a big slave market. In 1347 the Mongols tried to capture it back, but their siege withered as their army was reduced by plague. In a last desperate attempt at victory they catapulted dead infected bodies over Caffa’s walls and then withdrew. Their siege might have been a failure, but they left behind forces of destruction far greater than they ever imagined. By the beginning of 1348 the Black Death had reached Genoa itself. From there it crossed northern Italy into France. In 1349 it entered Britain and a year later spread through Scandinavia and the Baltic. It is difficult to be precise about how many people it killed across Europe. Thirty million is not an unreasonable estimate.
‘Soon men hated each other so much that if a son was attacked by the disease his father would not tend him.’
This number, in a population the size of medieval Europe’s, is a huge proportion – possibly a quarter of the total. The disease that brought such destruction had three variants. The most common was bubonic plague, carried by fleas hosted by black rats. The other two were septicaemic plague, which affects the blood, and pneumonic plague, which is a disease of the lungs. Other illnesses doubtless played their part as well – typhus and smallpox were both common – adding to the general feeling of overwhelming catastrophe. Bubonic plague is particularly horrifying. In medieval Europe black rats lived in houses and other inhabited areas, breeding profusely and never travelling far from their nests. Humans caught the disease from flea bites, or from bites from the rats themselves. Once a person had been bitten by a diseased creature the skin around the infected area grew dark and the body carried the germ to its nearest lymph node, the usual place for filtering foreign particles out of its system. The areas around the groin, armpit or behind the ear began to swell and became intolerably painful; this was followed by internal haemorrhaging. One of the clearest accounts of the plague was written by Gabriele de Mussis, a lawyer from