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Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant and traveler who presented the story of his travels in Asia in the famous Book of the Diversity of the World. This book significantly impacted navigators, cartographers, and writers of modern times. This passage from the above text is of considerable interest from the point of view of the medieval history of western China and Central Asia.
This passage describes part of Marco Polo’s journey that affected the southwestern outskirts of the Taklamakan desert, paying particular attention to the cultural characteristics and customs of the people who lived in this region. Of particular interest are the toponyms given in this source. Many of them, such as Yarkand, Kashgar, or Khotan, directly correlate with the name of geographical objects and the administrative division of modern China. The passage mentions that the described provinces, as Marco Polo writes, “the provinces of Turkestan,” were subject to the Mongols. The author calls the then Mongol Khan Khubilai none other than the Great Khan: “Khotan is a province eight days’ journey in extent, which is subject to the Great Khan.”
A rather interesting point is in the description of the province of Charchan, about which the traveler says the Tatars plundered it. It is unclear who exactly Marco Polo calls the Tatars since this word could denote the Mongols at that time, but he calls them Mongu further in the text. And it is unlikely that he would begin to reach the military campaign of the Great Khan, whom he treats with respect as “plunder.” However, these descriptions can generally correlate with current historical data. This fragment is of great interest to historians from the point of view of how the Europeans of the High Middle Ages perceived the lands in the far east.
Marco Polo gives very curious descriptions of the customs of the natives and some of the local legends. He tells how people hide their supplies and livestock when an army passes through their land to save them. The traveler describes the city of Lop, located on the very edge of the desert: “The city I have mentioned, which stands at the point where the traveler enters the Great Desert, is a big city called Lop, and the desert is called the Desert of Lop.” Interestingly, Lop County still exists in modern China. Marco Polo cites a local belief about night ghosts that copy the voices of a lost traveler’s friends and lead him out of the way: “he hears spirits talking in such a way that they seem to be his companions” This is quite curious, since often desert people demonize noon, and not the night, unlike the inhabitants of other places.
Quite curious are the descriptions of Marco Polo regarding the attitude of local people towards their women. There are two descriptions in the analyzed passage regarding the provinces of Pem and Kamul. The author writes about the Pem: “When a woman’s husband leaves her to go on a journey of more than twenty days, then, as soon as he has left, she takes another husband, and this she is fully entitled to do by local usage”.
Marco Polo indicates that the inhabitants of this province were Muslims, which makes this description rather strange. Of the Kamul people, he speaks as pagans and that “All the men of this city and province are thus cuckolded by their wives, but they are not the least ashamed of it.” The traveler even points out that the Mongols tried to eradicate this custom but failed. Such evidence is precious in terms of the history of the pre-Muslim traditions of the local population.
Although Marco Polo was not the first to establish links between the Mediterranean and China, he was the first to describe his travels. Despite doubts about the reliability of the facts presented in this book, expressed from the moment of its appearance and up to the present, it serves as a valuable source of knowledge on geography, ethnography, and history of Armenia, Iran, China, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, India, Indonesia and other countries in the Middle Ages.
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