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Marco Polo

Around 1260 Niccolò and Maffeo Polo left their trading station on the Crimea and set out to trade in jewels with the Mongol Khanate of the Golden Horde (southern Russia). Because of a war between Berke Khan of the Golden Horde and Hülegü, Ilkhan of Persia, the Polo brothers were forced to go east. After spending 3 years at Bukhara, an embassy coming from the Ilkhan Hülegü and bound for the court of the Great Khan passed through the city. Seeing the two brothers, the envoys suggested that they accompany their mission.

The Great Khan Khubilai (reigned 1260-94) received them well. Finally, he asked them to return with one of his barons to Europe on an embassy to the Pope. He gave them letters in Mongolian which asked the Pope to send him a hundred men skilled in the seven liberal arts (the standard educational curriculum of the learned at that time in the West) capable of acting as missionaries within his domains, together with some oil from the lamp which burnt in the Church of the Sepulchre of Christ in Jerusalem. The Polos were give a paiza, a gold tablet which served as a safe-conduct and which entitled its possessor to use the relay-posts and provision of escorts and supplies throughout the Mongol domains.

Returning to Venice, the Polos waited for a new pope to be elected (Pope Clement IV had died in 1268). After two years and still no pope, they decided to return and report the situation to the Great Khan. With them they took two Dominican friars, who soon abandoned the trip, and Niccolò's son, Marco, then aged seventeen.

It took the Polos three and a half years to return to Karakorum. Since the Polos had left five years earlier Khubilai had conquered the last remaining strongholds of southern China; after three centuries the north and south of China were now reunited. The Mongol Great Khan would now reign as the Emperor of China, beginning the Yuan dynasty, which was to last until 1368. Not wanting to rely on the Chinese mandarins, Khubilai relied on foreigners -- Muslims, Khitans, Uighurs -- particularly in tax-collection. Marco Polo, probably fluent in Mongol and Persian and Uighur, able to master four written alphabets, served the Khan in many ways. Marco Polo's book says he was governor of Yangzhou (a city on the Grand Canal, which has a room dedicated to Marco Polo in the city museum) and a successful emissary of the Great Khan to various parts of his empire.

One of the things that Marco noticed were Christians -- namely Nestorian Christians. He reports meeting Nestorian Christians in Kashgar (now in far-western China) and in cities along the northern rim of the Taklamatan Desert (also in western China, along what is called the Silk Road), including in a city called Kampion, where he finds "three large and handsome (Christian) churches."

Even in southern China Polo found Christians. In Chang-giang fu (modern-day Zhenjiang), Polo said that a Nestorian Christian had been named governor and in 1278 had erected three Christian churches in the city.

In fact, about the time that the Polos arrived in Khanbalik, two Nestorian monks left to go in the opposite direction, to visit Jerusalem (click here to read about Rabban Sauma).

Marco Polo tells of a Mongolian prince, Nayan, who was privately baptised, bore the sign of the cross on his banners and "had in his army a vast number of Christians." Unfortunately, he and his army were wiped out when Nayan revolted against the Great Khan. But even the Khan showed reverence to the Bible, in his own manner: "He devoutly kissed it and directed that the same should be done by all his nobles who were present." Polo theorizes that "if the Pope had sent out persons duly qualified to preach the Gospel, the Grand Khan would have embraced Christianity, for which, it is certainly known, he had a strong predilection."

However, with the breakdown of the Mongol Empire and the establishment of the Ming dynasty in China (1368), contact between Europe and eastern Asia was lost. Three centuries later, when Europeans again traveled to China, they found no Christians, nor any Christian churches. Why?

• Ascendancy of Islam and its persecution of other religions in western and central Asia (e.g. Afghanistan)
• The overthrow of the Mongols and the establishment of a Chinese dynasty that was anti-foreign
• Antagonism towards the Nestorian church by the Catholic church which regarded Nestorians as heretics

But what happened to the early East Asian Christians? No one knows. But Marco Polo's book nourished a longing for Europeans to reaquaint themselves with the Orient that was to last for many centuries.