Marco Polo and the saga of Venice

Playing and sabotaging markets? Venice has been there and done that.

The Travels of Marco Polo was a bestseller a century-and-a-half before printing presses changed Western civilisation forever.

The book comes down to us through seven centuries, several titles, a number of languages, innumerable textual variations, and perhaps 150 manuscripts from the 14th century alone. But when it first began circulating, the volume had one biting Italian nickname: Il Milione — the million, as in the number of lies to be found within. That was also the word some readers hurled at its Venetian originator, who was certainly aware of the incredulity triggered by his description of the riches and wonders of the empire of Kublai Khan and the Mongols. As he lay dying in January 1324 in Venice, Polo declared to people at his bedside, “I have not told you half of what I saw because I knew I wouldn’t be believed.”

On Saturday, Venice combines the septicentennial anniversary of his death with the annual two-week carnivale, the street fair/costume ball that lasts till the eve of Ash Wednesday. According to an Italian tourist website, the theme of this year’s carnival — Ad Oriente, “to the East” — is “travel, discovery and encounters with previously only imagined worlds.” As if tourists need any more encouragement.

The truth, of course, is that Marco Polo’s description of points east of Venice ceased being imaginary centuries ago — most famously, or infamously, inspiring Christopher Columbus to undertake treasure-hunting journeys across the Atlantic, landing in the Americas, which just happened to be on the way to China.

Philologists have also teased out real-life cities and sites from Polo’s sometimes mysterious place names: Chandu (the Xanadu of Coleridge and Olivia Newton-John) is Shangtu, Chinese for “upper capital,” where the Mongols summered. They wintered in Cambaluc, derived from khanbaliq
(Mongol or Uighur for the Khan’s city), which is now Beijing. The word for Polo’s favorite metropolis, Quinsai, comes from the Chinese xingzai(“temporary stay”), a designation that the Southern Song emperors gave Hangzhou, their interim capital, as they dreamed of reconquering lost territory, that is until Kublai’s army put a full stop to those aspirations.

Out of the Venetian’s gazetteer, my personal favourite is Zayton —  a city he described as one of the greatest ports in the world and the origin of our “satin.” It is more than likely Quanzhou, the home of my ancestors on the Fujian coast directly across from Taiwan, which Beijing would now like to take back.

China and the East have become very real today with the People’s Republic assuming a bellicose role in the rough-and-tumble of superpower geopolitics. What’s become imaginary is Venice.

Today, Venice enjoys a false isolation within the lagoon that once kept it safe from invaders for centuries. A sometimes soggy, sometimes fetid, often mesmerizing memento mori of a subcompact empire, it is swamped by tourists from every part of the world. After Polo died, the oligarchic democracy that called itself the Most Serene Republic of Venice endured for another 473 years, until Napoleon and the Austrian Habsburgs forced the last Doge to abdicate. In that half-a-millennium span, Venice, in glory and decline, unfolded as a multifaceted premonition of what the West was to be.

As it is now, so it was in Venice hundreds of years ago. The rich got richer by getting into government bonds or prestiti — financial instruments Venice pioneered in Europe — to help defray the many expensive military crises
and existential conflicts it faced with everyone from the Holy Roman Emperor to the Pope to the Ottoman Sultan.

Playing and sabotaging markets? Venice has been there and done that. The city possessed a hoard of as much as a quarter of all the silver out of European mines and profited from its price differential with gold. Just as we deal in derivatives today, Venetians brought silver to the Middle East, Egypt and Asia — where it was scarcer — in exchange for gold, which was more valuable in the West. In fact, so much gold that the surplus likely contributed to the 1345 European economic and financial collapse, when a number of important Florentine banks went under. The triggering event was England reneging on its loans, but the seeds of the disruption were likely sown by Venetian commodity trading and the imbalance it introduced into Europe’s various gold-based currencies (which just happened to be rivals of Venice’s coinage).

Though it had other city-state rivals, Venice dominated trade between Europe and Asia, Egypt and the Levant for the better part of four centuries. Still, like all other great powers through history, it was also blindsided by technical and commercial innovation and sudden economic coups de theatre. For example, the Portuguese voyages to Asia by way of the Cape of Good Hope took longer to bring back spices and luxuries than the Venetian land routes, but the goods were less costly because sailing cut out the middlemen that the city’s merchants had to pay off. At one point, Venice considered building a canal roughly where Suez is now to connect the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, but the Ottomans got in the way. As for all that silver in Venice’s treasury: Spain’s discovery of mountains of silver in South America deflated the value of La Serenissima’s hoard.

The pursuit of power and profit produced the kind of selective xenophobia that nations still practice. Venice loved migrants who were good for its bottom line; otherwise, good luck with residency. The city — which was founded by refugees fleeting the detritus of the Roman Empire — set up the first Jewish ghettos; yet it also encouraged a large degree of religious and philosophical tolerance — if only to spite the Papacy in Rome. Loving the Ottomans for their riches and fearing them for their sweeping military prowess, the Venetians sharpened the practice of diplomatic duplicity, playing multidimensional statesmanship better than many negotiators today. Without much of a citizen soldiery, Venice cultivated the use of mercenaries, just as present-day US and Russia do. If all else failed, there was poison. Sound familiar? And while the city sometimes produced populist figures, it preferred rule by deep state — faceless councils that safeguarded the oligarchy. It also experimented with embryonic forms of the junta (called zonta), which were summoned to deal with emergencies.

As with all great centers of wealth like London and New York today, Venice glowed even as it slid into political and economic senescence; its residual riches continued to finance art, architecture, music and, though evanescent, a sense of authority and grandeur. Still, at the very end, Venice was becoming little more than a souvenir painting by Canaletto that the offspring of British plutocrats brought home from their Grand Tours, just as the kids of the rich in China and India sweep up keepsakes today.

But the ghosts of the city persist — in Shakespeare’s Othello and The Merchant of Venice, in Thomas Mann’s novella, J.M.W. Turner’s paintings, in the canals and piazzas clogged with tourists, each looking for a personal Venice. My favourite evocation is Italo Calvino’s postmodern masterpiece Invisible Cities. In it, Kublai Khan asks Marco Polo to describe the cities of the empire he rules, which his armies conquered but which he doesn’t really know. Polo, who has traversed it, has that knowledge first hand. And so, the young Venetian goes through a poetic litany of city after fantastical city — in water, on land, in the air, refracted, reflected, hypnotic, accursed — 55 in all.

In the end, Kublai Khan realizes what Marco Polo is actually doing: He is describing only one place, Venice, the city he loves and longs to return to after all the years of travel through Asia. The Italian word for city is apt: città — it is both singular and plural. It was Venice’s destiny to prosper and falter in so many ways — and yet linger on today, even if in its haunted state. We should be so lucky.

Howard Chua-Eoan is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. Views do not represent the stand of this publication.

Credit: Bloomberg