Caravan To Xanadu

HISTORICAL NOTES

BOOK ONE

[1] The legend of Prester John is still told and believed in remote areas of Central Asia. Marco Polo repeated it with tongue in cheek for reasons unknown.

[2] This simple formula for invisible writing must have been known to the skilled Arabian chemists long before Marco Polo’s time.

[3] We cannot help wondering over the effect on history if Kublai Khan’s plan of importing one hundred learned Christian priests to spread Christianity throughout Asia had been carried out. It may be that the greatest opportunity that ever came to any man came to Pope Gregory X (1271-1276). For reasons even now unknown, he let it pass.

[4] The hypothesis of hatred between Nicolo Polo and his son Marco Polo underlying the plot of this novel derives from evidence that Nicolo left his wife before Marco was born to live in Constantinople, did not return at her death, and did not lay eyes on Marco until he was in his sixteenth year. If this were deliberate abandonment, which I believe, Marco obtained poetic revenge when he dictated the account of his travels that has come down to us. After brief mention of Nicolo’s earlier journey, he abandons him to oblivion. Not merely pushed into the background, he is barely mentioned throughout the long chronicle.

[5] The Jews were well advised. However, the rebellion of Kublai’s cousin Nayan was put down in four years of costly war. “He was wrapt in a carpet, and tossed to and fro so mercilessly that he died.”

[6] In spite of the culture, gaiety, humor, and spotty piety of the Venetian people in Marco Polo’s time, they were ferocious as wolves in punishing criminals.

[7] The fact that the world was a sphere was as well known to savants in 1270 as the existence of island universes to astronomers of the present day.

[8] Hypnotism was employed by mystics in India for psychoanalysis (by whatever name) long before the Christian era.

[9] Even Albertus Magnus tried to make out that asbestos was salamander wool or plumage. Actually the ancients knew what it was, but never put it to general use. The piece that covered the napkin of Saint Veronica was found in a pagan tomb of the Appian Way.

[10] The earliest authority on chess was Masudi, an Arab writing three hundred years before Marco Polo, and the game was ancient even then. The Italians probably learned it from the Byzantians a century before Marco Polo. Carlyle believed that King Canute of England was a chess player.

[11] Eratosthenes of Alexandria, who knew perfectly well that the world was round and something like 25,000 miles in circumference, lived seventeen hundred years before Columbus.