A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

Hulagu’s elder brother Kubla was the next in line for succession, and he and the youngest brother
were in strong disagreement on a vital matter - whether the Mongols should remain horsemen of
the steppes or move into a more civilised country. Arigboge, the youngest, agreed with Genghis
Khan that the Mongols should remain nomads - civilisation would soften and corrupt them. Hulagu
agreed with Kubla that corruption could be enjoyable, and was inevitable in any case. Now Kubla
needed his support in the argument, for Arigboge had strong supporters. And so, to the relief of all
the Mediterranean, Hulagu turned his army homeward.
But Baybars was unwilling to allow him to escape so easily. His army caught up with the Mongols
at Ain Jalut, near the Sea of Galilee, in September 1260, and the Mongols sustained their first real
defeat. The main body of the army was put to flight, although, with the injustice of history, the
Mongols managed to avoid massacre. And Hulagu, nursing his wounds, hurried back to Mongolia.
His intervention was timely. Arigboge lost the argument when he was seized and thrown into
prison, where he died. Kubla Khan became the Great Khan in 1260. He decided that his chief task
was to complete the conquest of China and start a new dynasty. And in the next thirty-four years,
this is precisely what he did.
He was warring against the Mongols’ former allies, the Sung, and it was altogether more difficult
than overthrowing the Chin in the north. The terrain consisted mainly of flooded rice fields, which
made cavalry useless. The hot, damp climate was hard on the Mongols. But they made good use of
the great siege catapults they had used to destroy the Kharismian Empire - some required a hundred
men to work them - and in less than twenty years, the last of the Sung emperors had flung himself
in despair from a high cliff into the sea. Kubla Khan was master of China.
In the year Kubla Khan became leader of the Mongols, Marco Polo’s father and uncle set out from
Venice and sailed to Constantinople. (It was still in the hands of the Latins - since the siege by the
crusaders - but would become Greek again the following year.) Marco himself was only six at the
time, and so too young to travel. The two men journeyed overland to Bokhara, and there met
envoys who had been sent by Kubla to Hulagu, no doubt to tell him of Mangu’s death and the
struggle for succession. The envoys pressed them to return with them to Cathay (which was the
nearest Europeans could get to pronouncing Khitai - China) to meet the khan, and the Polos
allowed themselves to be persuaded. It was fortunate that they knew the language of the Tartars,
and so did Kubla Khan. When they arrived (presumably at Karakoram) the great khan received
them affably and engaged them in long conversations. He liked them so much that he asked them to
go back to the pope and ask him to send a hundred scholars to come and teach western ways to the
Mongols. They returned to Europe, where they discovered that the pope had just died - as had
Polo’s wife - leaving a fifteen-year-old boy, Marco; they decided to return to ‘Cathay’ with Marco.
They went through Cilicia and Armenia to Persia, then over the Pamirs to Kashgar, and so by
stages on to Kubla’s capital, Peking. Kubla Khan again received them graciously, was much taken
with the bright young man who spoke Tartar so fluently, and sent him on various diplomatic
missions. All this is described by Marco Polo in the famous Milione, one of our most remarkable
and vivid glimpses into past history.
No doubt one of Kubla’s reasons for welcoming the Polos was that he himself was a far from
welcome guest in China. The Chinese saw the Mongols as something rather like Tolkien’s Ores -
filthy, smelly creatures with no manners, no morals and a revolting taste in food and drink. (The
Chinese would not have dreamed of drinking milk; they still prefer lemon in their tea.) But, then, in