Wise Man Of The West (Harvill Press Editions) Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Vincent Cronin

  Maps

  Dedication

  Title Page

  prologue: THE SEALED EMPIRE

  one: CALL TO THE EAST

  two: BREAKING THE SEAL

  three: PARADISE REVEALED

  four: GAINING GROUND

  five: BONZE INTO GRADUATE

  six: UP THE IMPERIAL CANAL

  seven: A BANQUET IN NANKING

  eight: PRISONERS OF THE EUNUCH

  nine: WITHIN THE FORBIDDEN CITY

  ten: THE CASTLE OF BARBARIANS

  eleven: CLASH WITH THE BUDDHISTS

  twelve: ADORERS OF THE CROSS

  thirteen: THE QUEST FOR CATHAY

  fourteen: UNLESS THE GRAIN DIE

  epilogue: THE END OF THE MISSION

  note

  index

  short bibliography

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Vincent cronin is well known for his historical biographies and for his two-volume history of the Renaissance (“Probably the best book that has ever been written on the Renaissance” Times Educational Supplement). He published his first book, The Golden Honeycomb, in 1954, and has since built a reputation as one of the finest historians of his generation. His other historical biographies include Louis and Antoinette, Catherine, Empress of All the Russias and Napoleon, which has been translated into eight languages and is a standard biography in both Britain and France (“To present Napoleon plausibly . . . takes nerve, originality, prodigious powers of research and a true historical imagination”, Michael Foot, Standard). His dual biography of Louis and Antoinette (“an impressive addition to the small list of biographies that are neither journalism nor Christmas pudding”, Robin Lane Fox) and his biography of Catherine, Empress of All the Russias (“A quite overpowering portrait of a great and admirable woman”, Spectator) are also available as Harvill paperbacks.

  Also by Vincent Cronin

  the golden honeycomb

  louis and antoinette

  catherine, empress of all the russias

  louis xiv

  the last migration

  napoleon bonaparte: an intimate biography

  the florentine renaissance

  paris on the eve 1900–1914

  paris: city of light 1919–1939

  For Chantal

  The Wise Man from the West

  Vincent Cronin

  prologue

  The Sealed Empire

  Asia, endowed with the first fruits of the sun, participating in the daily rite of creation, in the very origin of light, and, as the colours of dawn seemed to betoken, resplendently rich, was held by early Western peoples to be the world’s perfect and more marvellous part: a belief endorsed for Christendom when its nearer shores became the Holy Land. On medieval maps, those alchemic mixtures of legend, classical books and the Bible, which created the world as men wanted it to be, Asia was given, without question, pride of place. The central framework of these atlases, linking the East to northern Africa and Europe—its wavering coastline, in contrast to the bold sweeps elsewhere, a sign of certain knowledge—were the four rivers of Paradise, identified with the Indus, Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, their distance explained by subterranean watercourses. East of the Nile lay Palestine, the only part of Asia familiar to Christians. Pilgrims had travelled there to see the Sepulchre and new-found Cross, to wonder at hermits who, on pillar and in cave, chose extravagantly Oriental forms even for their sanctity; and in later centuries the pilgrim’s staff had become the mailed crusader’s lance. South-west of the Black Sea and Caspian was located with less assurance the land whence priests of Zoroaster, versed in astrology, had brought to Bethlehem gold, frankincense and myrrh—scriptural testimony to Asia’s wisdom no less than to her wealth. Further east lay Bactria, which Alexander had conquered, and the mountains whose tops touched the sky. Beyond, where no European traveller had ever ventured, lay furthest Asia, marked on the maps like chunks of unchiselled marble. Here the geographer became poet and prophet. He located precisely the beginning and end of time: the garden of Eden, surrounded by its fiery wall, and the quarter where Christ would finally appear, in recognition of which maps, like the churches of Europe, were oriented.

  Just as the severe lines of a Gothic cathedral were broken at the extreme points by gargoyles, so in distant Asia the neat categories of genera and species were burst asunder by a riot of grotesques. The unexplored continent was peopled with pygmies who fought storks, Arimaspians—men with one eye, manticores and unicorns, with headless men having eyes in their stomachs, others who lived on the smell of spices, loupgaroux and the Sciapodoi, who would lie on their backs during periods of extreme heat and protect themselves from the sun by the shade of their feet. Although its hills abounded in gold and gems, gryphons tore to pieces any intruder. Beyond the mysterious Ophir, whence came the jewels of Solomon, lay a great island, where Adam’s tomb was surrounded by a lake of tears which Eve and he had wept during a hundred years. In the north-east corner of Asia were located the tribes of Gog and Magog, whom Alexander the Great was supposed to have barricaded with an immense wall. Civilisation, like light itself, was held to have flowed from the East, from Eden, Assyria and Greece to Rome, and when it reached the Atlantic shore, these cannibal tribes would burst out and destroy the human race. At the eastern confines, following the Roman geographers, lived the Seres, who combed silk from the trees—terminus of the caravan trail to the Far East. The sea route ended at what was believed to be another country, the land of Thin, or as Ptolemy put it, Sinae.

  Since perfection implied the true religion, there was a strong tendency to christen these unknown spaces. While the Atlantic was dotted with such Christian domains as the Isle of the Seven Cities and St. Brandan’s Isle, the apocryphal acts of St. Thomas sent the apostle to evangelise India, and his disciples into central Asia. When in 1141 a Buddhist chief founded an empire in Chinese Turkestan, Europe, harassed by Islam, gave substance to her hopes by construing from the vague reports that a certain John, Christian priest and king, had won a great victory over the Persians. Soon a forged letter was circulating, addressed to the Emperor of Byzantium by Prester John, ruler of the three Indias, with seventy kings as his tributaries, a potentate surrounded by all the well-known Oriental properties. In his palace, the letter claimed, the windows of which were crystal, the tables of gold and amethyst, thirty thousand men, besides occasional visitors, were daily entertained. His capital city lay on one of the four rivers of Paradise. In one direction his territory extended four months’ journey to the tower of Babel, in the other it was measureless to man. The letter was accepted as authentic, and Prester John’s country added to the maps of Asia.

  In the next century that continent, from Hungary to its eastern limits, was united by Genghis Khan and his successors, discipline imposed on the marauding tribes, and direct travel between Europe and Asia became feasible. Louis IX of France first conceived the idea of communicating with the Mongol emperors, and, if possible, with Prester John, in the hope of procuring allies for the crusade against Islam. At his instigation Innocent IV sent Franciscan legates across the longitude of Asia. They did not find Prester John but their reports, supplemented by those of Marco Polo, described a no less marvellous kingdom far east of Persia and south of Tartary, on the confines of Asia, called Great Cathay, of immense extent, with the largest cities, widest rivers and greatest plains ever seen, where gunpowder, coal, paper-money and printing were in general use. Its huge population were idolaters, but in the capital city, Cambaluc, at the court of the Great Khan
, lived a community of Christians.

  From these reports, neglecting all that was disappointingly normal, Europe shaped the idea of a Christian Cathay ruled by Prester John. Mandeville wonderfully particularised. Beyond the mountains of India, where diamonds grow “as it were hazelnuts, and they are all square and pointed of their own kind, and they grow both together, male and female, and are nourished with the dew of heaven, and then engender commonly and bring forth small children that multiply and grow all the year,” lay the land of Prester John, characterised by “trees that at the rising of the sun each day begin to grow, and so grow they to midday, and bear fruit, but no man dare eat of that fruit, for it is a manner of iron, and after midday it turneth again to the earth, so that when the sun goeth down it is nothing seen, and so doeth it every day.” Such wonders were believed, and when in the middle of the fourteenth century the collapse of the Mongol Empire once again made travel impossible, Europe, sea-bound on every other quarter, still further idealised the princess Asia, imprisoned in her walled castle.

  Islam, the duenna, amassed a fortune by passing gifts between the two separated lovers. Europe shipped crude essentials, timber and iron, receiving in return turquoises from Nishapur, rubies from Yemen and pearls from the Persian Gulf, glass ware from the Syrian coast and marble from Azerbaijan. The gardens of Irak and Persia were plundered to provide violet and rose water; melons were carried from Turkestan and sturgeon from the Lake of Van to be served in halls fragrant with ambergris and sarcocol. The very incense burnt on Christian altars originally exuded in infidel Arabia. By way of Aleppo or Alexandria aloes, cedar wood and cinnamon flowed from Ceylon, pepper, tin and sugar from India and, changing hands at Calicut, whither they were carried by Kwangtung junks, cloves and nutmegs grown in the Moluccas, rhubarb and ginseng, fine porcelain and twenty-three types of raw silk from the land of the Sinae.

  Such goods, all that made life sweet, soft and spiced, were tangible proof that Asia combined luxury with beauty, refinement with wealth. They also provided yet another incitement to action. It became imperative to circumvent the duenna, to find another way to Asia in all her fullness, daring, since it was necessary, a route across uncharted Southern seas.

  Rigging was improved to permit closer sailing to the wind, main topsails added for greater speed on the first tentative coasting of West Africa. But it was a Chinese invention, the compass, perhaps transmitted by Arab sailors, which made possible the age of discovery and the eventual unveiling of China herself. By the end of the fifteenth century modes of travel had altered but the final cause remained the same as in the days of the Franciscan legates. Cathay, Asia at her most idealised, lured Columbus across the Atlantic. When he reached Cuba the Genoese explorer believed the island part of the mainland described by Polo, and Haiti he identified with Chipangu. Vasco da Gama, likewise, sailed from Portugal with letters for Prester John, whom a few imaginative geographers had transferred to the more accessible continent of Africa, in particular to Abyssinia.

  An array of cumulus suddenly massed across the blue; the earth was magnified ten times as North and South America, the full extent of Africa, India and Ceylon, the Philippines, Malacca and the Moluccas, fountainhead of spices, were wrested from the sea by a single generation of navigators. Furthest east of all, the Portuguese in 1513 discovered the coast of China, a land which from its position and silk products was identified with the Roman Thin or Sinae. New outlines were added to the maps, but the interior of every distant country still remained a repository of myth.

  In the explorers’ wake Christian priests sailed to baptise the new-born worlds. From Prince Henry, who first planned Guinea as a Christian dependency of Portugal, to Albuquerque, who sailed for India not only to capture the spice trade but to wrest the Holy Places from Islam, a twin desire—slaves and salvation, gain and grace—had driven men eastwards. As the new islands and continents were slowly differentiated, so too were the roles of merchant and missionary.

  The mendicant orders had already been at work in India for several decades when Francis Xavier left Rome in 1540 to evangelise the East Indies. Not even the apocryphal acts of St. Thomas had envisaged such travels which, within seven years, brought the gospel to Malabar, Ceylon, Malacca, the Molucca Islands and, shortly after its discovery by the Portuguese, to Japan. There he soon learned that her language, literature, fine arts, cult of the dead, Buddhism, all these and much else remained Chinese under a Japanese lacquer, that the island was intellectually dependent upon the mainland. He did not shrink from the formidable conclusion. “When the Japanese know,” he wrote to Ignatius de Loyola in the last year of his life, “that the Chinese have accepted the law of God, they will more readily abandon their idols.” He sailed from Japan in November 1551 and nine months later had succeeded in reaching the island of Shangchwan, seven miles from the China coast. For four months he tried in vain to arrange a landing in a country which refused entrance to foreigners. On December 3rd, 1552, attended by a Chinese servant, gazing from a bamboo hut across at the inaccessible coast, he died.

  Neither Xavier nor the other great Iberian travellers had attained Cathay, tentatively marked on maps as lying north-west of China. England now began to direct her efforts to this country, with its supposedly cold climate, hoping to barter her broadcloth for silks and silver. First Sir Hugh Willoughby attempted a north-east passage, only to be frozen to death with his crews in Russian Lapland. Jenkinson, Chief Factor of the Muscovy Company, whose articles bound him to “use all ways and means possible to learn how men may pass from Russia to Cathaia,” attempted a land route with as little success. Following another line, Sir Humphrey Gilbert wrote a learned work to prove that north of America, which he identified with the lost Atlantis of medieval geographers, a passage must exist to Cathay and the Spice Islands corresponding, in a symmetrical world, to the Straits of Magellan. Frobisher put this theory to the test in three voyages, but again Arctic ice proved a barrier more forbidding than the steppes and mountains of continental Asia.

  Had the Franciscans, at the end of their desert trek, been deceived by a mirage? Was Polo’s story as fictitious as that of Mandeville? The world had been circumnavigated, unimagined continents discovered, yet two marvellous countries of the remote East refused to yield their secret. Cathay, Europe’s fondest fancy, had been lost for two hundred years, while silken China remained a sealed empire, unknown as though her coast had never been descried.

  Francis Xavier’s last design was realised soon after his death by an Italian, who solved the mystery of Cathay, first explored China and revealed to Europe, in fullest detail, the marvels towards which she had been groping with unmistaken insight. While other merchants sailed east for spices and silk, for silver and sandalwood, he sought the pearl of great price and became a worthy apostle to the highest civilisation outside Europe. The discoverer emerges with the country he discovered, surviving in reports by his superiors and his colleagues’ correspondence, in almost fifty of his own letters and above all in his description of China and his mission there, a manuscript which was recovered at the beginning of the present century after being lost for almost three hundred years. The word-of-mouth reports and garbled romances of Oriental travellers are here superseded by a hundred and thirty-one folio pages containing a quarter of a million words, the neat script, instinct with life, just as it left its author’s hand at Peking, with the occasional misspellings and faulty grammar of one more at home in Chinese than in his mother tongue: the answer to Europe’s age-old questions, the discovery worthy of so long a search. With the other documents it makes known the travels, actions and sometimes the very words of the first and greatest mediator between China and the West. It is an authentic record, tallying with the dynastic annals, of events which really happened. Invention was unnecessary. The wonders, immensity and extravagance Europe expected of the East, the wealth and beauty associated with dawn, the legends and dreams of centuries were finally surpassed by the simple truth.

  chapter one

&nbs
p; Call to the East

  On a high hill, its slopes restless with wind-swept cypress trees, a boy was born in 1552, on the eighth of October, feast of St. Bridget, midway under the sign of the Balance, with Saturn in the ascendant; an excellent augury, so the astrologers claimed, foretelling an equable and just nature.

  Macerata was a town of some thirteen thousand inhabitants built high in the Marches between two torrential streams, looking across to the Adriatic, eastwards beyond the crescent moon of the threatening Ottoman Empire, to the rising sun. The town stood midway in the peninsula between north and south, and its people prided themselves on a similar balance of vigour and good humour. Lying in the papal domains, Macerata was linked intimately with Rome, but its particular spirituality, for which it was known far and wide, resulted from another physical circumstance. Twenty miles north-east lay Loreto, whither, it was devoutly believed, the house of the holy family had been miraculously transported through the air, like a magic carpet out of the East, from Nazareth. Loreto was a holy, chosen place, a centre of pilgrimage, and all the surrounding countryside participated in that miracle, to the reality of which four stone walls afforded lasting proof.

  The provincial town of Macerata boasted a handful of patrician families, among them the Riccis, ennobled three centuries before, their coat of arms, a blue hedgehog on a red background, being an illustration of the meaning of their name. Ser Giovan Battista Ricci made his living as a pharmacist but much of his time was given to civic affairs. He held a papal magistracy and for a period acted as governor of the town, where his prudence was respected. He had married Giovanna Angiolelli, a gentlewoman distinguished for her virtue, and by her had thirteen children, nine sons and four daughters. Matteo, as the boy born in 1552 had been christened, was the eldest child. Because his mother was occupied with so large a family and his father with local politics, he was entrusted at an early age first to his grandmother, Laria, then to a Siennese priest who lived in Macerata, Nicolò Bencivegni. Even before he reached the age of reason, God and the spiritual world had come to possess as much reality as the streets of his native town, while prayers, in the church which faced the Ricci palazzo, were the most important act of the day. The young boy loved his tutor and wanted to grow up like him.