part0019

You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock .

(Graham Greene, The Third Man )

The Renaissance, as proposed by Western historians, is the period of history that prominently follows the European Dark Ages. First used in the 18th century, the term “Renaissance” means “rebirth” in French. [88] This rebirth refers to a conscious return to the ideas and methodology of Classical Antiquity—that is, the Greeks and Romans, on whom many of Europe’s 13th - to 16th -century population was fixated. Similar to Classical Antiquity, the Renaissance classicists first appeared in the Mediterranean. The Republic of Florence and the Republic of Venice were at the forefront of this movement.

One of the countless wonderful products of Renaissance Venice was a man called Marco Polo. Born in 1254 to a merchant family, Marco Polo learned the importance and art of importing and exporting from his father and uncle, Niccolò and Maffeo. [89] The family traveled extensively to procure rare, in-demand items throughout West Asia that they could sell profitably back in Venice. The Silk Road beckoned to them strongly, and most of their years were spent traversing Asia and conducting trade within the exotic realms of India, Asia Minor, Mongolia, and China. Tea, gold, pearls, drugs, ivory, spices, jewels, and, of course, silk textiles were their products of choice, just as valuable in Asia as they were in Europe. [90]

At the court of Kublai Khan, the leader of the Mongols of Central Asia, Marco Polo found extravagance and luxury that he had not expected. To Westerners, the Mongols were considered a barbaric and bloodthirsty people; at court, however, the Polos learned their prejudice was unfounded. Like kings of the West, Kublai Khan lived in architectural splendor, surrounded by beautiful and ornate objects of great monetary value. At the Khan’s capital city of Cambaluc, the walls were covered in gold and silver, and the dining hall could host 6,000 guests. [91] Thousands of lions, leopards, wild boars, and elephants roamed the grounds. Said Marco Polo of the city and its many rhinoceros: “They have wild elephants, and plenty of unicorns, which are scarcely smaller than elephants.” [92]

Kublai Khan greatly valued knowledge of the world outside his realm, and he found the merchant Polo family to be an endless source of information and entertainment. He insisted they stay at court with him, which the whole family did for a time, even moving with the entire court from Shangdu to Cambaluc. The family business was revered above all else for the patriarchal Polos, however, and before long, Marco’s uncle and father decided to move on. They saw young Marco’s desire to stay behind with the Khan as a welcome way to remain in Kublai Khan’s good graces. Niccolò and Maffeo returned to business traveling throughout Asia, leaving Marco at the Khan’s court among thousands of other servants and administrators. [93]

Marco Polo spent more than two decades with the Mongols. [94] Having earned the trust of the mighty Khan, Polo had the ability to travel extensively throughout Mongol territory on administrative duties that might have included tax collection and even the governorship of Hangzhou, a Chinese city annexed under the rule of Kublai Khan. [95] He was the first European to ingratiate himself so thoroughly in an entirely foreign culture that when he finally returned to Venice in 1299 with a book detailing his adventures, he became the most famous explorer of the day. [96]

The facts and figures in the book, The Travels of Marco Polo , were so exotic and out of the norm for readers in Italy and Europe that despite its immense success, it was often considered a glorious fiction. Indeed, even some modern historians and researchers question the details of Polo’s book, which was actually written by Rustichello da Pisa, but that first impression of the Far East remains an important part of the history of Western civilization. It was perhaps even one of the fundamental inspirations behind the growing interest in higher education—a crucial aspect of the Renaissance. Although Marco Polo’s journeys and written renderings of the fascinating far side of the world sparked a yearning for knowledge and discovery in Venetians and other Europeans, Italy was hit hard by a fearsome bout of plague in the mid-14th century, curtailing any such expeditions.

The Black Death was so serious and widespread that it killed about a third of the population of Europe. The Republic of Florence and the Republic of Venice were among the worst of Europe’s plague cities. In Florence, 60 percent of the population died within just a few months. [97] Agnolo di Tura, a historian from Siena, Italy, recorded his experiences with the sickness:

All the citizens did little else except to carry dead bodies to be buried […] At every church they dug deep pits down to the water-table; and thus those who were poor who died during the night were bundled up quickly and thrown into the pit. In the morning when a large number of bodies were found in the pit, they took some earth and shovelled it down on top of them; and later others were placed on top of them and then another layer of earth, just as one makes lasagne with layers of pasta and cheese. [98]

The medieval Italians persevered, and when the death toll finally started to decline, the Florentines and Venetians leaped wholeheartedly into the new day. They embraced art, architecture, literature, and science once more as their early Roman ancestors had done a millennium before. Some of the world’s most influential polymaths, including Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, perfectly encapsulated the lost Classical ideals of literature, art, philosophy, and science. They inspired the lasting term “Renaissance Man.” [99] Thanks to the epic examples set by Marco Polo and his fellow Italians, Europe as a whole moved into the Renaissance period about a century later, embracing art, literature, exploration, and philosophy anew.