Marco Polo

The route

What defines it

1. 01

   Maabar ruled by five Pandya brother kings

2. 02

   Pearl fishery with Brahmin charmers in the gulf of Mannar

3. 03

   Brahmin merchants of Lar, ‘the most truthful’

4. 04

   The queen of Mutfili (Motupalli), taken to be Rudrama Devi

5. 05

   Dictated to a romance writer in prison, 1298

01From the Khan’s court to the Coromandel

Marco Polo had lived some seventeen years in China when, around 1291, Kublai Khan let the Polos sail west escorting a Mongol princess to the Ilkhan of Persia. The fleet waited months in Sumatra for the monsoon, touched Ceylon, and worked up the Indian coasts before reaching Hormuz in about 1293. Back in Italy, Polo was taken prisoner in a sea-fight between Venice and Genoa, and in a Genoese prison in 1298 he told his story to Rustichello of Pisa, a writer of romances, who set it down in French. Book III, as Henry Yule arranged it, holds the chapters on India: Maabar, Mutfili, Lar, Cail, Coilum, Comari, Eli, Melibar, Tana, Cambaet and Semenat. Whether he saw all of them himself is not clear.

02Maabar: five brother kings and the pearl divers

Maabar, the Coromandel coast, he calls the finest and noblest province in the world, ruled by five brothers who were kings; one of them, Sonder Bandi Davar, held the pearl country. In the shallow gulf between Ceylon and the mainland divers went down for oysters while Brahmins on the boats charmed the great fish so that they would not harm them. The king went almost naked but wore a cord of 104 large pearls and rubies, because he had to say 104 prayers each morning and evening, and the prayer, Polo heard, was ‘Pacauta! Pacauta!’. Girls were dedicated to the temples to sing and dance before the gods. Of the Brahmins of Lar he says they were the best merchants in the world and the most truthful, eating no flesh, drinking no wine, and wearing a cotton thread across the shoulder.

03The queen of Mutfili, and what holds

Some details check out well. Mutfili is Motupalli, the Kakatiya port on the Andhra coast, and Polo says its king had died some forty years earlier and his widow had ruled ever since, better than he had, loved for her justice. Henry Yule identified her with Rudrama Devi, the Kakatiya ruler who was in fact Ganapatideva’s daughter; Polo’s ‘widow’ and his forty years are hearsay, and inscriptions suggest she had died by about 1289. The five Pandya brothers fit the Pandya court of Maravarman Kulasekhara and his kin, and the Persian historian Wassaf also describes horse imports to Ma’bar. The pearl fishery, the horse trade at Cail, today’s Kayalpattinam, and the pepper of Coilum, Kollam, are all confirmed by other sources. His diamond valley guarded by serpents, where eagles carry meat studded with stones, is an old Arab tale retold.

In the texts

• Le Divisament dou Monde, The Description of the World (1298)
• Henry Yule (tr.), The Book of Ser Marco Polo (1871; Cordier revision 1903)

More in this family