Before you read this I have to warn you that while most of the facts are accurate and the research is valid--and it will be obvious in places where it is not--I also use some bad words and less-than-savory concepts in order to create a clearer picture of history, complete with idiotic metaphors.  So, to review:  there are bad words and references to sex.

Doubts about the veracity of Marco Polo’s Travels cavort wantonly like stampeding jungle creatures in that part of Jumanji where the boy is about halfway through turning into a monkey-child. Critics highlight Polo’s poor objective reporting, pointing to the many references to drunken bands of naked dwarf women riding giraffes, magical wish-granting merunicorns[1], battery-powered robot plesiosaurs, and a cadre of nomadic monk-assassins who would cover themselves in asbestos and light their clothes on fire to intimidate their prey. Polo’s account also includes obvious exaggerations of Polo’s own roles within China, stating that he invented an early form of the internet, as well as a saddle for said drunken giraffe-riding dwarf whores, who apparently kept falling off of their giraffes due to the awkward forty-five degree lumpy angle of their steeds’ spinal cords, and also assuredly because of their drunkenness. Hence, many have postulated that Polo never went farther than Constantinople and his travelogue is largely invalid as a source for Asian history.

However, these people underestimate Polo’s probable ignorance of Asian culture in general, the fact that he probably repeated a lot of legends and myths as fact simply because this is what he was told—much like when we go on vacation and the tour guides tell you that Caligula made his horse a senator and a priest and you go around repeating it like it’s a fact[2]—and his boredom while reciting all of this to his nerdy homosexual cellmate in prison, which probably accounts for all the exaggeration and obvious lies.

There are, by the same token, many truths in Polo’s account that speak to his familiarity with the magical realm of Asia. He reports the uses of coal, paper money, and the aforementioned asbestos; he accurately describes the appearance of the musk deer and the harvesting of its precious musk organs; and he marvels at the fact that dead children from different families are sometimes married, which is still done in some rural parts of China, because after all, a marriage is only as valid as the contract and does not depend on an actual relationship. However, given that such useful facts are intermingled willy-nilly with a bunch of crap, it is difficult to navigate the sordid waters of the account to find a consistent trail of truth. They do exist, though, and one of these that parades throughout the work is the nature of Mongol rule and the state of the world underneath its Rihanna-like metaphorical umbrella.

The center of this theme is the khan. Polo babbles about Khubilai Khan for ever and ever, like a little girl fawning over Zac Efron, or whatever sexy young man is currently postering the bedrooms of young women at the time you are reading this. He is clearly either totally jealous and wants to be the khan or he wants to have sex with him, or perhaps both. In his heathen idol worship and descriptive obsession, Polo accidentally also describes the administrative, ideological, social, and military systems that make up the empire, and shows that the existence of the empire is but a brothel of prostitutes to the great pimping of the khan. If the pimp were to fall, the house of whoredom would as well, its many independent strumpet agents scattered to the winds to land on random street corners and fend for themselves; any semblance of cohesion, bonds or group togetherness would become but a memory.

As such, the empire is both dynamic and frail: as long as Khubilai’s presence is maintained, the empire is as strong as his own ambition, but without him it withers and fades; Khubilai is the Viagra that allows the dysfunctional penis to rise mighty and prepared for baby-juicing. From the travelogue of Marco Polo, the nature of Mongol rule as an extension of an individual is evident in nearly every paragraph both interesting and boring, including its extent and limitations. The frequency and pervasiveness of this theme, along with the general legitimacy of Polo’s work as a historical source, lend a great deal of support to the concept of Mongol government as a highly personal machine revolving around the individual khan.

This system, both Polo and history illustrate, allows for an enormous amount of expansion, accumulation, and change in the span of a lifetime, one of the great advantages to living in a dictatorship. The khan’s city is a paragon of “masterly precision,” filled with “mansions with ample courtyards and gardens,” and “he often upon a whim has contests in his backyard that are much like a real-life version of Mario Kart, except the banana peels are covered in poop and the red turtle shells are covered in anthrax, thus making certain death by red shell ever more certain, and if you are the guy who gets to be Yoshi you have the option of firing a komodo dragon with infectious bacteria in his bite thus causing your target to become septic and die slowly.” The hall of his palace “is so vast…that a meal might well be served there for more than 6,000 men,” and the khan has at his command dogs, tigers, lions, horses, armies, falcons, mistresses, servants, wives, elephants, gimps, violinists, tea farmers, desperados, mavericks, silkworms, ninjas, assassins, GPS manufacturers, coffee baristas, Color Kids and crystal-mining Sprites, geraniums, genetically modified spiders, loincloth artisans, wandering bushmen, cyborgs, fruit bats, mosquito larvae, cherries, and indeed every living thing in his domain. Polo describes the khan as having such power that a lion, entering the khan’s presence, “flings itself down prostrate before him” and “seems to acknowledge him as lord.”

None of this is surprising to those familiar with the Mongol empire, its impressive military, and its ability to fucking kill people for their cash money and enslave them for marketable skills or sexual romps from Asian continent to the other. In number-reckoning and anecdotal ass-speech, such as that of the bowing lion, Polo’s version is exaggerated, but the gist of his impressions are valid.

Equally valid, then, are the remarks which give away the limitations of the khan’s power. Explicitly, Polo heaps awe and praise upon Khubilai as a lord of infinite power and wealth; but not plicitly, his observations are telling of the khan’s weaknesses. The first of these is the great and insurmountable issue of Everybody in the Mongol Ruling Family Bitching and Slapping Each Other and Stabbing Each Other In the Pancreas For Having a Stupid Face and Eating Their Cookie Dough That Had Their Name Clearly Written On It In Big Block Letters, originating with Chinggis Khan’s offspring and escalating until the empire’s collapse. Polo outlines the mode of succession in making it clear that the khan’s “kinsfolk and brothers tried to debar him” and it was only by his “great prowess” that he obtained lordship over the empire, i.e. he kidnapped his cousin and spanked him until he bled to death from his ass.

He then tells of the battle between Khubilai and Nayan, a kinsman backed by other kinsmen, one of the many family feuds Khubilai overcame. If you poke history with a spoon, it will tell you in a squeaky perturbed voice that this incident was typical of the crises that plagued the Mongol ruling elite with the death of every khan. Although officially the succession was supposed to be decided by all the important people getting together, getting wasted, and gleefully kicking each other in the nuts until one man remained standing, in reality things were never this simple. The succession was a bloody contest of strength that drew resources, energy, and attention away from the administration of an empire, like two guys in traffic getting pissed off and leaping out of their cars to beat the crap out of each other who then get their shit stolen out of their cars while they’re not paying attention. A ruling body built on the strength of an individual becomes severely jeopardized upon the individual’s death, and Khubilai’s Yüan dynasty was no exception.

Rebellion from the people who were fucked over by the Mongols throughout Khubilai’s reign is also a recurring theme in Polo’s report. He states that all over the khan’s domains, there are “many disaffected and disloyal subjects who, if they had the chance, would rebel.” In order to combat this threat, the khan has armies stationed near every major city to make sure that if any of the disaffected subjects get too big for their britches their lower halves will be cut off, thus dispossessing them of their britches and preventing them from ever having britches again. For his own capital, the khan builds a separate city with a thousand guards at every gate, as well as a private army, in order to protect himself from rebellion and “evil-doers.” In this city, the khan’s guard maintains a strictly enforced curfew, as nighttime is the Dark Cloak of Sin and Evil. According to Polo, a revolt instigated by the abuses of a corrupt official known as Ahmad is only quashed by the attentiveness and brute force of the thousands of night guardsmen.

Hence, the maintenance of order relies not on some unifying element of identity or ideology, but violence and force. The khan institutes new policies in a similar fashion. In reporting the use of paper money, Polo says that khan came up with the idea and ordered everyone to accept its awesomeness, and that “no one dares refuse it on pain of losing his life,” even though people think it’s fucking stupid. In Polo’s descriptions of varying provinces and cities, a common feature is that each has a native tongue, religion, culture, and even government completely separate from the Mongols, except that it is “subject to the Great Khan” and must pay tribute. There is nothing cohesive about the order created in the Mongol empire; it is a pug-fugly socially-retarded monster made of the sewn-up bits of several corpses electrocuted into life and stinking of dead meat and a malfunctioning pooping mechanism.

Even this authority, however, is limited. In the more far-flung regions of the empire, the khan has more or less stamped “KUBLAH!” on people’s foreheads, shoved a flag that says “KHUBILAI 4 EVA U BIN PWNED LOL” in the town square, and then wandered off, never to think about it again, never bothering to send an administrator or an official or a soldier or a dog with a walkie-talkie strapped to its collar or an observant pigeon. Though Polo says the use of paper money is enforced in China, in his description of Tibet, he mentions that the people use salt as currency, not paper, because paper is fucking stupid. Other people continue to use gems, precious metals, and cowry shells. Polo also says that Khubilai has forbidden certain cultural practices—for example, letting a house guest sex your wife as a part of hospitality custom—but they continue anyway because it’s a grand tradition and the khan could reportedly “go get fucked by a lion.”[3] The khan’s authority only extends as far as the threat of military retribution.

Hence, though Khubilai’s court has become more or less sedentary, and he has adopted more Chinese methods of government administration, his authority remains as nomadic as squeezing horse teats. The power and strength of the Mongols in East Asia moves, waxes and wanes with him, and without him there is Mongol authority only in the sparkly glitter clouds of imagination. The government of China can function without the khan, but its Mongol authority cannot; the institutions that Khubilai set up were only strong as long as he enforced their function. The Mongol empire, in Polo’s account, is a condition superimposed upon the existing world like a unitard on a fat man. Its presence is only felt when the khan is near, for he is, essentially, the Mongol empire.

[1] Half merperson, half unicorn.

[2] The legend of Caligula’s horse being made a consul comes from some writings of Suetonius and Cassius Dio, who wrote about a hundred years and two hundred years respectively after Caligula’s reign, who state that it was rumored that Caligula was thinking about giving his horse a consulship. The ancient Roman scholar Jeremy Baculum has said of this statement: “I think it’s pretty obvious that this ‘rumor’ about the emperor ‘thinking’ about giving his horse a consulship means that he made a joke about it at some point while jacking off at a party and humorless people—you know, the kind who write in to television networks about the offensiveness of jokes about runny poop or embarrassingly unsatisfying sexual escapades on their comedy shows—spread it around as evidence of his being wacked out of his pumpkin patch. I mean, he was, but not in that way. He was cruel and narcissistic but so are drunk frat guys, and they teach us that even douchebags have a sense of humor, even if it’s groin-grabbingly gawdawful.”

[3] “Get fucked by a lion,” or perhaps “tiger” or “snow leopard” or “jaguar” was a popular insult in various parts of the ancient and historical world. It was well-known that cat sex is largely a painful and unsatisfying act, as the male penis has cruel and pointy barbs all over it; it was reasoned that lions (or tigers or whatever the biggest cat happened to be in the geographical area), as the largest and most powerful, would have the largest and most powerful barbed penises, and thus being fucked by them would be a most painful experience.