4

Persian as a Lingua Franca in the

Mongol Empire
david morgan

I t could be argued that the most celebrated European Persian-speaker

of the Mongol period was the one such person of whom everyone has
heard: the Venetian traveler Marco Polo. But is such an assertion credible?
In 1995, Dr. Frances Wood published her skeptical take on Marco’s travels,
Did Marco Polo Go to China?1 Her conclusion was that in all probability the
great traveler, though he did travel, probably went no nearer to China than
the Black Sea. Her argument was based on a range of what she believed
to be evidence, notably a series of omissions—matters that, she asserted,
one would have expected Marco to have mentioned if he had indeed been
to China, such as tea, foot-binding, the Chinese script, and the Great Wall.
These omissions need not detain us. They were all speedily shown by re-
viewers2 to be much more plausibly explicable on grounds other than that
of Marco’s non-appearance in China: most conspicuously of all, we might
well have suspected Marco’s bona fides if he had in fact mentioned the
Great Wall of China, since it was not there at the time of his visit.3
More to the point of this chapter is a rather different objection to Marco
Polo’s veracity, which Dr. Wood makes a great deal of. That is the fact that
he tends to produce Chinese words and names in a recognizably Persian
form.4 For her, this was evidence that he had extracted his material from
some, now lost, Persian written source, and having passed it off as deriving
from his own experience, had now at long last been caught out by his own
linguistic ineptitude.
There was and is, however, an alternative explanation which is a great
deal more plausible and for which, unlike the non-existent 13th century