Holy Oil
Marco Polo was not the first member of his family to venture along the Silk Road to the court of Kublai Khan, located in modern-day Beijing. According to The Travels of Marco Polo, Marco’s father (Niccolò) and uncle (Maffeo) made the first such journey from Venice in the mid-1250s. As Niccolò and Maffeo prepared to return to Europe, the Mongol Emperor supposedly asked that they come back again with a number of items he desired, including some oil from the lamp that burns at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
When the Polo brothers ventured east again in 1271, this time accompanied by young Marco, they reportedly brought not only the requested holy oil from Jerusalem, but also a letter to Kublai Khan from Pope Gregory X. The voyage took some three years. On arrival, they allegedly presented the items to Kublai Khan with great ceremony, as captured in the image above, a detail from a manuscript housed in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England.
Although no other contemporaneous writing corroborates this event, the story fits with what we know about Kublai Khan’s religious curiosity and tolerance.
The quote in this week’s puzzle highlights this lovely moment of intercultural exchange. We found the passage in a 2024 work by Andrea di Robilant, a journalist and professor at the American University of Rome. This Earthly Globe: A Venetian Geographer and the Quest to Map the World, focuses on the anonymous publication of a three-volume work entitled Navigationi et Viaggi (Journeys and Navigations), which appeared in Venice in 1550, and on Giovanni Battista Ramusio, the little-known civil servant who masterminded that publication.
In constructing this acrostic, we adopted a broad approach to its theme, including references to the Polos’ travels to Asia, as well as to Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan” and the stately pleasure dome he decreed. How many such references did you find?
As for Clue/Answer I., one wonders what Kublai Khan (or Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, basking in that pleasure dome) would have thought of this:
Ah, the Middle East and its oil so precious.
Without it, the “Conveyance with a ‘two-box’ design” would sit idle, n’est ce pas?
Very clever comment. 🙂
Early on in my solve my thoughts headed toward early travel and the East, thanks to words like caravansary, and sure enough. This was a rare finish for me with no look-ups, some guesses that were correct and words that came to mind for unknown reasons. I didn’t know that “Danube” meant river, but it seemed reasonable. Didn’t know the term Tetragrammaton, but thought of Yahweh. Great to read about people getting along. Many thanks.
Another fine puzzle and splendid, informative essay.
I usually solve the old-school way, on the dead-tree version of the Sunday paper, which, because of its size, gets delivered in two parts, one on Saturday, one on Sunday. But because of a delivery snafu, it wasn’t delivered today, so I solved in the XWordinfo app.
That app works wonderfully well and makes the solving process considerably easier, because you can experiment with words quickly, without the somewhat laborious process of filling everything in manually.
I’ve used the app before, but I just noticed something that struck me as a tiny bug. In the clues, the blank letters contain a “tell“ for the letter i. That is, the underscored blank is a tiny bit narrower than the other letters.
I can’t swear that this glitch is consistent. I didn’t want to go further down that trail, because it felt like cheating to take advantage of it.
I don’t know if anyone else has noticed it (or even if I’ve accurately identified this as an issue)
OK, I can’t say OPHTHALMIA is wrong, per se. I can say no one ever says that. And it’s striking to me how rarely you resort to such words! Great puzzle.
Totally disagree! Ophthalmia is a great word, clearly defined in my Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. Perhaps I have more medical studies experience. “No one” ever uses it? I’ll check with my ophthalmologist. 🙂
I’ve always been fond of the lake poets, including Samuel Coleridge. (Clue N)
Am I the only one puzzled by the word BETTLE in the quote? Should it be KETTLE? Is this an error?
I also ended up with bettle in the quote. I can’t find the word anywhere
You seemed to have misspelled Lex LuthOr’s name (from the Superman comics)!
That’s because the name of Gene Hackman’s evil genius (I can never associate anyone else with that role) is Lex LuthOR.
us too
The correct word should be “bottle.” Perhaps you misspelled Lex Luthor?
I really enjoyed this one, though that may be because it was another little triumph for me (no look-ups). I knew so few of the clues at the start, but what a fun challenge to piece them together. This time, I needed to start extrapolating the title of the book fairly early to fill in some letters. Yes, “ophthalmia” threw me off, but the word, if unconventional, made sense. I thought your most dastardly tricky clue was “Rather sharp, at times” 😉
What a fascinating topic! It boggles my mind to think about a journey taking three years. Thank you again for challenging us in such an interesting way.