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: