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| The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
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220
MARCO POLO BooK I.
You must know that there are among them certain
religious recluses who lead a more virtuous life than the
rest. These abstain from all lechery, though they do
not indeed regard it as a deadly sin ; howbeit if any
one sin against nature they condemn him to death.
They have an Ecclesiastical Calendar as we have ; and
there are five days in the month that they observe
particularly ; and on these five days they would on no
account either slaughter any animal or eat flesh meat.
On those days, moreover, they observe much greater
abstinence altogether than on other days.3
Among these people a man may take thirty wives,
more or less, if he can but afford to do so, each having
wives in proportion to his wealth and means ; but the
first wife is always held in highest consideration. The
men endow their wives with cattle, slaves, and money,
according to their ability. And if a man dislikes any
one of his wives, he just turns her off and takes another.
They take to wife their cousins and their fathers' widows
(always excepting the man's own mother), holding to be
no sin many things that we think grievous sins, and, in
short, they live like beasts.4
Messer Maffeo and Messer Marco Polo dwelt a
whole year in this city when on a mission.5
Now we will leave this and tell you about other pro-
vinces towards the north, for we are going to take you
a sixty days' journey in that direction.
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NOTE I . —Campichiu is undoubtedly Kanchau, which was at this time, as Pauthier tells us, the chief city of the administration of Kansuh, corresponding to Polo's Tangut. Ka;zsuh itself is a name compounded of the names of the two cities Kanchau and Suh-chau.
[Kanchau fell under the Tangut dominion in 1208. (Palladius, p. io.) The Musulmans mentioned by Polo at Shachau and Kanchau probably came from Khotan. II. C.]
The difficulties that have been made about the form of the name Carzizsiciou, etc., in Polo, and the attempts to explain these, are probably alike futile. Quatren i e writes the Persian form of the name after Abdurrazzak as Ka;ntcheou, but I see that Erdmann
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