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| The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
CHAP. LXI. STORIES OF CANNIBALISM
313
an example to others." Vincent of Beauvais makes a like statement : " When they capture any one who is at bitter enmity with them, they gather together and eat him in vengeance of his revolt, and like infernal leeches suck his blood," a custom of which a modern Mongol writer thinks that he finds a trace in a surviving proverb. Among more remote and ignorant Franks the cannibalism of the Tartars was a general belief. No of Narbonne, in his letter written during the great Tartar invasion of Europe (1242), declares that the Tartar chiefs, with their dog's head followers and other Lotoplzagi (!), ate the bodies of their victims like so much bread ; whilst a Venetian chronicler, speaking of the council of Lyons in 1274, says there was a discussion about making a general move against the Tartars, "ponce qu'il man juent la char humaine." These latter writers no doubt rehearsed mere popular beliefs, but Hayton and Ricold were both intelligent persons well acquainted with the Tartars, and Hayton at least not prejudiced against them.
The old belief was revived in Prussia during the Seven Years' War, in regard to the Kalmaks of the Russian army ; and Bergmann says the old Kalmak warriors confessed to him that they had done what they could to encourage it by cutting up the bodies of the slain in presence of their prisoners, and roasting them ! But Levchine relates an act on the part of the Kirghiz Kazaks which was no jest. They drank the blood of their victim if they did not eat his flesh.
There is some reason to believe that cannibalism was in the Middle Ages generally a less strange and unwonted horror than we should at first blush imagine, and especially that it was an idea tolerably familiar in China. M. Bazin, in the second part of Chine Moderne, p. 461, after sketching a Chinese drama of the Mongol era (" The Devotion of Chao-li "), the plot of which turns on the acts of a body of cannibals, quotes several other passages from Chinese authors which indicate this. Nor is this wonderful in the age that had experienced the horrors of the Mongol wars.
That was no doubt a fable which Carpini heard in the camp of the Great Kaan, that in one of the Mongol sieges in Cathay, when the army was without food, one man in ten of their own force was sacrificed to feed the remainder. * But we are told in sober history that the force of Tului in Honan, in 1231-1232, was reduced to such straits as to eat grass and human flesh. At the siege of the Kin capital Kaifongfu, in 1233, the besieged were reduced to the like extremity ; and the same occurred the same year at the siege of Tsaichau ; and in 1262, when the rebel general Litan was besieged in Tsinanfu. The Taiping wars the other day revived the same horrors in all their magnitude. And savage acts of the same kind by the Chinese and their Turk partisans in the defence of Kashgar were related to Mr. Shaw.
Probably, however, nothing of the kind in history equals what Abdallatif, a sober and scientific physician, describes as having occurred before his own eyes in the great Egyptian famine of A.H. 597 (1200). The horrid details fill a chapter of some length, and we need not quote from them.
Nor was Christendom without the rumour of such barbarities. The story of King Richard's banquet in presence of Saladin's ambassadors on the head of a Saracen curried (for so it surely was),—
•
" soden full hastily With powder and with spysory, And with saffron of good colour "—
fable as it is, is told with a zest that makes one shudder ; but the tale in the Chanson a '4ntioche, of how the licentious bands of ragamuffins, who hung on the army of the First Crusade, and were known as the Tafurs,t ate the Turks whom they killed at
* A young Afghan related in the presence of Arthur Conolly at Herat that on a certain occasion when provisions ran short the Russian General gave orders that 50,000 men should be killed and served
out as rations 1 (I. 346.)
t Ar. T4fir, a sordid, squalid fellow.
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