Marco Polo and the Heresy of Evil (By Paolo Visigalli from Shanghai Normal University)

Abstract

Around 1290 CE, the famed Venetian merchant and adventurer Marco Polo (c. 1254, Venice—January 8, 1324, Venice) was visiting the Southern Chinese province of Fujian. Only recently conquered by the Mongols’ army and still a hotbed of rebellion, this province’s countryside was infested with tigers and unidentified fox-like rodents, while its coastal cities, bustling hubs on the Maritime Silk Road, were among the most cosmopolitan places on earth. In one such city, Fuzhou, Marco and his uncle Maffio ran into what they emotionally identified as fellow Christians. But the Polos were almost certainly wrong. This mysterious religious community were most likely Manichaeans, the easternmost offshoots of a religion founded by the third-century Persian mystic Mani, the self-styled Apostle of Light.

This talk will closely examine this unique episode describing the Polos’ encounter with the Fuzhou ‘Christians’. We will first discuss how this episode illuminates the complex textual history of Marco’s book. We will next consider salient elements of Marco’s description in light of recent spectacular textual, archaeological, and artistic discoveries of Manichaean artifacts in Fujian. We will finally speculate about Marco’s reaction had he known the religious community he helped gain support from the Mongol Court were not fellow Christians but distantly related coreligionists of the Cathars, Medieval Europe’s Heresy of Evil.

About the Speaker

Paolo Visigalli is Associate Professor at Shanghai Normal University (SHNU), Department of World History. His main area of research is Indian and Chinese Buddhism, with a burgeoning interest in Chinese Manichaeism. He holds a PhD in South Asian Studies from the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining SHNU within the framework of Thousand Talents Plan, he was a Postdoc at the University of Munich and the Max Plack Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and taught Sanskrit and South Asian history at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.