Marco Polo and the Heresy of Evil: Meeting Yuan dynasty Fuzhou's secretive religious group

Around 1290 CE, the famed Venetian merchant and adventurer Marco Polo was visiting the Southern Chinese province of Fujian. Only recently conquered by the Mongol army and a hotbed of frequent rebellion, this province's countryside was infested with tigers and unidentified foxlike 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 group were most likely Manichaeans, the easternmost offshoot of a world religion founded by Mani, the third-century mystic from Sasanian Mesopotamia, the self-styled Apostle of Light.

This talk will closely examine this fascinating and unique episode describing the Polos' encounter with the Fuzhou "Christians". We will first consider it in relation to Marco's book's complex textual history. We will then explore how recent spectacular discoveries of textual and artistic Manichaean artefacts in Fujian shed new light on some salient aspects of Marco's account. We will finally speculate about Marco's reaction had he known the religious group he helped gain institutional support from the Mongol Court were not fellow Christians but distantly related coreligionists of the Cathars, Medieval Europe's Heresy of Evil.