Whipping boy

Ihave been a latecomer to the Netflix production of “Marco Polo,” which is a two- season mini- series produced by the online streaming company, at a somewhat generous budget, even by TV-production standards.

The epic production is starred by an international cast and shot on location in the places where they happened, or at least very close to those actual events. It follows the time that the great Venetian explorer Marco Polo spent in Asia, and particularly in ancient China, where his chronicles described life in the royal court, and became the lens with which much of the modern world views that time in that great civilization’s history.

The centerpiece of those chronicles was Marco’s friendship with Kublai Khan, the great leader of China’s Mogul (Mongol) Dynasty, under whose reign North and South China were finally unified as one. To make the plot interesting, liberties with the story had to be taken, as it were. For one, this is the first time I had any notion that the European explorer was actually a proficient martial artist, schooled in the Wudang Shaolin Temple styles, by no less than one of their greatest monk-teachers. But that is, of course, an embellishment that is to be expected, in order to make such projects commercially attractive.

A feature I did not find that attractive, however, was how Christians (particularly Catholics, who were mostly the only “Christians” at the time) are portrayed during those times, and which to me typifies the way in which secular society, Hollywood included, want to portray religion to contemporary audiences.

One of the episodes in the mini-series depicted the rebellion against Kublai Khan by Prince Nayan, who was a Mongol royal who had converted to Christianity. Historically, it is accurate that he was a convert to the faith, but the manner of his rebellion, and the character of his person betray the Hollywood bias against religion.

In what is clearly an aim at the contemporary child-abuse scandals that have hit the Catholic Church, Nayan is described as having a penchant for very young girls, which was supposedly his “sin,” and hence his rather ascetic approach to atonement, which is again another cheap shot, dare I say, at some of the practices of the Church. In one scene, Prince Nayan is being gifted with a young Chinese girl, to entice him to join the anti-Khan rebellion. The very same scene also shows him cutting his palm with a sharp knife, to imitate the crucifixion wound of Jesus, and apparently to show him being “remorseful” for his past sins.

The other “twist” to the Marco Polo story is that the Christian prince’s rebellion was supposedly instigated on the orders of the pope – a preemptive strike at the heart of a “barbarian” empire, in order to secure the West against any incursions of the dreaded enemy. This variation to the factual account plays right into the hands of historical revisionists, who continue to blame the Christian forays into the Holy Land for much of the troubles the modern world has today.

I will leave it to our readers to research the historical facts over these events. Suffice it to say that Prince Nayan being a “pedophile” is not an account anyone would come across readily, and his ascetic practices are certainly poetic license in the extreme. And neither is it documented fact that the Christian armies marched into the heart of Mongol territory, at the instruction of the pope, to wage war against the Khan. True, the two armies did meet, but only when the Mongols tried to invade Europe, and the battles were waged in Western lands.

Marco Polo is a charming production, and may even be able to get the intellectually less-curious to become more interested in history. But I wish it did not have to play into the hands of the secular intelligentsia, who are fond of making the Catholic Church their favorite whipping boy, when it comes to anything and everything bad that happened in history.

(http://asbb foreign exchange. blogspot.com & http://twitter. com/asbbatuhan)