Il diritto come storia vivente: lo sguardo di Marco Polo nella Cina di Kubilai Khan

Marco Polo was a merchant, a traveller, but he was also an observer of the legal phenomenon. In his long stay in Cathay (today China), in the places he passed through, Marco Polo carefully listened, observed the lives of the people, their being in the group, the privileges, the duties, the roles they assumed in the group. In doing so, Polo makes contact with the primal source of law: the community and its typical normative expression, custom. It is into a fragmentary, variegated and plural legal space that Marco Polo transports us: there are as many communities as there are laws shaped by them. But over this vast space also reigns a great sovereign who governs with justice and tolerance: it is Kublai Khan, whom Polo admires infinitely, in whose service he works as a local administrator in the provinces of the Empire. There is a law that comes from below in Marco Polo’s China, but also a law that descends from oversight: law of Polo’s China appears to us in all the complexity of a phenomenon imprinted in the webs of the social fabric and in those of the power, within that political formation, unique for its time, that was the Chinese Empire ruled by the Mongols.