The descendant of the steppe warriors Kubilai he had been seduced by the millenary Chinese culture, changing the name of his dynasty from Menku in Yuan . Faced with the accusations of his generals of having sinned, losing his fighting spirit, the Khan he played his face trying to subjugate Japan . It seemed an easy task:it was enough to cross a short stretch of ocean starting from Korea and bend the islanders.
"They resorted to river junks , managed by Chinese sailors and Korean », Explains the Neapolitan archaeologist Daniele Petrella, "The Mongols were land fighters, not navigators." According to later Chinese sources, Kubilai he would have built 4500 ships to carry about 150,000 men , for the two conquest expeditions that he organized, a landing force superior even to D-Day in Normandy, which was 100,000 men (these numbers are a typical exaggeration of Chinese written chronicles; specifically, it is thought that there could have been a thousand but certainly not 4400 ).
The navigation continued well up to the sight of the city of Hakata (today Fukuoka ), government headquarters in the South of Japan . Here the two sections of the fleet should have been reunited, one from Quanzhou , in China southern , and the other from Happo , in Korea .
The boats were fast and safe, because the Songs , among the greatest naval engineers in history, invented the system of hulls with bulkheads, that is divided into watertight rooms, that is to say that if there was a leak and water was loaded only the hold concerned was flooded without sinking the ship.
Kubilai and his army, however, had not come to terms with a terrible typhoon:on 15 August 1281 the "Black Current" overwhelms all the ships , making them disappear forever on the ocean floor and nipping Kubilai's dreams of power .
Until Daniele Petrella and Hayashida Kenzo , with an Italian-Japanese team of underwater archaeologists, are finally unable to find them.
The discovery made in the seas of Takashima it relates to the second expedition of Kubilai , that is that of 1281 .
As regards the first, there is no archaeological evidence to support the Chinese written sources, dating back to about 50 years after the event, who also want the first mission of 1274 failed due to the same typhoon.
It is believed that the first expedition failed due to the strong resistance of the Japanese who closed the Mongol-Sino-Korean fleet in a vice that prevented the crew from restocking themselves with food and weapons, forcing them to retreat . This is because, the lack of archaeological evidence confirms the improbability that experienced Chinese and Korean sailors twice had stumbled upon a typhoon they knew all too well.
From the number of anchors found, the ships identified so far are 260 .
Among the other finds recovered, mortars , ovens , tableware , helmets , mirrors , even a leather armor with copper joints , perfectly preserved in a casket sealed with mastic.
But the most unexpected find is that of the teppo, terracotta throwing bombs filled with gunpowder and iron splinters. "A deadly weapon," observes Petrella , «Which we believed was created two centuries later in the West .
For centuries in Japan the legend said that the Mongols had been defeated by the kamikaze , the wind sent by the gods to protect the Japanese soil from invaders.
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