An introduction to The Travels of Marco Polo

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SOURCE: An introduction to The Travels of Marco Polo, translated by Ronald Latham, Penguin Books, 1958, pp. vii-xxix.

[In the following excerpt, Latham examines Rusticello's contribution to Polo's book and asserts that, while Polo's observations in other fields tend to be conservative, his remarks on the "human geography" of the places he visited are outstanding.]

The book most familiar to English readers as The Travels of Marco Polo was called in the prologue that introduced it to the reading public at the end of the thirteenth century a Description of the World (Divisament dou Monde). It was in fact a description of a surprisingly large part of the world—from the Polar Sea to Java, from Zanzibar to Japan—and a surprisingly large part of it from first-hand observation. The claim put forward in the Prologue, that its author had travelled more extensively than any man since the Creation, is a plain statement of fact, so far at least as it relates to anyone who has left a record of his travels. Even among the Arab globe-trotters he had no serious competitor till Ibn Batuta, two generations later. And to western Christendom the world he revealed was almost wholly unknown. Some stretches of the trail he blazed were trodden by no other European foot for over 600 years—not, perhaps, till the opening of the Burma Road during the last war. And the task of putting it on the map, in the most literal sense, is not yet complete.

The book can be enjoyed by the modern reader, as it was by the contemporary, for its own sake, as a vivid description of a fantastic world so remote from his own experience that it scarcely matters whether he thinks of it as fact or fiction. The enquirer who wishes to explore this world more thoroughly, in order to read the book with a just appraisal of its place in the development of human intercourse and knowledge, will find himself embarked on a journey potentially as long and varied as Polo's own.…

In 1298, according to the Prologue, Marco was a prisoner of war at Genoa. Ramusio says that he had been captured at the battle of Curzola (6 September 1298), when serving as 'gentleman commander' of a Venetian galley. But this again appears to be hearsay, if not mere conjecture. He was probably released under the terms of a peace treaty signed on 25 May 1299. At any rate, the captivity involved a period of enforced leisure, during which the restless wanderer had little to do but talk, and it is not surprising that his traveller's tales aroused the interest of his fellow prisoners. Among these was one Rusticello of Pisa, a romance-writer of some repute, who was interested in a more professional way. He had at one time enjoyed the patronage of Prince Edward of England, afterwards Edward I, and it is believed that, like the legate Tedaldo, he had travelled in his suite to Palestine. He may even have met the Polos there twenty-five years before, and must at least have known of their romantic mission. Now he was quick to perceive in Marco's narratives a new theme for his art, as picturesque as 'the matter of Britain' or 'the matter of Troy' or the legendary exploits of Alexander the Great—a theme that made up in novelty what it unfortunately lacked in love interest. Marco in his turn evidently cooperated by sending to Venice for his notes. And from this partnership of the merchant adventurer with the observant eye and retentive memory and the professional romancer with the all-too-fluent pen emerged one of the world's most remarkable books. We may regret that, with such incomparable material to work on, neither of the men was a literary genius—that Marco failed to impart, or Rustichello to elicit, a living drama of events and personalities, an image of the impact on a mind moulded by medieval Catholicism of a highly developed alien civilization. But genius of this order is rare. And the book the two collaborators actually produced, for which the literature of their day afforded no model, is sufficiently remarkable as it stands.

Rusticello's share in the joint venture has probably been underrated. Professor L. F. Benedetto, who produced the first critical edition of the Polo manuscripts in 1928, has clearly demonstrated, by comparison with his other writings, that Rustichello was responsible for the leisurely, conversational style of the oldest French manuscript, with its continual recapitulations and personal adjurations to the reader (Que vos en diroie? Si vos die; Sachiez por voire, etc.)—a seeming-artless style that reveals in fact the art of the story-teller in an age when stories were few and time was plentiful. He has also shown not only that the opening invocation to 'emperors and kings, dukes and marquises', etc. occurs verbatim in an Arthurian romance by Rusticello but that whole passages of narrative have been lifted with the minimum of adaptation from the same source. Thus the dramatic account of the welcome accorded to the Polos on their second visit to Kubilai and the commendation of the young Marco is closely modelled on Rusticello's previous description of the arrival of Tristan at King Arthur's court at Camelot—a description which already owed much to earlier writers and was of course in the central stream of romantic tradition. At the very outset a stock formula of knight errantry (il ne trevent aventure que a mentovoir face) is introduced into the report of a trade mission. With this clue to guide us we can safely see the hand of Rustichello in the conventional battle-pieces that largely fill the last chapter of the present work, with their monotonous harangues and their insistence on all the punctilio of 'Frankish' chivalry. It is tempting to go further. The sequence of the topographical survey is rather awkwardly broken by a series of digressions in which well-known legends of the Middle East— the miracle of the mountain, the tale of the Magi, the pretended paradise of Alamut—are related in the conventional romantic manner. Is it not possible that these stories, which could probably have been picked up by any visitor to the Holy Land, were inserted by Rustichello as a sop to his public, and that their attribution to Marco is a mere literary device? When we have travelled further east, outside the romancer's ken, such digressions become fewer and usually take the stock form of a battle-scene which may not owe more to Marco than a few names. There are other features of the book that are as likely to be due to Rustichello as to Marco, such as the tendency to glamorize the status of the Polos at the Tartar court, particularly their relation to the princesses entrusted to their care, the vein of facetiousness that often accompanies references to sexual customs, and the eagerness to acclaim every exotic novelty as a 'marvel' It is likely that without the aid of Rustichello Marco would never have written a best-seller. Conceivably he might have produced something not much more readable than Pegolotti's Handbook. More probably he would never have written a book at all.

As to Marco's own personality, apart from this book there are perhaps only two bits of evidence that throw any light on it at all. One is his will, dated 9 January 1323/4—a businesslike, unsentimental document by which he left the bulk of his possessions to be divided equally among his three daughters. The one human touch is the manumission of his Tartar slave Peter. The bequests of specified sums suggest a substantial but by no means colossal fortune. The second fact is his nickname of 'Million' (Il Milione), which appears in an official document of 1305; if this is really a tribute to his gift of 'talking big', it may well have been inspired by his book rather than by his conversation. He remains in fact a somewhat colourless personality, especially if we admit the possibility that such gleams of colour as appear in his book may be due to the refractive medium of the chronicler.

His travels are proof in themselves of enterprise, resource, and dogged endurance, and there can be no doubt that he travelled with his wits about him and his eyes open. Primarily they were the eyes of a practical traveller and a merchant, quick to notice the available sources of food and water along the route, the means of transport, and the obstacles interposed by nature or by man, and no less quick to observe the marketable products of every district, whether natural or manufactured, and the channels through which flowed the interlacing streams of export and import. Despite the ever-present risks of shipwreck, piracy, brigandage, extortion, and wild beasts, this was a world of highly organized commerce. And to Western merchants, who had hitherto known little more of it than its terminal points on the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, this inside information promised to be as useful as it was fascinating. The trade-routes followed by the Polos were mainly such as would quickly swallow the profits except on goods of very high value in proportion to their bulk. Hence in part that emphasis, to which the book owes much of its appeal, on precious gems and spices and gorgeous fabrics of silk and cloth of gold, as against the more humdrum commodities that formed the staple of medieval, as of modern, commerce. But we need not doubt that the cataloguing of these costly rarities gave pleasure to the author, as it has done to generations of readers.

From this practical standpoint, Marco judged town and countryside alike in terms of productivity: a 'fine' town is a thriving one, a 'fine' province a fertile one, and little use is made of more discriminating epithets. The descriptions of architecture and artefacts suggest a taste for efficiency, sound workmanship, costly materials, and bright colours rather than artistic sensibility. But there are hints of a feeling for natural scenery unusual in that age: the descriptions of the Pamirs and the Gobi reveal rather more than a recognition of the healthiness of the hill air and the desolation of the desert. The judgements passed on men and states show something of the same mercantile approach. The languages of medieval Europe had no word to express the concept civilization'; but Marco comes near to conveying the notion by his use of the word domesce; and he has a clear enough appreciation of its blessings. His 'good' men are hard-working, law-abiding folk who live by trade and industry si come bone jens doient faire; his 'bad' men are the indolent or unruly, the stuff that brigands and corsairs are made of. It is by a more chivalric standard, however, that he (or Rustichello) praises the prowess of the Tartar warriors or blames the climate of Lesser Armenia for the degeneracy of its inhabitants. His reference to the stinginess of the Kashgaris strikes a note of personal experience.

He is true to his age in classifying the people he encounters primarily on the basis of religion rather than of culture or colour. He does not, however, go much beyond the rudimentary classification into Christians, Jews, Saracens, and idolaters. While well aware that Nestorians, Jacobites, and Armenians are 'imperfect' Christians, he betrays no interest in doctrinal differences. Of the Jews, considering the part they played in international trade, he has surprisingly little to say. For Moslems, whom he persists in describing as 'worshippers of Mahomet', he has the traditional Christian hostility, embittered perhaps by commercial rivalry. It is in his attitude to 'idolaters', primarily Buddhists and Hindus, that he displays most clearly that tolerant attitude that we might expect from one who was in such a literal sense a man of the world. He admires the austerity of their holy men, even comparing the Buddha to a Christian saint, and acknowledges the efficacy of their humanitarian doctrines, though it cannot be said that he shows any insight into their philosophy of life. It has been suggested that he was deterred from speaking too openly on matters of religion by fear of ecclesiastical censure. It is even possible that the surviving manuscripts of his work have already undergone a certain process of censorship. Certainly, among those passages that are omitted by most of the manuscripts, there are several that might well have given offence to the church. Some of these betray just such an accommodating temper as we might expect to find in Marco himself; but others look more like the comments of some zealous churchman disgusted in a thoroughly orthodox manner by the lukewarmness of his fellow Christians.

In the field of natural history Marco's curiosity and powers of observation served him well. His descriptions of exotic plants, beasts, and especially birds are usually far more accurate and recognizable than those to be found in contemporary herbals and bestiaries. He was evidently a keen sportsman and shared that enthusiasm for falconry which was prevalent in his day among the aristocracies of Christendom, Islam, and the Far East alike. His curiosity, however, scarcely extended into the field of human history. Apart from echoes of Christian tradition and allusions to the Alexander legend, both of which may well be due to Rustichello, the horizon of his book barely extends beyond the rise of his Mongol patrons less than a century before. His accounts of the dynastic succession of the Khans and their mutual relationships are full of inaccuracies.… Even his narratives of contemporary campaigns are a disconcerting blend of fact and fable; and he gives little indication of the use of documentary sources. His distorted picture of earlier events is partly due to the role he assigns to 'Prester John'. It is possible that the original of this legendary priest-king was one of the Christian rulers of Abyssinia, whose successors were certainly identified with him in the fifteenth century. But in Polo's time his realm was generally believed to be somewhere in the Far East. As early as 1148 a disastrous defeat suffered by the Saracens in Turkestan was attributed to this mysterious champion of Christendom, though the actual victor was not in fact a Christian at all. Not long after this an unknown genius, possibly a Greek, had concocted a 'Letter of Prester John', purporting to be addressed to the two Christian Emperors and the Pope, which dwelt encouragingly on his power and benevolence towards the West and alluringly on the oriental splendour of his court. Thanks to this Letter, which soon became a best-seller, every European traveller in the East was on the look-out for Prester John, 'of whose great empire all the world speaks'. Some place clearly had to be found for him in Marco's narrative. He was actually identified (as he had been already by Roubrouck) with a Nestorian ruler of the Turkish Kerait clan named Togrul, known to the Chinese as Wang Khan, who played a prominent part in the early career of Chinghiz, at first as an ally, later as an enemy. His story is here romanticized in the Rustichello manner, and he is said to have passed on the title to a certain George, who is known from other sources as a Christian prince subject to Kubilai. Marco seems further to have confused the title Ung Khan, his version of Wang Khan, with Ung, which apparently denoted a tribe living near the Great Wall of China. This wall, which he never actually mentions, was called by Arab writers 'the Wall of Gog and Magog' and linked up with the legend that Alexander had cut off these barbarous tribes from the civilized world by a gigantic barrier. Marco's narrative had already located this barrier in a more traditional setting in the Caucasus; but the coincidence of the names Ung and Mungul (or Mongol) was too tempting; so Gog and Magog are perforce dragged in here. The whole passage exemplifies the sort of scholarly speculation from which the unscholarly Marco is on the whole singularly free.

The same freedom from speculation is a still more conspicuous quality of Marco Polo as a geographer. Apart from some confusion about the four rivers of Paradise he is scarcely ever influenced by those preconceptions about the shape and features of the earth that bedevil most medieval geographers, Christian, Moslem, and Chinese. A more learned writer might have avoided Polo's gaffe about travelling farther north than the Pole Star; but he would probably have been misled into more damaging errors. As a rule, Polo is content to plot the position and extent of countries, towns, and natural features according to a rough-and-ready framework of directions and distances that makes no exaggerated claims to precision. His favourite unit of distance, the 'day's journey', is obviously a highly elastic quantity, but no doubt sufficiently precise in its context for the traveller on a recognized caravan route. When he is reproducing hearsay evidence, as to the size of Java for instance or the trend of the Arabian coast, he is naturally liable to serious error. But his own observations, with due allowance for copyists' slips, are mostly pretty accurate. It would not be easy to translate them into a map, though they were certainly used by some cartographers in the fourteenth century; but they contained the essential data for a fairly reliable itinerary. We know that he fired the imagination of Columbus, who treasured a well-thumbed manuscript of his work and scribbled notes in the margin; but the Venetian cannot be held responsible for that fortunate underestimate of the size of the earth which encouraged the aspiring Genoese to seek for Cathay across the Atlantic.

It is when we turn to the wider field of 'geography' as the term is commonly used today, with an emphasis on 'human geography', that Polo's outstanding excellence is mostly clearly perceived. Instead of the picturesque fables that liven the pages of Sir John Mandeville and of many more authentic travellers, he gives us no less picturesque facts, and facts in great abundance. In no previous Western writer since Strabo, thirteen centuries before, and in none again for at least another two centuries, do we find anything remotely comparable with Polo's panorama of the nations. Persians, Turks, Tartars, Chinese, Tibetans, Indians, and a score of others defile before us, not indeed revealed in their inner thoughts and feelings, but faithfully portrayed in all such particulars as might meet the eye of an observant traveller, from the oddities of their physical features or dress to the multiplicity of strange customs by which they regulated their lives from the cradle to the grave. Faced with this superb tableau vivant, the most captious critic cannot but agree with Marco's own view, as modestly expressed in the Prologue: 'It would be a great pity if he did not have a written record made of all the things that he had seen and heard by true report, so that those who have not seen them and do not know them may learn them from this book.'

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