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number of learned and wise men who might instruct them in our faith, but those who were sent were forced to return home because of difficulties they encountered along the way.” As Paolo continued his tale, it became apparent that he relied heavily on Marco Polo’s popular account, which concerned the Venetian’s adventures in Asia from 1279 to 1295, and on the stories of a Chinese ambassador. In the physician’s telling, the events of two centuries before seemed to be happening in the present as he wove the two eras into a tapestry of royal palaces, rivers of great length and breadth, “vast numbers of cities” dotting their banks (in one case, two hundred cities along the length of a single river), “broad bridges made entirely of marble and adorned with marble pillars” over which flowed spices, precious stones, gold, silver, and many other “things of great value.”

How to get there? Simple, according to Master Paolo the physician: “From the city, in a line directly to the west, there are twenty-six spaces marked on the map, each representing two hundred and fifty miles, before you arrive at the most noble city of Quinsay”—Marco Polo’s distinctive name for the capital city of Hangzhou, and a dead giveaway of Master Paolo’s source—“which is a hundred miles in circumference,” and, in the same breath, of “Çipango,” Marco Polo’s name for Japan. “This island is most rich in gold and pearls and precious stones, and you should know that the temples and royal palaces are covered in solid gold.” Once again, getting there posed no problem to the initiated. “Because the route is unknown, all these things are hidden from us, even though one can voyage there without danger or difficulty.”

Columbus responded that he could find this extraordinary realm by sailing along a route indicated on a map supplied by Master Paolo, who was, it bears repeating, no navigator. Elated by the endorsement, he replied, “I am gratified to find my map so well understood and to learn that such a voyage is not only theoretically possible but will now become a fact and a source of honor and estimable gain and the greatest fame among all Christian men.” As if he were dispatching Columbus himself, he promised a voyage of “powerful kingdoms and noble cities and the richest of provinces abounding in all manner of goods that are much in demand,” not to mention spices and gems, rulers even more eager to have contact with the West than the West was to have contact with them, to exchange wisdom, knowledge, and religion. “I do not wonder that you, as a man of great courage,” Master Paolo wrote to Columbus, “should find your heart inflamed with the desire to put this enterprise into effect.”

Columbus enlarged upon these clues of undiscovered western islands with scholarly efforts of his own. He studied Ptolemy’s influential Geography, which had reached Europe from Constantinople in about AD 1400. In 1406–1409, Jacopo Angeli da Scarperia translated the text into Latin. It became the first book to be printed with engraved illustrations, in an edition published in Bologna dating from 1477, and was subsequently translated into several European languages. Ptolemy’s cartography was both inspiring and greatly misleading. Ptolemy, who lived in the second century AD, underestimated the size of the world by one-sixth. He did not know of the existence of the American continent, or of the Pacific Ocean, the largest body of water on the planet. The problem of determining longitude had yet to be solved, and would not be until the late eighteenth century. For all these reasons, relying on Ptolemy’s Geography proved as deceptive as it was inspirational.

Somewhere, at the confluence of Ptolemy’s flawed cartography, the legends of antiquity, Marco Polo’s account, and sailors’ anecdotes lay clues of a great prize waiting to be discovered. Columbus had his plan, and now he needed the backing of a powerful royal sponsor, and money.

Living in Portugal with his well-connected Portuguese wife, Columbus naturally presented his proposal to the Portuguese king. By this time, Columbus considered