Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [179]
Marco may have thrown himself recklessly into the conflict out of boredom with his life. In Venice, he was hemmed in by gray, brown, and ocher buildings looming over cramped, sometimes fetid canals. Instead of roaming the Steppe on horseback, or trekking across deserts in a camel caravan, Marco was negotiating the streets of Venice, some of them so narrow that he had to turn sideways to thread his way along them. Instead of seeing all the way to the horizon, he looked no farther than the windows of his neighbors as they went about their domestic routines. The grandeur and sense of adventure had been drained from his life, replaced by the routines of the merchants of Venice, their accounts and debts, their tiresome lawsuits and contentious families. For the man who had ridden with the Mongols and worshipped with the Buddhists, these restraints may have become unbearable.
In 1298, Marco was only forty-three, still capable of responding to any hint of adventure that came his way. The Battle of Curzola, in which he was taken prisoner, was not the glorious occasion for which Venice had hoped. But it may have offered the escape that he needed.
It is possible that Marco’s capture by the Genoese and privileged confinement came as a relief, allowing him to keep his distance from Venice and its restraints for a while. Paradoxically, he was freer in jail, where his daily needs were met and his mind could roam across the face of the world—the Pamir highlands, the Gobi Desert and the emerald Steppe, the gers of Mongolia, all the way to the fantastic palaces of Cambulac and Xanadu. It took the ordeal of confinement in prison to get the world traveler to sit still long enough to tell his story, and it is easy to imagine him talking night and day about his adventures to Rustichello, who enthusiastically assembled Marco’s feverish outpourings for European consumption. It had been an open question as to whether Marco could persuade his contentious Venetian neighbors, let alone all of Europe, of his fabulous exploits, but his collaboration with Rustichello promised to do just that.
As a popular writer accustomed to filling out his tales with courtly Arthurian romances and stirring battle scenes, Rustichello had distinct ideas about how to embellish Marco’s factual account with stock elements. But the veteran merchant preferred to emphasize events he had witnessed. Yet Marco’s perspective differed from that of his audience; his assumptions about the world, and Christendom’s place in it, were not their assumptions. After decades abroad, he was steeped in Mongol customs, Mongol languages, and the Mongol worldview, and he looked at life through Mongol eyes—vital, barbaric, and reverent.
RUSTICHELLO OF PISA was not merely a romance writer. He belonged to a family of notaries, and was qualified in the profession. In Italy, notaries have long enjoyed high status. In Roman antiquity, they were august public officials who drew up contracts and financial arrangements, and recorded and approved transfers of property, deeds, and wills; they left the tedious work of copying to their slaves. Their name derived from a widely employed system of shorthand writing, known in Latin as notae Tironinae, after Cicero’s secretary, M. Tullius Tiro, said to have invented the system while taking down Cicero’s prolix