Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [181]
Despite his limitations, Rustichello ultimately succeeded in his task. Without the stubborn Pisan to force the Venetian wayfarer to sit still long enough to dictate his overflowing reminiscences, the story of Marco’s travels would never have been written. It would have remained nothing more than outlandish scuttlebutt among the fraternity of merchants traveling the Silk Road, and the stories that Marco told would have died with him.
SEASONED ROMANCE WRITER that he was, Rustichello of Pisa did not hesitate to include a colorful, entertaining battle scene lifted nearly word for word from one of his earlier works. He borrowed the opening of his earlier success, Méliadus, a compilation of traditional Arthurian romances, employing nearly the same words for the introduction to Marco Polo’s account.
“Lords, Emperors, Kings, Dukes and Marquesses, Counts, Knights, and Burgesses, and all people who are pleased and wish to know the different generations of men and the diversities of the different regions and lands of the world,” Rustichello begins, “take then this book and have it read, and here you will find all the greatest marvels and the great diversities of the Greater and Lesser Armenia, and of Persia, Media, Turkey, and of the Tartars and India and of many other provinces about Asia Media and part of Europe, going toward the Greek wind, levant, and tramontaine, just as our book will tell you clearly in order, as Master Marco Polo, wise and noble citizen of Venice, relates because he saw them with his own eyes.”
From that point forward, Marco’s account departs from traditional romances, and he emerges as the beguiling and boisterous traveler of renown, a man who became the intimate of Kublai Khan, and even something of a Mongol himself. Caught up in their mutual excitement, the collaborators remark that no one, neither “Christian, Saracen, nor pagan nor Tartar nor Indian nor any man of any kind…saw and knew or inquired so much of the different parts of the world and of the great wonders so much as this Master Marco Polo searched out and knows.” With that, his tale takes on an unpredictable life of its own.
Marco’s voice, even when adulterated by Rustichello’s conventional derring-do, is like no other, one moment as dry and precise as the tax assessor and merchant he had been, the next as florid as a fabulist, his sense of conviction lightened with a conspiratorial wink. If this narrative voice, as rendered by Rustichello, captures the energy and intensity of the Marco Polo who appeared before his Genoese captors, it is easy to understand why he transfixed them. Only Marco had had the luck, for good or ill, to be imprisoned within the Mongol Empire for decades, and only Marco possessed the sympathetic imagination to identify completely with it, and to portray it with passion and authenticity.
NO ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT survives from the months that Polo and Rustichello spent together in prison. Produced before the invention of movable type in the West, the account was circulated throughout Europe in handmade copies in different languages, transcribed by monks, and collected by nobles for their libraries. In the process, it was often altered—sometimes intentionally and sometimes through sheer carelessness or accident. As a result, many sections are plainly out of order; often, chapters, paragraphs, and even sentences appear in the wrong place, breaking the narrative flow.
On the basis of internal evidence—episodes that Marco promises to narrate, but that never turn up in the narrative—it is incomplete, particularly the latter chapters. It is not that Marco’s energy is flagging; whole sections seem to be missing or truncated. In the absence of a definitive manuscript, scholars and translators have relied on the incomplete versions that have turned up in libraries and archives, both secular and religious, over the centuries, although the versions vary greatly, with some containing many more chapters than others. None