Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [190]
By itself, Marco’s documented wealth did not qualify him as a member of the Venetian financial elite, but it may not tell the entire story. A significant part, or even most, of his assets may have been in the gems he carried back with him from Asia. Rubies and sapphires lent themselves to concealment from commercial rivals, tax collectors, and even family members. Marco and his father and uncle had lived for years among the Mongols while concealing gems in the lining of their robes, and the story of Maffeo’s despair on learning that his wife had inadvertently given his apparently ordinary robe to a beggar suggests the critical importance of those hidden assets. It would have been natural for Marco to continue the custom of hiding his gems after he returned to Venice, even until his death. If this is the case, then the true dimensions of his wealth escaped the notice of the local authorities and will likely never be known.
AS THE HOURS DRAGGED BY, Marco approached death. According to Venetian law, the day commenced at sunset, and it was soon January 9. The all-important notary dated Marco’s will January 8, which meant that his life’s journey ended between sunsets on January 8 and 9, 1324.
The world’s most famous traveler was a prisoner for long periods of his life. He endured decades in two separate forms of confinement, the first when Kublai Khan held him in luxurious captivity in China, the second when he became a prisoner of war in Genoa. Paradoxically, it was during those periods that he was at his best. He had possessed immense patience in the face of trying conditions. That resolve made it possible for him to return safely home from his wayfaring, and later to complete his account in the unlikeliest of circumstances, an enemy prison. Infused with his restless spirit, the Travels survives as both a historical chronicle and a work of art, a depiction of vanished worlds in the form of a timeless adventure.
VENETIAN FUNERALS of the era were public ceremonies redolent of Byzantine influences. The deceased was taken from his deathbed and placed on a floor or pallet strewn with ashes. Then a mournful bell tolled, and priests chanted prayers in Latin. The widow was expected to display tremendous public grief, crying, howling, and pulling her hair out by the roots. When funeral assistants wrapped the body in a sheet and tried to carry it out the door to its final resting place, she was expected to block their path and carry on with renewed force. As the mourners took the body to the church, family members followed close behind, bewailing their loss in as public a manner as they could muster; the histrionics were repeated at the grave site. The poor of Venice displayed the corpses of family members on the street for days as a way to collect alms from passersby, but the wealthy Polo family arranged for Marco’s prompt burial in the cemetery of the church of San Lorenzo, close to his father, Niccolò, with whom he had traveled the world. Some years later, in 1348, the will of his youngest daughter, Moreta, indicated her desire to be buried in the same location, “in the tomb of my parents.”
Tradition holds that Marco’s final resting place was marked by his father’s sarcophagus, and it appears that the most famous Venetian citizen of all had no monument of his own, except, of course, his Travels.
Most of Marco Polo’s contemporaries scorned or simply ignored his feats, but eventually history remembered.
EPILOGUE
The Storyteller
DESPITE THE ESSENTIAL ACCURACY of the Travels, the name Il Milione clung to Marco Polo after his death. He was seen, initially, more as an entertainer and fabricator than as a historian. For instance, Amalio Bonaguisi, a Florentine translator of Marco’s account, wrote in 1392 that the Venetian had undertaken his labors purely “to pass the time and [avoid] melancholy.” He warned those who read his version of the Travels, “the contents appear to me to be incredible things and his statements appear to me to be not lies but more likely miracles.”
Bonaguisi’s reaction