Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [194]
THE FIRST PRINTED VERSION of the Travels appeared in Nuremburg in 1477, about 175 years after Rustichello set the account down in manuscript form. The book featured a full-page idealized representation of the young traveler on the frontispiece. Demand for Marco’s work led to a second German printed version, this one produced in Augsburg, four years later. Printers in other countries followed suit. Pipino’s rendition of Marco’s account served as the basis of a popular French translation (not to be confused with the French dialect in which Rustichello likely wrote), issued in book form in 1556.
For many years, the leading Italian version was Ramusio’s. It was published in several editions, with the definitive impression appearing in 1557, two years after Ramusio’s death in Padua (and more than two centuries after Marco’s death). The endlessly enthusiastic Ramusio, who was privy to the gossip surrounding Marco, breathed new life into the Venetian traveler’s legend and fully realized his contribution to understanding the world in which they lived. “Seeing that so many details of that part of the world of which…Marco has written are being discovered in our time,” Ramusio wrote, “I have judged it a reasonable thing to make his book come to light with the help of different copies written more than two hundred years ago (in my judgment) perfectly correct and by a great length much more faithful than that which is read hitherto; so that the world should not lose that fruit which can be gathered from so great diligence and industry about so honorable a science.”
Of all the explorers, ancient and modern, Marco Polo impressed Ramusio as the greatest—greater, even, than Columbus. Ramusio admitted his judgment was biased, for Columbus hailed from Venice’s archrival, Genoa, and sailed under the flag of rival Spain. Still, he opined, “it seems like to me that a [voyage] by land should take precedence over one by sea,” considering the “enormous greatness of soul with which so difficult an enterprise was carried out and brought to conclusion along such an extraordinarily long and harsh route,” not to mention the “lack of food—not for days, but for months.”
Columbus carefully annotated a copy of Marco’s account during the four voyages he made to the New World, as the Genoese navigator tried in vain to find Marco Polo’s China. (It could be said that Marco misled rather than inspired Columbus into thinking that China lay in proximity to the Caribbean.) In his personal copy of the Italian translation of the Travels, Columbus made copious marginal notes indicating that he paid particular attention to potential cash crops that Marco mentioned—pepper, cinnamon, and cloves—all of which Columbus dreamed of importing to Europe at great profit. And, hoping to take up where the Polo company left off, he planned to meet the “Grand Khan” and present him with official letters from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, his royal sponsors, and instruct him in the ways of the West, especially Christianity—all without realizing that the Mongol Empire was a thing of the past.
The Travels inspired another impressionable voyager, a young diplomat named Antonio Pigafetta, who served as the official chronicler of Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe, beginning in 1519. One of only eighteen survivors of that disastrous expedition, Pigafetta wrote his account of the circumnavigation in emulation of his hero and fellow Venetian, Marco Polo.
INCOMPLETE AND INCONSISTENT, the Travels remained an unfinished masterpiece that spoke to succeeding generations of voyagers and visionaries alike.
On a summer’s day in 1797, relates Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor