Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [196]
ALTHOUGH MARCO POLO was nearly forgotten, his book—considered an unclassifiable amalgam of fact and fiction, a gazetteer gone wild—lived on. That state of affairs began to change in the nineteenth century, when researchers tried to bring order to the chaotic state of Polo scholarship and to produce an authoritative version of his account. Drawn to Marco’s book as an expression of orientalisme, the vogue for Asian art and thought, the French were in the vanguard. In 1824, the Société de Géographie, based in Paris, issued a carefully annotated edition of the Travels. No longer did scholarship dwell on what was false; it was now concerned with documenting how much of Marco’s account was true. Despite his rhetorical excess, most of what he described withstood scrutiny. The Travels came to be seen as a storehouse of generally reliable information about an inaccessible continent, and it attracted cadres of new admirers. What once sounded like fantasy came to be seen increasingly as history.
Four decades later, M. G. Pauthier, a French linguist, compared Polo’s account, as expressed in the 1824 edition, against Mongol and Chinese annals and realized that it was not some fable, drug-induced or otherwise, but a strikingly accurate report. The annals confirmed that Marco diligently recorded commercial activity, court rituals, and exotic religious and burial and marital customs.
Pauthier’s scholarly labors were enhanced and embellished by two subsequent commentators, Henry Yule and Henri Cordier, who burnished Marco’s reputation for English-speaking audiences everywhere. For these two scholars, the chief “fascination” of Polo’s account resided not in its content, or the unique way it came into being, but in its “difficult questions.” In ringing tones, Yule and Cordier declared, “It is a great book of puzzles, whilst our confidence in the man’s veracity is such that we feel certain every puzzle has a solution.” With the vigor and certainty of the era to which they belonged, they proposed to find the answers. Drawing on a global network of correspondents, they tirelessly pinned down Marco’s references to people and places across Asia, and demonstrated that he could have written his account only from direct observation. Yule and Cordier considered this evidence sufficient vindication for their peripatetic hero, but their prodigious fact-checking partly obscured Marco’s imaginative essence. If he had simply written an encyclopedia of Asia, it is unlikely that his work would have been as popular and influential as it became.
Yule and Cordier’s heavily annotated edition, four times longer than Marco’s original, portrayed him as a harbinger of the Age of Discovery and the most ambitious and accomplished of all explorers—more successful even than Ferdinand Magellan and Christopher Columbus, who were inspired in part by Marco’s travels. Unlike them, Marco did not wield a sword; he launched no wars, took no slaves, killed no enemies. Alone among the journeys of European explorers, his served as the basis for works of literature whose impact continues to be felt. “He was the first traveller to trace a route across the whole longitude of Asia,” Yule and Cordier observed with a flourish,
naming and describing kingdom and after kingdom which he had seen with his own eyes: the Deserts of Persia, the flowering plateaux and wild gorges of Badakhshan, the jade-bearing rivers of Khotan, the Mongolian Steppes, cradle of the power which