Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [204]
THE EPIGRAPHS to the chapters of this book are taken from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan.
PROLOGUE / The Commander
Concerning Marco Polo’s involvement in the Battle of Curzola, some commentators have suggested that Marco blundered into combat while leading a merchant vessel rather than a warship. Still others insist that he did not participate in the battle at all and was instead captured in a subsequent military skirmish at sea. Henry H. Hart’s brief, pithy Marco Polo, Venetian Adventurer, page 207, has Dandolo’s speech at the height of the Battle of Curzola, but Hart is among those who place Marco Polo’s capture in a different engagement between the Venetians and the Genoese.
Although Venice and Genoa were both city-states famed for their aggressive maritime trade, they were very different from each other. The Genoese were stubborn individualists. Their trading ventures were privately financed, and their sense of civic duty was minimal. Venetians, in contrast, were known for their collective behavior, and for their exclusiveness. Their ships were communal property, their sailors not permitted to serve other governments.
Henry Yule and Henri Cordier, volume 1, page 55, of their version of The Description of the World, provide a variant account of Marco Polo’s capture and imprisonment, quoting the Dominican friar Jacopo d’Acqui’s Imago mundi. Many details are familiar, but d’Acqui says that Polo was captured in a different military engagement. There is no reason to assume that d’Acqui has more claim to accuracy than other sources, but he was a contemporary of Marco Polo, and therefore wrote shortly after the events. But even d’Acqui commits obvious errors. Maria Bussagli’s essay in Marco Polo: Venezia e l’Oriente, edited by Alvise Zorzi, contains another variant. In this version, Marco Polo was on his way back to Trebizond to recover valuable possessions that had been confiscated several years earlier. I have also consulted Annali genovesi dopo Caffaro e suoi continuatori.
Few accounts of the naval actions off Curzola in 1298 fully agree on dates. For a variant, see W. Carew Hazlitt, The Venetian Republic, volume 1, pages 454–472. Conditions in a Genoese jail are described at length in Leondia Balestrieri’s “Le Prigioni della Malapaga.”
CHAPTER ONE / The Merchants of Venice
For a lucid exploration of the medieval ethos of Marco Polo’s era, see Janet Abu-Lughod’s eye-opening work, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350, and Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, especially pages 55–56. The best modern history of Venice is John Julius Norwich’s A History of Venice. Mrs. Oliphant’s The Makers of Venice: Doges, Conquerers, and Men of Letters also has its charms.
The surprisingly sophisticated world of medieval Venetian and Italian contracts and commercial practices has been described in detail in Robert S. Lopez and Irving W. Raymond’s Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World; pages 14–15 and 168–178 are especially illuminating. See Benjamin Z. Kedar’s Merchants in Crisis: Genoese and Venetian Men of Affairs and the Fourteenth-century Depression for additional context. Lore about veneto comes from Jan Morris’s effervescent account, The World of Venice, page 31 in the 1993 Harcourt Brace edition.
Some of what is known about Marco Polo’s early years can be found in Hart’s Marco Polo, which has more context than biography, but see especially pages xvii, 55–56, and 63–64.
Rodolfo Gallo discusses the Ca’ Polo in “Nuovi documenti riguardanti Marco Polo e la sua famiglia,” note 3.
In Venice: Lion City, pages 30 and following, Garry Wills analyzes the basis of power in the Republic. Michael Yamashita describes the ceremony of marriage to the sea in Marco Polo: A Photographer