Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [212]
Francis Woodman Cleaves offers an exhaustive record of the sources of Kokachin’s travels in “A Chinese Source Bearing on Marco Polo’s Departure from China and a Persian Source on His Arrival in Persia.” The last leg of Marco’s journey receives colorful treatment by Mike Edwards in National Geographic, July 2001.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN / The Prodigal Son
The best, if not entirely reliable, source of information about Marco Polo’s life after his return from China can be found in the works of Giambattista Ramusio, a prominent Venetian official and an accomplished scholar of geography. Ramusio called his three-volume compilation of accounts by celebrated explorers Navigazioni e viaggi, and he led off with Marco’s chronicle, thus canonizing it. The well-connected Ramusio wrote that he believed the very first copy of Marco’s manuscript was in Latin; Ramusio based his translation on that manuscript and several others.
Although Ramusio sounds scholarly enough, he breathlessly reported and reinforced traditions concerning Marco Polo instead of relying on facts alone. Ramusio explained, “Because in the continual repetitions of the story that he gave more and more often when speaking of the magnificence of the Great Khan, he stated that his revenue was from ten to fifteen millions in gold, and in the way in speaking of many other riches of those countries, he spoke always in term of millions, they gave him as a nickname, Messer Marco Milioni, and thus I have seen it noted in public books of the Republic where mention is made of him, and the court of his house from that time to the present is commonly called the Corte del Milioni”—as it is to this day.
The story of the Polos’ return has been recounted by Hart (Marco Polo, page 171), among others. Ramusio’s comment about the “charming and gracious” Marco Polo can be found in Hart’s book, pages 175–177.
The best English-language account of the Republic’s travails is contained in John Julius Norwich’s A History of Venice. “For the past twenty years nothing seemed to have gone right for them,” he writes on page 173. “Militarily they had suffered defeats on land and sea, with serious losses, both in ships and human lives. They had been forced to watch, powerless, while the enemy penetrated to the very confines of the lagoon. Their neighbors, on many of whom they depended for trade, were in a greater or lesser degree unfriendly. Their chief colony, Crete, was once again in revolt. They had suffered the chilly joylessness—to say nothing of the spiritual dangers—of an interdict, the terrors of an earthquake, the misery of flood.”
Giorgio del Guerra’s Rustichello da Pisa has the fullest record of its subject’s life. For more on Rustichello’s efforts in the Arthurian romance genre, see Fabrizio Cigni’s Il romanzo arturiano di Rustichello da Pisa. John Larner, in Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World, pages 47–49, presents a precise analysis of Rustichello’s abilities and limitations.
It has long been assumed that Rustichello and Marco wrote their original manuscript in Latin, or perhaps an Italian dialect, but scholars have converged on French as the language in which they composed. As evidence, they cite a remark circulated by a Benedictine known as John the Long of Ypres; in 1350, he wrote that Marco’s book was originally composed “in the French vernacular”—for better or worse. Yule and Cordier (Travels, volume 1, page 83) offer a pithy assessment of Rustichello’s linguistic skills. “The author is at war with all the practices of French grammar; subject and object, numbers, moods, and tenses, are in consummate confusion,” they complain. “Italian words are constantly introduced, either quite in the crude or rudely Gallicized.” These grammatical and linguistic idiosyncrasies are consistent with the idea that the Venetian traveler dictated his account to the Tuscan romance writer, who wrote in French, “a language foreign to them