Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [214]
Il “Milione” veneto, edited by Alvaro Barbieri and Alvise Andreose, with an introduction by Lorenzo Renzi (who also refers to the possibility of manuscripts chained to the Rialto Bridge), contains a comprehensive, detailed account of the origins and relationships among various Marco Polo manuscripts. Renzi credits Luigi Foscolo Benedetto, who “untangled the dense mass of manuscripts…and devised the first systematic review of the multitude of witnesses” in 1928. Drawing on Benedetto’s work, Renzi summarizes, in part: “The more than 130 codices that have handed down to us the different versions of Polo’s work can be split into two main groups, labeled A and B, whose archetypes issue from a partially corrupted apocryphal version (01) of the lost original (0). Between the two derivative copies of 01, that differed one from the other for the degree of deterioration of the reading and reduction of content, the prototype of the B group was closer to the model. Group A is further divided into F, the only complete testimony in original linguistic form, and three conspicuous families that emanate from three lost Franco-Italian exemplars (F1, F2, F3), similar to F, but unrelated to it. F1 is the model of the rewriting in good French attributed to Grégoire (FG); from F2 issues the most ancient Tuscan abridgement (TA); from F3 the version of the Veneto region that we hereby publish. Group B comprises instead four editions that represent, to different degrees and levels, ‘a phase before F,’ meaning a more conservative stage in the transmission of Marco’s book. It includes Z, a Latin version of rich content, V, a rather rough translation in Veneto dialect, L, a Latin abridgement and VB, a very free Venetian re-elaboration, full of interpolations and misunderstandings. These texts presume lost Franco-Italian influences that should have been very close to F in form and subject, but are generally more correct in interpretation and more complete through certain passages….”
Some scholars insist that Columbus made his annotations in 1497 or 1498. For an extended discussion of the issue, see Larner’s Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World, beginning on page 155, and El libro de Marco Polo anotado por Cristóbal Colón, edited by Juan Gil. Unlike Larner, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, in his Columbus, pages 36–37, states that the admiral consulted Marco’s Travels in advance of the first voyage to the New World.
Hart (Marco Polo) presents the Samuel Purchas quotation on page 111. John Livingston Lowes, in The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, page 324 and following, opines that Coleridge’s memory was faulty, and that the poet actually had his famous opium dream in 1796. Caroline Alexander’s noteworthy study The Way to Xanadu contains a discussion of Coleridge and Marco Polo on pages xiv and xv.
In The Medieval Expansion of Europe, second edition, pages 194–195, J.R.S. Phillips discusses Mandeville and Polo. The enlightening introduction by C.W.R.D. Moseley to the Penguin edition of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, pages 9–39, is also worth consulting.
Yule and Cordier’s assessments of Marco Polo can be found in volume 1, pages 1 and 106–107, of their edition of the Travels. Despite its devotion to the minutiae of Marco’s account, and its charming record of correspondence among Victorian gentleman travelers concerning their impressions of Polo, their massive edition has its idiosyncrasies, of which the modern reader should be cognizant. When they find a passage too explicit for their taste, they silently omit it. More seriously, they delete entire sections late in Marco’s account, claiming that they are inferior, or, as they put it (volume 2, page 456), “are the merest verbiage and repetition of narrative formulae without the slightest value”—a highly questionable assessment, and not in keeping with their generally estimable scholarship.
The question of maps is one of the most vexed in all of Polo scholarship. It is possible