Marco Polo

by Laurence Bergreen

  VENETIAN FUNERALS of the era were public ceremonies redolent of Byzantine influences. The deceased was taken from his deathbed and placed on a floor or pallet strewn with ashes. Then a mournful bell tolled, and priests chanted prayers in Latin. The widow was expected to display tremendous public grief, crying, howling, and pulling her hair out by the roots. When funeral assistants wrapped the body in a sheet and tried to carry it out the door to its final resting place, she was expected to block their path and carry on with renewed force. As the mourners took the body to the church, family members followed close behind, bewailing their loss in as public a manner as they could muster; the histrionics were repeated at the grave site. The poor of Venice displayed the corpses of family members on the street for days as a way to collect alms from passersby, but the wealthy Polo family arranged for Marco’s prompt burial in the cemetery of the church of San Lorenzo, close to his father, Niccolò, with whom he had traveled the world. Some years later, in 1348, the will of his youngest daughter, Moreta, indicated her desire to be buried in the same location, “in the tomb of my parents.”

  Tradition holds that Marco’s final resting place was marked by his father’s sarcophagus, and it appears that the most famous Venetian citizen of all had no monument of his own, except, of course, his Travels.

  Most of Marco Polo’s contemporaries scorned or simply ignored his feats, but eventually history remembered.

  EPILOGUE

  The Storyteller

  DESPITE THE ESSENTIAL ACCURACY of the Travels, the name Il Milione clung to Marco Polo after his death. He was seen, initially, more as an entertainer and fabricator than as a historian. For instance, Amalio Bonaguisi, a Florentine translator of Marco’s account, wrote in 1392 that the Venetian had undertaken his labors purely “to pass the time and [avoid] melancholy.” He warned those who read his version of the Travels, “the contents appear to me to be incredible things and his statements appear to me to be not lies but more likely miracles.”

  Bonaguisi’s reaction was understandable. Marco’s collaborator, Rustichello, freely interpolated several Christian miracles in the belief that the story needed more excitement than it already had; in the process, the outright literary fabrications, though few in number, cast doubt on Marco’s actual experiences. “It may well be true that about which he tells,” Bonaguisi concluded, “but I do not believe it, though nonetheless there are found throughout the world many different things in one country and another…. I copied it for my pleasure…, not to be believed or credited.”

  This state of affairs was not as unlikely as it sounds because the only other account even roughly comparable to Marco Polo’s was a collection of tall tales and beguiling myths passed off as fact. Sir John Mandeville, whose Travels first appeared in a French edition in 1356, might be called the English Marco Polo, except that Sir John in all likelihood never traveled farther than a well-stocked nobleman’s library. Identified only as an English knight from Hertfordshire, the mysterious Mandeville said that he left home in 1322—or, in some versions, 1332—and traveled to the Holy Land, and later on to India, Persia, and even China, and returned home in 1356 (or 1366). He claimed to have shown his report to the pope, who proclaimed it true. But the account was actually an artful compilation of stories gleaned from historians and others—including Pliny, Herodotus, and the mythical Prester John, to whom Marco was also susceptible—as well as from various Alexander romances, legends about Alexander the Great. He also incorporated works of lesser-known writers such as Albert of Aix, William of Tripoli, Odoric of Pordenone, and Vincent of Beauvais, who in turn had borrowed heavily from authors of antiquity. Fittingly, Mandeville’s opus was later pillaged by others bent on compiling their own fabulous histories.

  Mandeville’s imaginary Travels became a popular work in late medieval and Renaissance England. In the fifteenth century, more than five times as many editions of Mandeville’s book were published as of Polo’s. For at least two centuries, the two books were often bracketed together as fanciful, entertaining accounts of voyages that might have been. By the early eighteenth century, Mandeville’s work underwent a reevaluation and was finally debunked as “enchanted ground and Fairyland.”

  Unlike Mandeville, who set out to fabricate, Marco believed every word he dictated; however, his notion of the truth was not merely literal but incorporated subjective, imaginative, and even mythological elements in an attempt to fashion a larger, more persuasive reality. Had Marco relied on facts alone, his account would have been as dry as those left by his clerical predecessors. Although it contained puffery, it was not a fabrication, and he expected—in fact, demanded—that his audience believe every word. While this approach may appear to have placed a huge burden on him, since he was obliged to attest to the veracity of all he described, the burden was transferred to his readers, whom he repeatedly challenged to accept whatever he had to say.

  Two decades of travel had taught Marco that fact was stranger than fiction, but he strained to persuade others of that paradox. Did any writer equipped with Marco’s experience ever feel the need to boast as much as he did, or to plead with his audience to accept what he was saying as the truth? Yet he possessed a unique asset to convince the doubters: personal reflections as well as historical commentary about the most powerful ruler in the world, Kublai Khan. Without his portrayal of this larger-than-life figure, Marco’s account would have been just another colorful report of life on the Silk Road. His long service to the Mongol leader lifted his book onto another plane entirely; more than being a mere traveler, he led a charmed existence at the juncture of two civilizations, acting as an intermediary and, best of all, living to tell the tale.

  Yet Marco has his blind spots. Once Kublai Khan enters his decline, the Venetian lacks a vocabulary to describe the deterioration of his former hero. Elsewhere, he is prone to sudden enthusiasms—for women, or art, or even religions—which he discards as quickly as he takes them up, as if he were a merchant in a bazaar, handling, considering, and finally rejecting the merchandise placed before him. His grasp of history is unreliable, in spite of his efforts to appear learned. He knows a little bit about many things, but he remains a dazzling dilettante.

  THREE CENTURIES after Marco’s death, Francesco Sansovino’s guidebook to Venice, considering the Church of San Lorenzo, mentioned the Venetian traveler in conjunction with Columbus, the Genoese navigator and explorer: “Under the portico is buried Marco Polo, surnamed Milione, who wrote the travels of the new world, and who was the first before Christopher Columbus who discovered new countries.” Had Marco been alive to receive these accolades, he would have accepted them readily, although he might have pointed out that he did not think of himself as an explorer of unknown lands but as an exceptionally well-traveled merchant following traditional routes, making observations of ancient worlds in Asia and in India. The lands and peoples he investigated were new only to Europe.

  It appears that by 1685 Marco’s reputation in Venice was secure at last. In his encyclopedic ecclesiastical history, Tomaso Fugazzoni, describing repairs to the Church of San Lorenzo, remarked, “In the center of the portico was the burial place of the most famous Marco Polo, noble Venetian”—a description grand enough to satisfy even its subject’s vanity.

  But the site did not survive. By 1827, Emmanuele Antonio Cicogna, writing in his comprehensive catalog of Venetian inscriptions, mentioned the lost memorials of the Polo family. In fact, the entire church of San Lorenzo had fallen into decrepitude. It was later rebuilt, and more recent investigations suggest that the bones of the Polos and others buried within its walls were collected in a common grave, and perhaps later used as filling to support the new floor of the remodeled church. In any event, the sarcophagus and other items marking the final resting place of Marco, his parents and uncle, and his wife and children were all lost.

  If any surviving member of the Polo family could be said to have carried on the family legacy, it was Fantina, the oldest of the three daughters, and she did so not as
an explorer but as a persistent litigant. Records show that she was in and out of court defending the inheritance she received from her father; on August 4, 1362, she claimed that her late husband had fraudulently appropriated her legacy before he died in the Venetian colony of Crete. For decades thereafter, Polos squabbled among themselves as they competed for the assets of the family—its gold, spices, fabrics, and real estate. None of them appears to have taken an interest in or furthered the cause of Marco’s greatest asset, the chronicle of his travels. That mission was left to others, as manuscripts proliferated across Europe, and the Travels took on a life of its own, far removed from the provincial circles of Venice.

  MARCO POLO’S collaboration with Rustichello of Pisa gave rise to a cottage industry of reproduction, all of it spontaneous and independent. The earliest patrons and readers of the Travels were scholars, monks, and interested noblemen. Less-educated and less-privileged people in Venice and elsewhere, if they knew of the book at all, relied on hearsay concerning Marco Polo’s fantastic account.

  One hundred and nineteen early manuscript versions of Marco’s book survive. All are different. An early version, in the Tuscan dialect, may have been composed while Marco was alive. The Travels soon appeared in other European tongues, including Venetian, German, English, Catalan, Aragonese, Gaelic, and of course Latin. In an era before movable type, the Travels received wide distribution, but others outdid it for popularity. At least 275 manuscripts of John Mandeville’s fictional account circulated, and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, no fewer than 500 manuscripts of the Divine Comedy placed Dante’s vision before the reading public.

  In contrast, Venetian skepticism rendered Marco a prophet without honor in his own land. Dante, his contemporary, never mentioned him (although some scholars believe they have discerned a cryptic reference to the traveler). Of all the early manuscripts, just two circulated in Marco’s native city, and they were dated 1445 and 1446, nearly 150 years after Marco served time in Genoa with Rustichello. A fortunate few may have been able to consult a public copy of the book—version unknown—said to be chained to the Rialto Bridge, in the heart of Venice’s commercial district. Jostled by bickering merchants and tradesmen, dedicated readers would have gathered to be transported to another world, one inhabited by Kublai Khan, his alluring concubines, and his limitless armies—the fruit of Marco Polo’s travels no less than of his imagination.

  Marco’s sensational manuscript eventually became general knowledge. Ramusio’s claim that “all Italy in [a] few months was full of it” was something of a well-intended exaggeration. In reality, the work was disseminated slowly, one handwritten copy at a time, and required more than a century to win a permanent place in the European historical and literary consciousness. Marco Polo eventually attained the status of a culture carrier, one of the rare individuals of wide experience who embody and transmit an entire ethos to succeeding generations. The culture was that of the global traveler and trader, comprising numerous subcultures—those of the Mongols, the Chinese, the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent, and Asian tribes. His reach extended from Armenia to Zanzibar. His portrayals of these cultures, and especially of China, became Europe’s primary source of information about them until the nineteenth century. Marco provided Europe with a description not of the world, as his original title promised, but of its missing half. In the process, he rescued crucial people and events from utter obscurity.

  EDITORS AND SCHOLARS attempted to reconcile the disorderly manuscripts, to verify or express skepticism about various details, and to guide readers through the distant and occasionally unfathomable Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Among the most prominent was a monk who was none too happy about the task of translating the immense manuscript into Latin. “I, Brother Francesco Pipino of Bologna of the Order of the Brothers Preachers,” he began, “am forced by many of my fathers and masters to reduce the true and faithful translation from the common tongue”—probably Tuscan or a Venetian dialect—“to Latin.” He completed his work between 1310 and 1314, during the last years of Marco’s life. The manuscript that Pipino used was close to the original, but it seems that Marco kept adding to his account until his death. For this reason, Pipino feared that his scholarly translation might not be the last word, and furthermore, it would lack the raw excitement of the “common tongue.”

  Whatever his misgivings, Pipino brought distinct religious ideas to bear on his labors. The Latin translation was intended to brief the monks of his religious order about the East in preparation for establishing distant missions. He edited with an eye toward propriety and religious doctrine, and omitted sexually explicit references as well as many of Marco’s sly double entendres. When he felt it necessary, Pipino interpolated words of his own. He expressed the hope that his pious readers “seeing the gentile peoples wrapped in such darkness and blindness and in such uncleanness may give thanks to God who lighting his faithful with the light of truth has deigned to call them from so dangerous darkness into his wonderful light.”

  Marco’s spiritual perceptions throughout his account are, of course, far more nuanced and paradoxical than Fra Pipino’s. Although Marco, for example, never gained an appreciation of the subtlety, power, and sophistication of Islamic culture, Pipino outdid him by inserting the world “hated” or similar adjectives each time the Venetian referred to Muslims or infidels; the result exaggerated Marco’s indifference toward Islam to the point of outright hostility—but the rancor existed in Pipino’s mind, not Marco’s. Nevertheless, Pipino’s distortions survive even in some modern versions of the Travels.

  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 p
aid 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 confines of Somerset and Devonshire.” Coleridge was twenty-five years old, the youngest of fourteen children of a country vicar. He had recently left Jesus College, Cambridge, without a degree, and set his heart on becoming a poet and utopian radical. Plagued by an unstable constitution and extreme melancholy, he sought relief in laudanum, a tincture of opium.

  “In consequence of a slight indisposition,” he continues, “an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence…in ‘Purchas His Pilgrimage’”—the chronicle published in 1613 by Samuel Purchas, which incorporated broad swaths of Marco’s book. “In Xanadu did Cublai Can build a stately palace,” wrote Purchas, never imagining he would inspire some of the most famous words in English poetry, words that would be attributed to someone else, “encompassing sixteen miles of plain grounde with a wall, wherein are fertile Meadows, pleasant Springs, delightful Streames, and all sort of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may be removed from place to place…Here the Kubla Khan commanded a palace to be built, and stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed within a wall.”