ABSTRACT

The earliest text of Marco Polo's book available to people today is a manuscript written in French in the early fourteenth century. The Paris MS is almost the only surviving representative of the version of the text it contains. There is a burned-out fragment in the British Museum which appears to be the remnant of another copy of the same recension, but it was written in the fifteenth century and is very corrupt. Most medieval copies of Marco Polo's book were of a Latin translation made by the Dominican, Francesco Pipino, sometime in the second decade of the fourteenth century. The man identified as Polo's co-author in the first chapter of the F text is Rusticiaus de Pise, a name usually expressed in an Italianate form as Rustichello. Rusticiens de Pise claimed to have taken his Arthurian material from a book lent to him by Edward, King of England.