ABSTRACT

And so farewell Marco Polo, at any rate for the time being. What can we claim to know about you that we did not know before? Or is it a merely a matter of knowing better what we do not know? You almost certainly existed; although in some respects the testimony of other men, such as Pipino and Peter of Abano, are more certain indications of this than is your book. Your name belongs not with one book but with several, or conceivably with none at all. To accept the last we must suppose Rustichello a liar, which is very possible, for he had both motive and literary precedent, and Pipino also, who did not. Pipino says you lived, you travelled and you wrote a book, and it can therefore be our working presumption that you did so. This does not mean we need believe a word of what you have to tell us in the book. The possibility remains that you went no further east than Iraq or Persia; but it is unlikely, and those who would portray you as a fraud must show it point by point. In any case, it matters less to us that you may not in fact have visited every place you claim because others like you certainly did. When you left you were a pioneer, your father and uncle even more so; but by the time of your return, twenty years on and more, you can have been less extraordinary. So it is not your travels that make you a remarkable man. You are different from the rest because you produced a book; writing up one's travels was not then a modish thing to do. We need a motive, and the best we have so far puts you and Rustichello in a Genoese prison cell in 1298. But this is only part of it. Once a basic text existed it was tinkered with by copyists and translators, a process in which you may well have had a part. As for the contents of your book, they show you to be very much a creature of your place and time. The place is Europe, not Asia; and, to the 179extent that it is possible to be more precise, the time is the end of the century rather than the years you were away. Posterity was to be more impressed than were your own contemporaries. And what this says to us about you all is now the most important feature of your book, more revealing than the tedious enumeration of Chinese cities or the stories we all have heard before. If we take your book on your terms and allow you to speak for yourself, many of us will be tempted to put it down and reach for something else, and we shall miss much of its historical importance.