Laurence Bergreen

by Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu

  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 that Marco intended to include some routes of use to merchants in his account, but they have been lost, or Rustichello, a romance writer rather than a geographer, failed to include them. Some contenders, or pretenders, to the status of Marco Polo maps have surfaced over time, but their authenticity is doubtful. For a review of these intriguing items, see Leo Bagrow’s “The Maps from the Home Archives of the Descendents of a Friend of Marco Polo.” It should be noted that maps discussed by Bagrow are modern copies of older maps, or purported older maps. It is possible that the maps that have been attributed to Marco Polo are nothing more than an elaborate scholarly hoax. Johann Ruysch is quoted by Hart in Marco Polo, pages 260–261. Also refer to J. H. Parry, The Discovery of the Sea, first California edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), page 51.

  The best discussion in English of the Great Wall, as it relates to Marco Polo’s account, is Arthur N. Waldron’s “The Problem of the Great Wall of China.”

  For a succinct discussion of the donnybrook kicked up by Frances Wood, see Luce Boulnois, The Silk Road, pages 353–355. Igor de Rachewiltz offers a persuasive and detailed critique of Frances Wood’s book in his “F. Wood’s Did Marco Polo Go to China?” For an even more detailed critique of Wood’s book, see de Rachewiltz, “Marco Polo Went to China.” My thanks to Professor de Rachewiltz for an appendix of additions and corrections to his work, which includes his observation about Chinese cartographers.

  For a fine technical discussion about how Marco’s account of escorting the Mongolian princess Kokachin to Persia amounts to proof that Marco Polo went to China and served Kublai Khan, see Francis Woodman Cleaves, “A Chinese Source Bearing on Marco Polo’s Departure from China and a Persian Source on His Arrival in Persia.”

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