Marco Polo
translation: Henry Yule, Henri Cordier

THE TRAVELS OF MARCO POLO
Volume I.
complete book, e-book

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MARCO POLO AND HIS BOOK.

INTRODUCTORY NOTICES.

I. OBSCURITIES IN THE HISTORY OF HIS LIFE AND BOOK. RAMUSIO'S STATEMENTS.

[Illustration: Doorway of the House of Marco Polo in the Corte Sabbionera, at Venice]

[Sidenote: Obscurities of Polo's Book, and personal History.]

1. With all the intrinsic interest of Marco Polo's Book it may perhaps be doubted if it would have continued to exercise such fascination on many minds through succesive generations were it not for the difficult questions which it suggests. It is a great book of puzzles, whilst our confidence in the man's veracity is such that we feel certain every puzzle has a solution.

And such difficulties have not attached merely to the identification of places, the interpretation of outlandish terms, or the illustration of obscure customs; for strange entanglements have perplexed also the chief circumstances of the Traveller's life and authorship. The time of the dictation of his Book and of the execution of his Last Will have been almost the only undisputed epochs in his biography. The year of his birth has been contested, and the date of his death has not been recorded; the critical occasion of his capture by the Genoese, to which we seem to owe the happy fact that he did not go down mute to the tomb of his fathers, has been made the subject of chronological difficulties; there are in the various texts of his story variations hard to account for; the very tongue in which it was written down has furnished a question, solved only in our own age, and in a most unexpected manner.

[Sidenote: Ramusio, his earliest biographer. His account of Polo.]

2. The first person who attempted to gather and string the facts of Marco Polo's personal history was his countryman, the celebrated John Baptist Ramusio. His essay abounds in what we now know to be errors of detail, but, prepared as it was when traditions of the Traveller were still rife in Venice, a genuine thread runs through it which could never have been spun in later days, and its presentation seems to me an essential element in any full discourse upon the subject.

Ramusio's preface to the Book of Marco Polo, which opens the second volume of his famous Collection of Voyages and Travels, and is addressed to his learned friend Jerome Fracastoro, after referring to some of the most noted geographers of antiquity, proceeds:[1]—

"Of all that I have named, Ptolemy, as the latest, possessed the greatest extent of knowledge. Thus, towards the North, his knowledge carries him beyond the Caspian, and he is aware of its being shut in all round like a lake,—a fact which was unknown in the days of Strabo and Pliny, though the Romans were already lords of the world. But though his knowledge extends so far, a tract of 15 degrees beyond that sea he can describe only as Terra Incognita; and towards the South he is fain to apply the (...)

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