A lot of questions have been asked about Marco Polo. Famous for being the first man to write about China from the inside, describing his travels as an agent for the Mongol ruler, Kublai Khan, concentrating on the years 1275 to 1292, and subsequently inspiring Christopher Columbus, his reputation has taken a periodic battering over the years. Nicknamed "Il Milione", presumably for the millions of fabulous tales he told, Polo's descriptions have been derided as a fabrication, a mix of the real and the imagined. Some, such as Frances Wood, author of Did Marco Polo Go To China?, have questioned whether he went to China at all.
The Life of Marco Polo
Very few concrete facts are known about him. The only irrefutable evidence about him is his last will and testament, dictated in Venice on 9 January 1323. Aside from that, and a couple of other legal documents, readers have to look to the evidence of his book for details of his life.
The difficulty of separating truth from fiction in the work of Marco Polo is compounded by the abundance of manuscript versions of The Travels. The original has not survived, only copies, amended copies of those copies, and translations, some eighty versions in total.
The Travels of Marco Polo
The Description of the World, or The Travels, is thought to have been dictated to a man named Rusticello of Pisa in the year 1298, while Polo was in jail or under house arrest in Genoa. This fits with the historical record, as Pisa and Venice were at war with Genoa in the late thirteenth century. Prisoners were often held awaiting ransom or a prisoner trade. Also, a Rusticello of Pisa is on record as a celebrated narrator of Arthurian romances some twenty years earlier, and The Travels is written in a way very reminiscent of a typical romance of the time.
Certain elements of the book can be refuted. One section depicts Polo, his father and uncle at the siege of Saianfu, modern Xiangyang. There is much ostensibly convincing detail in this segment, but the siege was over by 1273, and Polo, by the internal evidence of his book, could not have reached China before 1274. The “Z” Manuscript, discovered in Toledo in the 1930s, does not mention the siege, leaving the reader to wonder: did Polo take this segment out, or was it perhaps inserted by later copyists?
There are other oddities in the book, or rather, the oddities are what is omitted from the book. Polo does not mention the Great Wall, the bound feet of Chinese women or tea. Some of this can perhaps be explained by the nature of China's ruling dynasty at the time, the Mongols, and the circles Polo moved in. The Mongols had their own customs, and it is not always clear how separate they were from those of the native Chinese. On the other hand, he did mention China's paper money, the massed boats on China's rivers and the use of coal for fuel.
The conundrum of Marco Polo's The Travels continues.
Sources:
The Chan's Great Continent – China in Western Minds, Jonathan Spence (Penguin, 1998)
Did Marco Polo Go To China?, Frances Wood (Westview Press, 1997)
Paris Franz - Paris Franz is a London-based freelance journalist, specialising in the arts, history and travel.
