They departed probably in 1291, escorting a Mongol princess to Persia, and arrived back in Venice around 1295.
Marco spent about seventeen years in China and around twenty-four years abroad in total. He left Venice an adolescent and returned a middle-aged man. Details of his life in China remain mysterious. Although he is regularly described as a “merchant” in modern scholarship, it is unclear whether he and the elder Polos engaged in profitable trade so far from home. A number of Venetian and Genoese merchants went to China and India in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries so one must presume some commerce between Italians and Chinese, but such ventures are not described in the Divisament.35 The book claims rather that Khubilai took an instant liking to Marco and engaged him on numerous diplomatic missions throughout his eastern realms. It more dubiously states that Khubilai made him governor of the great city of Yangzhou for three years, that the three Polos played a decisive part in the subjection of Xiangyang, one of the last cities of the Southern Song dynasty to fall to Khubilai’s forces, and that Marco’s diplomatic ventures on behalf of Khubilai provided the initial impetus for his attempts to describe what he had seen.36 Many of the Divisament’s modern readers have scorned these details, citing a lack of contemporary Chinese records substantiating them. The claim of governorship is unlikely to be true, and from chronology alone the military claim is certainly invented as the siege of Xiangyang ended in 1273, two years before the Polos’ arrival.37 A few have gone further and contended that his whole book is a fiction, notably Frances Wood in Did Marco Polo Go to China?38 However, that argument is now discredited. Igor de Rachewiltz shows that numerous details were previously unrecorded in European texts and must have been the result of observation.39 He argues that Marco probably had relatively little to do with Chinese people and did not speak Chinese; rather, he moved among the Mongol, Persian, and Turkic peoples in residence and communicated in the Persian lingua franca of foreign denizens, which helps explain many alleged “omissions,” such as tea drinking and foot-binding. The lack of any description of the Great Wall is accounted for by the fact that the wall as we know it was not built before the sixteenth century. De Rachewiltz further shows that the embassy in which the Polos accompanied Princess Kökechin to Persia to marry the il-khân Arghun (a marriage that did not occur owing to Arghun’s death in the interim) could only have been described as a result of direct experience, as it was not recorded in any Chinese or other sources available to a European by 1298. The inclusion of descriptions of a range of locations suggests Marco traveled widely while in China, particularly in the north and down the eastern coast to “Zaiton” (Quanzhou), but also that he related tales he had heard of other regions from other travelers or his Mongol or Chinese hosts. His account of Cipangu (Japan), for example, is a result of hearsay rather than observation, and it has been suggested that his frequently mundane descriptions of south and east China came about from conversation rather than witness.40 The book’s account of the three Polos’ roundabout and strangely lengthy journey to “Cambaluc” (Khanbalikh or Khanbaliq) has also been doubted. John Larner acerbically remarks, “It is like travelling from Toronto to New Orleans by way of the Rocky Mountains.” The efforts of modern readers to identify the route taken by the Polos and provide accompanying maps are, Larner argues, a result of reading the book as an account of “travels” rather than what it states itself to be: a “Description of the World.”41
The slippery nature of the work becomes clearer still when we consider its composition. According to the Divisament, following his return to Venice Marco was caught up in a sea battle between Venetian and Genoese forces and became a prisoner of war in 1298.42 While interned he met Rusticello da Pisa, an author of Arthurian romances, and during their long hours of incarceration they together concocted the book in a hybrid Franco-Italian.43 The book caught on and was swiftly translated into French, Tuscan, and Venetian. The Dominican Friar Pipino produced a Latin version with a stronger Christian tone between 1314 and 1324, and this version represents 43 percent of surviving copies.44 German, Bohemian, Catalan, Aragonese, Portuguese, Gaelic, and other Latin versions followed. It was, in Larner’s words, “an unparalleled record in the Middle Ages for translations effected during the life of the author.”45 Only four surviving copies are extensively illuminated though a number of others are illustrated on a more modest scale and no doubt other illuminated copies have been lost.46 It is noticeable that the early fifteenth-century artists who worked on the grandest copies of the book (in Paris, Bib. Nat. fr. 2810 and Oxford, Bodley 264) regularly enhanced or exaggerated the oriental “Otherness” of places and peoples described, to the point of adding monstrous races where none is described in the text or portraying Mongol warriors as small, dark-skinned, “functional Saracens.”47 Such emphasis on difference is at odds with much of the book’s textual content. On the other hand they portray a light-skinned Khubilai Khân and Chinese courts, civilized habits, and cities as comparable to European counterparts. Manuscripts of Pipino’s Latin translation are parchment or high-quality paper productions and were aimed at a well-educated Christian readership seeking knowledge of the world God had created. The French manuscripts tend to be high-quality, luxury items while many of the Venetian, Tuscan, and other copies are paper manuscripts perhaps owned by gentlemen or mercantile readers.48
Figure 1. The Travels of Marco Polo (The Million or Le Livre des Merveilles). Map with the route of the journey [modern interpretation]. Drawing. Photo credit: © DeA Picture Library / Art Resource, NY.
While it has become conventional to stress that the Divisament was viewed as mostly an incredible fiction by medieval readers—the nickname “Il Milione” is thought by some to refer to the author’s alleged habit of concocting extravagant fables49—Dutschke and Larner go to lengths to counter this libel. They show that fourteenth- and fifteenth-century chroniclers, theologians, geographers, cartographers, and other intellectuals looked to the Divisament for moral insight and valuable information on the earth’s distant reaches. Both cite the testimony of Paduan professor Pietro d’Abano, who stated he had spoken to Marco in seeking instruction on the habitability of the equatorial parts of the world.50 Indeed, Larner claims skepticism about the book did not become widespread until the later seventeenth century.51
Another way to approach the question of reader reception is to focus on specific contexts. Suzanne M. Yeager shows that the Divisament had a different readership in England from its readership in many Continental contexts. Pipino’s Latin translation was by far the dominant version of the Divisament in England, with other Latin versions also in circulation there, and indeed the book did not receive English translation until 1579. The English readers were well educated and seem to have treated the book as a serious factual account with moral value; it often appears in manuscripts alongside scientific treatises, histories, and devotional works.52 Its Italian appeal was broader. Christine Gadrat’s research into fourteenth-century Italian Dominican uses of the Divisament shows that it had not only moral and edifying appeal (as in Pipino’s Chronicon, Pietro Calo da Chioggia’s Legendary, and Nicoluccio of Ascoli’s sermons) and educative value (as in Jacopo d’Acqui’s Chronica ymaginis mundi) but also lighter functions. Filippino da Ferrara used about twenty anecdotes from the Divisament in his Liber de introductione loquendi (c. 1325–47), a guide to pleasant conversation aimed at friars dealing with a range of social contexts from dining with the laity to visiting ill friends. These included the anecdote (discussed in Chapter 6) concerning oriental peoples who offer their wives to travelers as part of their hospitality and another about the people who make a kind of pasta from the meal produced from sago trees. Filippino writes, the dish “is very good and master Marco tasted it several times. This can be told when good pasta is on the table.”53
The Divisament appealed in various ways to its diverse readers. We shall see in the next chapter that modern readers are often baffled or repelled by the Divisament’s repetitive style and the apparent laziness of its linking phrases—“And why should I make you a long story?”—yet Larner suggests this “was designed
