travel books often seem to disappoint or confuse modern readers, no doubt because they have become accustomed to common elements in recent travel literature. These include a distinctive authorial personality, forward narrative momentum, and a persistent emphasis on the strangeness of worlds encountered, whether that strangeness takes the form of the charming, bizarre, contemptible, savage, or ridiculous. In Campbell’s words, “travel literature as we know it today [is] … fully narrative, fully inhabited by its narrator, self-conscious about the problem of presenting difference in terms that neither inadvertently domesticate nor entirely alienate.”12 The importance of strong authorial presence is in keeping with the powerful desire to denote Self as separate from Other, which many scholars see as central to modern travel writing. Casey Blanton states that “travel books are vehicles whose main purpose is to introduce us to the other, and … typically they [dramatize] an engagement between self and world.”13
Medieval travel writing’s failure to meet some modern readers’ horizons of expectation helps explain their often mixed, contradictory, or negative reactions to Marco Polo’s Divisament dou monde. Descriptions of the Divisament vary so much, whether by popular or scholarly writers, one might think the readers had picked up different volumes:
In the account of Marco Polo—Il milione, to Italians—we have the most balanced and lush of all medieval re-creations of the East: the grotesque titillations of [The] Wonders [of the East] and the splendor and fertility of Paradise are here combined in a single comprehensive image. It was that “mirage” that drew Columbus to our shores.14
Yet the book is surprisingly dull. Polo did not set out to write an account of his travels, despite the name by which it has always been known [sic]. … Instead he wrote a dry, factual guide to commerce in the East, a book by a merchant for other merchants, containing mainly lists of the merchandise available for sale on the caravan routes, as well as advice on how to overcome the difficulties that might be met along the way. … It is not a romance, nor a book of wonders, nor a history of the world in the manner of Herodotus.15
Marco Polo travelled to tell a fantastic story. He is singularly obsessed with difference and the desire to represent it. The world that sprouts from Marco Polo’s pen is as strange as the dreamscape of old fables. The text authorizes its vocation to capture this world by invoking the imperial command of the Great Khan himself, who, Marco Polo says, “would rather hear reports of these strange countries, and of their customs and usages, than the business on which he had sent them.”16
Unfortunately, those who actually read the Description of the World will discover that much of Marco Polo’s account of the East does consist of tons of salt and distances. Though these descriptions are sometimes intermingled with stories about Caliphs and Magi, they are fundamentally practical and, even without following a logical itinerary, the book serves more as a merchant’s view of the world than that of a creative writer.17
Marco Polo, whose rather limited vocabulary for describing marvels does not seem to have undercut the popularity of his descriptions, called the peacocks of the East “larger and more beautiful,” asserted that ostriches there were “as big as donkeys” and chickens “the most beautiful in the world,” and concluded enthusiastically, “in fact everything is different! … almost every animal he met (the “horrible” crocodile as well as the “beautiful” giraffe) was a marvel.18
Thus readers are split between those who value Polo’s book as a typically medieval repository of wonders and those who feel let down by the lack of precisely those same marvels. They find it dull because the Divisament gives little sense of the author’s personality or the tribulations he may have endured on his odyssey. Others allege that it represents an early instance of colonialist discourse. Casey Blanton quotes Polo’s rather out-of-character description of the inhabitants of Zanzibar, a country he never visited and whose inhabitants must have been described to him by another traveler (perhaps an Arab seafarer), concluding, “Marco Polo’s assumptions that the other is a demon or beast is [sic] a prelude to the long and complicated history of aggression upon indigenous peoples that characterizes the works and acts of Western Renaissance explorers.”19 Here, as one sees quite often, Marco Polo stands as the forebear of later uses of travel writing to help justify harsh treatment of non-Europeans. Campbell’s often brilliant and poetic Witness and the Other World claims in its opening sections that many of the medieval works she will examine, one of which is Polo’s book, “begin or end with explicit references to the future conquest of the lands or peoples described”—a claim not subsequently verified—and that “[t]he specter of the American holocaust will fade into the background of this study. But it haunts the whole.”20 Yet such haunting is not apparent in her own sensitive readings of medieval writings on the East.
Syed Manzurul Islam reads the Divisament as a precursor to modern imperial racism, repeatedly naming the book a “machine for othering.”21 This is, in my view, stunningly wide of the mark. When Polo’s book was composed c. 1298 he had been back in Italy only three years; the whole of his prior adult life (from age seventeen to forty-one) had been spent in Asia. The Great Khân’s empire was not a place he had any wish to represent as “Other”; rather, he seems to have wanted to convey, in a proud, perhaps even proprietary tone, the splendors of a realm he identified with and wished to promote. In parts, it is not so much a “machine for othering” but for “sameing,” or at least for “making similar.”22 A related view, though not dealing with Marco Polo, is Andrea Rossi-Reder’s contention that “[i]n Wonders of the East, India is identical to the India depicted by [E. M.] Forster,” that classical and medieval western perceptions of a monstrous Indies constituted an aspect of an “incipient colonial or even a proto-colonial discourse to assert Western superiority and justification for dominance over the strange creatures encountered,” and that “[t]he Eastern creatures in works such as Ktesias’s Indika and Wonders of the East are clearly the precursors of colonialist images of Indians.”23
John Larner, in contrast, considers and rejects a number of genres earlier scholars have suggested for the Divisament: adventure story, merchant’s manual, missionaries’ handbook, and book of wonders, suggesting finally that it should be considered primarily a work of geography or rather chorography.24 He wonders if Polo was influenced by Chinese authors, given that nothing in European tradition is quite like his book, and suggests its schizophrenic style was the result of dual authorship with Polo providing the mundane “raw material” and Rusticello spicing up the prose with marvels and the exotic.25 This may be too neat, but Larner’s reading has the virtue of acknowledging the diversity and inconsistency within Marco Polo’s book and of attempting to assess it on its own merits.
Where many are baffled by the Divisament and disparaging of its author, modern readers tend to sing the praises of William of Rubruck. Rubruck’s account of his mission to the Mongols at Karakorum in 1253–55 satisfies expectations of travel writing where Polo’s book fails: exciting narrative; distinctive personality; emphasis on the strangeness of worlds encountered; and endurance in the face of danger and hardship.26 Campbell appreciates Rubruck’s book for having “a plot and a character”: “It satisfies curiosity, answers questions that never occurred to Marco, such as How did you get there? What was it like? Were you afraid?” When Rubruck adds a detail such as his frozen toes at the Karakorum camp he takes us into his moment of experience with a vividness, she argues, that Marco Polo entirely lacks.27 Major scholars of medieval travel literature from Sir Henry Yule and William Rockhill to Leonardo Olschki, Christopher Dawson, and John Larner express a special regard for William of Rubruck and his book.28 Campbell even suggests Rubruck was “Europe’s first modern traveler” and that the qualities of his book “were not of his time.”29 Modern readers have also been captivated by the fourteenth-century narrative of the Moroccan Ibn Battuta, who claimed to have traveled as far as southern China, which provides an adventure story complete
