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John Larner is Professor Emeritus in History and Professorial Research Fellow of Glasgow University.

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This is a book not about Marco Polo the man or his trip, but about the Book of Marco Polo.

Larner (Emeritus, University of Glasgow) makes quick, early work of the kinds of questions that popular histories dwell on at length—Was there really a Marco Polo? Did he really go to China? Did he really write a book?—then proceeds with a more interesting, more original examination of the Book’s place in and influence on European culture. His sources alone are the stuff of bibliophiles’ wild dreams.

In Larner’s telling, Polo was not an adventurer, a merchant or a missionary. He was, rather, a minor Mongolian civil servant who during his years in the East had been an observer or student of the topography and human geography of Asia, of its customs and folklore, of the authority and court of the Great Khan, all seen from a Mongol point of view. Then, having taken early retirement, he had sought an audience for his memories. In writing the Book, says Larner, Marco created a new genre of western literature.

Marco’s Book (with co-author Rusticello da Pisa) was not a work of anthropology, and it was too abstract and impersonal to be a travelogue. It was not a book of fantastical marvels, despite the depiction of Blemmyae, Sciopods, and Dog-Headed Men by miniaturists commissioned to illustrate it. Marco was neither a Christian polemicist nor a Saidean Orientalist ex-ante. (Marco consciously paid tribute to the civilizing influence of Islam: in one passage about the Island of Sumatra he drew the distinction between the peaceful city folks ‘converted to the law of Mohammed’ and the ‘beastly’ residents of the mountain villages.)

The Book was, first of all, a work of human geography, writes Larner. The power of the book came from a careful, common-sense and well-organized transmission of what in its day was hitherto unknown information. The scope of Marco’s enquiry is what made it so ambitious an enterprise, and the variety of matters considered within that geographical coverage: the steady progress, people by people, province by province, town by town, each with its own political arrangements, religion, natural and manufactured products and other peculiarities, individually distinguished.

Few medieval works before Marco’s book were to be found in so many different languages at so early a stage of their existence. But quite aside from the question of its popularity, says Larner, was the question of how far it was believed. What commentators found unbelievable were not so much the miracles attributed to Christian holy men, references to the Alexander stories, tales of the Magi, or news of the Assassin-leader, the Old Man of the Mountain; most of these stories were familiar, and the miracles fitted into a worldview in which such occurrences, if not probable, were not wholly unlikely. What was astonishing was the news that there was a Great Khan more powerful than any western leader, attended by 12,000 lords and knights, who employed 10,000 falconers, and at whose banquets 40,000 guests assembled. Did there ever exist a city called Quinsai with 12,000 stone bridges and 30,000 baths, with palace grounds 10 miles in circumference? Could this teeming world exist without being previously known in the West? Accepting the truth of Marco’s book required a drastic revision of everything previously thought about the East, says Larner, and acceptance of quell ver c’ha faccia di menzogna—‘that truth that has the face of a lie.’

For 80 years after Marco wrote his book, European merchants and missionaries in the East could have testified to its veracity. By the mid-14th century, however, trade and travel within the Mongol world was becoming increasingly difficult. The conversion of the Khans of the Golden Horde to Islam eroded the Mongol tradition of pragmatic tolerance; pogroms and massacres by the Kipchak Khan made the Black Sea treacherous for foreigners. Fear of the Black Death spread through Europe and western Asia, and Mamluk gains in the eastern Mediterranean shut down access to Persia. The rise of the Ottoman Turks in Asia Minor and Tamerlane in Central Asia reinforced the sense of growing separation between East and West.

The Book’s effect on cartography was most immediate, according to Larner. The first map we know of that used Marco as a source was the Catalan Atlas of 1380, which still displayed mythical features—Gog and Magog enclosed behind a great wall by Alexander, diamonds hunted with eagles—but for the first time depicted western China in recognizable form.

A generation after the Catalan Atlas literary scholars began giving the Book of Marco Polo serious consideration, as the study of geography began to acquire dignity and substance. The humanists’ search for empirical knowledge expanded the intellectual horizons of geography, especially after the recovery of the works of Ptolemy and Strabo. In the struggle to distinguish truth and falsehood in the newly discovered texts and to verify and augment the information of the ancients, 15th c. scholars sought out knowledge on distant places from the more recent past. It was a merit of humanism, writes Larner, to bring together the learning of Ptolemy and the experience of Marco Polo. For his Mappamundi of 1457, the Venetian Camaldolese monk Fra Mauro consulted Muslim sailors to deny Ptolemy’s beliefs in the inhabitability of the equatorial zone and the landlocked character of the Indian Ocean, then relied upon Marco for place names and the location of rivers in China—and the hitherto unknown existence of Japan.

Larner uncovers other ways that the Book of Marco Polo bemused, confounded, and inspired Europeans in the Middle Ages. After Columbus accidentally ‘discovered’ the continents of the western hemisphere, his Diario and Marco’s Book were sometimes bound together in combined volumes. Misled, Johannes Schöner, in his Opusculum geographicum of 1533, confused the riches of Tenochtitlán—the Mexica capital city of bridges and canals and floating gardens—with Marco’s Quinsai (Hangzhou). The first Europeans who arrived by sea on the Chinese coast did not realize that they were in the country described by Marco Polo, who had given only the Mongol or Persian forms of Chinese place names. And despite its cultural power, the book could still be regarded with derision by non-geographers, as in the mocking treatment by Rabelais in Pantagruel and Sir Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy. On the other hand, medieval romance epics set in exotic locales drew directly on the information provided by Marco. And even in the late-20th c. Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (with Marco Polo describing his travels to Kubilai Khan) could replicate the sensation experienced by many medieval Europeans upon first reading Marco’s Book.

In Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World, John Larner succeeds admirably in establishing his keenest point: “Often irrespective of their merits, the fortune of books depends upon the intellectual and social milieu in which they are read.” Well put.
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HectorSwell | Mar 30, 2011 |

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