The Voyages of Marco Polo. Марко Поло
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Fasti for several great victories. But on this occasion the defeat of Pisa was overwhelming. Forty of their galleys were taken or sunk, and upwards of 9000 prisoners carried to Genoa. In fact so vast a sweep was made of the flower of Pisan manhood that it was a common saying then: "Che vuol veder Pisa, vada a Genova!" Many noble ladies of Pisa went in large companies on foot to Genoa to seek their husbands or kinsmen: "And when they made enquiry of the Keepers of the Prisons, the reply would be, 'Yesterday there died thirty of them, to-day there have died forty; all of whom we have cast into the sea; and so it is daily.'"[3]
[Illustration: Seal of the Pisan Prisoners.]
A body of prisoners so numerous and important naturally exerted themselves in the cause of peace, and through their efforts, after many months of negotiation, a formal peace was signed (15th April, 1288). But through the influence, as was alleged, of Count Ugolino (Dante's) who was then in power at Pisa, the peace became abortive; war almost immediately recommenced, and the prisoners had no release.[4] And, when the 6000 or 7000 Venetians were thrown into the prisons of Genoa in October 1298, they would find there the scanty surviving remnant of the Pisan Prisoners of Meloria, and would gather from them dismal forebodings of the fate before them.
It is a fair conjecture that to that remnant Rusticiano of Pisa may have belonged.
We have seen Ramusio's representation of the kindness shown to Marco during his imprisonment by a certain Genoese gentleman who also assisted him to reduce his travels to writing. We may be certain that this Genoese gentleman is only a distorted image of Rusticiano, the Pisan prisoner in the gaol of Genoa, whose name and part in the history of his hero's book Ramusio so strangely ignores. Yet patriotic Genoese writers in our own times have striven to determine the identity of this their imaginary countryman![5]
[Sidenote: Rusticiano, a person known from other sources.]
39. Who, then, was Rusticiano, or, as the name actually is read in the oldest type of MS., "Messire Rustacians de Pise"?
Our knowledge of him is but scanty. Still something is known of him besides the few words concluding his preamble to our Traveller's Book, which you may read at pp. 1–2 of the body of this volume.
In Sir Walter Scott's "Essay on Romance," when he speaks of the new mould in which the subjects of the old metrical stories were cast by the school of prose romancers which arose in the 13th century, we find the following words:—
"Whatever fragments or shadows of true history may yet remain hidden under the mass of accumulated fable which had been heaped upon them during successive ages, must undoubtedly be sought in the metrical romances. … But those prose authors who wrote under the imaginary names of RUSTICIEN DE PISE, Robert de Borron, and the like, usually seized upon the subject of some old minstrel; and recomposing the whole narrative after their own fashion, with additional character and adventure, totally obliterated in that operation any shades which remained of the original and probably authentic tradition," &c.[6]
Evidently, therefore, Sir Walter regarded Rustician of Pisa as a person belonging to the same ghostly company as his own Cleishbothams and Dryasdusts. But in this we see that he was wrong.
In the great Paris Library and elsewhere there are manuscript volumes containing the stories of the Round Table abridged and somewhat clumsily combined from the various Prose Romances of that cycle, such as Sir Tristan, Lancelot, Palamedes, Giron le Courtois, &c., which had been composed, it would seem, by various Anglo-French gentlemen at the court of Henry III., styled, or styling themselves, Gasses le Blunt, Luces du Gast, Robert de Borron, and Hélis de Borron. And these abridgments or recasts are professedly the work of Le Maistre Rusticien de Pise. Several of them were printed at Paris in the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th centuries as the works of Rusticien de Pise; and as the preambles and the like, especially in the form presented in those printed editions, appear to be due sometimes to the original composers (as Robert and Hélis de Borron) and sometimes to Rusticien de Pise the recaster, there would seem to have been a good deal of confusion made in regard to their respective personalities.
From a preamble to one of those compilations which undoubtedly belongs to Rustician, and which we shall quote at length by and bye, we learn that Master Rustician "translated" (or perhaps transferred?) his compilation from a book belonging to King Edward of England, at the time when that prince went beyond seas to recover the Holy Sepulchre. Now Prince Edward started for the Holy Land in 1270, spent the winter of that year in Sicily, and arrived in Palestine in May 1271. He quitted it again in August, 1272, and passed again by Sicily, where in January, 1273, he heard of his father's death and his own consequent accession. Paulin Paris supposes that Rustician was attached to the Sicilian Court of Charles of Anjou, and that Edward "may have deposited with that king the Romances of the Round Table, of which all the world was talking, but the manuscripts of which were still very rare, especially those of the work of Helye de Borron[7] … whether by order, or only with permission of the King of Sicily, our Rustician made haste to read, abridge, and re-arrange the whole, and when Edward returned to Sicily he recovered possession of the book from which the indefatigable Pisan had extracted the contents."
But this I believe is, in so far as it passes the facts stated in Rustician's own preamble, pure hypothesis, for nothing is cited that connects Rustician with the King of Sicily. And if there be not some such confusion of personality as we have alluded to, in another of the preambles, which is quoted by Dunlop as an utterance of Rustician's, that personage would seem to claim to have been a comrade in arms of the two de Borrons. We might, therefore, conjecture that Rustician himself had accompanied Prince Edward to Syria.[8]
[Sidenote: Character of Rustician's Romance compilations.]
40. Rustician's literary work appears from the extracts and remarks of Paulin Paris to be that of an industrious simple man, without method or much judgment. "The haste with which he worked is too perceptible; the adventures are told without connection; you find long stories of Tristan followed by adventures of his father Meliadus." For the latter derangement of historical sequence we find a quaint and ingenuous apology offered in Rustician's epilogue to Giron le Courtois:—
"Cy fine le Maistre Rusticien de Pise son conte en louant et regraciant le Père le Filz et le Saint Esperit, et ung mesme Dieu, Filz de la Benoiste Vierge Marie, de ce qu'il m'a doné grace, sens, force, et mémoire, temps et lieu, de me mener à fin de si haulte et si noble matière come ceste-cy dont j'ay traicté les faiz et proesses recitez et recordez à mon livre. Et se aucun me demandoit pour quoy j'ay parlé de Tristan avant que de son père le Roy Meliadus, le respons que ma matière n'estoist pas congneue. Car je ne puis pas scavoir tout, ne mettre toutes mes paroles par ordre. Et ainsi fine mon conte. Amen."[9]
In a passage of these compilations the Emperor Charlemagne is asked whether in his judgment King Meliadus or his son Tristan were the better man? The Emperor's answer is: "I should say that the King Meliadus was the better man, and I will tell you why I say so. As far as I can see, everything that Tristan did was done for Love, and his great feats would never have been done but under the constraint of Love, which was his spur and goad. Now that never can be said of King Meliadus! For what deeds he did, he did them not by dint of Love, but by dint of his strong right arm. Purely out of his own goodness he did good, and not by constraint of Love." "It will be seen," remarks on this Paulin Paris, "that we are here a long way removed from the ordinary principles of Round Table Romances. And one thing besides will be manifest, viz., that Rusticien de Pise was no Frenchman!"[10]
The same discretion is shown even more prominently in a passage of one of his compilations, which contains the romances of Arthur, Gyron, and Meliadus (No. 6975—see last note but one):—
"No doubt," Rustician says, "other books tell the story of the Queen Ginevra and Lancelot differently from this; and there were certain passages between them of which the Master, in his concern for the honour of both those personages, will say not a word." Alas, says the French Bibliographer, that the copy of Lancelot, which fell into the hands of poor Francesca of Rimini, was not one of those expurgated by our worthy friend Rustician![11]
[Sidenote: Identity of the Romance Compiler with Polo's fellow-prisoner.]
41. A question may still occur to an attentive reader as