The Voyages of Marco Polo. Марко Поло
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Professor Peschel takes a view similar to that expressed in the text: "The narrative of Ruysbroek [Rubruquis], almost immaculate in its freedom from fabulous insertions, may be indicated on account of its truth to nature as the greatest geographical masterpiece of the Middle Ages." (Gesch. der Erdkunde, 1865, p. 151.)
[A] The County of Flanders was at this time in large part a fief of the French Crown. (See Natalis de Wailly, notes to Joinville, p. 576.) But that would not much affect the question either one way or the other.
[2] High as Marco's name deserves to be set, his place is not beside the writer of such burning words as these addressed to Ferdinand and Isabella: "From the most tender age I went to sea, and to this day I have continued to do so. Whosoever devotes himself to this craft must desire to know the secrets of Nature here below. For 40 years now have I thus been engaged, and wherever man has sailed hitherto on the face of the sea, thither have I sailed also. I have been in constant relation with men of learning, whether ecclesiastic or secular, Latins and Greeks, Jews and Moors, and men of many a sect besides. To accomplish this my longing (to know the Secrets of the World) I found the Lord favourable to my purposes; it is He who hath given me the needful disposition and understanding. He bestowed upon me abundantly the knowledge of seamanship: and of Astronomy He gave me enough to work withal, and so with Geometry and Arithmetic. … In the days of my youth I studied works of all kinds, history, chronicles, philosophy, and other arts, and to apprehend these the Lord opened my understanding. Under His manifest guidance I navigated hence to the Indies; for it was the Lord who gave me the will to accomplish that task, and it was in the ardour of that will that I came before your Highnesses. All those who heard of my project scouted and derided it; all the acquirements I have mentioned stood me in no stead; and if in your Highnesses, and in you alone, Faith and Constancy endured, to Whom are due the Lights that have enlightened you as well as me, but to the Holy Spirit?" (Quoted in Humboldt's Examen Critique, I. 17, 18.)
[3] Libri, however, speaks too strongly when he says: "The finest of all the results due to the influence of Marco Polo is that of having stirred Columbus to the discovery of the New World. Columbus, jealous of Polo's laurels, spent his life in preparing means to get to that Zipangu of which the Venetian traveller had told such great things; his desire was to reach China by sailing westward, and in his way he fell in with America." (H. des Sciences Mathém. etc. II. 150.)
The fact seems to be that Columbus knew of Polo's revelations only at second hand, from the letters of the Florentine Paolo Toscanelli and the like; and I cannot find that he ever refers to Polo by name. [How deep was the interest taken by Colombus in Marco Polo's travels is shown by the numerous marginal notes of the Admiral in the printed copy of the latin version of Pipino kept at the Bib. Colombina at Seville. See Appendix H. p. 558.—H. C.] Though to the day of his death he was full of imaginations about Zipangu and the land of the Great Kaan as being in immediate proximity to his discoveries, these were but accidents of his great theory. It was the intense conviction he had acquired of the absolute smallness of the Earth, of the vast extension of Asia eastward, and of the consequent narrowness of the Western Ocean, on which his life's project was based. This conviction he seems to have derived chiefly from the works of Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly. But the latter borrowed his collected arguments from Roger Bacon, who has stated them, erroneous as they are, very forcibly in his Opus Majus (p. 137), as Humboldt has noticed in his Examen (vol. i. p. 64). The Spanish historian Mariana makes a strange jumble of the alleged guides of Columbus, saying that some ascribed his convictions to "the information given by one Marco Polo, a Florentine Physician!" ("como otros dizen, por aviso que le dio un cierto Marco Polo, Medico Florentin;" Hist. de España, lib. xxvi. cap 3). Toscanelli is called by Columbus Maestro Paulo, which seems to have led to this mistake; see Sign. G. Uzielli, in Boll. della Soc. Geog. Ital. IX. p. 119, [Also by the same: Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli iniziatore della scoperta d' America, Florence, 1892; Toscanelli, No. 1; Toscanelli, Vol. V. of the Raccolta Colombiana, 1894.—H. C.]
[4] "C'est diminuer l'expression d'un éloge que de l'exagérer." (Humboldt, Examen, III. 13.)
[5] See vol. ii. p. 318, and vol. i. p. 404.
[6] Vol. i. p. 423.
[7] Vol. ii. p. 85, and Apollonius Rhodius, Argonaut. II. 1012.
[8] Chinese Observers record the length of Comets' tails by cubits!
[9] The map, perhaps, gives too favourable an idea of Marco's geographical conceptions. For in such a construction much has to be supplied for which there are no data, and that is apt to take mould from modern knowledge. Just as in the book illustrations of ninety years ago we find that Princesses of Abyssinia, damsels of Otaheite, and Beauties of Mary Stuart's Court have all somehow a savour of the high waists, low foreheads, and tight garments of 1810.
We are told that Prince Pedro of Portugal in 1426 received from the Signory of Venice a map which was supposed to be either an original or a copy of one by Marco Polo's own hand. (Majors P. Henry, p. 62.) There is no evidence to justify any absolute expression of disbelief; and if any map-maker with the spirit of the author of the Carta Catalana then dwelt in Venice, Polo certainly could not have gone to his grave uncatechised. But I should suspect the map to have been a copy of the old one that existed in the Sala dello Scudo of the Ducal Palace.
The maps now to be seen painted on the walls of that Hall, and on which Polo's route is marked, are not of any great interest. But in the middle of the 15th century there was an old Descriptio Orbis sive Mappamundus in the Hall, and when the apartment was renewed in 1459 a decree of the Senate ordered that such a map should be repainted on the new walls. This also perished by a fire in 1483. On the motion of Ramusio, in the next century, four new maps were painted. These had become dingy and ragged, when, in 1762, the Doge Marco Foscarini caused them to be renewed by the painter Francesco Grisellini. He professed to have adhered closely to the old maps, but he certainly did not, as Morelli testifies. Eastern Asia looks as if based on a work of Ramusio's age, but Western Asia is of undoubtedly modern character. (See Operetti di Iacopo Morelli, Ven. 1820, I. 299.)
[10] "Humboldt confirms the opinion I have more than once expressed that too much must not be inferred from the silence of authors. He adduces three important and perfectly undeniable matters of fact, as to which no evidence is to be found where it would be most anticipated: In the archives of Barcelona no trace of the triumphal entry of Columbus into that city; in Marco Polo no allusion to the Chinese Wall; in the archives of Portugal nothing about the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci in the service of that crown." (Varnhagen v. Ense, quoted by Hayward, Essays, 2nd Ser. I. 36.) See regarding the Chinese Wall the remarks referred to above, at p. 292 of this volume.
[11] [It is a strange fact that Polo never mentions the use of Tea in China, although he travelled through the Tea districts in Fu Kien, and tea was then as generally drunk by the Chinese as it is now. It is mentioned more than four centuries earlier by the Mohammedan merchant Soleyman, who visited China about the middle of the 9th century. He states (Reinaud, Relation des Voyages faits par les Arabes et les Persans dans l'Inde et à la Chine, 1845, I. 40): "The people of China are accustomed to use as a beverage an infusion of a plant, which they call sakh, and the leaves of which are aromatic and of a bitter taste. It is considered very wholesome. This plant (the leaves) is sold in all the cities of the empire." (_Bretschneider, Hist. Bot. Disc._I. p. 5.)—H. C.]
[12] It is probable that Persian, which had long been the language of Turanian courts, was also the common tongue of foreigners at that of the Mongols. Pulisanghin and Zardandán, in the preceding list, are pure Persian. So are several of the Oriental phrases noted at p. 84. See also notes on Ondanique and Vernique at pp. 93 and 384 of this volume, on Tacuin at p. 448, and a note at p. 93 supra. The narratives of Odoric, and others of the early travellers to Cathay, afford corroborative examples. Lord Stanley of Alderley, in one of his contributions to the Hakluyt Series, has given evidence from experience that Chinese Mahomedans still preserve the knowledge of numerous Persian words.
[13] Compare these errors with like errors of Herodotus, e.g., regarding the conspiracy of the False Smerdis. (See Rawlinson's Introduction, p. 55.) There is a curious parallel between