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 to produce a lulling, undemanding, hypnotic rhythm which carried them forward effortlessly.”54 While some readers sought epic elements, others involved in European-Asian trade may have been drawn to the book’s lists of places, natural resources, and commodities such as salt, silk, and spices. Others looked for geographic and chorographic information to aid them in placing Asia within a Christian cosmology, especially once Friar Pipino’s Latin translation gave the book greater authority for Christian intellectuals. The Divisament’s attention to certain kinds of Asian marvels appealed to medieval audiences’ persistent, if fading, sense of wonder. Its accounts of abundant foods, splendid cities, and freedom from Christian monogamy and sexual restraint were among the elements that made the book a miscellany of earthly pleasures. Marco Polo’s Orient, but particularly his Mongol-ruled China, was a place of sophistication and sensual delights. Indeed, such readings were not necessarily mutually exclusive. Benedetto, Dutschke, and Larner cite the testimony of humanist Domenico di Bandino, who gave the book ample space in his thirty-five-volume encyclopedia around the turn of the fifteenth century, taking it to be instructive in the way that the geographical statements of Pliny, Isidore of Seville, and Brunetto Latini were, while also describing it as “delightful” (delectabilem).55 As the longest and most detailed of the travel narratives studied here, it exemplifies the argument that medieval readers sought variously information, edification, wonder, and pleasure in contemporary travelers’ tales of the Orient.
In the wake of diplomatic envoys and merchants came a wave of missionaries. Ricold of Monte Croce’s Liber peregrinacionis, also called his Itinerarius, was produced after his return to Italy from Baghdad in 1301 following thirteen years of voyaging in the Middle East.56 Ricold (1242–1320) was a Dominican missionary from Florence who embarked on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1288 and continued through Turkey and Persia to Baghdad in 1289, remaining for twelve years. He learned Arabic and gained a relatively high level of knowledge about Islam—though viewing it as Christian heresy—and though his written work, notably the Contra legem sarracenorum, denigrated the Muslim faith, he was more generous in describing Muslim peoples. His Liber peregrinacionis reserves its most negative ethnological assessments for Turks, Kurds, and Mongols. In its original Latin the work was not very widely transmitted. Seven manuscripts survive, three of which are fragmentary. There are also six extant manuscripts of John le Long’s 1351 French translation and three late medieval copies of Italian translations, two fragmentary.57 For the present work, Ricold’s text is valuable primarily for its account of Mongols. Persia was under Mongol control during his stay in Baghdad so some