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 with swaggering hero.30
Against the ambivalent modern reactions to Marco Polo’s book and the praise heaped on William of Rubruck’s one must set the uncomfortable fact that few people in medieval Europe read Rubruck’s book (although it was drawn upon by Roger Bacon, as previously discussed), while Marco Polo’s was a sensation—widely copied, translated, and influential. As noted in the previous chapter, there are five surviving manuscripts of Rubruck’s book, four of them in England and all in Latin, and around 150 manuscripts of the Divisament in Latin and many vernaculars, scattered across European collections.31 Much has been lost between the medieval period and the present, including the aesthetic sense and brand of curiosity that made Marco Polo’s book of greater appeal than Rubruck’s. Medieval travel books will generally disappoint readers hoping to be taken on a quasi-biographical journey of conscious engagement with the world, composed with a linear narrative and literary flair; we need to appreciate them for their contemporary appeal.
However, by the early sixteenth century a taste for the modern mode in travel writing was already emerging. Lincoln Davis Hammond contrasts the relatively impersonal style of Poggio’s book of Niccolò’s experiences with Ludovico de Varthema’s Itinerario of 1510 and argues that Ludovico represents a new kind of traveler.32 Where medieval travelers had particular purposes—usually mercantile, missionary, or ambassadorial—and produced works shaped by their motivations and overwhelmingly influenced by later scribes and readers, Ludovico enjoys travel for its own sake.33 Where Poggio’s humanistic desire was to provide a body of useful knowledge, Ludovico added an acknowledgment of the reader’s desire for vicarious experience of the dangers of the journey: “whereas I procured the pleasure of seeing new manners and customs by very great dangers and insupportable fatigue, they will enjoy the same advantage and pleasure, without discomfort or danger, by merely reading.”34 He tells of how he left Alexandria “longing for novelty (as a thirsty man longs for water).”35 The passive reader is invited to project himself onto the figure of the adventurer, and the armchair traveler is born.
Marco Polo’s book may not have been a “machine for othering,” but concepts of Otherness underlie rather a lot of recent scholarship on travel writing. These draw on insights regarding modern colonialism in which the West is seen as needing to emphasize the strangeness of the non-West in order to buttress its own sense of identity and to justify claims to superiority.36 In colonial discourse the Other may be demonized, stereotyped, caricatured, stigmatized, denigrated, and even dehumanized in the political effort to claim superiority for colonizer and justify acts of conquest and dominion. Homi K. Bhabha states, “The object of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction.”37 Modern travel writing is one among many genres in which textual representation of other peoples and cultures is implicated in colonial domination: “Travel and its cultural practices have been located within larger formations in which the inscriptions of power and privilege are made clearly visible. … There is a sense in which all travel writing, as a process of inscription and appropriation, spins webs of colonizing power.”38 The Orientalizing, possessing, imperial eye, in this view, can rarely be absent.39 Peter Rietbergen, in his 1998 cultural history of Europe, states, “Everything, including Europe, exists only by virtue of its contrast or its opposite. Moreover, everyone has an ‘unknown side,’ some characteristics of fears