Did Marco Polo Make it All Up?
By CAI MALI
Every schoolchild knows that Marco Polo had something to do with firing up the early Western imagination of China with his tales of travel through the Far East. But Sinophiles have gone searching, sometimes in vain, for traces in Marco's accounts of Khublai Khan's vast empire of the China and Chinese they might recognize.
Scholars have been especially preoccupied recently with questions and doubts - about the extent to which the accounts have been fictionalized, some going so far as to suggest that Marco never made it as far as China in the thirteenth century, and that the Book of Marco Polo is completely fraudulent. He did not seem to have learned Chinese in his 24 years of travels in the area, nor from his appointment as a civil servant in the service of the Great Khan's empire. And he does not appear in any Chinese accounts of the era. Yet his accounts exhibit a deep familiarity with the organization, government, local products, provincial borders and general geography of a world that very few people at the time could know about.
What are we to make of these perplexing contradictions?
Part Mythology
John Larner, in Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World, has written perhaps the best argument yet that neither Marco's enduring (and arguably undeserving) fame as a travel-writer, nor the authenticity of the stories themselves, matter as much as the real and more important contribution of this book to European geography and exploration. This is a book about a book, its history and its impact. Those who seek to understand the phenomenon and enduring legacy of Marco Polo will find much rewarding material here.
This is not, however, a book about China or China readers. Marco Polo's 'Book' is not so much about China either; Larner describes one version in which only about one third of the pages are devoted to China. Nor is Larner's book even about Asia per se. While mainly about the impact of Marco's work and its dissemination and influence in Europe, it is an important part of the great, long story of East and West.
As Larner points out, and as any reader who has ventured into Marco's 'adventures' will tell you, it is not 'travel-writing' as we usually know it. It is part-catalogue, part-anecdotal, part-mythology, part-epic, reflecting, in Larner's estimation, attempts by Marco's collaborator - his fellow prisoner in Genoa, Rustichello da Pisa, a talented raconteur - to add life to the accounts of the more practical-minded, information-oriented Marco.
Readers of these tales are often quickly overwhelmed by the abundance of detail and confusing array of places and names, rewarded occasionally by remarkable and exotic, if not often amusing detail.
Good Literature?
If Marco's book does not measure up to the standards of good literature, should it not at least be measured by accuracy? Larner, who believes that Marco did travel to Cathay, downplays the importance of authenticity. When considered in its historical and cultural context, it seems clear that arguments over the truth of some of the accounts are pointless. As Larner points out, the early manuscripts of the book that do remain (around 150), all vary, and some by quite a lot. Some of the details in subsequent copying and translations of the text undoubtedly were embellished or censored to fit the prevailing political or religious climate.
The seemingly exotic behavior of non-Christians was presented either in a more positive, or negative light, depending on the scribe (usually a monk) and the intended readership.
So how should Marco Polo's contribution be understood? Larner eloquently makes the case:
"This book has to be thought of, judged, as a geography and neither a work of anthropology nor a travelogue. In this respect, the fact that Marco had wide-angle lens vision, that his close-ups generally lacked all the intensity found in the reports of the friars [who travelled to Asia before him and wrote about it] were positive advantages. ... For the supreme strength of the Book lies in its organization, its steady progress, people by people, province by province, town by town, each with its own peculiarities, distinguished. Never before or since has one man given such an immense body of new geographical knowledge individually to the West."
Larner's own contribution is soberly to investigate the book's impact on Europe, on mapmakers, and the European worldview, and its indirect influence on Columbus. Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Glasgow, Larner has attempted to reach beyond the academic world of Polo scholars to a broader readership. In this he has not entirely succeeded; many historical references go unexplained for the uninitiated. Yet the striking color plates of illustrations and maps from the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance lift this book well above the usual academic study.
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