CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
THE THREE POLOS arrived at the Ca’ Polo after their quarter-century absence and rapped on the door, only to be ignored by the stranger who opened it. So ran a popular account published in 1559 by a Venetian official and scholar named Giambattista Ramusio; he compared their plight to that of Odysseus, who returned home to Ithaca disguised as an old man after a lengthy absence and found that no one recognized him. Similarly, the Polos learned to their dismay that relatives had taken up residence in their home in the mistaken belief that Marco and his father and uncle were long dead or had vanished permanently to another land.
To add to the inhabitants’ skepticism, the three strangers claiming to be Polos did not resemble genuine Venetians in the least. “They had an indescribable something of the Tartar in their aspect and in their way of speech, having forgotten most of the Venetian tongue. Those garments of theirs were much the worse for wear, and were made of coarse cloth, and cut after the fashion of the Tartars,” Ramusio reported.
Chief among those who speculated about the new arrivals’ identity was Maffeo Polo, Marco’s half brother. The two had never before met; Marco probably was unaware of Maffeo’s existence until that moment. But Maffeo had heard of Marco; moreover, legal provisions, however skimpy, had been made concerning the eventual return to Venice of his father and uncle. Fifteen years earlier, on August 27, 1280, Marco’s uncle, also named Marco, had drawn up his will, appointing as his trustees his sister-in-law Fiordilige and her husband, Giordano Trevisan, “until my brothers Niccolò and Maffeo should be in Venice. And then they alone are to be my executors.” When he dictated these words, the elder Marco had no way of knowing if they would ever apply, but with the unexpected appearance of Niccolò, Maffeo, and the younger Marco, they suddenly did.
The terms of the will gave the brothers, if not Marco, much-needed legal standing in the Polo family and in the Venetian merchant community.
ANOTHER OFT-REPEATED tale involved the misadventures of Marco’s uncle Maffeo on returning home. Although his wife recognized him, she could not abide the Mongol del that he insisted on wearing. To break her husband of the habit, she took it upon herself to donate his exotic clothing to a passing vagabond. That night, when Maffeo arrived home, he naturally asked what had become of his Mongol outfit; he was particularly concerned because, according to his longstanding custom, he had sewn all of his gems into the lining for safekeeping.
When his wife reluctantly admitted what she had done with his clothes, the story goes that he tore his hair and thumped his chest, as he tried to think of a way to find the anonymous beggar who had come into possession of his fortune. Fortunately, Venice is a small place. The next morning, he went to the Rialto, the center of Venetian commerce, and awaited the appearance of the man in question. It was said that Maffeo carried a spinning wheel without wool, and turned it, as if he were deranged. A crowd gathered around the spectacle, and onlookers shouted questions at him, to which he replied, “He will come, God willing.”
Word spread through Venice about the appearance of the elderly madman Maffeo Polo on the Rialto, generating curiosity. The vagabond who held Maffeo’s fortune failed to appear. The next day, Maffeo repeated his performance, and the day after that. This time, someone did appear—the vagabond, wearing Maffeo’s discarded Mongol attire. On seeing the strange man, Maffeo fell on him, took back the clothing, and felt for the concealed gems. All were there, just as they had been before the beggar came into possession of the discarded garments. Maffeo rescued his fortune and sent the hapless beggar on his way.
RAMUSIO PASSED on another Polo legend. He had learned it, so he said, from the “magnificent Messer Gasparo Malpiero, a very old gentleman, and of singular goodness and integrity, who had his house…exactly at the middle point of the…Corte del Milion”—the location of the Polo ancestral home. “He stated that he had heard it in turn from his own father and grandfather, and from some other old men, his neighbors.”
The old gentleman’s story began with the Polos of Venice evincing skepticism about the identity of their long-absent relatives. Instead of showing pride and relief at their return, they seemed embarrassed. To establish their credibility, Marco and his father and uncle decided to invite all their relatives to a lavish feast. They prepared for the event in “honorable fashion, and with much magnificence in that aforesaid house of theirs.” As the feast began, gondolas jammed the canals; the guests disembarked and awaited the travelers, hoping to receive gifts from afar, or some proof that the three had traveled the length and breadth of the Silk Road, as they claimed. Instead, the guests found themselves attending a most unusual costume party.
Once the guests were seated, the reassembled Polo company appeared. The three travelers were dressed in long, flowing robes made from costly fabric, in the Venetian style. Later in the evening, they removed the robes and tore them apart, distributing the pieces to the servants in attendance. Puzzled, the guests fell to eating, while the Polos once again changed clothing, reappearing in red velvet robes; as before, they tore these garments apart, and distributed the scraps to the servants. If Marco and his father and uncle wished to create the impression that they were so wealthy after their trip to Asia that they could give away valuable fabrics without blinking an eye, they succeeded completely.
Their demonstration was not yet over. Near the feast’s conclusion, the Polos changed their attire once more, and once more gave away the pieces, as their guests marveled at this display of wealth. At that moment, they disappeared, and then returned clad in the Mongol clothing all three had been wearing on the day of their return to Venice, only to have their identity doubted.
According to Ramusio, who was probably embellishing but not inventing, the three took up knives and tore at the seams of their Mongol robes, “to bring forth from them enormous quantities of most precious gems such as rubies, sapphires, carbuncles [a deep red garnet], diamonds, and emeralds which had been sewn up in each of the said garments with much cunning and in such fashion that no one would have been able to imagine they were there. For when they took their departure from the Great Khan, they changed all the riches which he had given them into so many rubies, emeralds, and other precious stones, knowing well that had they done otherwise, it would never have been possible for them to carry so much gold with them over such a long, difficult, and far-reaching road.”
This demonstration left their guests astounded and, most important to the Polos, impressed. “Those whom they had formerly doubted,” wrote Ramusio, “were indeed those honored and valorous gentlemen of the House of Polo, and they did them great honor and reverence. And when this thing became known throughout Venice, straightway did the whole city, the gentry as well as the common folk, flock to their house, to embrace them and to shower them with caresses and show demonstrations of affection and reverence, as great as you can possibly imagine.”
Although Ramusio’s tale concluded happily, it stands as a sardonic commentary on the superficiality and materialism of Venetians. They were unwilling—indeed, unable—to recognize Marco, Maffeo, and Niccolò until the three staged a theatrical display of their wealth.
The startling dinner marked the beginning of the rehabilitation of the newly returned Polos. Thereafter, the three received the respect they felt they deserved from their fellow citizens, with Marco singled out for special attention. “All the young men went every day continuously to visit and converse with Messer Marco,” Ramusio claimed, “who was most charming and gracious, and to ask of him matters concerning Cathay and the Great Khan, and he responded with so much kindness that all felt themselves to be in a certain manner indebted to him.”
IT IS EASY to understand why Marco attracted notice. The significance of the inventions that he brought back from China, or which he later described in his Travels, cannot be overstated. At first, Europeans regarded these technological marvels with disbelief, but eventually they adopted them.
Paper money, virtually unknown in the West until Marco’s return, revolutionized finance and commerce throughout the West.
Coal, another item that had caught Marco’s attention in China, provided a new and relatively efficient source of heat to an energy-starved Europe.
Eyeglasses (in the form of ground lenses), which some accounts say he brought back with him, became accepted as a remedy for failing eyesight. In addition, lenses gave rise to the telescope—which in turn revolutionized naval battles, since it allowed combatants to view ships at a great distance—and the microscope. Two hundred years later, Galileo used the telescope—based on the same technology—to revolutionize science and cosmology by supporting and disseminating the Copernican theory that Earth and other planets revolved around the Sun.
Gunpowder, which the Chinese had employed for at least three centuries, revolutionized European warfare as armies exchanged their lances, swords, and crossbows for cannon, portable harquebuses, and pistols.
Marco brought back gifts of a more personal nature as well. The golden paiza, or passport, given to him by Kublai Khan had seen him through years of travel, war, and hardship. Marco kept it still, and would to the end of his days. He also brought back a Mongol servant, whom he named Peter, a living reminder of the status he had once enjoyed in a far-off land.
In all, it is difficult to imagine the Renaissance—or, for that matter, the modern world—without the benefit of Marco Polo’s example of cultural transmission between East and West.
BENEATH ITS PLACID SURFACE, the Republic of Venice was ailing at the time of Marco’s return. The reign of Lorenzo Tiepolo, the doge when the Polo company departed, had been marked by one setback after another—first famine, then unnecessary squabbles with neighbors whom Venice alienated by imposing tariffs on foreign shipping, a gesture that served only to lessen trade. At about this time, the Republic embarked on three years of military skirmishes with Bologna. Not surprisingly, relations with northern Italy deteriorated badly.
Matters worsened when Venice refused to aid the Church in the War of the Sicilian Vespers, a protracted conflict (1282–1302) pitting King Peter III of Aragon against Pope Martin IV. In retaliation, the Church put an ironclad ban in place, beginning in 1284. Mass could not be said in San Marco; the bells high in the campanile remained eerily silent. The religious pageantry that marked Venetian life—weddings, funerals, even baptisms—was strictly forbidden. The ban extended to the last rites; those denied them might suffer even worse torments in the afterlife. Winter arrived and departed without the celebration of Christmas. As Venice fell silent and penitent before the Absolute, it seemed that God had banished it to a mournful purgatory. “For the past twenty years nothing seemed to have gone right for them,” writes the historian John Julius Norwich of the Republic’s plight. “Militarily they had suffered defeats on land and sea, with serious losses, both in ships and human lives. They had been forced to watch, powerless, while the enemy penetrated to the very confines of the lagoon. Their neighbors, on many of whom they depended for trade, were in a greater or lesser degree unfriendly. Their chief colony, Crete, was once again in revolt.”
As if to confirm the impression of divine disfavor, an earthquake shook the fragile city to its foundations that winter. When the earth’s crust trembled, floods wrought havoc in Venice, claiming homes, destroying lives, leaving some citizens to starve amid ruined splendor. Its civic infrastructure still intact, Venice rallied and managed to maintain a veneer of prosperity and might despite disaster. But behind the scenes, the Republic had fallen on hard times, with no prospect of relief.
VENETIANS BLAMED their decline on a coterie of elite families that had amassed wealth during these difficult years, rather than on natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods, the Republic’s disastrously confused foreign policies, the Church, or jealous rivals—all of which had done actual harm to Venice. In particular, the tightly knit Dandolo clan was held responsible; during the worst of the Republic’s recent troubles, two doges had happened to be Dandolos, including Giovanni Dandolo, who held the office during the trying period from 1280 to 1289.
During his tenure, the Piazza San Marco reverberated with public demonstrations in favor of a rival family, the Tiepolos, who harked back to the Republic’s traditional democratic character. Giacomo Tiepolo, the son of a doge, found himself poised to lead the Republic in these troubled times. Marco may have reflected that Tiepolo faced some of the same pressures as the Great Khan. On the one hand, Tiepolo had to satisfy a core group of like-minded supporters, and on the other, he had to cultivate his popular base. Insiders warned that Venice was becoming too democratic and was teetering on the verge of mob rule, while populists believed that Tiepolo planned to establish a hereditary monarchy in Venice.
Under pressure from all sides, Tiepolo went into exile on the mainland. At the same time, 1289, Pietro Gradenigo, the thirty-eight-year-old scion of a newly rich merchant family, was grudgingly elected the next doge, acquiring in the process a condescending nickname, Pierazzo. No matter who occupied the Doge’s Palace, whether autocrat or populist, Venice’s deterioration accelerated.
IN 1291, the sultan of Egypt, Al-Ashraf Khalil, fulfilling a long-held vow, had overrun Acre and killed most of its residents. The shock was felt thousands of miles away in Venice, since Acre had served as a staging area for merchants and their goods, just as it had for the Polos.
With the fall of Acre and other Christian outposts in the Middle East, Venetians turned their attention toward Europe. Ships sailed to destinations as varied as Amsterdam, London, and Marseilles. Venetian merchants learned to distract and entertain neglected feudal barons with a traveling menagerie of animals, clowns, musicians, and acrobats before transacting business. The doge encouraged trade with the West, exempting himself alone from the necessity of paying duty on the items he acquired.
IN TIME, the Republic’s struggles against commercial and military rivals drew Marco Polo into the fray. On this occasion, the main irritant was Genoa. That city-state, every bit as avaricious as Venice, jealously guarded its trade in spices from India and grain from the Crimea, as well as fish, salt, furs, and even slaves. Anything that could be bought and sold became fuel for Genoa’s economic engine.
To prevent outright conflict, Venice and Genoa had established a flimsy treaty, but the fall of Acre upset the balance, for both parties wanted control over that city. In preparation for war against its rival, Venice joined forces with a lesser power, Pisa. This time, the allies meant business: all those of sound mind and body between the ages of seventeen and sixty were eligible to be drafted at any moment. Furthermore, the wealthiest families were each expected to finance and equip one or more galleys. The Polos were not of their exalted rank; nevertheless, Marco became caught up in war fever. He was responding, in part, to a dramatic change in the Venetian mood. After years of decline, the Republic was suddenly ready to fight to defend its reputation and interests.
Marco may have thrown himself recklessly into the conflict out of boredom with his life. In Venice, he was hemmed in by gray, brown, and ocher buildings looming over cramped, sometimes fetid canals. Instead of roaming the Steppe on horseback, or trekking across deserts in a camel caravan, Marco was negotiating the streets of Venice, some of them so narrow that he had to turn sideways to thread his way along them. Instead of seeing all the way to the horizon, he looked no farther than the windows of his neighbors as they went about their domestic routines. The grandeur and sense of adventure had been drained from his life, replaced by the routines of the merchants of Venice, their accounts and debts, their tiresome lawsuits and contentious families. For the man who had ridden with the Mongols and worshipped with the Buddhists, these restraints may have become unbearable.
In 1298, Marco was only forty-three, still capable of responding to any hint of adventure that came his way. The Battle of Curzola, in which he was taken prisoner, was not the glorious occasion for which Venice had hoped. But it may have offered the escape that he needed.
It is possible that Marco’s capture by the Genoese and privileged confinement came as a relief, allowing him to keep his distance from Venice and its restraints for a while. Paradoxically, he was freer in jail, where his daily needs were met and his mind could roam across the face of the world—the Pamir highlands, the Gobi Desert and the emerald Steppe, the gers of Mongolia, all the way to the fantastic palaces of Cambulac and Xanadu. It took the ordeal of confinement in prison to get the world traveler to sit still long enough to tell his story, and it is easy to imagine him talking night and day about his adventures to Rustichello, who enthusiastically assembled Marco’s feverish outpourings for European consumption. It had been an open question as to whether Marco could persuade his contentious Venetian neighbors, let alone all of Europe, of his fabulous exploits, but his collaboration with Rustichello promised to do just that.
As a popular writer accustomed to filling out his tales with courtly Arthurian romances and stirring battle scenes, Rustichello had distinct ideas about how to embellish Marco’s factual account with stock elements. But the veteran merchant preferred to emphasize events he had witnessed. Yet Marco’s perspective differed from that of his audience; his assumptions about the world, and Christendom’s place in it, were not their assumptions. After decades abroad, he was steeped in Mongol customs, Mongol languages, and the Mongol worldview, and he looked at life through Mongol eyes—vital, barbaric, and reverent.
RUSTICHELLO OF PISA was not merely a romance writer. He belonged to a family of notaries, and was qualified in the profession. In Italy, notaries have long enjoyed high status. In Roman antiquity, they were august public officials who drew up contracts and financial arrangements, and recorded and approved transfers of property, deeds, and wills; they left the tedious work of copying to their slaves. Their name derived from a widely employed system of shorthand writing, known in Latin as notae Tironinae, after Cicero’s secretary, M. Tullius Tiro, said to have invented the system while taking down Cicero’s prolix speeches. A scribe employing the system was called a notarius, and he traveled in the highest circles of the Roman government bureaucracy; his Christian successors, notarii, dutifully recorded the sermons of preachers as well as legal proceedings against Christian martyrs. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, notaries became papal appointees whose authority extended throughout Christendom. They were an integral part of the legal system. In his capacity as a notary, Rustichello could certify the veracity of Marco’s adventures.
Rustichello’s literary imagination tended toward battles and knights errant and virtuous maidens, but his legal training prompted him to require verification from Marco. How could he document his travels, to say nothing of the fantastic episodes he claimed to have witnessed? In answer to this question, Rustichello offers a glimpse into Marco’s working method. Marco, Rustichello writes, “noted down only a few things which he still kept in his mind; and they are little compared to the many and almost infinite things which he would have been able to write if he had believed it possible to return to these our parts; but thinking it almost impossible ever to leave the service of the Great Khan, king of the Tartars, he wrote only a few small things in his notebooks.”
Fortunately for posterity—and for Rustichello—all was not lost, because Marco sent for and received his notebooks while in prison, and with these in hand to prompt his memory, he “caused all these things to be recounted in order by Master Rustichello, citizen of Pisa, who was with him in the same prison in Genoa, at the time when it was 1298 years since the birth of our Lord Master Jesus Christ.”
MARCO WAS FAMILIAR with Persian and with Mongol tongues unknown in the West, not to mention the Venetian dialect, but none suited the epic that Rustichello and he contemplated. Only French, the language of romances—that is, adventure tales—would do, but there is no evidence that Marco was familiar with it. Rustichello, however, did know French, or at least an idiosyncratic, nongrammatical version of the language (the thought of his attempting to speak French is painful to contemplate); so the two Italians composed their Asian epic in that tongue. The rigors of language posed a serious problem for Marco’s amanuensis. Rustichello mangled French syntax. At times he refers to Marco Polo in the first person, at other times, in the third, without any apparent reason for the change. The book itself is sometimes described as “my book,” meaning Polo’s, and sometimes as “our book,” the fruit of a collaboration. Rustichello frequently spells the same word various ways, even on the same page. Tenses, which can be especially complex in French, proved difficult for him to master, and so the narrative fluctuates between the present tense and various past tenses, often in the same sentence. His nongrammatical French would become the despair of centuries of translators trying to divine his precise meaning.
MARCO’S EXPERIENCE of the world, his imagination, and his ego far exceeded Rustichello’s capacities, and the two collaborators often failed to achieve a harmoniously blended voice. Rustichello tried to impose his idea of proper literary form and Christian ideals on the unruly Marco, but as their account took wing, Rustichello apparently let the hyperactive traveler have his blasphemous way. With his conventional narrative formulas and mannerisms, and his constant straining for effect, Rustichello lacked the gift ofsprezzatura, the art that conceals art. But Marco, having honed his stories by telling and retelling them, and fired by his shrewd and contagious enthusiasm, overflowed with sprezzatura. As a result, the amateur storyteller outdid the professional. Given the stark differences between the collaborators, one can practically hear them quarreling over the narrative, with all its awkward compromises, abrupt shifts in tone, and glaring inconsistencies. Like a medieval cathedral fashioned by anonymous artisans, the result is a spectacular but disorderly accretion of ideas, and of first, second, and third thoughts—an accidental monument to vanished civilizations.
Despite his limitations, Rustichello ultimately succeeded in his task. Without the stubborn Pisan to force the Venetian wayfarer to sit still long enough to dictate his overflowing reminiscences, the story of Marco’s travels would never have been written. It would have remained nothing more than outlandish scuttlebutt among the fraternity of merchants traveling the Silk Road, and the stories that Marco told would have died with him.
SEASONED ROMANCE WRITER that he was, Rustichello of Pisa did not hesitate to include a colorful, entertaining battle scene lifted nearly word for word from one of his earlier works. He borrowed the opening of his earlier success, Méliadus, a compilation of traditional Arthurian romances, employing nearly the same words for the introduction to Marco Polo’s account.
“Lords, Emperors, Kings, Dukes and Marquesses, Counts, Knights, and Burgesses, and all people who are pleased and wish to know the different generations of men and the diversities of the different regions and lands of the world,” Rustichello begins, “take then this book and have it read, and here you will find all the greatest marvels and the great diversities of the Greater and Lesser Armenia, and of Persia, Media, Turkey, and of the Tartars and India and of many other provinces about Asia Media and part of Europe, going toward the Greek wind, levant, and tramontaine, just as our book will tell you clearly in order, as Master Marco Polo, wise and noble citizen of Venice, relates because he saw them with his own eyes.”
From that point forward, Marco’s account departs from traditional romances, and he emerges as the beguiling and boisterous traveler of renown, a man who became the intimate of Kublai Khan, and even something of a Mongol himself. Caught up in their mutual excitement, the collaborators remark that no one, neither “Christian, Saracen, nor pagan nor Tartar nor Indian nor any man of any kind…saw and knew or inquired so much of the different parts of the world and of the great wonders so much as this Master Marco Polo searched out and knows.” With that, his tale takes on an unpredictable life of its own.
Marco’s voice, even when adulterated by Rustichello’s conventional derring-do, is like no other, one moment as dry and precise as the tax assessor and merchant he had been, the next as florid as a fabulist, his sense of conviction lightened with a conspiratorial wink. If this narrative voice, as rendered by Rustichello, captures the energy and intensity of the Marco Polo who appeared before his Genoese captors, it is easy to understand why he transfixed them. Only Marco had had the luck, for good or ill, to be imprisoned within the Mongol Empire for decades, and only Marco possessed the sympathetic imagination to identify completely with it, and to portray it with passion and authenticity.
NO ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT survives from the months that Polo and Rustichello spent together in prison. Produced before the invention of movable type in the West, the account was circulated throughout Europe in handmade copies in different languages, transcribed by monks, and collected by nobles for their libraries. In the process, it was often altered—sometimes intentionally and sometimes through sheer carelessness or accident. As a result, many sections are plainly out of order; often, chapters, paragraphs, and even sentences appear in the wrong place, breaking the narrative flow.
On the basis of internal evidence—episodes that Marco promises to narrate, but that never turn up in the narrative—it is incomplete, particularly the latter chapters. It is not that Marco’s energy is flagging; whole sections seem to be missing or truncated. In the absence of a definitive manuscript, scholars and translators have relied on the incomplete versions that have turned up in libraries and archives, both secular and religious, over the centuries, although the versions vary greatly, with some containing many more chapters than others. None of them feels complete in all respects. They resemble scripts without stage directions; the audience must supply its own, and make its best guess about where Marco might be when he describes an encounter, and even about his attitude—is he being reverent or ironic, amused or outraged? He was capable of registering all these emotions, and more, but they have to be coaxed from Rustichello’s fractured French. Despite his limitations, Rustichello manages to convey Marco’s narrative voice, by turns histrionic, reverent, and bawdy, constantly shifting in tone and tempo. Marco bubbles over with stories of his travels in Asia, and embellishes his years in the service of Kublai Khan with bawdy jokes, double entendres, and asides. The result is a compendium of his personal experiences along with the impersonal forces of history, like graffiti on granite.
Rustichello reveals Marco as volatile, high-strung, self-dramatizing, and subject to endless mood swings. He captures Marco’s nonstop rush of memory and language, as well as his addiction to overstatement. Marco’s naïveté shines through undiminished, especially the sense that he never met a ruler he did not admire wholeheartedly. The Marco of the manuscript talks too loudly and quickly; he likes to throw his voice, and to mimic whenever he can. Unlike many compulsive talkers, he rarely repeats himself, and he is fully aware that he is spinning one of the greatest stories ever told. Beneath the lively surface of the narrative a different Marco can be glimpsed: a person of lucid intelligence, phenomenal memory, and, if he relied on records kept in China as he tells his story, attention to detail. Although he gives in to the passions of the moment—hero worship of Kublai Khan, fascination with the countless women who cross his path—he is rarely fooled in the long run, but remains skeptical. The impulsive sensualist grows into a seeker after truth and spiritual fulfillment, goals that prove to be far more elusive than the profitable trading that is the basis of his livelihood. With his quicksilver intelligence, Marco constantly evaluates the sights and people he encounters, and he tries to make them comprehensible to his readers. Like any diligent reporter, he takes care to furnish the who’s, what’s, and where’s of his story, but he is much weaker on the when’s, for he does not provide a true chronology of his decades in China, with the exception of his voyage into and out of Asia. Rather, he assembles thematic descriptions of places he visited or heard about, studded with anecdotes and bits of history that he picked up along the way.
The impassioned storyteller is never less than chatty, and often rises to great heights of eloquence as the recording angel of vanished civilizations. If this narrative as rendered by Rustichello is anything like the tales Marco spontaneously told his Genoese captors, it is easy to understand why they were transfixed. Marco’s hybrid persona, part Venetian, part Mongol, imparts a distinctive flavor to his account; no other record of a pilgrim’s progress through China matches his zest, his profusion of data, and his imaginative sweep.
No storyteller ever had a surer sense that an audience would materialize, prepared to hang on every word. Marco exudes confidence that he is writing for the present, and for history; his chronicle seems, among other things, an obvious bid for fame, a stratagem to perpetuate his name. If that indeed was his goal, he succeeded perhaps more than he imagined, for “Marco Polo” has become synonymous with travel both real and metaphorical, and the peaceful exploration of the unknown.
Throughout the brief chapters of his account, Marco displays an exaggerated sense of self. He places himself center stage during the great events of his day—battles, court intrigues, scandals—when the historical record often shows that his role was minor or nonexistent: that he was more onlooker than actor. Nevertheless, his penchant for self-aggrandizement, which is startlingly apparent compared with the self-effacing tone of accounts left by other travelers and pilgrims of that era, imparts urgency, meaning, and emotion to his chronicle. It is memorable in large part because it overflows with amour propre. Everything that Marco encounters or hears about matters greatly to him, and he makes it matter to his audience as well. He jealously guards his privileged seat at the pageant of history; in an astonishing act of daring, he appoints himself chronicler of the East and the West.
EVENTUALLY, copyists created more than a hundred versions of Marco’s account, and no two versions were alike. To simplify the enormous textual puzzle these versions presented, scholars adopted the convention of assigning them to either of two groups, labeled simply A and B. Many A manuscripts contain obvious interpolations—that is, additions made by overzealous translators—and errors abound. For example, a sixteenth-century Tuscan translation derives from a Latin translation of an earlier Tuscan version, thought to be based on a very early version of Rustichello’s French. Marco’s nuances, flashes of humor, and irony often did not survive the translating and retranslating. To complicate matters even more, the B manuscripts often contain material not found in the A group. Some scholars believe that Marco may have overseen the B versions on his return to Venice, to satisfy the curiosity of readers seeking a fuller account than the one he had composed while in jail. Like a series of studies of the same subject by an artist, each of the manuscripts has some claim to authenticity, but none contains the last word on the subject of his travels.
WHILE MARCO REMAINED in captivity in Genoa, his father, Niccolò, and his uncle Maffeo stayed behind in Venice, concerned for his safety. They repeatedly attempted to ransom him. They had no idea that he actually enjoyed a certain amount of comfort and status in captivity, and was engaged in a collaboration about his fantastic travels.
They also had plans for Marco’s future, even if he had none. Since their return to Venice, they had been trying to arrange a respectable marriage for him, if only to retain wealth on their side of the family in future generations. Marco had resisted the idea, but while he was in captivity they were trying to find him a suitable match in expectation of his safe return.
It seems they eventually despaired of doing so. “Seeing that they could not ransom him under any condition,” Ramusio later wrote, “and having consulted together, they decided that Messer Niccolò, who though he was very old was nonetheless of robust constitution, should take a wife unto himself.” Marco might have been troubled by this development, had he known of it, or, indeed, if it actually occurred. Documents from the era tell a contradictory tale. If Niccolò proceeded with his nuptials, he immediately started his new family, which would eventually consist of three sons.
In Genoa, Marco Polo and Rustichello continued to compose their epic, with no idea of their own fate, or that of their remarkable literary collaboration.
ON MAY 25, 1299, Genoa and Venice ended hostilities by agreeing to a “perpetual peace.” After years of conflict, the two city-states had fought to a draw, much to everyone’s relief. Neither side had to pay reparations, and few recalled what had sparked the battles in the first place—pride, perhaps.
Three months later, on August 28, Marco Polo and his collaborator, Rustichello of Pisa, won their freedom from the Genoese prison in which they had languished. Marco promptly returned to Venice; Rustichello, his task completed, dropped from view. The Venetian was forty-five years old, and he was ready at last to take his place in the Polo family hierarchy. After the dreary months of confinement, Venice appeared as a seductive haven, not as enticing as the glories and excesses of the Mongols, perhaps, but safer than any place he had known since embarking on his travels as a very young man.
In his absence, family members had improved their standard of living and social status. They had bought a tidy, elegant palazzo, complete with courtyard and tower, in the fashionable San Giovanni Crisostomo neighborhood. It was here that Marco would live out the rest of his years. Exactly how the Polo family financed their impressive new home is a matter of speculation; it is possible they invested the profits from their trading business, but the suspicion lingers that they paid for it with the rubies and sapphires that they had brought back to Venice.
Marco’s place in Venetian society was secure, his fortune intact. And once again his elders raised the question of an advantageous marriage—not to the exotic Indian or Mongol princess of his daydreams, but to a woman of a Venetian family equivalent to the Polos in status. After all the mating customs and behaviors he had witnessed in Asia, the thought of marital monogamy may not have been entirely welcome. Nevertheless, a match was arranged in 1300.
MARCO’S PROSPECTIVE BRIDE was named Donata, the daughter of a merchant named Vitale Badoèr. Venetian weddings were elaborate affairs, notable for feasting and business arrangements between the two parties. Representatives of the bride and groom formally contracted on the dies desponsationis. On this occasion, the groom made a formal visit to the bride, and, reenacting a ritual handed down from their Roman ancestors, anointed her head. The wedding ceremony itself occurred on the dies nuptiarum, and it was marked by additional rites. In the transductio ad domum,the groom escorted the bride to his home for the first time, to the accompaniment of celebrating relatives. Afterward, the couple performed the visitatio to the church where the service would occur, highlighted by the benedictio, devoted to the presentation and blessing of the wedding ring. Immediately afterward, the bride produced her repromissa, or dowry, in this case coffers filled with jewelry, linens, damasks, silk, and jewels. Donata’s dowry also included a considerable amount of property, including real estate. (According to a legal document dated March 17, 1312, Donata’s uncle liquidated her dowry for her husband’s benefit.)
Venetian wedding tradition prescribed that eight days after the ceremony the bride pay a visit to her father’s house; known as the reverentalia, the visit was marked by another feast, and presents were distributed to the guests. With this observance, Marco and Donata’s formal wedding rites concluded.
AFTER MARRYING so late in life, Marco Polo behaved in accordance with traditional Venetian life. In rapid succession, he and his wife welcomed three daughters into the world: Fantina, Bellela, and Moreta (the names, common in Venice, frequently appeared in legal documents with variant spellings). His father had died at some point before 1300, when a record referred to him as “the late” Niccolò Polo, but the precise date of death is unknown. Although Marco alone is remembered for his travels, the elder Polo’s career in exploration was perhaps even more extraordinary than his son’s, for Niccolò completed not just one but two round-trip expeditions to the court of Kublai Khan.
Although Marco gave his father and his equally adventurous uncle Maffeo scant attention in the Travels, and often seemed eager to take all the credit for their joint endeavors, he did pay respect to his father in Venice. “His father being dead,” according to Ramusio, “he, as befits a good and pious son, caused to be made for him a tomb that was very much honored for the conditions of those times, which was a sarcophagus of living stone that may be seen to this day”—Ramusio was writing 250 years later—“placed under the portico that is before the Church of San Lorenzo of this city, on the right-hand side as one enters, with such inscription as indicates that it is the tomb of Messer Niccolò Polo.”
AFTER NICCOLÒ’S DEATH, Marco and his uncle Maffeo continued to trade profitably, but their travels had come to an end. It is likely they never went farther than the Venetian province of Dalmatia. As for Marco, he never again set foot on the Silk Road, nor did he return to Asia and its sense of promise, magic, and danger. It seems that prosperity instilled caution to the point of respectability. He remained tethered to Venice, domiciled with his wife and daughters, his uncle Maffeo, and other family members in a large, crowded household, where they weathered the political storms assailing the Republic.
IN 1300, irate citizens greeted the new century by mounting a rebellion against the doge, Pietro Gradenigo. Venetian forces subdued it, and the bodies of the upstart leader, Marin Bocconio, and ten of his followers swung from gibbets erected in Piazza San Marco, as a stark warning to others who might have entertained similar notions.
In time, Venice recovered a measure of economic stability and capitalized on the misfortune of its rivals. Talented weavers from Lucca exchanged the conflicts of their home for the promise of Venice, quickly finding a place for their looms near the Rialto. As a result of this migration, Venetian silks and velvets became celebrated for their rich texture and vibrant color; guilds enforced high standards, and sub-standard goods were publicly burned.
Venetian business practices, long the most aggressive and innovative in Europe, continued to evolve. For centuries, merchants such as the Polos had relied on barter for their transactions, usually trading gems and fabric for goods. But during his troubled reign as doge (1280–1289), Giovanni Dandolo had urged Venice to adopt the financial symbol for which she eventually became known throughout the world: the gold ducat. Ducats had been around for some time, but Dandolo raised the monetary unit to a new standard of quality, declaring, “It must be made to the greatest possible fineness, like to the florin, only better.” The florin was the commercial symbol of rival Florence, but it was soon eclipsed by the Venetian ducat. The name of the Venetian mint, the Zecca, that produced these valuable ducats was derived from the Arabic sikkah, denoting a stamp or seal, and ducats were often called zecchini (the basis of the word “sequin”). The ducat was beautiful to behold, heavy and gleaming. The obverse was adorned with an image of the doge kneeling before Saint Mark, and the reverse with one of Jesus. Henceforth, merchants such as the Polos tallied their fortunes in ducats rather than gems.
DESPITE MARCO’S eventual embrace of Venetian life and customs, there remain tantalizing suggestions that he never gave up his Asian obsessions.
Wherever he went, Marco carried manuscript copies of his travel narrative. He talked constantly of his adventures, and on occasion gave a copy of the narrative to an important noble, who would, Marco hoped, preserve it in his library for safekeeping. The interest or indulgence of a wealthy patron was the only way—aside from storing a copy in a monastery—Marco could be assured that his stories would outlive him. The inscription on one very early manuscript indicates that he presented it to a “Monseigneur Thiebault, chevalier, seigneur de Cepoy” in August 1307. According to the inscription, the knight, in Venice on behalf of Charles of Valois, the king of Aragon, requested a manuscript from its author, and one can imagine that Marco was only too glad to comply.
All the while, the Republic’s long-standing feud with the Church was fraying the delicate fabric of economic life. On March 27, 1309, the Church issued another punitive papal bull, this one far more serious than the earlier one. Trying to teach the unruly city a lesson for all time, the Church excommunicated the Republic and its citizens. All of Venice’s treaties were declared void—a potentially disastrous blow to its trade relationships. Venetian properties beyond the lagoon were subject to seizure by the Church. Christians everywhere were forbidden to trade with Venice. Banks, ships, factories, storehouses, and trading posts with Venetian interests in foreign lands reportedly were burned.
At first, Venetians, toughened in conflict, took the latest uproar in stride, but when their soldiers fell prey to disease, the Republic’s enemies decimated its fleet. La Serenissima seemed to face the end of her long reign. Even the self-confidence of the Venetian merchant aristocracy crumbled, and the doge, Pietro Gradenigo, humbly dispatched a mission to Pope Clement V, now in Avignon, to seek forgiveness. The gesture succeeded, and the excommunication of Venice ended. Nevertheless, the doge fell into disrepute with the citizens of the Republic.
THERE WAS ANOTHER whiff of rebellion in the air, as a conspiracy of nobles sought to remove Gradenigo from power. Their plan was bold: on the morning of June 15, 1310, they would storm the Piazza San Marco, kill the doge, and then slaughter his closest aides. Fortunately for the stability of the Republic, the weather refused to cooperate. A violent storm blew up, lashing the lagoon with rain and thunder, as if to warn of the awful deed to come. Street thugs chanting “Morte al doge Gradenigo!” could barely hear themselves and scattered under the onslaught of foul weather. Amid the ensuing chaos, the doge’s guard learned of the uprising and attacked at least one hostile group, driving them off.
The rebels suffered another disaster from a most unlikely source. As Bajamonte Tiepolo, one of the leaders, led a vicious mob near the Rialto, the racket infuriated one of the residents, a woman named Giustina Rosso, who opened her window, seized a heavy pot planted with carnations, and hurled it straight at Tiepolo. The missile almost found its target; Tiepolo was spared, but his standard bearer fell to the wet pavement, lifeless, his skull shattered by the flower pot. Tiepolo’s rabble suddenly panicked, as enraged residents hurled one object after another at their exposed heads. The rebels scattered, leaving Tiepolo with no choice but to surrender and bargain for his life. Luckily for him, he managed to negotiate banishment to Dalmatia for four years, while others paid for their rebellion with their lives.
Giustina Rosso, who had thrown the fatal flower pot, received heartfelt thanks from the doge. Asked what reward she desired for her valiant deed, she modestly declared that she wished to display a banner of Saint Mark, patron saint of Venice, every June 15 to commemorate the event. She had only one other request—that her annual rent never exceed fifteen ducats.
On such whimsical deeds turned the fate of Venice.
MARCO AVOIDED the political disputes of his day, preferring to watch over his holdings. He challenged the established order only once, in 1305, when he appeared in court on behalf of a disreputable smuggler, Bonocio of Mestre, to indemnify him. The scenario suggests that the troublemaker may have been operating at Marco’s behest.
ON FEBRUARY 6, 1310, Marco’s uncle Maffeo felt his days coming to an end. He drew up his will, and died soon thereafter. Though married, Maffeo had no children, and therefore he left most of his substantial estate to his nephews, including Marco. Soon after, Marco’s half brother died without a male heir, and left most of his estate to Marco as well. These bequests, combined with his father’s estate, meant that Marco controlled the lion’s share of the Polo enterprise.
The newfound wealth failed to make him comfortable or generous. Accounts of Marco’s animated storytelling yield to records of his litigiousness and pettiness in the latter years of his life. He became increasingly preoccupied with the pursuit of wealth for wealth’s sake, and known for his combativeness and irritability. This sort of behavior, so unlike the engaging attributes of his youth, suggests a tendency to depression. The world’s greatest traveler journeyed no more. He ceased to add to his storehouse of experiences, preferring to strengthen his financial status in the years remaining to him. Documents attest that Marco could be greedy when it suited him, as if he believed having great wealth entitled him to still more. On occasion he lent money to needy relatives, but he always charged them interest; when they were unable to pay, he did not extend or forgive the debt, he took them to court, heedless of the spectacle of one Polo suing another.
In 1319, Marco brought suit against his cousin Marcolino to recover a debt incurred by Marcolino’s father in 1306. The Venetian court ruled that the plaintiff was entitled to seize goods equal to the debt, in addition to twice that amount in the form of a fine, as well as 20 percent interest accumulated over a period of thirteen years. The total exceeded poor Marcolino’s liquid assets, and on September 10 he was forced to transfer ownership of two properties in the San Giovanni Crisostomo neighborhood to Marco Polo—now wealthier than ever.
Marco did not hesitate to take others to court for small matters as well as large. He called a fellow Venetian, Paolo Girardo, to account for a modest unpaid commission for the sale of a pound and a half of musk. To complicate matters slightly, Girardo had surreptitiously sold a small portion, and then returned the remainder to Marco, who, on weighing it, discovered that one-sixth ounce was missing. Outraged, he sued. Described in legal documents as a “noble man,” Marco won a resounding victory and had the paltry satisfaction of being repaid by Girardo, who faced jail if he failed to make Marco whole within a reasonable amount of time.
MARCO POLO’S reputation survived this petty episode and others like it.
At one point Marco drew the attention of Pietro d’Abano, a professor of medicine and philosophy. The two met several times to discuss Marco’s voyage beyond Venice, and each time d’Abano came away impressed by his wide-ranging knowledge, his retentive memory, and, as is obvious on every page of the Travels, his outstanding powers of observation. Returning to Padua, d’Abano composed a treatise in which he complimented “Marco the Venetian” as “the man who has encompassed more of the world in his travels than any I have ever known, and a most diligent investigator,” and proceeded to recount their conversations concerning astronomy, of all things, and, in particular, a certain “star” visible in Zanzibar, the island Marco claimed to have visited near the end of his journey. “He saw this same star under the Antarctic Pole, and it has a great tail, of which he drew the figure, thus.”
Thereafter, Marco spoke as the endlessly curious traveler he once had been, gushing forth details in wild profusion, as if he had found a new Rustichello ready to immortalize his experiences. “He informs me furthermore,” d’Abano wrote, “that thence camphor, lignum aloes, and brazilwood are exported to us. He informs me that the heat there is intense, and the habitations few in number. These things indeed he saw on a certain island at which he arrived by sea. He says, moreover, that the men there are very large, and that there are also very great rams that have wool coarse and stiff as are the bristles of our pigs.”
D’Abano asked Marco whether it was true that people who live “in hot places are timid, and those who are, on the other hand, in cold places, virile,” as Aristotle claimed. Marco attempted to reconcile Aristotle with his own experience as best he could. “I heard from Marco the Venetian, who traveled across the Equator, that he had found there men larger in body than here, and he had found this because in such places one does not meet with the cold that is exhausting and consequently tends to make them smaller.” According to d’Abano’s account, Marco was debunking classical theories in a free-flowing, nonsystematic way drawn from personal observation, yet the professor continued to hold him in the highest esteem. If no longer a traveler, Marco could at least enjoy a burgeoning reputation as the sage of Venice.
BY 1318, when Marco was sixty-four, he could look with some satisfaction on his growing family. Fantina, the oldest of the three daughters, married Marco Bragadin, with a splendid dowry provided by her wealthy father. Her younger sister, Bellela, followed the same pattern when she married Bertuccio Querini, from an old Venetian family; the union produced two children. Less is known of Moreta, Marco’s third daughter, who left no recorded issue, and probably did not marry while her father was alive.
Marco’s new sons-in-law became his allies in his continuing quarrels with other Polos. Ignoring blood relatives who perhaps had more claim on his loyalties, he chose instead to work with Fantina’s husband, Marco Bragadin; they were so close that the young couple and their four boys and two girls all lived with the patriarch in the Ca’ Polo.
APPROACHING his seventieth winter, the sage of the Ca’ Polo fell out of favor with Venetians. With the Mongol Empire in decline, and the Silk Road no longer passable, the moment in history to which Marco belonged receded in time, even though the implications of his travels had yet to be understood, or his Travels fully appreciated.
When he ambled through the streets of Venice, children followed after, calling out, “Messer Marco, tell us another lie!” Or so one legend has it. Another tradition holds that a Venetian masque witnessed the appearance of a reveler disguised as Marco Polo, who amused the guests by telling the most outrageous stories imaginable as though he believed them to be completely true.
By 1323, Marco had become sickly and bedridden. By this time, his Travels had come to the attention of a Dominican friar named Jacopo d’Acqui, who, as was common, reproduced parts of the narrative in his own work, Imago mundi, in which he related a tantalizing story: “Because there were to be found great things, things of mighty import, and indeed almost unbelievable things, he”—that is, Marco—“was entreated by his friends when he was at the point of death to correct his book and to retract those thing that he had written over and above the truth. To which he replied, ‘Friends, I have not written down the half of those things that I saw.’”
What did Marco omit from his travels? Perhaps gossip from the Mongol court, or his own peccadilloes as a young man far from home. Yet that is not exactly the sense Marco’s statement conveys. Rather than referring to a specific idea, his admission suggests that although he was done with his book, it was not done with him. The experiences contained within its pages would not leave him alone. He had been reliving them since his return, but had found no relief in committing them to paper; describing them only reinforced his obsession. If the accuracy of d’Acqui’s report is to be trusted, Marco’s startling comment tells us that his propensity to relive endlessly his travels along the Silk Road was both a gift and a burden; he could never put those experiences behind him. Although his account draws to a conclusion with his release from Kublai Khan’s empire and return to Venice, his story is amorphous, an odyssey without limits. Asia was so large and varied, so rich in natural resources, customs, politics, in wars and wisdom, and so far advanced over Europe, that no one could manage to include it all in one book.
AS MARCO’S health deteriorated, a physician was summoned—a measure tantamount to calling a priest to administer the last rites. Venetian physicians occupied a respected role in society, but their professional skills were severely limited. By law, they were required to advise a patient suffering from a serious illness to allow for time to draw up or revise a will, and to seek absolution.
On January 8, 1324, Marco lay at home dying, despite the ministrations of the exalted physicians. The day was short; the pale sun cast somber, drawn-out shadows. His family called for the priest of San Procolo, Giovanni Giustiniani, who conveniently doubled as a notary, which meant that he could draw up the dying man’s will and certify it. For Marco, this was his last transaction, his contract with eternity, and he approached it with the skill of an experienced merchant. Working from Marco’s precise notes, Father Giustiniani, writing in the vulgate Latin of the late Middle Ages, drew up the document, long on specificity but short on consistency.
Marco appointed his wife, Donata, and three daughters as coexecutrices, and much of the will’s language was formulaic, in accordance with Venetian customs. He directed that the Church was entitled to tithe his estate, as provided by law, and further directed that additional sums were to be paid to the monastery of San Lorenzo, “where I wish to be buried.” In addition, he listed a number of bequests to people, to religious institutions, and to “every guild and fraternity to which I belong.”
On his deathbed, Marco declared, “I cancel the debt of three hundred lire that my sister-in-law owes me,” and proceeded to cancel other debts owed to him by the convent of San Giovanni, San Paolo of the Order of Preachers, and a cleric named Friar Benvenuto. At the same time, he specified that a fee of 220 soldi be paid to the notary, “for his labor on this my testament and that he may offer prayers to the Lord for me.”
When he came to his servant Peter, the Mongol who had served him in Venice, Marco suddenly turned magnanimous: “I release Peter my servant, of the Tartar race, from all bonds of servitude as [I pray] God may absolve my soul from all guilt and sin, and I likewise release to him all that he may have earned by his labors in his own house, and over and above this I bequeath to him one hundred lire of Venetian denari.”
Only then did Marco consider bequests to his family. Donata would receive an annuity, a prearranged settlement, and the household furnishings, including three beds and all that went with them. The daughters were instructed to divide whatever was left among themselves in equal measure, with a significant exception. Moreta, still unmarried, was to receive “a sum equal to that given to each of my other daughters as dowry and outfit.”
Marco’s will ended with a strict admonition: “If anyone should presume to break or violate this will, may he bring upon himself the curse of almighty God and may he remain bound under the anathema of three hundred and eighteen Fathers, and over and above this he shall pay over to my abovementioned executrices five pounds of gold and may this document, my will, remain in force.” The document ended: “The signature of the above written Messer Marco Polo, who requested that this be drawn up.”
He did not actually sign his will, now on deposit at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice—an omission that has led to the suspicion that he was so infirm he could no longer perform even this simple act. In any case, his signature was not necessary. Giovanni Giustiniani, the priest and notary, signed and authenticated Marco’s last will and testament under Venetian law. To forestall the possibility of forgery, he affixed his tabellionato, a distinctive flourish.
MARCO’S WILL reveals that he had amassed a considerable estate, including items in which he traded, such as fabric, and valuable real estate, including the Ca’ Polo, all of which might have belonged to any prosperous Venetian merchant, with the exception of a few exotic items that bore witness to his exceptional past. Each of the items told a story to those able to understand it.
The first was a “golden tablet of command” conferred on him by Kublai Khan when Marco left Cambulac, and which appointed him to high rank in the Mongol court—a court that barely existed by the time of Marco’s death. The tablet spoke to the depth of the relationship between the Great Khan and the Venetian who had served him for so many years.
The second was a “Buddhist rosary,” made, according to an inventory of Marco’s possessions, from boxwood “in the manner of a paternoster”—a carefully wrought turn of phrase designed to distinguish it from its Christian counterpart. This object spoke to Marco’s once-fervent search for spiritual enlightenment in Asia and India.
The third was a bochta, or Mongol helmet or headdress, decorated with gems and pearls. This unusual item may have been the same headdress worn by the young princess Kokachin, whom Marco had escorted across China. The bestowing of a royal garment on a favorite servant was common practice, and it would have been natural, perhaps even expected, for her to thank the Venetian who had helped to guide her safely across Asia to her new home. Marco wrote that she had shed tears when she and the Polos parted company, and perhaps she had offered the prize at that emotional moment.
By itself, Marco’s documented wealth did not qualify him as a member of the Venetian financial elite, but it may not tell the entire story. A significant part, or even most, of his assets may have been in the gems he carried back with him from Asia. Rubies and sapphires lent themselves to concealment from commercial rivals, tax collectors, and even family members. Marco and his father and uncle had lived for years among the Mongols while concealing gems in the lining of their robes, and the story of Maffeo’s despair on learning that his wife had inadvertently given his apparently ordinary robe to a beggar suggests the critical importance of those hidden assets. It would have been natural for Marco to continue the custom of hiding his gems after he returned to Venice, even until his death. If this is the case, then the true dimensions of his wealth escaped the notice of the local authorities and will likely never be known.
AS THE HOURS DRAGGED BY, Marco approached death. According to Venetian law, the day commenced at sunset, and it was soon January 9. The all-important notary dated Marco’s will January 8, which meant that his life’s journey ended between sunsets on January 8 and 9, 1324.
The world’s most famous traveler was a prisoner for long periods of his life. He endured decades in two separate forms of confinement, the first when Kublai Khan held him in luxurious captivity in China, the second when he became a prisoner of war in Genoa. Paradoxically, it was during those periods that he was at his best. He had possessed immense patience in the face of trying conditions. That resolve made it possible for him to return safely home from his wayfaring, and later to complete his account in the unlikeliest of circumstances, an enemy prison. Infused with his restless spirit, the Travels survives as both a historical chronicle and a work of art, a depiction of vanished worlds in the form of a timeless adventure.
VENETIAN FUNERALS of the era were public ceremonies redolent of Byzantine influences. The deceased was taken from his deathbed and placed on a floor or pallet strewn with ashes. Then a mournful bell tolled, and priests chanted prayers in Latin. The widow was expected to display tremendous public grief, crying, howling, and pulling her hair out by the roots. When funeral assistants wrapped the body in a sheet and tried to carry it out the door to its final resting place, she was expected to block their path and carry on with renewed force. As the mourners took the body to the church, family members followed close behind, bewailing their loss in as public a manner as they could muster; the histrionics were repeated at the grave site. The poor of Venice displayed the corpses of family members on the street for days as a way to collect alms from passersby, but the wealthy Polo family arranged for Marco’s prompt burial in the cemetery of the church of San Lorenzo, close to his father, Niccolò, with whom he had traveled the world. Some years later, in 1348, the will of his youngest daughter, Moreta, indicated her desire to be buried in the same location, “in the tomb of my parents.”
Tradition holds that Marco’s final resting place was marked by his father’s sarcophagus, and it appears that the most famous Venetian citizen of all had no monument of his own, except, of course, his Travels.
Most of Marco Polo’s contemporaries scorned or simply ignored his feats, but eventually history remembered.