In Our Time - Marco Polo

Episode Date: May 24, 2012

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the celebrated Venetian explorer Marco Polo. In 1271 Polo set off on an epic journey through Asia. He was away for more than twenty years, and when he returned to Venice he told extraordinary tales of his adventures. He had visited the court of the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan, and acted as his emissary, travelling through many of the remote territories of the Far East. An account of Marco Polo's travels was written down by his contemporary Rustichello da Pisa, a romance writer he met after being imprisoned during a war against the neighbouring Genoese.The Travels of Marco Polo was one of the most popular books produced in the age before printing. It was widely translated, and many beautifully illustrated editions made their way to the collections of the rich and educated. It was much read by later travellers, and Polo's devotees included Christopher Columbus and Henry the Navigator. For centuries it was seen as the first and best account of life in the mysterious East; but today the accuracy and even truth of Marco Polo's work is often disputed.With:Frances WoodLead Curator of Chinese Collections at the British LibraryJoan Pau RubiesReader in International History at the London School of Economics and Political ScienceDebra Higgs StricklandSenior Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of GlasgowProducer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, one morning in 1271, two merchants boarded a ship in the port of Venice and set sail for the east. Their names were Niccolo and Mafio Polo,

and with them was Niccolo's teenage son, Marco. Their travels lasted almost a quarter of a century, and when they returned to the city of their birth, they had some extraordinary tales to tell. The Polos had travelled widely throughout the Mongol Empire. They'd met the Mongol Emperor himself and been members of his imperial court in China, and they'd been the first Europeans to visit some of the remotest spots of Asia, seeing wonders unimagined by their contemporaries.

An account of these adventures is contained in what is perhaps the most celebrated travel book ever written, the travels of Marco Polo. It first appeared in the early 14th century and became one of the most popular books in late. medieval Europe. The explorers of later centuries, including Henry the Navigator and Christopher Columbus, studied the work. And today, Marco Polo remains the most celebrated European ever to have explored the distant east. With me to discuss the travels of Marco Polo are Francis Wood, lead curator of Chinese collections at the British Library,

Jean-Pol Rubies, reader in international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Deborah Strickland, senior lecturer in the history of art at the University of Glasgow. At that time, the end of the 13th century, how much contact had Europeans with the East? What was the situation? At that time, Europe had very little direct communication with the East. The East was mainly known at that time through its products, through things like Silk, which had been celebrated since the days of ancient Rome,

and increasingly things like spices and other luxury goods that were brought to Europe, but by a series of merchants. though I suppose you could say that at the really in from about the middle of the 13th century they start knowing quite a lot through the travels of missionaries. There was an incredibly interesting sort of ambivalence about the Mongols that on one hand the Mongols who were advancing through Russia to the gates of Vienna were seen as an absolutely terrifying threat. But on the other hand, the Christian leaders of Europe, the King, kings of France, the popes, were very keen to establish contact with the Mongols, who they saw as a kind of potential ally against the increasing growth of Islam. They wanted to try and secure the Holy Lands through a pincer movement of Mongol armies from behind

and the Western Europeans coming in from the West. So that quite a few missionaries were sent out to the Mongol capital. And they wrote accounts. I mean, John of Plano Carpini in 1246, William of Ruebrook, most notably, in 1240. 54 got to Caracorum and they wrote long accounts of what they saw. On the other hand, I think one has to say that these accounts were not widespread. They were known, you know, within religious circles, but it wasn't knowledge to the man in the street. So the east was still a very mysterious place.

Can you give us some idea of the heft and the size of the Mongol Empire in the mid-13th century? Well, it stretched from North China right the way across, you know, past Kiev, almost to Krakow. and famously the Mongols reached the gates of Vienna in 1241. And this caused an amazing panic in Europe. I mean, there's a wonderful letter from Matthew Paris and St. Albans, which has picked up by Gibbon later on, which recounts how the Baltic herring fleets used to come every year to pick up herrings in Great Yarmouth.

But in 1241, they were so terrified of leaving their wives and children back home to be ravaged by the potential Mongols that they didn't come and all the herrings rotted in Great Yarmouth. So there was knowledge of them And they stretched And of course they go down into the Persian Gulf as well So really the whole continent of Asia And quite a bit of Western Europe was under Mongol's way

But they didn't just sweep across it They administered it and ran it as well, didn't I? They did indeed, yes. I mean it's an extraordinary sort of transformation Because fundamentally, you know They're a kind of semi-nomadic group They sweep across places But they did then take them over

And they used to use They were quite sort of cosmopolitan in their use of local people. I mean, they always took on locals to do the running for them because they realised that that wasn't their main skill. Did they have a previous Chinese bureaucracy, as it were, to lean on? Oh, in China, yes, yes, absolutely. And did they extend that across that new empire?

They extended across the Chinese empire. I mean, they ruled in different ways. And, of course, there was always a chief Khan back in Karakoram, but there were different rulers in different areas. And they sometimes fought against each other, which is kind of one of the key things in the story, that the Polo brothers were supposed to be travelling home and then they found that they couldn't get home because of Mongol wars,

so they just went further east. John Powell, let's turn to Marco Polo himself. He grew up in Venice. Can you give us some idea of the city at that time and about what he might have encountered in his childhood? Well, Marco Polo, we only know really that he was born about 1254 and that he left his city when he was 17. so we don't have any documentary details about his life.

But we can well imagine that he was brought up as a merchant son. Therefore, he learned to read and write, I think that's crucial. Because he didn't write the book, actually, but he took notes. And he also was, obviously, brought up as a Christian, which is a fundamental element of his identity. During his travels, he was faced with a huge variety of religions. Muslims, Christians of different denominations, that's a very important part of it. He met many Christians who were Nestorians, Jacobites, Armenians, Georgians.

So he was constantly confronted with variety of versions of Christianity. And of course, Buddhists, Hindus, which he called idolaters. So he had a huge sense, I guess, of diversity in his voyages. And I think that when he grew up, he probably got the fundamental identity. as a Latin Christian and the fundamental skills as a merchant. What about Venice at that time? Can you give us some idea of its place and power? Yes, Venice was the door to the east to some extent.

It had been connected to Constantinople for a long time. Constantinople was the place from which his father and uncle traveled to the Black Sea and that took them to their adventure. It was a city therefore very geared towards the east, towards the Latin kingdom in Palestine, the Holy Land, that was being lost at the time. It was essentially gone back to Muslim hands. On the other hand, there was also the connection with Constantinople,

which still was alive. And there was some rivalry with the Genoese about that. So in that sense, the Venetians had a continuous strife with the Genoese for influence in those areas. But we're talking about in that period, It was a rich city, a voluptuous city, sat with many people from many nations coming there with fleets and ambitions?

Yeah, well, I mean, Venice was, had fleets, obviously. It was a very mercantile city. It was changing. It was becoming more patrician-oriented, we could say. At the end of that century, the wealthier families created a new system in the political, it was a republic. It was a place where merchants had had an opportunity for profit for many decades.

Now we find that the patricians are beginning to take control of the politics and close down the doors. Was Marco Polo's family part of that patrician said? I believe that they are part of the kind of growing merchants who are becoming like Nouveau-Hish in probably in when looked at from the point of view of the patrician families. They are not a patrician family that we know. They do, however, on important palaces. I think that is the result, partly of their travels. So they are investing in risk.

They are undertaking journeys that take them many years. They didn't plan to go for 15 years, but they did go for 15 years, so that's a long time. Are you talking about Marco Pella's father and his uncle at that? That's right. Just after he was born off, they said, And what drove them into the Mongol Empire? They went, they were in Constantinople, they went to the Black Sea.

That is a place where, a good place for trade. They probably brought silks and spices, lesser spices, silks and precious stones. They do declare, I mean, he mentions at the beginning of the book, that they were trading in particular in precious stones with the tartar lords of that part, that is to say the ones of the golden horse in the tartar lords, as Francis said,

were beginning to fight each other. They were quite divided among branches because they had such a vast area, and one of them was in Buddhism, now Russia, and he was trading. They were trained with him when they couldn't go back, as Francis also said. So they decided to continue going towards the east,

and at that point they did meet someone who told them, why don't you come with me to meet the Great Khan? And of course, that was a huge opportunity for... And this was Kublai Khan. Yeah, it was Kublai Khan. And there was a huge opportunity for a new kind of business. It's extraordinary to think of them setting up and coming back 15 years later on a trading mission. That was not common.

But what was common is that those merchants, going back to Venice, who were trying to establish themselves, were taking bigger risks than those who were the patricians who stayed behind. So this is a period when you see a split between the merchants growing, those who are willing to take risks because they have to probably and those who are less willing to take risks and because they're investing in controlling

the city and its surroundings. No wonder we've got the merchant of Venice. Anyway, Deborah Strickland, we've already been told something about the Mongol Empire by Francis and John Pard. But in general, what was the European view of the Mongols? Can we develop that a little?

Yes, the European view of the Mongols was fairly negative. And it was based on a very long tradition of the way that Western Europeans tended to regard non-Western Europeans, particularly those that didn't follow Christianity. And there was a kind of stereotype set of characteristics described to such people, including the Mongols, such that they followed the wrong religion, they ate a strange diet, they were physically unattractive, they spoke in comprehensible language. And as Francis was mentioning, you know, owing to the invasion of the Mongols in the 1240s,

into Europe. All of these characteristics were also heightened by a great deal of fear and suspicion that they might even move eventually into Western Europe. And so... It's interesting to develop, I'd like to develop that because Francis used the word panic. There seems to be a sort of hysteria around. I mean, that nobody would move, they were going to be got by these people coming from the East. And the idea of the East is a powerful mystery. In a way, where it began then, didn't you? Yes, and not only a powerful mystery, but filled with all. kinds of strange creatures, monsters, not just people with whom, you know, were considered culturally alien, but physically deformed strange beings known collectively as the monstrous

races. Such as? Such as one-legged creatures known as cyapods or ones with heads and faces in their chest known as blemere, giant-eared figures known as pinotie. And in fact, artistically speaking, Mongols were represented in some of the same way. So to go back to Francis mentioned of Matthew Paris, Matthew Paris in his famous chronicle that he compiled at the Abbey of St. Albans, accompanied his description of the recent invasions with an extraordinary image of figures, hunchbacked grotesque, shown roasting a boy over a pit, another one's decapitating people. There's a third eating human legs. There's a woman naked tied to a tree with a horse rearing up in

front of her. They were effectively illustrated by Matthew in the same mold as artists might have rendered monstrous races. In this case, the race of the anthropophagy, the man-eaters. And so it's a combination of the fear towards their actual presence and also the way that they could slot in quite seamlessly to this earlier tradition that kept this whole stereotyped and monstrous tradition going. Did they feel the Europeans at that time that they could learn anything from the Mongols, if only to throw them off, or throw them back, sorry? Well, a part, again, Francis mentioned of a potential alliance against Islamic forces. I don't think that was the way they were thinking.

What they really wanted to do was convert them to Christianity, which is another reason besides mercantile ones, that there were people journeying and interested in going to these lands, the earlier missionaries, obviously. But even the earlier missionaries, in part, prepared. these earlier ideas about Mongols, who, by the way, were known in the West as Tardars from the word Tartarus, meaning the infernal regions. So the very name communicates that more on their agenda was to either convert them or escape them or keep them from invading their own territories. Christian twist as well, creatures from the internal, infernal regions, yes, if they don't. Well, they'd let hell loose, right?

Exactly. So they were demonic, effectively. When Marco Polo's father and uncle returned to Venice and he was in his mid-teens, that was in 1271, they set off again, what did they intend to do? You mean the reason for bringing along? No, what were they out? Why did they sit out again? They'd been away for 15 years and it was not going to be enough.

Well, part of what they wanted to do was continue their service to the Great Khan because they had been charged with visiting the Pope, collecting informants who would come back to the mob. lands and try and convince them of the truth of Christianity. The Khan had also requested that they bring back some oil from the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. So part of what they were doing was trying to fulfill that mission. And then they brought Marco along with them, presumably because they would have believed that Marco might have found favor in the Khan's court. And so he did. He was 17. By the time they got there, if we're to believe the length of the journey,

three and a half years to get back, then he would have been about 20, I suppose, by the time he arrived at court. Francis Wood, pretty much everything we know about the journey comes from this book written 25 years later after Markopola return, The Travers of Markopola, written with a man called Rustycello, that's how I pronounce it, the going idea is that they met in jail, the two of them in a jail, and this man was a writer of romances.

Can you tell us how the book actually came about? Well, it's difficult to say exactly how the book came about since we don't have the original book. I mean, the thing is only known through copies of copies of copies. But in the prologue, it does state that they were imprisoned. I think that Rusticello, if we start with him, he was a fairly famous romance writer, and he was a Genoese. Sorry, he's from Pisa.

And he was apparently captured in some kind of sea battle in Italy and imprisoned. But the trouble with this imprisonment business, is that nobody can agree which battle Marco Polo might have been captured in because none of the big battles fit the timing. So we have to just say he was captured in some sea battle and imprisoned. And I think again imprisonment, we should say, too, was probably more of a form of house arrest because in those days the Venetians and the Genoese were endlessly at each other's throats

and they would take in prisoners in the hope of exchanging these prisoners for their own sons and so on. So it might not have been such a kind of, you know, it might not have been a kind of rat-infested damp dungeon, but a perfectly normal house. Again, the question was raised about whether Marco Polo had notes. I mean, the stories about him returning, either completely ragged and with no possessions at all

or else he'd got a great briefcase full of documents that think he'd taken. All of this is all a bit unknown. But it appears on the surface that Rostachello may have seen in the stories he may have heard from this person if he ever met him. you know, that were exciting and interesting and something could be made of them. Rosticello is more famous for writing proper romances. He was the favourite romance writer of Edward I of England.

He wrote romances about Gwynnevere and Arthur for him, and he had been on a part of a crusade with Edward I. So his means of living was to get the support of rich and famous people who would get him to write romances for them. And so he seemed suddenly to have turned from, as it were, from kind of strict romance into a kind of mercantyre geography. So you're saying that Rustichello's fingerprints are all over this? Well, it's been demonstrated from, I think actually from the 19th century, was Boni, who first

pointed out that the form of the prologue is exactly the same as the way that Rustichello begins his romances, you know, gentlemen, kings, ladies and so on, the wording is exactly the same. So that's quite kind of credible. On the other hand, people could have just pinched that, I mean, quite easily because it was a fairly well-known way of beginning. But yes, it's got the hand of Rustichello And indeed, Barbara Vair, a famous romance specialist from Germany, has suggested that Marco Polo may not really have existed, but might have been just a literary device, because in fact the text is pretty boring.

And we shouldn't call it the travels, because that's the sort of penguin version. It's actually called the description of the world. And it is a kind of geography. You go from 16 miles to this city, and then 17 miles to the next city, and you can buy this and that. It might be interesting at that time, though, when people didn't know the cities. I mean, you're a bit dismissive, calling it boring, Francis.

But then the cities, you know, with their difficult names, their strange names, are, would have been, I would have thought, pretty baffling. Also, they're usually very badly transcribed by the copyists. So we're going to talk, part of the conversation from now on is the authenticity of the manuscripts, the validity of the whole enterprise, even as has been put to us, the existence of Marco Polo. Nevertheless, let's plow on. Jean-Parr, what about the route that he and his father, and uncle were supposed to have taken on this journey?

Well, I mean, we know, again, almost everything about it from the book itself. So I will establish the fact that I do believe that the book is by Marco Pol and Rusticelo on the basis that I don't think how else... I mean, we don't have any other better hypothesis for explaining the book as we have it other than that. It was written that way, both in terms of the rhetoric it follows and the contents. And the contents are so precise sometimes. And there are, of course, many errors.

and many misjudgments, but we do have a fairly accurate, remarkably accurate description of a huge amount of the world, basically, as it existed in the period in Asia. Marco Polo tells us then in that book that he went with his parents through Armenia, which was then very much connected to Latin Europe because there was a dynasty in what was called lesser Armenia, Cilicia, in southeast. Turkey today. And they were in some ways a crucial connection because the Armenians were, on the one hand, with the Mongols, they had Mongol overlords. On the other hand, they were trying to get help in the West support from the Latin. So in some ways, there was an important connection between

the Tartars and the Latin West. And then from there, the Polos went to Tabriz. You're talking about traveling overland all this. Yeah, overland, overland. Did they have a baggage train with them? Did they have enough money to have, as it were, protectors? How many would there be? Would there be 40 people in this? We don't really know exactly, because they, I mean, there were a small group because they were setting out

for a huge, long-distance voyage. Not only taking them to trade, but they're taking jewels. Well, we don't know exactly what they had, but we know that they were, their main idea was to get to the Greta Kahn, who was their patron. Once they got there, just the fact that they went back. would give them, I would think, a huge set of opportunities.

I took them and I understand three years on this journey. That's right. How did they get through all this stuff? Francis has said that the Mongol warlords are rising against each other. It's an for Europeans largely unmapped way. Did they have a pass from the kind? Did they have any authority that took them through?

They did have a pass from the can. In fact, a huge golden table. A golden table? Yes. That was, that came from the Great Khan and which was meant to offer them protection, because for merchants, the crucial issue was safety when travelling. And the Tartars had been extremely, the Mongols,

extremely destructive of many of the places they conquered, especially the whole Persia, but at the same time, they created new conditions for travel afterwards. And the fact that the single authority could say these people are allowed to travel gave them a chance that would otherwise not have existed before, and this is why we have this kind of journey at this point and not before or later. Francis. I was just thinking, I mean, if I, for the moment forget that Marco Peli didn't live China.

If they did travel, I think, in this way, across the sort of Mongol area, I think we shouldn't over-stress the Pax Mongolia because it wasn't very much of a Pax. But I think one has to imagine that people in those days, I mean, we know how goods travelled. They travelled from one merchant to another. So that, I mean, one can imagine that if you traveled, you went from this city to that city in the company of a caravan, you would then pick up another caravan going on.

So that, and I think one can gather that a bit from the language of the text, that, you know, proper names are always in Persian, and there would have been, you know, different Persian caravans going across. So I think they wouldn't have been alone. Yeah, of course, they wouldn't have been alone. Once they reached Tabriz, which was the capital of the Eastern Mongols, in the border between Persia and the Caucasian area going towards there, then they would have traveled with,

caravans but with also this protection I believe. They're all in table. Well, it gave them a special status. I say. Deborah Strickland, according to the book, Marco and his father and uncle reached the court of Kublai Khan after this long journey, three, three and a half years. What was their role when they got there? What do we know about how they were received and so?

They were received extremely well. and Marco's father and uncle were correct that he became a great favor with the Khan. The Khan admired his cultural facility. We're told that he learned four languages and for writing systems, although these don't seem to have included Chinese, interestingly. But more than that, Marco was recognized

as being a keen observer with great powers of observation and a cultural curiosity. And this was important to the country, because since he'd recently reunited this vast empire, particularly China, he needed to know something more about his subjects. And he had been let down by previous emissaries, administrators, who would go deliver messages, for example, but not tell him about what was going on or what the people were like. So he entrusted Marco in some kind of administrative role, we don't know exactly what, for 17 years, to really travel across the empire on the Khan's business and to bring back information. about what the people were like and what kind of customs that they followed. And this, of course, is a lot of what Marco puts into his book.

Now, Francis is right when she says that a lot of it is quite boring because some of the places Marco visits, in fact, quite a disturbing number of them, he dismisses through a kind of series of formulaic statements, such as, the people here are idolaters, they are subject to the great con, they speak a language of their own, they live by trade and industry, They burn their dead. Their lands are stocked with wildlife. They have many spices.

There's nothing more here to report, so we'll go on to the next place. But then there are other... It's quite a lot, really, when you look at some of the cities around the place. Well, yeah, it's true, but when you read that over and over again, it does get a bit dull. However, Marka makes up for this with the lavish attention that he gives to other places, the great cities as he sees them,

such as the city of Kinsai in China, which he describes as the most splendid city, in the world, connected by 12,000 bridges with wide roads and magnificent architecture and people engaged in all kinds of occupations. Do we get, Francis, Wood, a sense of, you know, Zanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree, have this magnificence of his court?

Yeah, in some versions we do. I mean, I think that the long descriptions of the Great Khan come only in certain manuscripts, and probably we should come back to the question of manuscript transmission and what's included when. Well, I think one of the great problems, we start off, we don't have the original. The earliest texts come from, well, the earliest reference the text is 1320, I think. And then you have manuscripts kind of quite a lot coming from about 1,400.

The wonderful one in the Bodleian is copied in about 1,400. The texts, now we don't even know what the original language was. It may have been French. Some people say it could have been Latin. We don't know. We get versions in French, various Italian dialects, Latin sort of throughout the 1300s coming up to 1400. But one of the big problems is that you get certain manuscripts.

I mean, there's the Toledo manuscript, for example, which is probably copied in about mid-15th century, which has got 200 lengthy passages that don't occur in any other of the early manuscripts. And one of the things I think is important is to try and go back to the early manuscripts and see what's there. And Hangzhou Kinsai is very brief in the early ones. But you were slightly on my mind. I have to sort of share this with the listener,

shaking your head when claims were made that what Marco Polo did at the Court of Kulayakhan. What's the spy, four languages, four scripts, that sort of stuff. I think there's absolutely no, that we don't know about how many languages he knew. And one of the things that's very interesting about all of these early versions, if you take about 50 early manuscripts,

that the language of proper names is almost entirely Persian. there are only something like two Chinese names in the whole thing and some others are sort of Turkish versions. So you know you haven't got Mongol names either. How do you react to this, Jean-Pao? Still, we're back on actually the central issue in a way for this discussion, which is, was it telling the truth?

Was it made up? Was it a romance? Was it added to by later writers? What was going on? Francis is right that we don't have one book. We have many books. On the other hand, we do have books that make sense. historically and geographically to a remarkable extent.

I think that the best hypothesis is that he produced not one version but various versions and that we don't have an UR text, but we have simply, there is an initial version probably with Rusticelo, which is the one in a French with Italianisms as described by Benedetto famously. And then after that we have a number of versions which seem to be addressed to slightly different audiences. The one in Latin, for example, was on by Frippino, Dominican, and it cuts out some things.

The one in French, courtly French, is clearly one that has a story of its own and is very important for the most illuminated manuscripts. So it was a luxury item for quarterly audiences. And then we have the kind of Venetian and Tuscan versions, which are more for probably merchants and kind of patricians.

And finally, we have these other mysterious text in Latin, which has amplifications, which are very remarkable. And I think that this one is the most difficult to count for, but at the same time is so detailed in some of its simplification that we have to believe that it is a later version that Marco Polo at some point before he died created. Yes, another way that the books, as we should pluralize them, were disseminated was through works of art.

And the manuscript that Francis mentioned in the Bodlein Library In addition, there is lavishly illustrated. There is a wonderful one made for the Duke of Barry around the same time, early 15th century, that has got wonderful illustrations. We know also that the Duke of Barry commissioned a series of tapestries, which indicates the importance of imagery in this book. Can I stay with you here, Deborah, for a moment.

I take it, think that an awful lot of the book states what really happened and I think it's you who said that one of the things that's remarkable about the book is that he says things about the East and in a way, both his what he finds out and the way he discusses this, the way we hadn't been said before,

he's more tolerant, he's more understanding, he's more curious, can you just elaborate that a little? It gives it a feeling of authenticity. Yes, it's true. I mean, I don't want to come out and say whether or not I think the book is, you know, written in the way that it's implied. Mainly I was trying to quote what the book tells us, it said. But yes, what's very interesting about it is that on the one hand, Marco is giving new information about the East. He is very much giving a more balanced view of what people are like. He's noticing things like plurality of religions, of different kinds of customs, not all of which he's condemning. He has a particular interest in certain kinds of customs, such as treatment of the dead. He's fascinated with the notion of cremation and the fact that in some places the dead are burned alongside little paper cutouts of animals or coins or even slaves that might be useful in the afterlife. He's very keen on describing sexual practices of the various groups, such as the keeping of many wives. So on the one

hand, he's telling people new things about the East and he's presenting them in a kind of surprisingly balanced way, but he is not totally uninformed by the older stereotypes. So, for example, he has consistently negative stereotype crusader-informed views of Muslims, for example. And although it's claimed that he debunks a lot of the myths thought to be true of the East, such as the existence of unicorns and griffins and monstrous races, there are various ways in which he does get some of this in here. So he's not entirely without influence from the old ways. It's one of the mentioning that Mark Apollo says that some things he didn't see himself, but he reports from hearsay. And he's quite good at telling us that.

And usually the more miraculous stories are the ones which he reports from hearsay. And the more boring stuff is the stuff that he seems to have seen. So he says, I mean, all this thing about this city, these customs is usually, I mean, the basic geography and ethnography is his own voice. And then he tells us all these stories about these people with dog heads, cannibals, which usually is things he hears from so or else. That's true. On the other hand, you could also suspect that when he uses formula

to describe these various places, that those might be the places he didn't visit, as opposed to being places that he was really bored with. And he is careful about differentiating what's hearsay and what's not. But on the other hand, some of the things he claims to observe still arguably were informed on older traditions, such as the hospitality method that he observed. serves of men handing their wives over to visitors for a couple of days or so is actually rooted

in a very, very old tradition that can be dated back to the 11th century. Can you just tell us briskly how and when the polos returned to Venice? How long were they away at this time? They were when a huge amount of time. They came back in 1295. So we're talking about 24 years. That's right. And in fact they were not allowed to leave.

That's the reason. I mean, that's at least the reason stated. They asked to leave and the great can prefer to have them with him. That's the thing about sharing someone like a great can't, is that he might become very wealthy, yeah. Could become very wealthy, but you're also a prisoner in some ways. And in the end, the story goes, again, as in the prologue, that they have the chance when a request from the can't in the Levant, that is to say the ones in Tabriz,

request a princess from Kublai Khan, which obviously is part of cementing the alliance that still exists. And at that point, they are allowed to go back with that expedition. They take a different route this time. They don't go overland. They go by sea.

And they go, therefore, through Southeast Asia to Sumatra, and then from Sumatra to India, from India to the Persian Gulf, and then up to Tabriz. And that makes, again, a huge amounts of sense. In terms of geography, even the times they have to spend in Sumatra

waiting from the Munzun makes sense. But 24 years. But also I think one of the things that's interesting about this return journey is that this is an account that is corroborated in other sources. I mean, and it raises the question of where the information comes from. It's corroborated in Arabic sources and also in the Chinese Encyclopedia Jungla Dardian. And the great Chinese Marco Polo scholar Yang Zhugeo

was very excited to find in the Jungla Dardian. And the account of this sea voyage when the princess was indeed sent, they get there, and then they find that her intended husband is dead, so they offload her on his son instead, and then they carry on home. Now, Yangtogel says, well, because this account occurs in the Yungladia and in Marco Polo's description of the world, therefore Marco Polo was on the ship.

But of course, there's nothing in the Yungladdadi and says, and of course we had these three people on board as well. So it's, I mean, I think quite a lot of the material is stuff that is known. You can find it in other sources, and it's broad. together in the description of the world. But not necessarily keyed into Mark a-Oppola. There are certain omissions, if you can briskly tell us, there are sort of rather strange omissions in this account.

The things that he doesn't mention, which, I mean, I think one can go backwards and forwards on this, but, I mean, he doesn't mention chopsticks, he doesn't mention the use of tea, he doesn't mention foot binding, he doesn't mention the Great Wall. So there's quite a lot of, you know, you'd think that if he's meant to be telling the Great Khan

what southern China is like, because the Khan's never been there, and it's indeed still only just conquering it, that these are some of the things that might have been of interest. What surprised you were reading it, though, what do you say, oh, that's interesting, I never come across that before? Well, I think I started reading it originally for architectural description,

the description of the city of Peking, and because when I was a student there, I used to bicycle along the old Yuan dynasty, the Mongol Wall. And in those days, before the kind of city, Sixth Ring Road. Peking was indeed a chequerboard, as Marco Polo said. And you know, you felt very much in tune with his description of the city. So that pleased me because it fitted in with, you know, how the city was. But then when you look a bit further into it, I think it's the whole idea of the far east having to be presented through the eyes of Europeans. All this claim of, you know, I did this, I did that. I ended the siege of Xiangyang, which is completely redact. as the siege was ended two years before Marco Polo could have got there unless he was flying. I did this, I did that. It's a, I don't know, there's something so bogus about many of the claims and so many defenders throughout the years you get Yule saying,

well, perhaps he didn't quite do that, perhaps he didn't quite do this. Two hands have gone on. Just very quickly. I mean, on the question of the omissions, we don't have the URTex. It is possible that he, we've lost some stuff. That's one important point. The second one is that he's not entirely systematic clearly. I mean, sometimes he will go at full length about some things.

Sometimes it's going to be less. But the question about wrong claims, it's clear that there are exaggerated claims. They are usually by Rusticelo. It's not I did. It's he did. Yeah, and I just wanted to say that it's important also to realize that there are these competing agendas in the book. There is Marcos and the claims that he wants to make about his important role in all of this. Rusticello

has romance agenda and we don't know to what extent he might have had some influence of what goes in, what stays out in the way that these things are described. And then thirdly, I think that something that really makes a problem in trying to interpret the text is you don't

really know where Marco is in all of this. As Jean-Paul says, that it's Rustichello who's doing a lot of kind of third-person narrating. Marco, you would expect to give some kind of indication of his emotional responses or something that tells us a little bit

about him and yet he stays very much a kind of narrator and you're frustrated as a reader. What happened to him on his return, Jopal? Sorry, could I go back to that point? I think that's a very important point you just raised. He's a witness but he's not talking about

himself primarily. That's not his main aim. His main aim is to just describe the world as you just said when you gave us the right title, the Divism and Dumont, the description of the world. When he came back, just to go back to your question then, I think he became a very successful petition. He now had lots of money.

Did he come back a wealthy man? Yes, he did. There are two versions. It comes back in rags or he comes back with riches now. Or did he come back in rags with riches hid in the rags? It seems quite clear he came back in riches. We have his last will, and he has a lot of slaves and very expensive things,

and he marries and has daughters, who also have lots of things. so it's quite clear that he's came back rich. How was it received, Francis, the book, and when did it, as it were, take off? This is quite an interesting point, which I wanted to mention, that if you take, for example, the Bodlian version, which is a very beautiful one, copied in about 1,400, that is bound together, copied together with two romances about Alexander the Great, one of which has written in a Yorkshire dialect,

you may be interested to know. And these, so in this very early period, he is regarded, it's regarded, as literary rather than geographical. And it's not until about 1559, when the book is, well, a version, an extremely expanded version of the text is included in one of these great compendia of travels by Ramusio,

travels all over the navigationaliae viaji. And so from the middle of the 15th century, it starts being looked at as geography, and people start looking at it in a much more serious way, you know, is it 15 miles from here to there? but starts off in the romantic context. Tamara, sorry, please follow up, but I'd like to include finally what impact do you think it's had.

Yes, I just wanted to follow on a moment. What Francis is saying is also corroborated by the illustrations that are included in the bodily manuscript and also the one, the Duke of Berries and still others, which is, just as it was viewed as a piece of literature, so the illustrations can be kind of stock-romantic ones. so very familiar types of battle scenes and scenes of court and so forth, accompany this to kind of reinforce the notion that this is a type of text

that people were familiar with from other contexts, even though what was in it was startingly different in many respects. How would you describe the impact? Sorry, the impact, Jean-Barr. Well, I mean, apart from the fact that we have so many manuscripts, it's the fact that there were so many languages, and it was a text written by a merchant, and this is quite remarkable.

In that period, these kinds of books, the few that existed were written by friars, missionaries, as you have mentioned before, Deborah. In this case, we have a text written by a merchant. It's a lay person's perception of cultural diversity. And this gives a legacy to Europe, a much more tolerant, I believe. Much more tolerant than the Christian. Yes, more non-judgmental. He's not interested in theology.

He's obviously anti-Muslim and Christian, and he wants the Latin Christians to be better than any others. but he is actually, when it comes to describing different customs, extremely open-minded, and that I think is a lexie. And that, I'm afraid, is where we have to end this morning. Thank you very much, Deborah Strickland, Francis Wood, Jean-Par Rubiers. Next week, we'll be talking about the Trojan Wall. Thank you for listening.

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