Kings and chieftains of that city. There was then in the city a princely Friar in the habit of St. Francis, named Franciscus, who was versed in many languages. He was brought to the place where those nobles were, and they requested of him to translate the book from the Tartar (!) into the Latin language. It is an abomination to me,' said he, 'to devote my mind or labour to works of Idolatry and Irreligion.' They entreated him again. It shall be done,' said he; 'for though it be an irreligious narrative that is related therein, yet the things are miracles of the True God; and every one who hears this much against the Holy Faith shall pray fervently for their conversion. And he who will not pray shall waste the vigour of his body to convert them.' I am not in dread of this Book of Marcus, for there is no lie in it. My eyes beheld him bringing the relics of the holy Church with him, and he left [his testimony], whilst tasting of death, that it was true. And Marcus was a devout man. What is there in it, then, but that Franciscus translated this Book of Marcus from the Tartar into Latin; and the years of the Lord at that time were fifteen years, two score, two hundred, and one thousand” (1255). It then describes Armein Bec (Little Armenia), Armein Mor (Great Armenia), Musul, Taurisius, Persida, Camandi, and so forth. The last chapter is that on A baschia : "ABASCHIA also is an extensive country, under the government of Seven Kings, four of whom worship the true God, and each of them wears a golden cross on the forehead; and they are valiant in battle, having been brought up fighting against the Gentiles of the other three kings, who are Unbelievers and Idolaters. And the kingdom of ADEN; a Soudan rules over them. "The king of Abaschia once took a notion to make a pilgrimage to the Sepulchre of Jesus. Not at all,' said his nobles and warriors to him, 'for we should be afraid lest the infidels through whose territories you would have to pass, should kill you. There is a Holy Bishop with you,' said they; 'send him to the Sepulchre of Jesus, and much gold with him' The rest is wanting. XI. SOME ESTIMATE OF THE CHARACTER OF POLO AND HIS BOOK. 66. That Marco Polo has been so universally recognized as the King of Medieval Travellers is due rather to the width. of his experience, the vast compass of his journeys, Grounds of and the romantic nature of his personal history, than to transcendent superiority of character or capacity. The generation immediately preceding his own travellers. has bequeathed to us, in the Report of the French Friar Polo's pre eminence among medieval VOL. I. i William de Rubruquis,* on the Mission with which St. Lewis charged him to the Tartar Courts, the narrative of one great journey, which, in its rich detail, its vivid pictures, its acuteness of observation and strong good sense, seems to me to form a Book of Travels of much higher claims than any one series of Polo's chapters; a book, indeed, which has never had justice done to it, for it has few superiors in the whole Library of Travel. Enthusiastic Biographers, beginning with Ramusio, have placed Polo on the same platform with Columbus. But where has our Venetian Traveller left behind him any trace of the genius and lofty enthusiasm, the ardent and justified previsions which mark the great Admiral as one of the lights of the human race? It is a juster praise that the spur which his Book eventually gave to geographical studies, and the beacons which it hung out at the Eastern extremities of the Earth helped to guide the aims, though scarcely to kindle the fire, of the greater son of the rival Republic. His work was at least a link in the Providential chain which at last dragged the New World to light. * M. D'Avezac has convincingly refuted the common supposition that this Friar was a Fleming rather than a Frenchman. But I cannot give the reference. High as Marco's name deserves to be set, his place is not beside the writer of such burning words as these addressed to Ferdinand and Isabella; "From the most tender age I went to sea, and to this day I have continued to do so. Whosoever devotes himself to this craft must desire to know the secrets of Nature here below. For 40 years now have I thus been engaged, and wherever man has sailed hitherto on the face of the sea, thither have I sailed also. I have been in constant relation with men of learning, whether ecclesiastic or secular, Latins and Greeks, Jews and Moors, and men of many a sect besides. To accomplish this my longing (to know the Secrets of the World) I found the Lord favourable to my purposes; it is He who hath given me the needful disposition and understanding. He bestowed upon me abundantly the knowledge of seamanship; and of Astronomy he gave me enough to work withal, and so with Geometry and Arithmetic. . . In the days of my youth I studied works of all kinds, history, chronicles, philosophy, and other arts, and to apprehend these the Lord opened my understanding. Under His manifest guidance I navigated hence to the Indies; for it was the Lord who gave me the will to accomplish that task, and it was in the ardour of that will that I came before your Highnesses. All those who heard of my project scouted and derided it; all the acquirements I have mentioned stood me in no stead; and if in your Highnesses, and in you alone, Faith and Constancy endured, to Whom are due the Lights that have enlightened you as well as me, but to the Holy Spirit?" (Quoted in Humboldt's Examen Critique, I. 17, 18.) M. Libri however speaks too strongly when he says: "The finest of all the results due to the influence of Marco Polo is that of having stirred Columbus to the discovery of the New World. Columbus, jealous of Polo's laurels, spent his life in preparing means to get to that Zipangu of which the Venetian traveller had His true glory. 67. Surely Marco's real, indisputable, and, in their kind, unique claims to glory may suffice! He was the first Traveller to trace a route across the whole longitude of ASIA, naming and describing kingdom after king- claims to dom which he had seen with his own eyes; the Deserts of PERSIA, the flowering plateaux and wild gorges of BADAKHSHAN, the jade-bearing rivers of KHOTAN, the MONGOLIAN Steppes, cradle of the power that had so lately threatened to swallow up Christendom, the new and brilliant Court that had been established at CAMBALUC: The first Traveller to reveal CHINA in all its wealth and vastness, its mighty rivers, its huge cities, its rich manufactures, its swarming population, the inconceivably vast fleets that quickened its seas and its inland waters; to tell us of the nations on its borders with all their eccentricities of manners and worship, of TIBET with its sordid devotees, of BURMA with its golden pagodas and their tinkling crowns, of LAOS, of SIAM, of COCHIN CHINA, of JAPAN, the Eastern Thule, with its rosy pearls and golden-roofed palaces; the first to speak of that Museum of Beauty and Wonder, still so imperfectly ransacked, the INDIAN ARCHIPELAGO, Source of those aromatics then so highly prized and whose origin was so dark; of JAVA the Pearl of Islands; of SUMATRA with its many kings, its strange costly products, and its cannibal races; of the naked savages of NICOBAR and ANDAMAN; of CEYLON the Isle of Gems with its Sacred Mountain and its Tomb of Adam; of INDIA THE GREAT, not as a dream-land of Alexandrian fables but as a country seen and partially explored, with its virtuous Brahmans, its obscene ascetics, its diamonds and the told such great things; his desire was to reach China by sailing westward, and in his way he fell in with America" (H. des Sciences Mathém. &c. II. 150). The fact seems to be that Columbus knew of Polo's revelations only at second hand, from the letters of the Florentine Toscanelli and the like; and I cannot find that he ever refers to Polo by name. Though to the day of his death he was full of imaginations about Zipangu and the land of the Great Kaan as being in immediate proximity to his discoveries, these were but accidents of his great theory. It was the intense conviction he had acquired of the absolute smallness of the Earth, of the vast extension of Asia eastward, and of the consequent narrowness of the Western Ocean on which his life's project was based. This conviction he seems to have derived chiefly from the works of the Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly. But the latter borrowed his collected arguments from Roger Bacon, who has stated them, erroneous as they are, very forcibly in his Opus Majus (p. 137), as Humboldt has noticed in his Examen (vol. i. p. 64). The Spanish historian Mariana makes a strange jumble of the alleged guides of Columbus, saying that some ascribed his convictions to "the information given by one Marco Polo, a Florentine physician!” (Quoted in Markham's Garcilasso de la Vega, p. 26.) strange tales of their acquisition, its sea-beds of pearl, and its powerful sun; the first in medieval times to give any distinct account of the secluded Christian Empire of ABYSSINIA, and the semi-Christian Island of SOCOTRA; to speak, though indeed dimly, of ZANGIBAR with its negroes and its ivory, and of the vast and distant MADAGASCAR, bordering on the Dark Ocean of the South, with its Ruc and other monstrosities; and, in a remotely opposite region, of SIBERIA and the ARCTIC OCEAN, of dog-sledges, white bears, and reindeer-riding Tunguses. That all this rich catalogue of discoveries should belong to the revelations of one Man and one Book is surely ample enough to account for and to justify the Author's high place in the roll of Fame, and there can be no need to exaggerate his greatness, or to invest him with imaginary attributes.* His personal attributes seen but dimly. 68. What manner of man was Ser Marco? It is a question hard to answer. Some critics cry out against personal detail in books of Travel; but as regards him who would not welcome a little more egotism! In his Book impersonality is carried to excess; and we are often driven to discern by indirect and doubtful indications alone, whether he is speaking of a place from personal knowledge or only from hearsay. In truth, though there are delightful exceptions, and nearly every part of the book suggests interesting questions, a desperate meagreness and baldness does extend over considerable tracts of the story. In fact his book reminds us sometimes of his own description of Khorasan :"On chevauche par beaus plains et belles costières, là où il a moult beaus herbages et bonne pasture et fruis assez fois y treuve l'en un desert de soixante milles ou de mains, esquel desers ne treuve l'en point d'eaue: mais la convient porter o lui !" et aucune Still, some shadowy image of the man may be seen in the Book; a practical man, brave, shrewd, prudent, keen in affairs, and never losing his interest in mercantile details, very fond of the chase, sparing of speech; with a deep wondering respect for Saints, even though they be Pagan Saints, and their asceticism, but a contempt for Patarins and such like, whose consciences would not run in customary grooves, and on his own part a keen appreciation of the World's pomps and vanities. See, on the "C'est diminuer l'expression d'un éloge que de l'exaggérer" (Humboldt, Examen, III. 13). one hand, his undisguised admiration of the hard life and long fastings of Sakya Muni; and on the other how enthusiastic he gets in speaking of the great Kaan's command of the good things of the world, but above all of his matchless opportunities of sport!* Of humour there are hardly any signs in his Book. His almost solitary joke (I know but one more, and it pertains to the oùк ȧvýкovтα) occurs in speaking of the Kaan's paper-money, when he observes that Kublai might be said to have the true Philosopher's Stone, for he made his money at pleasure out of the bark of Trees. Even the oddest eccentricities of outlandish tribes scarcely seem to disturb his gravity; as when he relates in his brief way of the people called Gold-Teeth on the frontier of Burma, that ludicrous custom which Mr. Tylor has so well illustrated under the name of the Couvade. There is more savour of laughter in the few lines of a Greek Epic, which relate precisely the same custom of a people on the Euxine : "In the Tibarenian Land When some good woman bears her lord a babe, 69. Of scientific notions, such as we find in the unveracious Maundevile, we have no trace in truthful Marco. The notions. former, "lying with a circumstance," tell us boldly Absence of that he was in 33° of South Latitude; the latter is scientific full of wonder that some of the Indian Islands where he had been lay so far to the south that you lost sight of the Pole Star. When it rises again on his horizon he estimates the Latitude by the Pole-star's being so many cubits high. So the gallant Baber speaks of the sun having mounted spear-high when the onset of battle began at Paniput. Such expressions convey no notion at all to such as have had their ideas sophisticated by angular perceptions of altitude, but similar expressions are common among Orientals, and indeed I have heard them from educated Englishmen. In another place Marco states regarding certain islands in the Northern * See vol. ii. p. 258, and vol. i. p. 359. + Vol. i. p. 378. Vol. ii. p. 52, and Apollonius Rhodius, Argonaut. II. 1012. |